The Megyn Kelly Show
Megyn Kelly is Joined By Doug Brunt To Talk About His New Book, and the Importance of Laughter in Marriage
27 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. I'm joined now by a very special guest, a New York Times bestselling author, host of the excellent podcast Dedicated with Doug Brunt, and the author of the upcoming book, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanoff's Revolutionaries and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World.
Doug happens to be my husband as well, so that worked out well. Hi, honey.
Hi, it's great to be here.
Congrats. So here is the galley copy of the new book, which is just so cool looking. It's beautiful. The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel. And it looks kind of similar, similar style to your last big New York Times bestseller, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel. Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel will not be available until May, but they can pre-order it today. Have it in time for Father's Day.
Chapter 2: What is the main topic of Doug Brunt's new book?
Yeah. And tell us what The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel is about.
What is by getting the galleys is such a nice moment. We opened the box, you know, as a family around the dining room table and you pull them out and you see it and you hold it in your hands after years of working on it. It is a companion book to the diesel book. Emmanuel Nobel has an appearance in the Rudolph diesel story.
But you don't have to have read diesel in order to read this book.
It can be out of sequence. And in fact, I haven't said this really. The only people who know this next piece are you and my editor and a few people in archives around the world, but I'm working on a third, which will be, will complete a trilogy of,
of these three turn-of-the-century characters, Emmanuel Nobel essentially established the Russian oil industry along the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. So by 1900, he and his family had built an oil business larger than Standard Oil. And in World War I, he controlled more oil than anyone else on the planet.
So it was this huge prize sitting in southern Russia that Germany, the Brits, the Bolsheviks, the communists, Japan, everybody wanted to get to the Nobel oil because they had essentially developed a whole oil infrastructure that was superior to anything else in the world.
Superior to Rockefeller, that's crazy.
Even to Rockefeller. And yet, for reasons explained in the book, Nobel has been obliterated from history. Totally. So this brings him back to life and tells the story.
The only Nobel anybody knows is Alfred Nobel, who started the Nobel Prizes. This is Emmanuel Nobel, his nephew, built a totally different, bigger fortune that has been totally forgotten, wiped out. His name is not really known at all in connection with the awards. That's all the Uncle Alfred who did dynamite. That was his business. And it's it's do you reveal why?
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Chapter 3: How does Doug Brunt's book connect to the history of the Nobel family?
You know, you should take care of your family and put all the money toward that. So Emmanuel stands up to the king of Sweden and says, no, no, no, we're going to, you know, I'm taking my role as the executor of his will. Seriously, we're going to have the prize. And so he, at the last second, rescues the prize.
Had it not been for Emmanuel Houston. But the funny thing is, is like, you think about... you know, Russia, and you know, they've got one huge asset. Well, two, one is oil and two is their ability to mess with you online, right? Like those are two big assets that they have. Those are their two primary weapons.
There's also the matter of nuclear weapons, but in any event, this is their main source of income is their petroleum industry. And it wasn't theirs and they didn't invent it. And actually nobody was doing it at all in Russia until Emmanuel Nobel came along and it was like, hey, look at all this stuff. This actually looks quite interesting.
When they first bought land in Caucasus, in present-day Azerbaijan, along the Caspian Sea, people were skimming oil out of puddles. There was no drilling. Any wells that were dug were dug by hand with spades. So they come down there with great... They are chemists and engineers by trade. And so they come down there and they completely... turn it around.
But this was in the 1870s, in the time of the Tsars. So the book has these amazing detours through history that include the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and Dostoevsky and Fabergé.
And tons on Stalin. I learned so much about Joseph Stalin that I did not know. And you personalize his backstory in a way that I didn't know. Like, how did he grow up to be this murderous, crazy dude? And now I know. I mean, you actually have a lot of backstory on Stalin. You see the rise of these two men, very, very different in character, but in strength. Yeah.
they were equals for a long, long time, Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin. So you learn a ton about world history, about Russia. Everything that Russia is today is explained in this book. But you don't feel like you're learning. You feel like you're just getting like a caper.
Well, yeah, it's written ideally in a very novelistic way. It's a ripping read. I mean, you go through it, but it has these fun detours, but it is... a piece of history. And Stalin, as you say, grew up as a neighbor to Nobel in Southern Russia. He grew up in Georgia, which is between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
And he actually worked in the oil fields of the Nobels and the Rothschilds, who are another big figure in Russian oil. And so Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin, they're sort of like these counterpoints to each other. And Stalin's looking at these oil capitalists, industrialists with envy and hatred. And, you know, ultimately, you know, the whole book brings this collision you know is coming between
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Chapter 4: What role does laughter play in a healthy marriage?
And what are we doing?
Well, rye, which is basically bourbon. Okay.
The reason that we're doing this is A, it's eggnog, and why not? It's that time of year. But B, on Doug's podcast, which is called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews authors, he both interviews authors and talks about their books, and he always pours a cocktail of choice. Could be virgin, could be alcoholic. This one happens to be alcoholic.
It's almost always alcoholic, thank God. And everyone drinks the drink. Michael Lewis was on the other day, and he's like, do people actually drink the drink? He had a Sazerac, by the way, which is like the New Orleans cocktail. Sazerac? Yeah. It's basically similar to an old-fashioned.
Now he's doing the nutmeg. Nutmeg over the... Didn't we do this last year? Didn't we do the eggnog last year?
