Best of the Program | Guests: Darren Beattie & Douglas Brunt | 9/22/23
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Really good Friday podcast for you today.
We have a little bit of the history.
We have the goods on Ray Epps and this sham of a prosecution.
Also, kind of a recap of the week, if you will, of the way I've been feeling right at the beginning of the podcast.
Where we are in time and what do we believe in and what are we willing to do and what should we do?
It's a really good beginning of the podcast, and we end with Ron DeSantis.
I talk to him about Ukraine.
I talk to him about the border, the deep state, Donald Trump, all of it on today's podcast.
Don't miss it.
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You're listening to
the best of the Blendback program.
I have
had kind of a fun week.
If you've been listening all week, you know,
I've been a little
on the edge, little on the edge, to the point to where, I don't know, maybe I want to spend my life as a dog, you know, dog's life.
It's very popular.
I'll show you in a few minutes
what's happening with people who want to identify as a dog.
That is finally, we've gotten to the civil rights program,
gotten it to the place to where we can finally say what needs to be said.
People can choose to be dogs.
But I've been,
I watch the news and I watch for things that the average person doesn't necessarily watch for.
If you read my daily email newsletter, which is free every day, you can get it at glennbeck.com.
If you read that, you see things
that
media is not talking about, even conservative media not talking about.
And when you start to piece all these puzzle pieces together, you see a pretty bleak picture.
And
we are at a place
where the die has been cast,
the Rubicon has been crossed,
and we're here.
And
it is a battle.
We are at war.
We are in a spiritual war primarily.
And too many of us don't even know what that means anymore.
But we are not fighting flesh and bone.
We are fighting evil, true evil.
And the longer we wait, the stronger stronger evil will become.
The longer we wait,
the more chance it comes to blows.
And that will be the death of the Republic and the death of the American,
you know, the American experiment.
It will be over.
And I don't know about you, but I am...
I'm...
I have children.
I have four.
I have grandchildren.
I have two.
and I'm desperate for them to live a full, happy, comfortable life.
Even if it means I give my life or I give up all that I have so they can have,
and we overuse freedom and liberty.
Nobody knows what that is.
So they have opportunity, opportunity.
That's all I want them to have.
Honestly, it has been a very tough battle, and I know you feel the same way.
I've at least had the luxury of,
I was going to say fame and fortune, but fame is a curse.
And so is fortune in many ways.
But I mean, it's a nice way to go.
If you're going to go to hell, it's a nice way to go with fortune.
But
I've had a much more comfortable life.
It's easier for me to think than it is probably for many in our audience because
they have the daily bills bearing down on them all day.
So we all have our own things that we're carrying through.
We've all been, you know, injured.
We've all been foolish.
And we've also been blessed enough to do some things that will prepare us.
I've been sued.
I so far haven't been arrested, but, you know, I don't know what's going to happen next.
When they're arresting just anybody, when they can arrest attorneys for giving somebody advice that's not illegal,
we don't know what's going to happen next.
I have
worked hard to serve the Constitution.
I've worked hard to serve my fellow man.
I have
served my God, and I can't even say to the best of my ability,
but I have tried.
And moment, you know, momentarily, occasionally, once in a while, I forgive myself for being proud of what I have created because I didn't create it.
I was allowed an opportunity in America.
God gave me certain abilities, and I'm a lucky man.
I'm a blessed man.
Still,
with all of that going on, we have to realize where we are right now.
I've always talked to you about we're on a highway and we're passing the exit signs and the bridge is out.
Well, we are now,
you know that point in the movie where they're on a bridge and it's either open
or there's no way out and all the cars are coming up behind them and they're going to be killed by the bad guys and they're like, what do we do?
We're at that moment right now.
What do we do?
We are in what possibly is the final battle for the American way of life, the American truth, justice, and the American way.
I don't really care if we're a poor nation.
I really don't.
I don't want to be a poor nation.
I don't want to have poverty.
But I do believe that we have been so misguided, we have lost our way so expertly that we have put all of our belief that what America is, is about success, money, ease,
an abundance of food, we don't have to work hard, and that's not true.
It's just not true.
As we advance as a species,
are we any better than the people that came before us?
Are we any better than those who we say we stand against their principles?
