YouSaid · the spoken record

Theodore Roosevelt

lines on the record: 23
first: 2021-04-11
most recent: 2021-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“By November he was back in the hospital, so ill he was hardly able to walk or even stand. When told he might be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Roosevelt paused, and then replied All right, I can work that way too. Roosevelt passes away in his sleep at 60 years old. And this is what two of his friends remember about him. This is first from John Burroughs, which is an American naturalist. And I would say the leader of the U.S. Conservation Movement and a writer as well. John Burroughs was asked for remembrance of his old friend. And he said, we shall not look upon his like again.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although sick, frustrated, and brokenhearted over Quentin's death of his son, I think all of his sons served in World War I, and one of them died, Quentin. So this is many years after the expedition. This is about four years after the expedition and about a year and a half to two years before he's going to die. So it says, although sick, frustrated, and brokenhearted over Quentin's death, he continued to fight, refusing to bow to the sorrow and grief that he had outrun his entire life. When the young die at the crest of life, in their golden morning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness he had written, yet there is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So no matter what, what did you just say? Created a young man who given a goal, which is I'm going to get my father out alive, even though he looks like he's on death's door, I will fight with everything I have to achieve that goal. And he accomplishes that goal. Even at the time, it does not seem like it's even possible. This is a description of the group on April 15th. They are 11 days from being rescued. They wind up, Rondon had this guy's obviously the best person you could possibly have on an expedition like this. He had the foresight to send part of his party. He said, hey, there's a meet me at this at a confluence of another river and then bring supplies. And they did this before they went down the river of doubt. They had wind up showing up a few weeks. And as the days went by, there was no sign of Ronda and Roosevelt, anybody else, they were convinced that they were all dead. But there are 11 days from being rescued.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything he had to achieve it. I gotta repeat that. Creating a young man who given a goal would fight with everything he had to achieve it, Kermit not only refused to do what his father asked of him, but demanded that Roosevelt step back and let his son determine his and the entire expedition's course of action. Recognizing the resolve on his son's face, Roosevelt realized that if he wanted to save Kermit's life, he would have to allow his son to save him. It does not direct quote from Roosevelt. It came to me, and I saw that if I did end it, that would only make it more sure that Kermit would not get out, meaning he would not survive. Why did he say that? For I knew he would not abandon me, but would insist on bringing my body out to. That, of course, would have been impossible. I knew his determination. So there was only one thing for me to do, and that was to come out myself.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always made it a practice on such trips to take a bottle of morphine with me because one never knows what's going to happen. If at any time death became inevitable, I would have it over with it once without going through a long, drawn-out agony from which death was the only relief. So it shows he's not afraid to die. This is when he's laying on a cot. He has a fever, his cherry, and it's naturalist that really respects him and develops a closer relationship with Roosevelt on this trip. He had spent decades in exploring South America before this. And his son, and he's telling him, like, that's it. You can't go on, leave me here. I'm ready to die. Lying on a small cot, the injured ex-president talked about the dangers they faced with or without the canoes. Then without a trace of self-pity or fear, Roosevelt informed his friend and his son of the conclusions he had reached. Boys, I realize that some of us are not going to finish this jury. Cherry.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, struggle was going to reveal extreme behaviors. A man may be a pleasant companion when you meet him in dry clothes and certain of substantial meals at regulated intervals or regular intervals, but the same cherry individual may seem a very different person when you're both on half rations, eaten cold, and have been drenched for three days, sleeping from utter exhaustion, cramped and wet. And so at this point, Teddy ends up getting malaria. He winds up having jumps in the river to try to save like I think it was a canoe or some food getting away or whatever the case was. He busts his leg open. There's a huge cut. It's a leg he injured like...”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fever. He defines that as a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity. Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by the real dangers in the wilderness, whether be an angry lion or a roaring river, could suffer from buck fever. What such a man needs is not courage, but nerve control, cool headedness, he explained. This he can only get by practice. Okay, so this next section really is, the lesson here is there's just always another way to solve a problem like the Incas, and I'll tell you what I mean by that. So it says, as Rondan had learned, when they learned him with the wine of the spider monkey, the Sinta larga were talented mimics and could recreate nearly any animal call. So let me pause there. This is the tribe that killed Rondan's dog. And so he's out in the forest looking for, they're trying to kill monkeys, right?”