The Ben Maynard Program
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The Ben Maynard Program
EP. 92 MOONSHINE OVER GEORGIA: The Hidden Story Behind America's Deadly Addiction. A Conversation with Chris Skates
What happens when a man who once collected samples from nuclear reactors finds himself writing speeches for the Vice President and facing a deadly leukemia diagnosis with just a 2% survival chance? Chris Skates' life journey reads like fiction but unfolds as a testament to human resilience and unexpected second acts.
From the radioactive tunnels of power plants to the halls of the Kentucky governor's office and eventually the Trump administration, Skates' career path defies conventional wisdom. Though his English teachers recognized his writing talent early, he pursued chemistry for stability—only to have writing persistently find its way back into his life through an emotional tribute to his grandfather that unexpectedly launched his publishing career.
Behind Skates' newest book "Moonshine Over Georgia" lies a forgotten chapter of American history. Far from the romanticized portrayal in shows like The Dukes of Hazzard, moonshine was America's drug of choice for nearly two decades, destroying families and communities. The book reveals his grandfather's crusade as a revenue agent fighting a deadly epidemic that continued long after Prohibition ended, driven by a deeply personal mission after witnessing the devastating impact on children.
Perhaps most remarkable is Skates' battle with the deadliest form of leukemia known to medicine—diagnosed the day before he was scheduled for breakfast at the White House. His doctor's stark assessment: "There is no medical explanation for why you're alive right now." Through brutal chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant that required his son to endure 200 needle insertions, Skates emerged as one of just two people ever cured of this specific cancer.
Throughout our conversation, Skates reveals how seemingly disconnected life events—from childhood writing exercises to chance encounters with political figures—created an extraordinary tapestry of purpose and meaning. His story reminds us that our darkest moments often contain the seeds of our greatest contributions, if we simply refuse to give up.
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Hey there, everyone. Welcome into the Ben Maynard program. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, a little bit of housekeeping to take care of. As you know, this program is available wherever you get your podcasts. It's on all the streaming platforms. All you need to do is search the Ben Maynard program Boom, it's on all the streaming platforms. All you need to do is search the Ben Maynard program Boom, it's right there and go with it. But if you do that, then please give me a five-star rating or something.
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Speaker 1:Ben Maynard program. All one word, or as I roll my eyes and I can't believe I'm saying this, or you can follow me on TikTok. Okay, it's the Ben Maynard program, all right, and I am actually getting more traffic on my TikTok account than anything else, but still help me out, tell 10,000 of your family and friends and let's get those subscribers up, all right. So plenty of ways to take in this show for your dancing and listening pleasure, and without delay. This is going to be a good one. I've got a really special guest today and I'm just going to bring the guest on right now and introduce them. This guest is here to talk about their new book, but so so much more than an author. More than an author and you'll find out in just a minute and it pleases me to bring on to the Ben Maynard program Chris Skates. Yes, as in like ice skates. All right, chris, thanks a lot for being here.
Speaker 2:Chris, thank you for having me, and I've used that ice skates metaphor like 3 million times so far in my life.
Speaker 1:Only three million. So, as I mentioned, you've written five books, but you're so much more than an author. You have such a fascinating story and I really want so much to hear about it. I want you to tell the audience about it. But before we get into that whole story, you are here to pitch your latest book, and that is Moonshine Over Georgia, right?
Speaker 2:That's right, I'm going to show it. I couldn't get mirroring off of my camera, so it's going to look backwards.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, it's good.
Speaker 2:Okay, good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I have it switched on mine, so everybody sees it like it is.
Speaker 2:So I want your audience to take a good look at the artwork. You see the old barn and the car headlights and the moon, and we'll talk about why that's significant here in a minute. But yeah, that is the story of my grandfather and his real life career as a revenue agent. So after prohibition ended and I think 32 or 34, moonshining became a tax violation because these guys were making liquor without paying the liquor tax. You know, you may have heard about legal liquor or bourbon or something being bonded. So you have to be bonded and that's how you pay the government fees to make the liquor. So my grandfather actually worked for the revenue service.
Speaker 2:Everybody hates the tax man and that's what a lot of the moonshiners called him tax man. But he was driven to stamp out moonshine in his community because moonshine even after prohibition, moonshine consumption actually went up after prohibition all the way into the 50s, about 55. Um, and there's a number of reasons for that. But he saw what moonshine was doing to his community. He saw rampant alcoholism. And do you mind if I just tell you how? What motivated me to write this book? When I was a 12 year old, of course of course yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, let me, let me let me stop you before you get into that, though you know it's weird For me that just the, the, the. You know dummy that I am. When I hear moonshine, I always think it makes you think of, I don't know, the Dukes of Hazzard, and the guys are playing moonshine and they're trying to get away from Roscoe P Coltrane and it's all fun and games. But I've heard you talk about this in the past and it's no fun and games. But I've heard you talk about this in the past and it's no joke at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that that's this story will will highlight that. But you're right, moonshine was the drug of choice in the United States for about 15 or 20 years, wow. And the price went up and up and up exponentially in the 40s. And as the money got higher, their organized crime got involved because they saw money making opportunity and so as the money went up, the violence went up linearly. So this backstory highlights exactly what you're asking.
Speaker 2:I was about 12, 11 or 12, and I spent all the time I could with my grandfather. We were very close. I've never been, as even my own dad. We were close. But I had a more bonded relationship even with my grandfather, because we had everything in common. We liked all the same hobbies, so I was at his house for the summer and we would go fishing in the morning and then work in his massive garden that he fed the whole family out of, and then my grandfather would make a big southern lunch and then we'd watch the andy griffith show. So we're watching andy griffith and a character comes on named rafe hollister, who was a minor character in the show I think he was on about five episodes, but he was the mayberry area moonshiner and in this, in this episode, otis was trying to buy some moonshine and it was just a big comedy thing.
Speaker 2:And I noticed my grandfather fidgeting in his chair and he became more and more agitated and he finally he just this was back before remotes. He just slapped the button off on the TV and turned the show off and I said, pop, what's wrong? We aren't going to finish the show. And he said, pop, what's wrong? We aren't going to finish the show. And he said it wasn't like that boy, there was nothing funny about the moonshine business. He said you don't even know what poverty is compared to what people lived in back.
Speaker 2:Then you take him to some little shack and his little children will be running right out of the yard at midnight crying because they hadn't eaten all day and their bellies are distended from hunger. And daddy just spent all the money for groceries on a gallon of moonshine and now he's sick and can't work this week. He said those little children would grab my leg and wail and cry and he started just repeating over and over and I couldn't help them all. I couldn't help them all and then he just started sobbing and he and my grandmother had been married 60 something years at that time and they bickered constantly. But she came over then and took his both his hands and pulled up an ottoman and just sat with him and let him cry wow. And it really resonated with me, even as a little boy. I wasn't a writer for another 20 something years, but I knew in my subconscious one day I would tell this story wow, that's just.
Speaker 1:You know, as you're, as you're describing that I'm visualizing this as a movie or miniseries. And it starts out with grandpa and his grandson doing exactly what you were doing, and then grandpa says boy, it wasn't like that at all. And then man says, boy, it wasn't like that at all. And then man and it, and then and then steam, and it goes right back to that time and the story story begins. Hat, have you been approached or have you approached anybody about writing a screenplay or anything like that?
Speaker 2:It would make a wonderful show and it's funny you say that I've sold a few thousand books and I have had so many people that will find the book. I'm not hard to find on Facebook or Twitter. They'll find me on social media. I have had a couple hundred messages of people saying this should be a movie.
Speaker 2:I agree, I'm not in the movie business. I've pitched it where I can, but I don't really have connections. I'm glad I'm on with you because I know you're in California. Maybe one of the Hollywood guys will hear this, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe one of those Hollywood types, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know I've got an audio book and I hired an actor to play my grandfather. Gary Barboza just knocked it out of the park and that even enhances the movie potential even more because he's a professional actor reading these parts and, yeah, it'd make a great movie.