We fight with words, we fight with votes, and God bless it with politics,
but we don't fight alone.
I couldn't say this to you three years ago, four years ago,
because we were still putting our faith in one man in the office of the President of the United States.
And I think still too many people are doing that.
But I know today that I'm not fighting this alone.
I'm fighting this with you.
We're fighting this battle with parents that will stand up.
So many parents won't say anything.
They'll say it privately.
They'll say it to their neighbors.
They'll say it to somebody else in the school board meeting.
But when it comes time to stand up, they don't want their children to have any problems at school.
They They don't want to be a pariah
in the neighborhood.
But I'll tell you right now,
I know there are parents all over this country that are standing up.
There are moms all over this country, moms for liberty.
They're conservative.
They're independent.
Even some of them are Democrat.
A lot of them are.
That are seeing the insanity in our schools.
I personally am waiting for more teachers to join us.
I'm waiting for the teachers who don't believe in pedophilia and Marxism to stand up and say, I reject my union.
We need some courage there, gang.
I mean, unless you're with Marxist and pedophiles and child mutation, you know, mutilation, you know, go ahead.
But then I oppose what you believe
because I am for children being children.
I I am for children having innocence in their childhood.
I am for children being safe from predators.
And I know we fight with doctors by our side.
There are doctors all over the country that are against this and standing up and risking their license to stand up and say, no, no mutilation of children.
No, you don't have to take the vaccine.
No, you should be able to consult with your doctor.
And if you have a different treatment that you want to try, you should be able to try it.
They're doctors who know first do no harm.
Scientists, the scientists that are standing up, that know that science is based on provable fact,
and that science is always wrong until new fact or only right until new facts come along, which makes the old science outdated and wrong.
Scientists that know that the military-industrial complex wasn't all that Eisenhower warned about.
He warned about the military-industrial complex becoming so big that it can control Congress, that we would be in never-ending wars.
But he also warned us about education, getting into bed with the government, and training a whole new generation to be slaves of an out-of-control government.
He warned of a scientific complex where our scientists would no longer be able to think individually because so much of the study would be funded by the government, which was looking for answers that they wanted.
When we fight today, we fight with the scientists who know that and will stand up and say, no, this is wrong.
And there's lots of them.
Today, we fight against the mainstream media.
But we're fighting in a different way.
We used to have to fight them with every fact and everything else.
Now with the new media, something that when I started the blaze 12 years ago, people said I was insane.
This would never work.
You can't get past the mainstream media and the big networks.
And yet we did it.
And look what has spawned from that.
Now
we are fighting with the voice of a new media where soon, and I mean very soon, the mainstream media has to answer to us.
We are no longer in a position to where we have to answer to them.
We have to say what they are charging and then, you know,
prove them wrong.
Instead,
They're going to be in the position very soon where they have to prove us wrong.
And that has taken a toll on so many people in the media that got out and risked everything
and came to the new media.
And they're still coming.
We're now fighting with actors and actresses and writers and directors and gaffers and cinematographers and stage people
that have had enough of the insanity that are now coming to something even newer than the new media, and that is the new Hollywood for lack of a better term
we have seen amazing advances from the Jesus Revolution to the chosen those are not low quality conservative films
that is the highest quality
And we're now making inroads to distribution.
Once we have full distribution, the whole world changes.
We fight with Mike Lee.
We fight with father and son, Ran and Ron Paul.
We fight with Chip Broy and Ted Cruz.
We fight with the members of the Freedom Caucus.
And there are many others in Washington, in Congress, in the Senate that are actually fighting.
We are also fighting with others in Washington like whistleblowers.
Have you noticed the number of whistleblowers?
And we also fight with people who are silently standing in place, not abandoning their posts and trying to protect what they can from the inside.
We fight for the rule of law, the Constitution.
We fight for the rights of all mankind.
We fight with posts on Facebook and X and Instagram, blah, blah, blah, a hundred other places.
We get to raise our flags.
We fight it every day at a gun range.
We fight it when we buy the hunting license at Cabela's.
In our hearts, we know
we don't care about the stupid bear, the black bear, the deer.
In our hearts, we actually have compassion for these animals, and we take their life to feed our families.
It's not a sport where we kill them and leave them on the side as the media would have you believe.