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are so often possessed and that may be so readily developed. So now I'm going to give you a flashback because Kermit is also somebody that Roosevelt's admiring. He's like, look at the sun. Look at my son. He's leading from the front. He's using the first canoe. I mean, he's taking on some of the most dangerous work. He's suffered from malaria. He's working in South America for a few years before this. So he'd be very familiar with malaria. But he's got malaria. He's got a fever and he's still pushing. And so this is Roosevelt talking about the children. He would lead all his children. It doesn't say if he let his daughters are not, but he definitely let his sons. And so this is Roosevelt on what he calls buck fever. The only rule during these expeditions was that the participants could go through over or under an obstacle, but never around it. Roosevelt used these excursions to attack his children's wilderness fears, which he referred to as buck.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really, this is a testament that we are all, all of us, are more capable than we know. We just have to choose to bring this out of us. And sometimes circumstances do this for us, right? Roosevelt had developed a deep admiration for his team. Look at the way they work was done. This is now a direct quote from Roosevelt.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“relying on and the things in the rainforest have evolved to not allow themselves to be killed very easily. And the idea that he'd want to eat monkeys when he's back home in America is ridiculous. He's not doing that. And now he's realizing he's so hungry that he sees this as a delicacy, that, oh my God, I can't believe we actually have meat that we can eat. Hunger has powerful transformative properties. At this point, they've lost two of their canoes and they realize they're running out of food. This is many pages later. This is just a constant, they're dealing with constant hunger throughout this whole thing. Not only is it wet, dangerous. Bugs are everywhere. They're hungry. With grim certainty, they calculated that if the expedition continued to advance at this slow rate, they would be without food of any kind, beyond what they could catch or forage for the last month of their journey, as well as worrying about their quickly dwindling rations. The men were reluctant to stay in one spot for too long for another reason. They were not alone.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this entire time it's a race for survival, they're trying to go as fast as possible. The jungle and the river is doing everything they possibly can to make them slow down. And they're forced to cut back, continue to cut back amount of food. I think at one point they can have one saltine cracker, a cup of fish soup, and coffee for dinner. And now they're down to eating twice a day, once in the morning, once like 11 hours later. And hunger, this is another metaphor, both literal hunger and hunger for success has powerful transformative properties. That is the note I left myself on this page, one sentence for you here. Roosevelt himself had even developed a taste for monkey meat. And the reason I think I said this powerful transformative process is because they have to, now they're running out of food, they have to, whatever they can, whatever they can actually kill to eat is what...”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, however, he realized that he would be called on to pay the full cost of his ambition, and he found himself gravely unprepared for what might lie ahead. After months of inattention, Roosevelt had now come face to face with the acute logistical shortcomings and rapidly escalating risks that his own casual approached the expedition and its route had produced. Roosevelt, Rondon and their men were about to begin the most difficult leg of their journey, but they were already at the limits of their endurance. After spending more than a month slogging through the muddy highlands when long days on Muleback nearly constant downpours, illness, worry, death, and sorrow, the men were exhausted, homesick, and wary, and that is their condition at the beginning of the river of doubt.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is two paragraphs, and it's really about facing the full cost of your ambitions. This is fantastic. Ready? Roosevelt was about to become an explorer in the truest and most unforgiving sense of the word. It was an opportunity he had dreamed of.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roosevelt's realizing, hey, they're more valuable than I am. I'm going to cut my food in half so they can eat more. Okay, so it says the expedition had now turned into a race against time. The survival of every man would depend on their collective ability to master the churning river, evade its ever-present dangers, and discover a route out of the deepest rainforest before their supplies ran out. And really that could be a metaphor, not only for an expedition, but for a company. You have some kind of runway, and hopefully your company is profitable so then your runway is theoretically forever, right? But in many cases, if you're raising money or if you're going through a bad period of time, you have a certain amount of resources. And if you don't fix this problem, it's a race against time. Think about that. They need to discover a route out of the deepest rainforest before their supplies ran out. That could be the same thing going back to the SpaceX example. They had enough money for three launches. They couldn't figure it out in three. They could go bankrupt. They wind up pulling it together and getting it right on the fourth one. But there was very much a race against time as well. So that's what I mean.