Speaker 1:I hope it happens someday man, it just, it sounds, it just sounds. Complete opposite. I'm of what most people's perception of moonshining is all about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I will tell you two celebrities that have the book. Just crazy coincidences. It would take me too long to tell you the whole backstory, but Jeff Foxworthy has it Okay and Tucker Carlson has it. Not shocking Whether or not either one of them. I know Tucker Carlson had not read it the last time I got word, which was about six months ago, but he's a busy man, so hopefully he'll get to it someday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it just that sounds absolutely, it sounds amazing, and it sounds so very dark. There is a darkness to it, you're right, man. So, uh, before we get into the rest of the book, so the book is available where?
Speaker 2:on Amazon, yeah, Amazon and paperback, audio and Kindle, and then also people that get their audio books on Spotify it's on Spotify as well so you've got about four options to get it, okay.
Speaker 1:So, people, we're going to get back into this book, in in in a little bit. Um, go out, go get the book. I I'm I'm actually waiting for mine, chris. Chris put it in the mail for me, sent it to me, and I was hoping to have it before today. But I told Chris to make sure he had the books readily available so he could hold them up to the camera and you could all get a good look at them. But before we get back to the book, can we go back to the beginning? This is where I find Chris's story to be absolutely fascinating, folks. As I said, he's written five books, but that's not where it begins. That's kind of not his forte. You heard him say, you know, when he was 12, he didn't start writing for another 20-something years. Chris is a chemist, chris is a nuclear chemist, and that's kind of what I find to be even more fascinating. Because, well, I'm going to let Chris talk about that. Chris, can we just come on? Let's go back to the beginning, please, okay.
Speaker 2:So I had a high school English teacher really a middle school English teacher was the first one that gave me the writing book. She gave us a great assignment. Every Friday she would put a Norman Rockwell painting in front of the class and she'd say by Wednesday I want an 800 word short story about what you see in this painting. It was a wonderful writing exercise. Most of the kids hated it. Most of the kids half-assed it. No-transcript. I blew it off, but at the same time I'm 62 years old and I'm talking to you about it, so it resonated with me. Then I had a couple of college professors try to get me to major in creative writing and literature and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to. I was afraid I would end up with a job at a small town newspaper making $10,000 a year. So I thought I was strictly looking for a way to get a good job and I was like well, nobody wants to major in chemistry, I'll major in chemistry.
Speaker 2:So I did that it wasn't at all a calling or anything, but I was like I know I'll be able to get a job and it worked great. I was a chemist for 30 years and then I went into writing and politics and we'll get to that in a minute and then I went now I'm back into the sort of the chemical industry, but the writing really took off for me Even as I was a chemist. I was keeping a journal and I would occasionally write a short story and not show it to anybody. And then my grandfather, the same one that I was watching Andy Griffith with, passed away in 1995. And to sort of deal with my grief, I thought I'm just going to write a story about us and I wrote a story called First and Last, about him taking me hunting my first time when I was a little boy and me taking him hunting his last time when he was 93.
Speaker 2:That's great, and I didn't know how to. I first printed it on about 30 or 40 little typewritten papers that I gave out at my family reunion and the whole family just had a fit over it. When they got home and read it they were like you've got to try to get this published. I had never really seriously considered trying to get anything published. So then I began to try to research. Well, how do you get something published? This was in 2000 by the time I started, or 99 when I started submitting it, and back then the internet wasn't near what it is now.
Speaker 1:Still still fairly new.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you submitted everything via hard copy and I was blessed to meet another chemist from Colorado. We went to a better. I was in this association of power plant chemists and he was in it too, but he published a fly fishing articles, so he started. He started in it too, but he published fly fishing articles, so he started. He started mentoring me on how to get published. Okay, and what? The only piece of advice he ever gave me that was turned out to be incorrect was, he said grow a thick skin, because your story is going to get rejected by a hundred editors before you finally get accepted. Instead of that happening, the first magazine I submitted it to bought it published. It didn't just publish, it made it their feature article in their 30th anniversary issue.
Speaker 2:The name of the magazine is Turkey Call, which may not sound like a big deal to your audience, but it's got half a million subscribers and it was a big audience for me for my first story and I've got the artwork hanging on my wall right now. They did some beautiful artwork with it. It was a bifold article.
Speaker 1:No matter what, wait, hold on, hold on, no matter what. Getting something published that's going to be in the faces of half a million people, that's huge, that is huge.
Speaker 2:Half a million people, that's, that's huge, that is huge. They sent me 10 copies of the magazine with that artwork and a $200 check. And I was standing at my mailbox and I opened up the package that had the magazines. And when I opened it up and saw that artwork, my life was changed. It was just the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It said first and last by Chris Gates, and I was just blown away. So then I said, well, I'm going to keep trying to do this, let's see if I can do it again. So I wrote another article ended up. I was like, hey, go with what, brung you. So I submitted it to the same magazine. They published the second article I wrote. So now in my mind I'm like, hey, I'm Ernest Hemingway, I'm a natural, I can't miss, you know. And that third article was the one that got rejected a bunch of times and finally got accepted later by a different publication. And then I just started fishing. I just was. I wanted to see what I could do. So I started, started. I said, well, I've been published in a hunting magazine, let me try other magazines. And so I published some short stories and some other genres. And then I was like, let me see if I can publish a technical paper in some of the trade journals for chemistry. And I did that.
Speaker 2:And then in 2005, I was carpooling to, I was working at a power plant as a chemist and by then I had stories published. And I said to my carpool buddy I was like you know what? I just read John Grisham's the Pelican Brief. I think I could do that, I think I could write a book. And he said something that actually was very motivational. He said well, don't talk about it, do it.
Speaker 2:So I started trying to write Moonshine Over Georgia and I could not figure out how to write a book. I couldn't get past the first page, which, interestingly enough, after I wrote that first page, I stuck it in a file folder in my little file cabinet here and it's still the first page of the book today. I got it back out almost 15 years later and still use it. Pretty good first page. But I just couldn't get anywhere and I kept getting writer's block. So I gave up for a period of time and I started praying I'm a personal faith and I was like Lord, what story do you want me to tell? So the journey continues. I'm getting more hunting articles published. So I got asked to speak at a church about the churches got real into doing these wild game suppers for men and it would get a lot of men to come to church that didn't normally come. So I was because I had some hunting articles published. They asked me to be the speaker.
Speaker 2:So I spoke at this dinner and there was a friend there. We already knew each other and he said hey, I love your stories that you're writing. And he said I've got an idea for a book. And he said I'm not a writer, I'm never going to write it. All I've ever written is the first sentence. And I folded it up like a fortune cookie and it sent my wallet.
Speaker 2:He said would you look at it and see if you think it could be a book? He said would you look at it and see if you think it could be a book? Okay, and I said okay, what's the premise? And he said Noah's Ark Only. Everything you see about Noah is a little children's pop-up book and Noah's got his arm around a giraffe and they're singing happy songs. They're on a fun little boat ride. He said but that can't be the way it was. If it really happened, happened in history. It was literally the most terrifying event in human history. And he said so I think it should be a book aimed at the an adult audience. And I said, okay, let me, you got my attention, let me see the sentence. So he takes out his little piece of paper and he opens it up and the sentence was we covered our ears to block out the screens, covered our ears to block out the screams, and I instantly said I'm going to write your book. Wow, so that became this.
Speaker 1:The Rain A story of knowing the art.
Speaker 2:You see the art there on the back cover. Yeah, that was the perfect book for me to start out with, because I had parameters. You know how, when you're little or a kid bowls and they put those bumper pads in.
Speaker 1:No, come on, Chris, you okay. You said you're 62. I'm, I'll be 60 in August. We didn't have bumpers and pads and all that stuff. Come on, we were real bowlers when we were eight, nine years old.
Speaker 2:Well, you do a little kid party. Now they'll put these inflatable things in the gutter. So the kids don't get discouraged, because if you hold every ball it will go in the gutter. Well, noah's art story gave me bumper pads. It gave me structure. I knew how the story was going to begin and end and that game kept me in the alley for the story and it was a perfect training ground for me to know how to structure a book. Okay, uh, the book got published. We actually self-published that one, uh. But I did win a, an award from the christian writers association best fiction of the year in 2005 for that book wow sold it sold it in 15 countries, got postcards from around the world One of my favorite postcards of all time.