It's not brutal and grotesque.
That's why we go to the firing range because we have a responsibility if we're going to hunt to take the animal down in one shot.
We have a responsibility to if we carry a gun and we're seeing a crime and people in danger that we pull our gun out and we don't get other people killed including ourself.
We care about being outdoors.
We care about the land.
We care about the timber.
We care about the smell of pine and how cold the waterfall is coming off a glacier.
We care about these things.
This is the best of the Glenbeck program.
Welcome to the Glenbeck program.
We're glad you're here.
Hey.
Oh,
thank good the New York Times have been vindicated about Ray Epps.
You know, see, the government is going after him because, you know, he apparently was a threat.
And wow, they,
he could spend hours in jail.
And
that'll teach him.
And
so he's definitely not somebody that was involved in any way with the government.
Now, Darren
Beatty has been following this.
He's the founder and editor of Revolver News.
He's been on the program many, many times, holds a Ph.D.
political science, taught political theory at Duke University.
He got involved in all of
the news and trying to find the truth just a few years ago.
I couldn't take it anymore.
And he does some incredible work at Revolver News.
If you haven't been to Revolver.news, you need to.
He joins us now to tell me what he thinks about the Ray Epps charge.
Wow.
They They nailed him, didn't they?
Absolutely.
Now, there are a number of things to say about this.
One is just how obviously desperate and bungling this is as a cover-up attempt, as a last-gasp effort to salvage the absolutely crumbling narrative surrounding Ray Epps,
specifically in the Fed section generally.
So just a couple of things about this indictment, which is a misdemeanor guilty plea deal for a single offense, which is disorderly conduct in restricted grounds.
So there are two things to say about this initially.
One is just how weak the charge is.
And to get a sense of how weak it is, you need to compare it to charges other defendants face for far less egregious behavior.
In just about every case, anyone who did remotely what EPS did, leave aside the EPS telling people to go into Capital in advance, just his movements in the restricted zones,
that would have come with an obstruction of an official proceeding charge, which is a felony.
And there are a number of other charges which the DOJ could easily have given EPS if they wanted from very early on, ranging all the way up to conspiracy, which is some of the more serious charges.
It's worth noting that Enrique Tario, some of these Proud Boy sentencing, which is really just the perfect contrast with Eps' misdemeanor.
Enrique Tario, who got the most severe sentence in all of January 6th, 22-year sentence, he wasn't at the Capitol.
He wasn't even at D.C.
He wasn't in D.C.
for that day.
And yet he got convicted of seditious conspiracy.
So the people saying, oh, Epps didn't go into the Capitol.
That's why.
No, it has nothing to do with not going into the Capitol.
The biggest sentencings were for people who didn't go into the Capitol, one of whom wasn't even in D.C.
And those were the conspiracy charges.
And the great irony is, even though I would say after having read the charging documents, the evidence is very flimsy against Tario and others for those serious charges, Ray Epps is the only one of them who has actually acknowledged his role in a conspiracy with the literal text message to his nephew saying, I orchestrated it.
So everybody's being charged with conspiracy except for the guy who explicitly acknowledged
it and
justifiably so because the the video evidence is astonishing and people can go to revolver.news now the very top piece has some very rare footage you know there's the stuff that everyone has seen but there's some rare stuff that really contextualizes the focus the term determination and the extent to which he was just on this mission to get people in the capital there's amazing things from the evening before we've all seen the we need to go into the Capitol, but he was going from group to group.
Anytime a group was talking about anything other than the Capitol, he was there to redirect them to the point that, in one instance, he stated, our enemy is the Capitol, as though he traveled across the country to vet his vendetta against neoclassical architecture.
It's really something remarkable.
And the thought that the regime press would cover this as though this slap on the wrist charge
two
years and eight months after January 6th that's the other thing the time span we know that the feds were aware of Epps from the very beginning on January 8th two days after the 6th
he was one of the first 20 people put on the FBI's most wanted list They've been aware of him for a long.
It's not like this weird scenario where they just heard of him because they just happened to stumble on a revolver news piece, you know, a week ago.
No, they've been aware of him since the very beginning, and they've considered his behavior so egregious as to warrant being put as one of the first 20 people on the most wanted list.
