Douglas Brunt

The Volga is a good horse.

So they would send ships up the Volga

on the river systems to get the oil around Russia.

So they were naturally using ships already.

So he goes around to all the other oil drillers and refineries and said, let's go in on this together.

It's going to be very expensive and he can't get anyone to do it because they don't believe it can work.

So he just designs his own oil tanker and builds it and pioneers the first river going and then ocean going oil tankers, which totally takes even Rockefeller by surprise.

And suddenly he's putting oil out of the international markets in a way that Rockefeller,

I really get sort of knocked back on his heels.

I've always been, and I think you are the same, totally curious about history.

And I was joking, there are some connections.

Certainly you can see something like, how is Nobel connected to all this?

And you know the story's a little bit hidden.

It's logical that Stalin would have covered up and appropriated

some of the achievements of the Nobels for his own, then retold the story.

We kind of know that.

So then it's just sort of a curiosity of like, all right, well, I'm going to go into some archives.

I made it into some archives in Stockholm, Sweden, that has treasures of Nobel history that's been pulled out of Azerbaijan.

And it's funny that you say like sort of a treasure hunting thing when, for me, like the geeky version of Indiana Jones, you know, I'm sort of digging into the story and then I'll find a document that for most people like, oh, this doesn't really mean a lot.

But for me, in the context of this story, it's gold.