Speaker 2:I've got it somewhere here in my file cabinet. It was from Saudi Arabia. I didn't realize that Noah was also a hero in the Muslim faith. Okay, and a Muslim man. It was a Muslim name on the card and it just said your book helped me be a better man. That was the whole card and I was like that's why you do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So time went on and I made the other guy the co-author because it was his concept and he helped me with a lot of research. He was a bibliophile and he had a lot of research on Noah, so he provided me that.
Speaker 2:So he had enough research that we did a sequel and that's this book the tower about the tower of Babel, because we learned that Noah was still alive when they built the tower of Babel. As grandson rebelled again and we were like man, what would be going through Noah's mind? He'd already seen the great flood and now his grandson's going rogue and building the tower of babel. So the tower was my second book and then, uh, over time I wanted to write. I just wanted to go somewhere else. Writing biblical fiction does a lot of work. You're trying not to violate the bible and you're so research oriented. I wanted some freedom to just write something that you ever heard the phrase write what you know, yeah, so what I knew was power plants and environmental compliance and the EPA and how hard the EPA made it on power plants.
Speaker 2:So the next book I wrote was this one that I'm about to re-release. It was called Going Green subtitle. For some. It has nothing to do with the environment. It was called Going Green subtitle. For some. It has nothing to do with the environment. Not a good title for marketing, because everybody thought it was a lesson book on how to go green. They didn't get the sarcasm but it did. Okay, that book. This is where it gets really interesting, ben. That book got me invited onto the Rush Limbaugh program. If you're on Rush Limbaugh as a writer when he was at his peak and he was at his this would have been 2010. You were on Rush Limbaugh on Monday. You were on the New York Times bestseller list on Tuesday.
Speaker 1:That's how powerful his audience reach was.
Speaker 2:Right, right. But my pub, my life, took a turn right there. My publisher went bankrupt. I didn't self-publish going green, I had a publisher, yeah. So my books ended up in a lawsuit, all their books, not just mine. So the books were locked up in a warehouse in Boca Raton, florida. So I had to let the Limbaugh people know, and so I let them know that, hey, my book didn't get distributed to the bookstores. I just want to let you know that. And they said well, we got to cancel you. We can't have a guest on who's written a book and our audience can't even go get the book Again. This was the Internet and Amazon Books wasn't even a thing yet, and so I didn't blame them.
Speaker 2:There were no hard feelings. But that ship sailed and people say, well, could you just contact him again when you got it all cleared up? It doesn't work that way. Getting on Rush Limbaugh is a moonshot. People say you should get on Oprah. Yeah, I should also grow wings and fly to Mars. It's that difficult. Everybody wants to be on those shows, Wow. But once your window of opportunity is closed, it's closed.
Speaker 1:They've moved on. I kind of know I don't mean to interrupt, but I kind of know how that feels, because everyone wants to be on the Ben Maynard program. I mean, they're just kicking down my door, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And you live that life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Now you live that life. Now I'm depressed. What am I going to do? My ship sailed away. I end up with a gentleman's agreement settlement with the publisher. They just give me the first 5,000 copies of the book and give me my rights back. Now I got my garage. 5,000 books takes up a lot of room.
Speaker 2:I could not even get my car in my garage. I had so many books. So now I'm thinking how am I going to sell these things and light bulb? I said I'm really into politics. What if I start a political column in my local paper and then I have a little tagline at the bottom? Chris Gates, political columnist, is also the author of Going Green. You can buy it from him at this address.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and then later.
Speaker 2:I built a website, all this stuff. Well, here's what I didn't foresee. First of all, I can't believe I conned the local newspaper editor into letting me do that, but I did. What I didn't foresee is the political column took on a life of its own. I got picked up by a lot of the conservative websites nationally.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:So now I'm making a little pocket change writing political columns, but the book sales they weren't really taken off. I sell one every once in a while. So then while I'm writing a political column I go travel to get things to write columns about, at my own expense. There's nobody's, there's no Calvary here. So I would go, I would get a Motel 6, get the cheapest flight I could find and go to these different political rallies and carry 20, a box full of books and walk around in the hotel selling books. I did that in Phoenix, arizona once and I sold a copy of Going Green to a guy who I didn't know. That guy read it, fell in love with it, took it back to his workplace in Washington DC. He worked at the Heritage Foundation that's a conservative think tank, probably the biggest conservative think tank or most well-respected and he read it and he put a yellow sticky on it. All this time I'm still writing political columns, still selling a few books here and there. On the yellow post-it note it said this is an incredible book. You guys need to read it. The next Heritage Foundation person that picked it up was a lady who I just spoke on the phone with yesterday named Becky Norton Dunlop. I don't know. Any of this is happening In the meantime. Hold that thought for a minute. We're going to come back to Becky. All right, I'm looking for something to write my next column about.
Speaker 2:And a guy was coming to Paducah, where I live, to run for Senate against Mitch McConnell. The guy's name was Matt Bevin. I was like, man, I've heard about this guy, I've heard him on you some. I really like a lot of what he's got to say. I'm going to go to his Paducah rally and try to get an interview with him. I did.
Speaker 2:His staff was trying to blow me off because they thought I was a nobody and I told him. I said, look, I'm syndicated and on a lot of conservative websites. I said you might want to give me a little time. So he told the staff to go stand over there. I'm going to talk to this man, right? The staff said, okay, you can have 15 minutes because we've got to be somewhere else. Ben, we ended up talking for three hours. Oh man, we just connected on a lot of levels. We ended up exchanging personal cell phone numbers and we just stayed in touch. He loses to Mitch McConnell, which was inevitable. By the way, that was the first time in American history, a sitting Senate Majority Leader was challenged in the primary Wow.
Speaker 2:Because nobody takes on the Senate Majority Leader.
Speaker 1:It's like taking on Goliath Right.
Speaker 2:But Bevin had a very respectable showing. He got like 32% of the vote.
Speaker 1:That's actually not bad, first time out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the Senate campaign ends Now. Don't forget Matt Bevin. We're coming back to Becky.
Speaker 1:Gotcha.
Speaker 2:Becky calls me. Never met her before in my life, didn't know who she was, was. I was smart enough that when I would sell a copy of Going Green I stuck a little author card in it with my cell phone number on it. So she calls my cell phone one day I'm on my way home from the power plant where I work. She introduces herself. She says I'm the vice president of the Harris Foundation. I read your book. My husband read your, your book. We absolutely love it. And if you're ever in Washington DC we'd like to take you to dinner. And I thanked her profusely. I said I'm honored to get such a compliment from you, but I don't ever go to Washington DC and I doubt I ever will. And so she said well, if you ever are, call me.
Speaker 2:All right, matt Bevin calls me about six months later. He said, hey, I'm going to run for governor and he wanted to know if I would serve on his pre-election transition team, which was a volunteer position, and I agreed to do it. So, long story short, in one of the real political dark horses he wins the governor's right, so he becomes governor of Kentucky. Dark horses he wins the governor's right, so he becomes governor of Kentucky. He knows about my energy background, he knows about my writing background. So he appoints me to wear two hats in the administration communications advisor and energy advisor. So people sometimes ask me is that like a full-time job? Yeah, an advisor to a governor is very much a full-time job. So I leave the power generation business and I go to the Kentucky State Capitol and my office joins the governor's office.
Speaker 2:So it was really exciting, intense four years. And keep in mind I was an amateur writer and I had a political column. But when you're a writer for a governor and you're helping him write his official correspondence to senators and the president of the states and foreign leaders, and you're writing speeches and you're writing proclamations, that is an intense writer's workshop. Governor Bevin was an outstanding writer in his own right and a real grammarian. I mean, he knew grammar way better than I did. So you weren't going to slide something past him unless you had literally your I's dotted and your T's crossed. So that pressure cooker made me a much better writer. So after I had been with Governor Bevin about a year and a half, he sent me to Washington DC for the National Governors Association meeting.
Speaker 1:Now, chris, what year is this, Chris?
Speaker 2:2017, 18. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to put the timeline together, that's all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1:So I call.