They took his name off quietly literally the day after our second big piece on federal involvement in January 6th.
So it's
too little, it's too late.
We all see it for what it is, and it fits this pattern of of almost unimaginable incompetence.
Where if they were smart, the Epps case is so bad for them, it's like the worst thing they could possibly talk about.
If they were smart, they would do everything they could to keep Epps out of the news cycle, period.
They wouldn't re-up him in our consciousness and remind us of what a sham January 6th was with desperate attempts like a misdemeanor charge almost three years after January 6th.
So the the amazing thing is, he said he came to Washington because he was a big Trump supporter, but he didn't attend the Trump rally.
He was at the Capitol
before Trump even finished his
speech, and he was already appeared to be preparing the way for the entrance of everybody into the Capitol.
Is that true?
Absolutely.
It's even crazier than that.
So in this piece I'm talking about that's at the top of Revolver now, we go through his entire workings the evening before, then the next day on the 6th, keep in mind, Trump didn't start speaking, he wasn't set to start speaking until noon.
We have Ray Epps before 10,
so over two hours before,
hanging around the entrance to where the speech would be, directing people to go to the Capitol.
That's where our true problems lie.
It's in that direction.
Spread the word.
The Capitol is where our problems are over and over and over.
And like you said, despite what he told authorities, you know, in interviews with authorities, both the JSICS committee and the FBI,
he told them the whole reason he traveled all the way across the country was that his son wanted to go to the Trump speech, and he was there to protect his son.
because he had some premonition that there would be explosives planted on side streets near the Capitol, which is an amazing premonition.
And the people didn't even ask him follow-up questions about the pipe bombs, which is another story altogether.
But he ends up, as you point out, not going to the Trump speech and abandoning his...
Stop being with his son.
His son's not with him.
Exactly.
And he just happens to skip the speech and mosey on over to the very location that just happened to be that initial decisive breach location that kicked off the entire event.
And may I just ask you to verify, at one point he's in this
mosh pit of people.
He's not only not with his son, it appears that he has four protectors, or sorry, eight protectors with him, four behind him, four in front of him, kind of clearing the crowd so he can get up into the front of the crowd.
Is that right?
Yes, I'm aware of what you're the video that you're saying, and I can say generally that
his initial moniker for researchers into this was crowd control because he was so proficient at controlling the crowds, being in the front lines, organizing movements of people.
And again, there's compilation video.
He's a Where's Waldo figure throughout the whole day.
He's everywhere.
He's directing people.
He's organizing the crowd.
He is an actually commanding presence.
And it's pretty clear.
It's clear this is not his first rodeo.
He's been around a long time.
And in some other contexts, I might say he's a very impressive figure.
He's
kind of a badass dude if you look at some of his pictures from his history as a Marine and so forth.
But
he was everywhere.
and there's there's actually another piece of funny footage that's in this piece i mentioned that's pretty rare of this is on the evening of the fifth of the crowd saying you're not going to do anything you're not going to storm the capital because he's telling people to go into the capital in one clip he actually says we need to storm the capital and he's listening to these naysayers and he has this grin on his face like i know something you don't know he puts his hand up up and he slaps his hand in the kind of talk-to-the-hand motion like, wait and see, kid.
Wait and see what happens tomorrow, which is
pretty amazing indeed.
All of his
all of the reports, I mean, the love puff piece from the New York Times, if I'm not mistaken, made him look like kind of almost a feeble old guy without his wife.
I mean,
he's not a strong figure.
He's just a guy who was misguided by, I mean, the excuse they will give no one else, including grandmothers,
he was just misguided and misled by some very bad people.
No, and it's really amazing.
And another data point that's
worth noting that gives a sense of just how aggressively the system is protecting him, not just the regime media, but people like Adam Kinsinger, the director of the J-6 witch hunt,
and even the DOJ and figures in the FBI.
To give you a sense of how aggressively they're protecting him,
it's little spoken of that he was actually had a leadership role in the Oath Keepers, which is the most demonized and heavily prosecuted militia group associated with J6, at least until the recent Proud Boy sentencing.
And
we have footage of him hanging out with Stuart Rhodes way back in the day in Arizona, just hanging out with him at marches,
at a memorial service, at a brunch service.
