Doug Brunt
speaker
745 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 Dec
Doug Brunt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
He ate chocolate-covered popcorn out of a sealed bag.
Yeah, like how do you even smell it out of a sealed bag? But he finds it. He eats it. It's supposed to be life-threatening, but he's indestructible. He's fine. He's totally fine.
He'll be thrilled to know Strud enjoyed it.
We'll save the $5,000. Thanks.
These are my Christmas recommendations of great reads. It covers the gamut of reading interests, I believe. The first is our friend, Nelson DeMille, who recently passed away, a dear friend and a mentor to me and a great friend to you. He wrote a book called The Charm School, and this came out in 1988. Just after the war came down, ironically. But the Russia stuff is back in vogue.
So it's about a Russian spy training school. So it's almost like the show American, the Americans with Kerry Russell and the other guy. Matthew Rhys. Matthew Rhys, which is a terrific show. But this is even better than that. And it's just a great read. There's so many people writing thrillers now. Um, no one, and they all revere Nelson as, as just such a great inspiration to them.
And no one does it as well as Nelson has done it.
It's great. I mean, this one, I just cannot go wrong. It's one of the best thrillers ever done. Nelson DeMille is awesome. We miss him. We love him. We truly sad when he left. He was a real inspiration to me.
Yeah. The next also by a friend. So this is different. This is a bit more of a literary work. Amor Tolles, I think, is one of the best writers working today. He's written a number of novels that people might recognize. A Gentleman in Moscow or Rules of Civility or Lincoln Highway. And a friend of yours. And a good friend. And just a terrific writer.
Oh, by the way, as you know, for writers whose work I respect, I like to get the hardcover first edition of the book. So this is the first edition of The Charm School by Nelson. It came out in 88. This is a more recent book by Amor. And it's one novella and a few short stories. It picks up on Eve, who is a character in... um, rules of civility. It's called even Hollywood and some short stories.
So it's easy to, you know, pick up and read a 30 page short story in here. And Amor's writing is really, it's just so good. He's a little more literary, uh, type, but it's just fascinating. Still page turning. And then the last one is Barbara Tuchman.
She is the OG of narrative nonfiction, narrative history, the stuff that Eric Larson and David Grant are doing so well now, what I'm trying to do with Diesel.
Thank you. Plug, plug. And she is just amazing. She's sort of the godmother of that whole genre in modern narrative fiction. And so this is called the Zimmerman Telegram. And it's really the biggest reason we got into World War I. People say the Lusitania and the submarines, but Lusitania happened long before we entered the war. This actually happened right before it.
And it's about the foreign secretary for Germany named Arthur Zimmerman, who sent a telegram down to Mexico saying, go invade the U.S., And distract them over in the Western Hemisphere while we fight this war over here. This is World War I. While we fight this European war. And if you do that, we're going to give you, you know, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico back.
And so he's trying to enlist the Mexicans to fight us in World War I. And the British intercepted and let us know about it. And, of course, that gave us all the reason to enter the war. But her writing is so it's like crackling, incredible prose, just really beautiful writing and a great, great ripping story.
A movie. A movie. That's what it's going to take. If the book gets adapted to the movie, then it just sort of breaks into a whole new stratosphere. But it's true. He... Everyone... Passes the word diesel multiple times a day at a filling station, on a train, on a marine outboard engine or something like that. And not an outboard, more a marine engine inboards. They tried outboards.
But, you know, you never misspell Ford with a lowercase f or Chrysler or Benz. A lot of people don't know there was a Rudolph diesel behind the diesel engine. And, you know, as people who are familiar with the book or the story know, he disappeared right before World War I. And he was a huge celebrity at the time, even though his name has really been kind of scrubbed from history.
And there were theories about what happened. He disappeared on an overnight passenger ship going from Belgium to Great Britain in the middle of the night.
the north sea and there was there were new headlines in newspapers around the world some speculating murder that it wasn't an accident or suicide that he was murdered either by john rockefeller or kaiser wilhelm ii the emperor of germany for reasons that the book gets into you could not have a u-boat or submarine without diesel power so every navy was scrambling for diesel and this was 1913 in the middle of the anglo-german arms race everyone was needed diesel's help to build a navy program
Separately on the Rockefeller side, Diesel advocated flexibility with regard to fuel. You can run the diesel engine on recycled kitchen grease, as Willie Nelson did, or on vegetable or nut oil. And he was saying, I can break the American fuel monopoly, and I don't need a law to do it. I can do it with my technology. And so he was a threat to both. There were theories of murder.
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