Speaker 2:I remember Becky Norton Dunlop and I was like that was years ago when she told me she would take me to dinner. She's not going to remember who I am, but I called her. I said hey. You said if I'm ever in DC, I'm going to be in DC. Do you remember me? And she said I definitely remember you. She said where are you going to be staying? Association was in a nice hotel.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Only then do I go back to my hotel room. I'm in DC now and Google, becky Norton, dunlop and George Dunlop I don't think they mind me mentioning their name. They had both been undersecretaries for Ronald Reagan during his administration. Wow, so I'm like holy smokes. I'm going out with people from the rate and reg is kind of a hero of mine, heck, yeah. So we go to dinner and they were just so gracious and, um, ask me a lot of questions about how I came up with the plot of my book. And the plot basically, is environmental terrorists are trying to shut down power plants so they can weaken the American electrical grid, and they're doing it with some foreign adversaries helping them. So, becky, we finished dinner and Becky turns to me and she said Mr Skates, we spent our whole career in Washington fighting the left. And she said we've dealt with the environmental, the presence of all the environmental activist groups up close and personal, and the plot of your book. You nailed it and it gave me chill bumps because I'm just I wrote it.
Speaker 2:I'm just a little guy working at a power plant spitballing what I think might be going on. So, in a way that this book Going Green, even though I wasn't on Rush Limbaugh, it helped me get a political column which got me appointed to a governor's office, which got me back in touch with Becky Norton Dunlop. And when we talk about Moonshine Over Georgia in a minute, the reason Moonshine Over Georgia got published is because I got Becky and George to read the manuscript and they said this may be the best book we've ever read, and they introduced me to people and helped me get Moonshine River Georgia published 10 years, 15 years later. So we had lunch in the mid about 2018 and Moonshine River Georgia got published in 2023.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All those years later that that came back to me.
Speaker 1:That's absolutely incredible. That is so, so incredible and just fascinating. You know, to your book lands up by chance in in their hands, you know, and uh, and it leads to all this stuff. Can, um, can we talk about? Excuse me, can we talk a little? Let me get this cleared up. Can we talk a little bit about your, um, your time in Washington DC? Your time in Washington DC.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I said that I wore two hats communications advisor, which was all the writing we already talked about, but also energy advisor. Yes, so Governor Bevin was appointed as chairman of an entity called the Southern States Energy Board. Most people don't know about that board, but it was created by the United States Congress in the 60s and their charter says they have to have a sitting governor as the chairman. So Governor Bevin was elected as chairman and he knew about my energy background, so he wanted me to be sort of a liaison between him and the Southern States Energy Board In that role and that was right in my wheelhouse, because I've been in power plants for 30 years. In that role, I worked with the Secretary of Energy's office in DC. So, sadly, governor Bevin ran for reelection. Kentucky has an off year election, so he ran for reelection in 2019 and we did not win. So I got a job offer from the secretary's office really soon after we didn't get reelected. So I got appointed a senior energy advisor for fossil energy in the Trump administration in 2020.
Speaker 2:My first day was like January 3rd of 2020, right after the New Year's holiday. So I go to Washington DC and my first day on the job I didn't even have time Happens all the time I didn't even have my office supplies yet, yeah. But I was at DOE headquarters on the Washington Mall and I was called to the Deputy Secretary's office and I went in there and he said we hear you write good speeches and I said yeah, and he said the Vice President needs one in the morning about energy. Get busy, get busy. So I wrote a speech for the vice president of the United States on my first day in Washington. That led to I also later wrote actually before that, while I was still with Governor Bevin.
Speaker 2:Governor Bevin had become good friends with President Trump. That's not why I got the Department of Energy job. I kind of did that with my own sweat equity. Got the Department of Energy job. I kind of did that with my own sweat equity. But that's how they heard that I wrote good speeches. Governor Bevin had said something to somebody blah, blah, blah. So also right before I left the Bevin administration, I was on a conference call with the president Secretary, rick Perry, secretary of Energy and Vice President Pence and Governor Bevin and they were wanting to close a power. Tva was wanting to close a power plant in Kentucky that President Trump did not want to close and he said by the way, when you're in a meeting with Donald Trump, there's no doubt who's in charge. And he said he was calling the governor by his first name, which was freaking me out. But he said Matt, matt, have your boy there, write me a tweet about this power plant. I'm going to tweet it out in a few minutes. So I was the boy. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:I wrote a tweet for President Trump Not many people can say that and then, when I got to DC, I wrote a speech for Vice President Pence. They love the speech. So I get a call a little while later, two or three weeks later, from the White House. At the time I haven't moved all the way to DC. I'm living in an apartment in DC. My wife's still in Kentucky. My entire furniture was a lawn chair and an air mattress. So I'm sitting in a lawn chair in Washington DC eating ramen noodles. I'm sitting in a lawn chair in Washington DC eating ramen noodles. I'm loving this.
Speaker 2:And I get a call from the White House and the guy says and this gentleman is in the Trump administration now in a high position. I'm not going to say his name, but he said we are writing an energy speech for the president and we wonder if you'd help us. We saw what you did for Vice President Pence. We really liked it and I said sure, I'd be glad to. When do you need me to help? And he said right now. Oh, no pressure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm on the phone till like 1 am, my ramen noodles got cold, and so a week or two goes by and I get another call from the White House and they said the president liked what you did. We want you to come to the White House for breakfast. Can you come on Wednesday? And I said absolutely. And that's one great thing about a political administration. If the president or the governor says he would like you to come to breakfast, you don't got to ask your boss, the boss has already said come to breakfast.
Speaker 1:You automatically have permission. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the breakfast was going to be on Wednesday, the following Wednesday. They were talking to me on a Wednesday. Yeah, on Friday. I'm on my way home to back to my apartment with my air mattress and my and my lawn chair. I'm walking down the sidewalk in Washington DC and I black out and some stranger helped me to my feet. I think I was out for about 10 or 15 seconds, right right and uh some stranger helped me up, painted on the sidewalk there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everything went black. Um, I actually wrote a story about this that got published in daily wire that I'd be happy to send you a link to. But I love this, yes. So I end up going to a series of doctors over the next three or four days. By Tuesday, the day before I was supposed to have breakfast with the president, I'm told I have acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Speaker 1:Okay, wait, acute lymphoblastic. What Lymphoblastic with a, b Lymphoblastic leukemia? Yes that sounds like a party yeah, and so I was.
Speaker 2:When the guy told me, by the way, my wife had found out, I passed out and she flew to washington on an emergency flight and went to the doctor with me. When the doctor told me that I was totally macho about it, tough guy, you know, I've been around hazardous chemicals my whole life. This ain't nothing. So I said that's okay, I'll beat it. I said, listen, I've got breakfast at the white house tomorrow. I'm going to go do that. And, uh, you, when I come back Thursday, you can tell me whatever pills I got to take or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the doctor physically grabbed me by the shoulders and he said Mr Skates, you're not absorbing what I'm telling you. He said there is no medical explanation for why you're alive right now. Wow, leukemia has wiped out almost your entire red blood cells. The reason you're blacking out is oxygen is not getting to your brain because there's no vehicle to carry it. He said there will be no breakfast at the White House. You're not starting chemo after your breakfast, you're starting chemo immediately and trying to survive. This will dominate the next 18 months of your life. Wow, wow.
Speaker 2:So I have to call the White house and say sorry, guys, can't make breakfast, I'm dying.
Speaker 1:That was my exact words, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, he right, and uh please, uh, extend my apologies to the president. Oh, and they were great, by the way. They they checked on me several times while I was going through treatments and I've stayed in touch with those folks.
Speaker 1:That's great, that's great. So now, really, from one moment to the next, you are now in the fight of your life. Yes, you are now in the fight of your life.
Speaker 2:Yes, I had. I had a once. They one of the things that there's a local doctor there in Washington. I am going to say his name because he deserves credit. The first guy I went to was an internal medicine doctor named Dr Gary Miller, who literally saved my life. He held my hands and he was looking at my nails. I didn't know this. He told me this later.
Speaker 2:We stayed in touch too and my nails were not pink. You know the pink underneath there. You can probably look at yours. That was chalky white and he told me. Then he said I think you may have a more serious problem than you're thinking you have. He said I want you to go see a friend of mine. So he sent me to one of the top oncologists in the world and he told me later that he knew that it was critical that whoever I was treated by get the DNA of the cancer cells correct. They had to correctly identify what strain of leukemia it was in order to get the right chemotherapy cocktail. Wow, leukemia it was in order to get the right chemotherapy cocktail Wow. So when they did that DNA testing, it turned out I had not just any leukemia but the most deadly leukemia on the face of the planet and the one doctor in the world who had ever cured it was working out of the hospital I went to in DC and he had cured it one other time.