And so
it could be the case, it probably is that he had left the group since, but nonetheless,
in every other context, anyone who is remotely associated with the Oath Keepers, the press, and the charging documents make a huge deal of this involvement to the point of extreme exaggeration.
And yet here we have a guy who on paper would be the perfect poster boy as the villain for this insurrection.
The guy in camo gear with a Trump hat telling people to go into the Capitol, who is a leader in the Oath Keepers, where there's video of him hanging out with Stuart Rhodes, who was next to Tario, got the biggest sentence in J6 for seditious conspiracy.
and yet nobody even talks about that.
It's not mentioned in the charging documents, it's completely kept out of media reports on Ray Epps and so forth.
So that gives you a sense of how aggressively they're defending him.
And you're right, the New York Times did a puff piece on him.
60 Minutes did a sympathy segment on him.
It recently came out in a transcript of Stephen D'Antuono, the head of the FBI's investigation of J6 in D.C.
He was asked about Ray Epps.
He said, quote, I feel awful for Ray Epps.
And then there are follow-up questions.
And this individual who feels awful for Epps, the head of the FBI's investigation of J6 in D.C., who feels awful for Epps, this is amazing.
He was asked.
Darren, thank you.
Go ahead, quickly.
Yep.
He said, have you seen the video of Epps?
And he said, no.
No, no.
Darren, thank you so much for everything you do at Revolver News.
I'd like to have you come in and maybe we do a special on just what you know and all that you've gathered on Ray Epps.
Just go to revolver.news and you will see the lead story is on all of the videos and it's it's pretty amazing thank you so much now the reason why this is important is I'm not saying that he's a fed I don't know but I don't know why they're passing him by because if you believe like I do, the people who were actually instigating and organizing and breaking windows and doing violence, those people should go to jail.
So,
wait, why are the people that are trying to throw everybody in jail taking this guy and not throwing him in jail and giving him a severe sentence?
I don't know if it's because he's a fed.
I just know I want actual justice for all involved.
So, the question remains: why is no justice
done here?
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Douglas, may I call you Doug?
Doug, please.
Where do you go by Douglas?
Doug, okay.
May I call you Bob?
Hey, I'm on your show.
You call me whatever you want.
Okay,
Douglas Brunt,
you have written this great, great book.
By the way, full disclosure, you are the husband of Megan Kelly.
Not that that's important.
I just don't want somebody going, well, you know Megan Kelly and that's why you had him on.
I didn't.
I'm having Doug on because his book is fantastic.
And your wife did tell me, Glenn, I know this, this book was written for you.
I feel like it was, Doug.
Tell the story.
It's funny you say that because as I was finishing it up, I spoke to my editor and I said, we've got to get this book over to Glenn Beck because he is a student of history and I believe he will love it.
And maybe I'll get a chance to talk to him and talk to his listeners who also appreciate history.
Yeah, no, it's great.
It's great.
So tell me the story.
Well, as you were suggesting, people have been mistakenly spelling Diesel with a lowercase D.
You know, you don't do that with Ford, Chrysler, Benz.
And the reason for that is he was involved in the greatest, the reviews of the book have been really terrific, and several have referred to it as the greatest caper of the 20th century.
And so.
On the eve of World War I, September 29th, 1913, Rudolph Diesel was traveling from Belgium to Great Britain on an overnight passenger ferry and he disappears.
And it's hard to state the level of his global fame at this time.
And in today's standards, it would be like Elon Musk disappearing one day to the next.
And so the newspapers around the world, the front page of the New York Times, all the papers through Western Europe, all the papers in Russia were covering this crazy disappearance of this celebrity inventor.
And as you said, suicide was the prevailing theory, but there are also two theories of murder.
One, that either Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, had dispatched agents to murder him, or that John Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and richest man in the world, had sent maybe a Pinkerton detective thug over there to murder him.
So those were the theories.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, Doug, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
Don't tell me, because I'm only halfway through it.
Don't tell me the ending.
But do you come to a conclusion?
Yes, I do.
And I will
tell you now is I'll only tell you not suicide, but by exploring the motive that each of these two had to kill him.
And they each viewed diesel as an existential threat.
By exploring that in the quarter century leading up to World War I, you understand the period and what's going on and why diesel and the engine were so critical.
