Joining us on the line is Douglas Brunce. He is a New York Times bestselling author, host of the top-rated serious XM author podcast dedicated with Doug Brunt. He has a brand new book out title, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel. I've read the book. It is fantastic. It is coming out in just a couple of days. Doug, thanks for joining the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. It's great to be here.

So why don't we start with a pretty obvious question?

Who the heck is Rudolph Diesel and why don't we know his name?

His name seems familiar because obviously we've seen the brand of what a diesel is. But who is he? And why did you care of it? It is often misspelled with a lowercase D, unlike Ford, Chrysler, Benz, and others. And he really, the deficit of appreciation for Rudolph diesel is massive.

And seven years ago, I was like most people and knew, of course, the diesel engine, but not that there was this man, Rudolph Diesel, who had invented it in 1897. I was buying an old boat, a bigger boat that had these gasoline engines, and I was going to repower it. And the guy's like, well, you really ought to repower a boat like this with diesel. And I had no idea why. And he launched

into these reasons that 100% of boat fires come with gasoline engines, zero with diesel. The fuel

efficiency is four times. And there's no fumes. The fuel is stable. So I repowered it. And then later,

I was looking around for ideas for a new novel, came across this list of mysterious disappearances at sea and learned that in 1913, just before World War I, Rudolph Diesel, who at the time was as famous as Elon Musk. The history of him has really been paved over over the last 120 years, but he disappears. And the prevailing thought was it was suicide.

He was on a passenger ship going from Belgium to Great Britain. But there were two other theories

that emerged in the headlines because it was front page news from New York, Western Europe,

Moscow. Everyone was talking about the disappearance of Rudolph Diesel. And there were two murder

suspects. One was Kaiser Wilhelm, the emperor of

Germany, and the other was John Rockefeller, the richest man in the world and founder of Standard Oil.

And as I explored the motivations behind these two men, a whole story emerged.

So let's talk about some of the evidence that you uncovered in your investigation, because it

really is pretty fascinating. So you mentioned these two theories. And why don't you explain why people thought that Johnny Rockefeller would be interested in, say, killing Rudolph Diesel and why Kaiser Wilhelm might have been interested in getting rid of the guy? In the case of Rockefeller, it was really unsettled what the fuel of the 20th century was going to be. And one thing I uncovered in here that many people may not know is that in 1905, there was a fleet of New York taxi cabs, all electric cars. There was a charging station on Broadway and Times Square. And Rockefeller at that time, he had made all his money through kerosene. Standard Oil is founded in 1870. By the turn of the century, he was the richest man in the world. But Rockefeller and Standard Oil, they were in the illumination business. Gasoline was something they would

throw away as a waste product, and they were selling kerosene that they distilled from

rock oil, petroleum. In 1900, though, Rudolph Diesel won the Paris World's Fair for his internal

combustion engine, the diesel engine, running on peanut oil. And he was advocating that countries around the world didn't need petroleum. We didn't need to be beholden to places in the world that drilled oil out of the ground. We could grow our own fuel. We have farmers. He could run the engine on vegetable and nut oil, which, by the way, 15 years ago, Willie Nelson's on tour in his bus with a diesel engine running the bus around the country on recycled kitchen grease.

That works to this day. And that's what diesel advocated. And he said, I can break the American fuel monopolies, not through a law, not through the Sherman Antitrust Act, but through the power of my technology.

So he was an existential threat to Rockefeller just at the time that he had lost the leg of the

stool of his revenue base of kerosene. That was going down. He needed combustion engines to run on gasoline.

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