Speaker 1:Jeez, I'm his second.
Speaker 2:I'm his second case, oh my goodness. And he was very frank with me. He said I give you about a 2% chance to survive Two 2% and I was glad for the. I was glad for the candor yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1:At that point you got to say hey. Well then, I love my odds.
Speaker 2:You know? There you know, and he said I'm probably going to kill you with chemo. He said I'm going to have to give you so much chemo at such an intense level that the chemo alone is probably going to kill you, but it's the only chance. You've got Right. So I started a very intense chemo regimen in February of 2020. And guess what happened while I was in the hospital for six weeks doing my first chemo.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Just a few short weeks later, this little old fake pandemic called COVID hit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so now I'm locked down inC which is actually a thousand miles from my real home. Yeah, my church has to move my furniture for my wife to that apartment in DC. And then my wife becomes a full time nurse. So I did inpatient chemo for six weeks and I got a funny story. I'll share with you about that, but I don't want to distract from the larger picture. Then I did outpatient chemo as a lockdown person so my wife never could even go in the waiting room of the hospital. My wife has to sit in the car in the parking lot while I'm getting chemo for six hours at a time.
Speaker 2:And then, after six months of that and they transferred me and my body is just hammered by a combination of the leukemia and the chemotherapy. Then they transferred me and my body is just hammered by a combination of the leukemia and the chemotherapy. Then they transferred me to Baltimore where I got a bone marrow transplant and the chemotherapy was brutal but it was a walk in Disney World compared to the bone marrow transplant. The bone marrow transplant just absolutely hammered me and I lost 90 pounds. But I'm cancer free now. I'm fully cured. I've got some side effects. I've got some joint uh degradation because of all the chemo and some of the other stuff. But uh, I'm, I'm cancer free and I'm, I beat it.
Speaker 1:God bless you, sir. Thank you. Is it is, is the? Is the bone marrow transplant? Is that a real painful process? It actually is, yeah.
Speaker 2:They gave me OxyContin for parts of it, but it wouldn't touch it. It's amazing I would have died five years ago. They've come so far with bone marrow transplants. They've learned so much. But my son was my donor and the best you can hope for is what's called a 50% haploid match, and he was a 50% haploid match, so he was my bone marrow donor. He had to be stuck with two needles 200 times in his pelvis 200 times 200 needles in your.
Speaker 2:Come on, 200 times 200 needles in here, hey come on, so you know what, when he's at my house, I used to be a big dad thing about when I would walk into the room and you automatically hand me the remote because it's my house, my TV. Now, when I walk into the room and he's there. I'm like you know what, keep the remote. You endured 200 needles and gave me your bone marrow and saved my life.
Speaker 1:Go ahead, you kind of earned the right to hold the remote.
Speaker 2:So you know it was. It was hard for him, but, yeah, when they brought his bone marrow into the room, first thing they got to do is destroy your bone marrow. Okay, and that's brutal, dude. They put you in a tube and just ultra radiate you and it shrinks your bone marrow. So then you're what's called neutropenic for a week or two, which means you have no ability to fight off disease. So if I got caught, covid, at that point, it probably would have killed me, right? Well then, when it finally time and your body's ready, they brought his bone marrow in and it was in, like you know, you see, iv bags. This bag looked like a trash bag from your kitchen, holy toledo. It was full of bone marrow, wow. And they stuck it in me and it dribbled in for hours and hours and I was in and out of consciousness and. But then, as that marrow was like migrating in your bones, it hurts like a booger.
Speaker 1:Like can you just like feel it coursing through your veins?
Speaker 2:No, you feel like in your long bones, and it was particularly in my fingers. You just feel like somebody's hitting you with a hammer. Oh wow, wow, yeah, bones, and it was particularly in my fingers. Yeah, you just feel like somebody's hitting you with a hammer. Oh wow, wow, yeah, because and there were times I was in a I was just in the fetal position on the floor, crying, and I don't want to scare people, it's still worth it.
Speaker 1:well, yeah, I mean yeah, especially when you're, when you're when you're trying to fight off the uh, the deadliest form of leukemia there is. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna put yourself through whatever you need to.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean they have learned some more about pain management since I had mine.
Speaker 1:So it might not be as bad for the next person, holy cow. Well, do you think? Okay, now I want to kind of go back again. Do you? Do you think that, um, your time working in power plants, working in nuclear power plants, uh, do you think that it contributed to your, uh, getting?
Speaker 2:leukemia. Yeah, I worked around some nasty chemicals. I did take my safety precautions for the most part, but what my oncologist thinks did it is when I was working on the nuclear reactor. I was the new guy, so whenever they needed a sample in a really hot, nasty place I mean hot with radiation they sent me and I was too young and bulletproof. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Stop, stop, one second Timeout, timeout. Okay. First, how old are you at this point?
Speaker 2:Uh 24.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let me see 24 people. I'm speaking to you now, okay, uh, 24. And did you hear that? Yeah, uh, what, what? What was it? Um, a hot, um, uh, uh, finish that one for me. What's that? A hot sample, yes, and, and we're talking a nuclear power plant here. Chris is, he's 24 and he's the young guy at the nuclear power plant. He's got good checked. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Were you wearing like, like, like your hazmat suit. Did it look something like like what we saw in ET when those guys were wearing all their hazmat?
Speaker 2:suits. Yeah, that's it, that's the suit.
Speaker 1:And that's supposed to resist radiation, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, radioactive material.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the radiation still goes through the suit. What you don't want to get is the suits to keep the solid stuff off your skin. Okay, the radioactive waves still penetrate the suit and you're wearing this thing called dosimetry, and you wore different kinds underneath your suit, but one of the kinds was like a big fat fountain pen and you could look through it like a telescope and it had it had a gauge inside there so you could see in real time how much radiation you were getting.
Speaker 2:That thing was really never should come off zero, because most of the places in a nuclear power plant you don't get that much in any one single night. One night they sent me into a tunnel, suited up. I had to crawl down this tunnel and I was. The tunnel was right over the top of the reactor dome and I had to get.
Speaker 2:I had to sample reactor gas off the top of the dome and I took my little fountain pen thing and I looked in it and that needle was moving while I was watching it and I was like, oh shit. So I think that is what gave it to me, and my oncologist thinks that too. He tells me that this type of leukemia has a 30-year latency period. And, um, the last guy you know, I told you he cured it two times. Yes, the other guy that had it was a chemist also wow, okay, so there there's, so there's there's.
Speaker 1:That just can't be coincidental, right?
Speaker 2:but of course for me, there's no uh disability. There's no payment. Uh damages nothing, because Damage is nothing, because I can't prove it Wow. I did pursue that, but it got nowhere.
Speaker 1:Uh huh right, I picture Young Chris Gates. I'm sure you, because you're kind of a nerd like me. Did you ever see Star Trek? What was it the Wrath of Khan? When Spock goes in and he's trying to? Did you ever see Star Trek? What was it the Wrath of Khan? Yeah, when Spock goes in and he's trying to fix the reactor on the Enterprise and when it's all done, his skin's falling off and everything and he's got so much radiation poisoning that it takes him right then and there.
Speaker 1:But that's what I'm picturing. I'm picturing you doing that, chris, come on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, like I said, I was too macho to. I was like I'll show them they can't break me.
Speaker 1:Well, they didn't break you you know?
Speaker 2:No, they didn't.
Speaker 2:I mean, well, they didn't completely break you, but you know yeah, I told you I had a funny story about my chemo. So a doctor that was helping, the main oncologist that was overseeing my treatment, was from Egypt and he became a great friend, a great guy, and I was about three weeks into my chemo and I got I wasn't losing any hair. They couldn't believe it. I hadn't thrown up once and I swear I wasn't losing any hair. They couldn't believe it. I hadn't thrown up once and I swear I don't. There's no scientific evidence of this.