So, you know, you do a great job at explaining coal engines.
I had no idea how inefficient trains and ships were.
You know, I've seen,
you know, you've brought up the
Titanic movie, and we've all seen it when he's like, let's open this up and see what she can do.
And they ring full speed ahead, and you see all these people that are shoveling the coal in.
And you might think, wow, they've got to have a lot of space for coal, and these engines are huge.
But I never thought of the, what, about 200 people all told between the mechanics and the shovelers
that had to have room on the ship and the food that they had to have and the quarters they had to have.
And then how inefficient those engines were.
I had no idea.
Oh, it's amazing.
They would get, back in the days of James Watt, 1770s, you know, you would say the James Watt engine is as old as America.
Back then, the metallurgy and the casting of the engines was so poor that they would use rope and leather to sort of bind the pipes.
So you can imagine how much pressure and heat can be lost in that.
And in those days, out of a unit of fuel, they could get about 2% of energy.
In Diesel's days, when he was first starting starting the diesel engine, steam engine could get 6% to 8%.
What Diesel ultimately achieved with his diesel engine was closer to 40%.
So it was just leaps and bounds in fuel efficiency.
Game-changing.
Where is the diesel engine in relation to
the Ford engine?
Because I always thought that the car engine, the combustion engine,
that was developed at the same time of the car, but it wasn't.
It was actually, they actually
used,
I mean, anything that would burn very flammable stuff, but that was actually
at first
to replace the steam engine, and it came long before the car or just as the car.
And where did the diesel engine come in?
The auto cycle
engine.
Yeah, the auto cycle engine, which is the origins of sort of a gas-burning engine now, initially was burning gaseous fuels like benzene, methane, and things like that.
But those were low-torque, sort of, you know, very tiny engines.
And, you know, Benz used them in the 1870s, 80s in experimenting with his first cars, which really looked like a motorbike.
And they were, you know, half a horsepower, one horsepower.
They could never drive a ship, and they really weren't used for that.
What ultimately became and remains to this day, the prime source of power in the world is the diesel engine.
It's incredible that I didn't know any of this stuff and he was as big of a name as
he was.
So he's on the ship.
They find
his coat
folded up.
It's so strange, Doug, and I know this is personal and only to me, but the way you describe that, my mother committed suicide and it was on a boat.
And
it was a double suicide.
And the clothes were folded up and put right on the ledge of the ship.
And that's why we believe that it was suicide.
And when I read that, I thought,
wow, what a great way to cover a murder if you're doing it, because that does lead you to believe that.
It does seem to mark the point where he went off the ship.
And it was kind of set up to do that.
There's just so many inconsistencies with the story.
And as you read the book, you can see the various holes
in that theory.
And then you can also see why the
newspapers were speculating at that time that Diesel might have been murdered by one of these two suspects.
I think if the book's going 60 miles an hour for you now, it's about to go 120 as you get into the investigation of it.
And I won't spoil anything, but I will tell you that in 1913, a diesel engine had emerged as the only option for the U-boat or the submarine.
And as you know, as a student of history, you know, we're in the the middle of an Anglo-German naval arms race where Germany is growing by leaps and bounds, and they feel they need colonies to support their growth, to bring natural resources back into the homeland.
So they're trying to build a navy to rival Great Britain, and they've decided the U-boat is the way to go.
Rudolph was traveling across the North Sea on that day in September because he was going to be co-founder and board director of a new diesel engine manufacturing company in Great Britain whose mandate was to build diesels, submarine diesels, for the Royal Navy.
And so you can imagine the Kaiser was thinking hard no.
Right.
Right.
And he also, but he, I mean, he didn't stop it.
Diesel was also the guy who started the oil industry in Russia?
Nobel.
Yeah, the Nobel family.
Alfred Nobel's two older brothers.
Oh, okay.
And how was he involved?
I thought it was diesel that did that.
How were they involved?
In any way?
Yeah, they were actually in a big way.
The diesel engine followed a standard licensing practice of that time, which was to license out the exclusive rights to manufacture and market the technology by national territory.
So in Russia, the Nobel family, which is another crazy story, we only know Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, but he had two older brothers who manufactured arms and engines and steam boilers and things like that.
in Russia.