We did. I think I had to read your ad by the end. Maybe that was a different show. Cheers, honey.
Merry Christmas. Love you. Oh, yeah, that's tasty.
Our first eggnog of the season. That's delicious.
I know. Well done. Yeah, no, and we talked about how that one year we were drinking eggnogs like they were going out of style. When we were young, we didn't have kids, and we both blew up like ticks. We were huge.
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Chapter 5: How do Doug and Megyn incorporate humor into their family life?
You have a little elf up in the north.
Yeah, so I don't really need Doug Brun's help because I've got Santa.
Although I do help a little.
You do help. But we were talking a little bit about our Christmas traditions. I was doing this for Steven Crowder. And there's so many that we do. Like we go to Montana every year.
Yeah.
And there's a bunch of stuff we do over there. But what would you say? Like I've asked what's our top or what's a couple of top Christmas traditions that we have?
I mean, well, we're still, you know, earmuffs on the kids. We're still firing away with the elf every morning. Shh. And the advent. They know. And- We try to carol as much as possible, but that's not every year. We do have a great, like, almost 20 years tradition of getting lunch with a particular group of friends in the city. It used to be at the 21 Club. Hello, that's got to open back up.
It does. The 21 Club. Yep. But we have found new venues for that.
Wait a minute. What was the second thing you said?
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of modern parenting discussed in the episode?
We do It's a Wonderful Life.
But everyone's a gamer.
With the salt and the bread and the whole bit and, you know, ringing the bell when Clarence makes an appearance on screen. And hissing when Potter- You and I, the greatest tradition, bar none, of Christmas aside, you and I start every morning with a cup of coffee. We've got the coffee machine in the bedroom. It's set-
The night before with the alarm, it goes off and we start each day with 20 minutes together talking, having coffee. Sometimes listening to AM Update, other times watching Christmas in Connecticut for a few minutes to start the day. It's just an awesome way to enter the day and enter the world, you know, having connected a little bit.
It's so true. And right now we have a little tree in our bedroom. We've got some Christmas lights. And that makes it magical too, you know, like turn that on. The only thing Doug and I argue about in the bedroom is the temperature. Yes. Right? Yeah. So now we both like it cool when we sleep. That makes sense. Everybody should have it. They say 68 degrees. It's good for your health.
It's good for your sleep. But... Doug would like the thermometer to be turned down much earlier in the evening so that it's like cold when we arrive.
Yes. That makes me irritable. We climb in bed. I'm like, it's so effing hot in here.
And I'm like, it's freezing. Because you can't function in there when it's 68 degrees. When you're doing your nighttime routine, you're washing your face, you're in your nightgown, you're freezing your ass off if it's 68 degrees.
You've got a heated floor, though. You should just sort of like get low.
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Chapter 7: How does the conversation shift to the topic of education and accommodations?
Oh, look, here's back to the future. Oh, nice. Blurred the kids, kids' faces. You were the best McFly. You were George McFly, the dad. Oh yeah. And you, oh, you've got to do your imitation. Can you do your George McFly imitation?
All right. Take your damn hands off her. I don't know if I nailed that. You did. I love it.
And then we did Moses. We did Ten Commandments, and you made an amazing Moses. Years earlier, this was good. I mean, this, we went all out for the Moses. We got Pharaoh represented. We got Zephia.
If there's no one in the family who does this amount of planning as you do, which is amazing because everyone fully appreciates, but even like a wig night is kind of fun if you're recommending to the audience. We have a closet full of wigs. It's true. And it's fun just to like, I don't know,
Somehow things are more fun in wigs. Yeah. Right? It's like you could just be eating your dinner. We don't actually do anything. Like somebody's asking, what do you do on costume? I'm like, nothing. We just put them on.
Laugh at each other.
There's the wonka. That was a great one. Here's the funny story about these two people in there as Violet Beauregard and Augustus Gloop. They've since become dear friends of ours, but that night we didn't know them at all. So we were expecting two family members who then couldn't come. It was like right after COVID, that was either 2020 or 2021.
It was right when things were still nutty because of COVID and their flights got canceled. And these two go to our school and we had just met them. And we're like, so would you like to come for dinner? They're like, sure, we'd love to. And we're like, could you wear some weird costumes?
That's not exactly how it goes. There's no could you wear. Meg lays down the law. When you cross that threshold, you're in her world. And she says, off you go. And here's your costume. And don't come back out until it's on.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Doug provide about the importance of font in communication?
a background from Amazon. So if you go into Amazon and you type in 10 commandments or you type in back to the future backdrop, you will pull up so many options for 40 bucks or under. 40 bucks for the big one, for eight by 10. But if you want to go smaller, it's much cheaper.
Anyway, my point is simply for under 150 bucks, you could probably get everybody in your family in a costume and with a backdrop. And that's really the end of it. So we'll try to sometimes do like the food that's themed appropriately. Like that night, one year we did Karate Kid, Cobra Kai.
Yeah, that was great.
We had Asian that night. That's about as much as, you know. It's not that, like, then you just sit there and you laugh.
Miyagi specials. Yeah.
Oh, we did have John Kreese do one of those.
And speaking of, like, cheap, that was like 30 bucks or something, right?
Yeah, one of those services where you can pay an actor to, like, say something personalized.
Yeah, he's like, strike first, you know, getting on with our kids, who, by the way, that was the best 30 bucks we ever spent because the kids were totally into it.
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