Speaker 2:I think I had worked around so many hazardous chemicals I built up some kind of a hard shell or something and so I got hungry and I taught my wife this was right before the COVID lockdown. I taught my wife into smuggling me in some good old Southern barbecue. So I'm in my hospital bed slamming a half a rack of ribs. I got barbecue sauce dripping down, chemo's going in the veins and the Egyptian doctor walked in and sees me and I said, hey, doc, you want some ribs. And he goes, mr Skates, you, sir, are the toughest son of a bitch I ever saw.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, you know what I like around my whole family. I tell them I, I, I claim to be Superman. Okay, well, compared to Chris Gates, everyone, I'm like Superboy. That's Superman, right there, I'm just Superboy.
Speaker 2:I did hold on to that day because about three weeks later it hit me like a freight train and I was laying on the bathroom floor. But it wasn't the barbecue that did it, it was the chemo.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, man, that's just amazing. All right, can we go back to? Let's go back to moonshine over Georgia. Let's talk some more about that, cause I want to get more, more into the story of that, I'm sorry. More into the story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's a great rich story. When I was in the cancer protocol I was I told myself I'm going to get my grandfather's story published Somehow. I put it away and I never got it published. I had written the full manuscript in the in the waning years but I never, never was had been able to get it published. And I said, if I live through this, I'm going to find a way to get it published. Well, I wouldn't have found it on my own. I don't think.
Speaker 2:Becky Norton Dunlop from earlier in my life and, by the way, she was locked down in DC while I was going through my cancer. So we got to our families, got to get together a couple of times when we had a break and she was just great to me and she kept calling me and checking on me. She was actually a mile away, small world Again. I ended up renting an apartment. I didn't know where she lived and she was like a mile away from me. So we stayed in touch and so when I got back to Kentucky, she called me one day and she said moonshine, out of Georgia, out of my head, and George and I have just retired and we've decided we want you to be our first project. We want to see moonshine over Georgia published. So she started introducing me to some of her friends and we want to see Moonshine River Georgia published. So she started introducing me to some of her friends, and so Moonshine River Georgia gets published and it's a great. I really. I love the look of the book. I love the interior layout. Everything about it went great. So I got it published and I produced and directed the audio book. But the story is fascinating. So my grandfather was a revenue agent. He would look for these moonshine stills as part of my research for the book I wanted to have.
Speaker 2:The murder that's covered in moonshine over Georgia is the murder of a victim named Wilson Turner by a man named John Wallace. John Wallace was a Georgia moonshine kingpin, like a local crime boss. He had gunmen. He ruled an entire county called Meriwether County. With an iron fist. He owned the sheriff. Everybody did what John Wallace told them to do, and so my grandfather knew that he had a huge still somewhere, and so he was trying to investigate Wallace for making moonshine, and Wallace knew he was looking for his still. They had gotten to know each other. So I want to go back to my clever art. Let me reach down here so you see this you see this car and the barn and everything.
Speaker 1:I do, I see. I see the headlights and I see the barn at the bottom of the cover there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I see the headlights and I see the barn at the bottom of the cover. Yeah, yeah, so he was actually interested in making a liquor case against Wallace Well, hold that thought a minute. In the 1970s somebody wrote a book about this murder called Murder in Coweta County. It became a New York Times bestseller. A local reporter in Newnan, georgia, which is where it all took place, wrote the book. It became a bestseller. It was made into a movie, I think in the early 90s or late 80s, starring Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash read the book Murder in Coweta County, fell in love with it. He said I want to play the sheriff in this story. So he made a movie called Murder in Coweta County. You can watch it on YouTube and guess who played the killer.
Speaker 1:I know who played the killer. He looked it up.
Speaker 2:Andy Griffith. So remember the story about me watching the Andy Griffith show with my grandfather, and then Andy Griffith ends up playing John Wallace the killer killer.
Speaker 1:What's funny, though. What's what's really funny about that? I don't mean funny, haha, just the irony in it is that all these years ago, you're watching an episode of andy griffith involving moonshine, and then, all these years later, here's this movie about moonshine, and Griffith is is in it again, and now he's the bad guy.
Speaker 2:So when the movie came out and my grandfather had read the book and was not happy about it Okay, we can talk a little bit about while later but when the movie came out, I'm watching it at my grandfather's house and my grandfather comes by and hits me on the leg.
Speaker 2:He says boy, what are you watching that crap for? I said, pop, this is really cool. You were in the book, maybe you're going to be in the movie. They mentioned my grandfather briefly in the book. He should have been mentioned a lot more. He said all them movie. People don't know nothing. He said when it's over, you come back to my room.
Speaker 1:He took me back in his room. Let me get this prop here. Sure, where he had this. This is great stuff, people. Oh yo a little toolbox.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's really just a little tackle box, but he had some of his important papers in it, and I'll show you one that I've still got. I'll show you two. So he was a revenue agent, and as a revenue agent, his primary responsibility was to find moonshine stills, and so this is a commendation from the governor of Georgia that this is raised. I see.
Speaker 1:I see, yeah, it's, it's I. I don't know if that's embossed or debossed one of the two, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Got the state capital, it says. Dear agent Miller, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you on the excellent job you did in helping toward the indictment and conviction of the liquor gang in Upson County. Well, Upson County is a different county than the John Wallace murder. So when I wrote my book I decided I want to make the Upson County is a different county than the John Wallace murder. Ah, so when I wrote my book I decided I want to make the Upson County liquor gang case. I want to marry it to the same summer that's the great thing about fiction based on actual events as the John Wallace case. So now I've got him investigating two things at the same time. So the book really moves fast.
Speaker 2:Right A lot happening in every chapter, right?
Speaker 2:But the other thing he showed me no longer exists. I can't find it anywhere. There was a handwritten note in this box, written in pencil on a, on a piece of women's stationery, and it said agent Miller, it is urgent that we speak. Meet me at my barn at midnight. That's this artwork. Okay, my grandfather went to the meeting. My mother was a little girl. She remembers holding on to him and begging him not to go. And her mother was holding on to him, begging him not to go because they thought Wallace was going to kill my grandfather. All right, but my grandfather went to the meeting and that's how my story starts. So my grandfather's involvement in the John Wallace murder of Wilson Turner really began intensely a year before the murder occurred, because what John Wallace didn't know that night, but what my grandfather was concerned about was Wilson Turner. The victim was my grandfather's informant, or he was at least trying to talk him into becoming his informant.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, and all this is covered in my book. Murder in Coweta County missed all of that. My grandfather is the only law officer that Wallace wrote letters about during his time in prison that Wallace wrote letters about during his time in prison. He wrote entire letters about my grandfather and that midnight meeting. It's key to the whole case. How the movie people miss that baffles me. I know how, but it would take me too long to explain it and it wasn't anything sinister on their part.
Speaker 2:They just weren't local people. They didn't have a grandfather who was intimately involved in the entire investigation. So murder wasn't normally in my grandfather's jurisdiction. But because it was his informant, he took it personally and he involved himself in the investigation and he was key to bringing the conviction. But then at the same time this Upson County Liquor Gang case. I was able to find the last surviving member of the Upson County Liquor Gang in a nursing home in Panama City Beach, florida.
Speaker 1:This guy had to be like in his 90s.
Speaker 2:Right, he was 93. And his mind was as sharp as mine or yours right now. His body was failing, his heart was failing, but his mind was crystal clear and I spent three of the most fascinating hours of my life with that gentleman. And I didn't know keep in mind, I didn't know how many people were in the Upson County Liquor Gang. I didn't know if he knew my grandfather or not, but when I had the meeting with him I said did you know a revenue agent named CE Miller? That's my grandfather. Yeah, and his exact words were I didn't just know the son of a bitch, he's the one that took me to jail. I don't care if he liked him or didn't like him.
Speaker 2:Now I've got a living witness to my grandfather that knew him in his heyday. That is great. He said something that I'll take to my grave as a treasure. He said I fought in World War II in the infantry, but your grandfather was the only man I ever met in my life that I would say was completely fearless. He was fearless and he was relentless. And he said your grandfather, before he arrested me one night, he chased me through the woods for 20, no, for 12 miles. He said he would not give up. He said I finally got away from him that night but he caught me later.
Speaker 1:Wow, sometimes people say that those, uh, that those traits are foolish, but uh, others will say that's very noble to have those traits. You know, yeah, and it was.
Speaker 2:It goes back to the original story. He told me it was the kids.