They're Swedish by origin, but in Russia.
And they were going to find more wood for rifle stocks to fill an order for the Tsar of 100,000 rifles.
And they went down to the Caucasus region and discovered oil.
And they ended up founding the Russian oil industry.
And by 1900, they were bigger than standard oil.
The reason we don't know much about them now is
Salon came down there with a Bolshevik Red Army and kicked them all out and seized everything and renamed it the Soviet oil company and the Soviet Engine Manufacturing Company.
But the Nobels were also the exclusive manufacturer of diesel engines, built diesels for the Russian Navy and for other things.
The castle,
in the U.S., in the North America, the person who took the license for the diesel engine was Adolphus Busch, founder of Anheuser-Busch, and used the diesel engine to pump water for his breweries and also had a side business of building submarine diesels for the U.S.
Navy.
And
the diesel engine hasn't really changed that much, except now with computer chips and everything else, but it's still the basic thing, isn't it?
It is.
And it's funny, Glenn, the way I came into it is Megan and I bought a boat, and it was an older boat and a little bigger, and I was going to do some work to fix it up.
And I was talking to this guy at the boat yard, you know, what should I do to fix this old boat up?
And he said, well, a boat like this, you know, you really ought to get rid of these gasoline engines and put in diesel.
And at that time, this is eight years ago, I always thought of diesel as sort of the other fuel that the trucks use.
I didn't associate it with certainly not in name and not even a different kind of engine.
And he said, look, you can take, he said, the diesel fuel is completely stable.
I can take a lit match, drop it into a barrel of diesel fuel, and nothing will happen.
It won't ignite.
It has no fumes.
100% of boat fires come from gasoline engines, zero from diesel.
And it gets four times the efficiency.
So on your 200-gallon tank, you can go four times as far.
So I repowered the diesel, and that's how I got started with this whole thing eight years ago.
It is, it's a remarkable story.
Why do we not know about him now?
Why has he been lost to history?
Two reasons, I would say.
One is the presumption of suicide.
If you look him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it says suicide.
And there's just something that's kind of impairing to your legacy about all that.
And after he disappeared, others kind of moved in to try and seize some of the credit for his work unjustly.
But the other bigger reason you will soon get to, because he is at the heart of this caper.
And so for reasons that you'll, and all readers will come to understand as they get into the back half of the book, he has been scrubbed from history.
It's remarkable.
It is absolutely remarkable.
I love discovering history.
You know, it's fun.
You must have had a blast researching this book.
Oh my gosh.
So much fun.
There are so many interesting things about it.
I mean, one of the fascinating things about it, and I know you're doing some work on Rockefeller, who is our other suspect, the reason Rockefeller viewed diesel as an existential threat is the diesel engine ran on a range of fuels.
Diesel won the 1900 Paris World's Fair on a diesel engine running peanut oil, and he didn't need petroleum or any of Rockefeller's products.
And Rockefeller, when you think about from the founding of Standard Oil in 1870 to 1900, when he became the richest man in the world, he wasn't selling gasoline.
That was a waste product that they would get rid of.
They were selling kerosene for lighting.
But Rockefeller was in the illumination business.
And then along comes Edison in the electric light bulb, wipes out the prospects for the future of kerosene for illumination, and threatens to do to Rockefeller what Rockefeller had done to the whaling business.
You know, we used to use whale blubber, then kerosene came in, and then the light bulb.
So Rockefeller is now searching around for new markets for revenue as the combustion engine is emerging as a major player and it can run on gasoline.
So suddenly his waste product is his new main product.
But Diesel comes along and says, we don't need to do that.
We don't need to be beholden to petroleum in certain areas of the world that have that.
We have farmers.
We can grow our own fuel, the vegetables and nuts, or it could even run on coal tar.
If you do the coking process with coal, you get this tar-like sludge, which is a great diesel fuel.
A great book.
Thank you so much.
Doug, we have to get together sometime because
you would love to see the museum and the collection that we have down here.
And I think you could bring some insight to it as well.
Doug, thank you so much.
Would love that.
Glenn, thank you.
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.
When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter jug.
When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
Oh, come on.
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.
Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
Whatever.
You were made to outdo your holidays.
We were made to help organize the competition.
Expedia, made to travel.