We all have some recollection of high school – though some memories are hazier than others. Depending on what kind of student you were, your grade point average might be something you’ve chosen to forget.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by her husband, best-selling author Doug Brunt, to discuss his new book The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. During their chat, she admitted that she recently revisited her high school transcript and was, well, surprised by what she found.
‘It Was Horrible’
Megyn’s assistant Abby recently tracked down a copy of her high school transcript because Megyn was curious to see her grades. “I just kind of wanted to see how I did,” she shared. “I didn’t think it was very good, but I didn’t think it was terrible.” Much to her chagrin, it was apparently a bit worse than she remembered. “It was horrible,” she admitted. “It was absolutely terrible.”
Megyn joked that she didn’t show it to Doug because she didn’t want him asking himself “what did I marry?” Needless to say, everything worked out just fine for her academically and otherwise.
Playing to Their Strengths
What Megyn knows she excels at, however, is a skill she has honed throughout her career – first in law and now in media. “The one thing I’m good at – though it is not apparently testing in school – is taking large amounts of information and condensing them into small digestible bits,” she said.
As it turns out, that is also what she sees as one of Doug’s biggest strengths as an author. “You’re even better at that than I am,” she noted. This is particularly evident in his new book, which is the first non-fiction work he has written. “You’ve taken such complex matters in this book and you’ve revised it over, and over, and over again until you got to the point where it’s easy for anyone to understand,” she explained.
Doug said he learned from the best, and the multifaceted nature of the book is a reflection of that. “You are the best at taking complex stuff and making it digestible, but the book does do a lot of different things and, I think, does them well,” he said.
You could classify The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel any number of ways. “It is, in part, a biography of this man, and it is, in part, mini biographies of the prime suspects in the murder investigation,” Doug explained. “It’s a primer on nineteenth century diplomacy and that Gilded Age and the decades leading up to World War I… and it’s also a bit of a ‘combustion engines for dummies’ book… People of that era and even today don’t understand why it is such a fundamentally different engine and why it completely changed the game.”
Most importantly, Megyn said, it is “interesting” for everyone.
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Doug by tuning in to episode 630 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.