Speaker 1:He was tired of seeing kids lives ruined by alcoholism and I just never like I, I said earlier, I, I, I don't know if it's just me, I don't think it's just me, but on the whole, we just seem to have this completely different idea about moonshining and we say, oh, it's this guy, you know, yeah, he makes it in his bathtub and he puts it in mason jars and you know, he's just selling it or giving it to all of his buddies, you know, and that kind of thing, and it's so much more than that. It sounds like there was a whole, it's a whole underworld.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was, and in fairness, there were moonshiners like you described. Right and there were guys like Popcorn Sutton who really cared about making good liquor and it was safe to drink, but the more money there was to be made, the more unscrupulous guys got into it, guys that didn't know what the hell they were doing. I'm working on a sequel to moonshine over georgia right now about another bad guy my grandfather went over, went after and arrested who, who was based in Atlanta, named Fat Hardy. You can't make up these names.
Speaker 2:The real names are better than anything you can make up. Fat Hardy weighed 380 pounds and he screwed up the distillation process one night, and so he produced toxic methanol instead of the drinkable ethanol and he realized his mistake. But rather than dump it out, he put artificial flavoring in it and sold it anyway. And in one night in Atlanta, georgia, he blinded 324 people and killed 31. Wow, man, and he became the second guy my grandfather sent to the electric chair.
Speaker 1:It's things like that. That's why moonshining was really so bad and that's why it. You know, carelessness like that is what probably got a lot of people hooked on it as well and, yeah, and kept people in in poverty right yeah, man, that's bad.
Speaker 1:You, it was funny. The other day I don't even remember what I was looking at and I saw this picture and it was a depression era picture of four or five hadn't eaten in days, bellies distended. That's exactly what these young boys in this picture looked like, you know. And when I saw the picture the other day, I thought exactly of you, because we had talked about this a little bit before. And, man, it's just, yeah, I could see how it's like you. You said it was your grandfather. It wasn't. It wasn't the dummies doing this stuff, it was how it was affecting the kids and their families and that's why he did what he did, because it was for the kids and uh, man, let me share a line with you from the book too.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure. My grandfather grew up in Northern Florida, a little town called Evanston, evanston. Even if you drive to it today, and I went not long ago, it's like a little place lost in time. Wow, the general store that was in operation when my grandfather was a little boy in 1910, it's still in operation today Same building. It's the oldest continuously operating store in the United States of America. Wow, that's great.
Speaker 2:Just a little one room store. That is awesome. So he grew up in a household with five sisters. He was the only boy in a single parent home so he was sent out at six years old to hunt coons, rabbits, whatever he could get so they could survive. It wasn't for fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so he developed incredible navigation skills in the deep woods, incredible endurance and incredible marksmanship skills and tracking. So he was basically lived more like a pioneer and was pretty much a professional hunter by the time he was 13 or 14 years old. So when he became an adult and he found out they would pay him to hunt moonshiners, he was like, well, that's right up my alley. So that's one of the reasons he was so incredibly effective at it. And then he moved to Georgia and did all his revenue agent work in Georgia.
Speaker 2:But where murder in Coweta County gets things wrong and my book gets it right is how the victim was found. When the assault happened against Wilson Turner, the body was hidden so effectively that they almost had to drop the case, and where my grandfather came in was finding the body. But I promise you I was going to tell you a little blurb from the book. So when my grandfather was a little boy there in North Florida where that general store was, he saw something and I don't want to go into too much detail because it would be a spoiler. Yeah, no, don't, don't do that but he saw some drunk men basically assault a little girl and he tried to help her and he was very sickly at the time. He had malaria. Mosquitoes were just rampant in northern florida the early 1900s, as you can imagine.
Speaker 2:Sure, and he tried to fight these guys. It was just a little kid and he had no chance. But in the book I say he went back to it, he lost track of the men, took the little girl away and he lost them and he cried, he said. In the book he says on the way home I cried, hot cried, hot tears, not for myself, but for that little girl. Yeah, and I pray. I looked out of my window when I got back to my house and I looked at the moon and I prayed to God that I would grow up big and strong and then I would meet men again like that and I would know just what to do?
Speaker 1:I'm like getting chills right now and that's what my book's about.
Speaker 2:Believe me, when he became an adult, he had an agenda.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he had an agenda and, like you said, relentless, you know, not going to stop at anything. That's just, that's awesome, so, wow. So again, folks, the book is Moonshine Over Georgia. I'm a little misty-eyed here, sorry. I'm having a hard time seeing, hearing about so poor little girl, that just you know, no, that should never happen. But the book's available everywhere, right. Amazon and your website also, right?
Speaker 2:I don't have a website right now. I'm going to reestablish one, but I'm on Facebook. That's the best place to reach out to me. Send me a message on Facebook. I'd love to get your reviews, if your listeners get the book. Also, if you would post a review on Amazon, it really helps me out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:I've got like 210 reviews on there and 99% of them are five star. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:See, that's great, See, so it's all worth it. People will be the. It'll be worth the, the few bucks that you'll invest in this book. And look if the other stuff sounded good, like going green, which I that sounded really really good, but also the tower. And what was? What was the process with the rain, the rain, I remember that. So you worked in the Trump administration for just a short time, just a short time, but it was good, right, Good time.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah. I got to be in three meetings with the president Fascinating to watch him do his thing. He's a brilliant guy. He's very aware of even technical aspects of what's going on. I think people are starting to see that now. The first administration of the media was very unfair to him, but he's playing three-dimensional chess a lot of times.
Speaker 1:I think it's 4D Really, yeah, so okay. So you saw a little bit from that first term, and certainly President Trump didn't get reelected well, second time around, second time around. But now that he is in office again and we're I don't know, 120, 125 days into his second of I don't know what three or four terms maybe. What do you think now? What do you think so far?
Speaker 2:I love most everything he's doing Not 100%, but I mean, who do you agree with 100% of the time? And maybe on the part that I'm disagreeing on, maybe he knows better than me but particularly I'd like to focus on an area that I'm the most familiar with and that's energy and environmental regulation, and he's knocking it out of the park. He's doing things in those two spaces that I have called for and published work that I've done for 20 years, stuff that desperately needs to be done for the good of America. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but the whole man-caused climate change hysteria, where we shut down power plant after power plant after power plant because of CO2, is a fool's errand. Thank you, thank you, until the COVID thing I called a man caused catastrophic climate change, and those descriptors are key.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying there's no such thing as climate change. I'm saying it's not man caused and it's not catastrophic. But the hysteria over that was the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetuated on humanity. Right, and like my original book, going Green said, it was done on purpose and it was done to weaken the United States. And so now he is calling. He's called all the right shots, but it's one thing for the president to have a vision to create American energy dominance. It's another thing to execute that vision. Yeah, and that's going to be the hard part. Now. Build a power plant is not like building a tool shed in your backyard. So if we want to get, if we want to get this generation on the grid, we got to.
Speaker 1:We got to start breaking ground, like now right, yeah, energy is so very important and and and it's it doesn't come from the wind, from wind, and it doesn't come from the sun. You know it. It's just, it can, and I, I me personally like I don't have anything against those forms of energy, but only in supplementation, not to replace.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, and I'm in Kentucky. I'm going to advocate for something here. Underneath my feet are some of the richest coal reserves in the world, and we've got at least 150 years worth left and we have laid it on the altar of sacrifice to the green goddess. We aren't digging any coal. We're not digging a fraction of the coal in kentucky that we were because of the climate change hysteria so why should we sacrifice that energy source for this misguided environmental ocean?
Speaker 2:President Trump talked about in his inaugural address beautiful, clean coal, and he's right. We can burn coal and do it clean and have very reliable energy. The power plant, the last power plant I worked at, was built in 1956. In 2015, it was available at 100% capacity 98% of the time that you needed it. Wow.
Speaker 1:Isn't the newest power plant that we have? Wasn't it built like 35 years ago, 40 years ago?
Speaker 2:Nuclear yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, some of the coal ones are newer than that, okay, all right.
Speaker 2:Nuclear, yeah, yeah, okay, some of the coal ones are newer than that. Okay, all right. But they shut down so many coal plants I mean I think it's like 10 000 gigawatts now that have been taken off the grid. The plant where I worked last was shut down and basically spiked uh, they, they let it get flooded so on purpose, so that you couldn't restart it. Wow, and, and I think that was driven by environmentalists, so you couldn't restart mine, you'd have to build a new one.
Speaker 2:But we've got. We've got natural gas. And if we get back to fracking, as Sarah Palin said, everybody laughed at her, but she was right Drill, baby drill. We can do natural gas turbines, which I've also worked on, but we can get some coal, some small modular nuclear reactors. We can get some coal, some small modular nuclear reactors. We can get some small modular coal plants going. If we set our mind to it, this united states of america, we've got fuel sources coming out of our ears. All we got to do is get the environmentalists out of the way, and I don't mean sacrifice the environment, I mean just be reasonable about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I. I totally understand what you're saying. I lockstep with you on that, because the United States does oil, coal, nuclear energy better and cleaner than anybody on the planet. That's right. That's right. Keep the United States down for the betterment of everybody else. Instead, it needs to be the other way around. Start looking at what everyone else is doing around the world and come down on them for it and let us continue to do what it is we're doing. But I guess it's way above my pay grade and I'm sure that there's a lot of money that gets involved in that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So definitely yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but anyway, your story is fascinating. It really is. It's, it's so um and and, honestly, people we've we've really only touched the surface. We've so touched the surface on this. It's so much more in depth and it's so much better than what you've actually heard today or watched today. Um and uh. I can't thank you enough, chris. I can't thank you enough to do this and you know reaching out and wanting to, wanting to, to be on on on this podcast, you know um but um and when you get well, let me say this, when, when you, uh, when you get ready with the next book, please, I would love to have you back because I just thank you, I'll reach out. Yeah, I would love to look.
Speaker 2:I do want to I do want to mention. Can I mention one last book?
Speaker 2:You can mention anything you want, absolutely. This one just came out two weeks ago Showdown of the Beanstalk. Okay, so that's me as a little cowboy, that's my sister and then this is me when I was getting chemo. All right, but the subtitle is Stories of an Overcomer. So that's my first nonfiction book. It's a collection of short stories, and a lot of them are about things that I overcame as a child and a lot of them are about some of what I told you more detailed about beating leukemia. But I didn't write it in any way as oh, poor little me, look at what I went through book it's about. That's why the subtitle is Stories of an overcomer. I wrote that for somebody else that's just been diagnosed with cancer or somebody else that's in a difficult relationship or somebody else that's really struggling at work. So they can see hey, look, I made it through. Here's how you're going to make it too.
Speaker 2:It's really a book to encourage people and uplift people. Right, it's a short story. You don't have to read it in chronological order. It could be a good bathroom read, and a third of the stories are humor. I actually started out. One of my first types of story writing was humor stories, so I'm getting really good feedback on it. It's only been out a couple of weeks, but that's another one. If you, if you want something to read, some short stories and get a laugh or two, show that cover one more time, please.
Speaker 1:And then I want everybody.
Speaker 2:It's also on Amazon. All my books are on Amazon All right.
Speaker 1:So just if you're listening to this, it's Showdown at the Beanstalk and it's by Chris Gates and, as he said, that one's also available on Amazon.
Speaker 2:The reason it's called that is when I was a little kid I played Cowboys constantly. I was obsessed with Gunsmoke and so I decided in my five-year-old brain that the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk had taken up residence on our farm. So the showdown at the Beanstalk is the first humor story in the book, and it's about how I got on my stick horse with my six shooter and decided to go slay the giant.
Speaker 1:Nice, nice, um, uh, oh, yes, so so the books are all available on Amazon. Or if people reach out to you on Facebook, right, they can get yeah, if you want an autograph copy, I can mail you one.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. You know I I forgot this. I wanted to. I wanted to ask him to put my glasses back on here so I can see what it is I'm looking at. Um, okay, so now are you working on a? Uh, are you working on an autobiography? Are you gonna put all this stuff in a book itself? A?
Speaker 2:lot of these stories and showing out the beanstalk are essentially an autobiography. It's just not quite perfectly chronological.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hope of my life story is in there okay, okay, I you Okay, okay, I you know, um, I like autobiographies and um, I just say I find that stuff I just like. I like stories about people, I like something that's fascinating, you know, and I'll tell my life story.
Speaker 2:I just tell it in the form of essays.
Speaker 1:Right, right, you know, um, you and I talked about this previously. A lot of people love books. I mean, I love books myself, and a lot of people use the same excuse that I do where, oh, I just I love them, I love to read, but I don't have time to read. And you said something that really resonated with me and it's something that I'm going to put more focus on and more, uh, try to get this done more, and that was to just take 10 minutes, 10, just 10 minutes a day. If you, if there's a book out there you want to read, just take 10 minutes a day and read it. You'll probably find, you'll probably find yourself reading more like 15 minutes.
Speaker 2:You will exactly right I, when you and I were talking pre-show, I said people really do have time to read. They just think they don't because their screens have robbed them. Yes, our screen time is making us and I'm guilty of it too. Our screen time makes us feel so overwhelmed with input and busyness that when we get some quiet time, we just want to zone out, maybe turn the TV on instead of reading a good book, or do more screen time, which just feeds the beast and the books that I've set a goal for this year to try to read 24 books. I'm a little behind, but I've read several, and the way I've done it is I cut my screen time in half. You know everybody's smartphone will track your screen time for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I just.
Speaker 2:I did less social media, which was a lot of wasted time anyway, and I was reading a ton of articles on social media, and so I cut that in half and instead picked up a book and I've I've knocked out about, I think, 10 books this year no eight eight, but I'm still going to try to make 24 by the end. Books this year, no eight Eight. But I'm still going to try to make 24 by the end of the year.
Speaker 1:As much as I love reading, it's still. I'm a slow reader, though, see, I didn't attend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am too.
Speaker 1:I didn't attend the Evelyn Woods School of Speed Reading For all us old people. We understand that reference. Okay, yeah, the young ones out there, you won't understand.
Speaker 2:I think a slow reader absorbs it more.
Speaker 1:I try, I'll take something in, and there's some times I have to go and read it a second or third time before I can turn the page or something, Maybe because I just want to absorb it more. Again, I can't thank you enough for this. You are a fascinating storyteller. I love the fact that you like detail. I mean you have to, because if you're going to write a book, you better include all the details too. But I know when I listen to stories, that's what I want to hear. I want to hear all the details. I know when I tell stories, people tell me oh my gosh, you talk too much and it takes you so long to tell this story. And I said well, but I want to put you right in there and make you feel like you were part of the story.
Speaker 2:I don't want you to just listen to it I understand and the top two comments I've had from readers and this is going back to my very first book, yeah, but I really had it in spades on moonshine georgia is I felt like I was there, I felt like I knew the characters and I couldn't put it down. That's the best compliment a writer could get. Yeah, and they don't fully realize that that's by design, because I got my chops as a short story writer, so I tend to write my chapters as a series of. I've got like 66 chapters in Moonshine River Georgia. There are 66 short stories in there that are there, of course, interconnected, but I like to give the reader a short chapter that something real happens during that chapter. So if they've only got a few minutes to read, if you've got 10 minutes to read, you can knock out a chapter of my book easy in 10 minutes. Then you throw your bookmark in there and you're at a point where you're wanting to go back.
Speaker 2:You're wanting the next chapter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's great, okay. So, look, I'm going to wrap up here, so stick with me, chris, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:All right, listen everyone. Thank you so much for being here today. We're going to call it. As you know, this program is available wherever you get your podcast. It's on all the streaming services, so, whichever one you're using, just search the Ben Maynard program. Boom, it's right there. Just subscribe to it. Sorry, didn't mean to hit that. Just subscribe to it, um, and you'll get notified anytime a new episode drops. However, if you're watching on YouTube and you just can't resist this, you're just enjoying this, or maybe you're enjoying that over there too. Thank you for doing that. Again, subscribe to the channel, give me a thumbs up and leave a comment. All right, I love the comments. Also, you have to tell 10,000 of your family and friends too. All right, and last but not least, follow me on Instagram Ben Maynard program all one word. Or follow me on TikTok the Ben Maynard program. All right, with that, we're done. We'll see you next time, everyone. Okay, this is the Ben Maynard program. Tell a friend.