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's all these different people that are at war. There's a literal battle that's taking place where he's living. His mom, I think he's two years old the time picks him up and they have to escape shortly thereafter. She dies. His grandparents wind up taking care of him. Like a year or two later, they die. Then he winds up being under the custody of his uncle. So he realizes from a very young age, okay, no one's coming to save me. He has an extreme regimen of discipline. And so I think at the age of 16, he lists in the Brazilian military. And that's where he serves, and I'm pretty sure his entire life, he lives somehow survives to the ripe old age of 92. Again, he might pop up if I can find a good book on him. He might pop up as a future episode because I think we can learn a lot from him. Just want to read one paragraph to you about, he's at military school right now. So it says Rondon was not like the other boys in military school. And nearly a year passed before he feels...”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nine other men. So I've had nine lives full of nine lives full of experiences in my one life, right? I have had my full share. And if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so. So this expedition is the opposite of easy. Check this out. So remote, the region that he had agreed to explore was that even getting to the river of doubt would require a journey of at least two more months, first by boat and then on mule, and I think they have to once get to the river they have to traverse something like four hundred seventy miles. So before we get to that adventure, I want to tell you more about this guy named Rondon. Remember, I'm most likely pronouncing his name incorrectly. His father dies six months before he's born from some kind of disease. His mother, there's like all these war. He grows up in the wilderness. There's Indian, Brazil.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does nothing. Others do all the work. Show all the forethought. Take all the risk and are entitled to all the credit. So really there, he's describing, if we think about the opposite, he's describing what he despises, something that we've studied over and over again is that you can learn the right way to do something by observing it the wrong way. And if you think about what Roosevelt's saying there, he's describing all the attributes that he finds disgusting and lazy humans, right? All the attributes that he won't himself allow in his life and he won't let when he's raising his kids allow them to do. And you're going to see a couple of the people on the expedition wind up having these traits. And he disposes them rather rapidly. So this is a little bit about the river of doubt, this guy named Mueller happened to be just offhand comment. Mentioned it to Roosevelt and Roosevelt immediately makes the decision, okay, that's where we're going. The river that Mueller...”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll describe a little bit about his early life and a little bit. This is more on Roosevelt's why he's doing this. Ex-President had come to the Amazon for neither tourism nor sport, but for scientific exploration, and he held the deepest disdain for anyone who wanted anything less. The ordinary traveler, he said, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others. Remember that phrase carried by others because somebody tries to do this literally without himself doing anything or risking anything does not need to show much initiative and intelligence, much more initiative and intelligence than an express package.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trim, he would be able to perform a free man's duty and fight as efficiently as anyone if the need arose. And the book goes into more detail what he expected he expects his sons to read, to learn, to be curious about the world around them, to keep themselves physically fit, to be able to survive in the wilderness, to be able to hunt and trap and forage off the land. And these are all these adventures that Teddy would lead his sons and I think his daughters on when they were kids. And it winds up, I think benefiting Kermit. I think he's 24 when he starts this expedition. And so he's not afraid of hard work and he has all this skill sets from his childhood that proves very valuable. I want to talk more about what Teddy's intention was for this. He wanted adventure. He did not want tourism. And so this is a little bit about the Brazilian government or the ones that are going to provide Roosevelt with the guide. And he's...”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roosevelt's idea of his whole life before he was a politician, before he wind up being an adventure, fighting in wars, he wanted, he considered himself a naturalist. He thought he was going to dedicate himself to studying nature. He would collect birds. He would study trees, plants, and everything else. And he yearned to be an adventure. He grew up in a time where there were still unmapped parts, unmarked parts on the globe. And so he realized at this point, okay, well, I'm 54 years old. I think he is when he starts this adventure. If I'm going to do it, I need to do it now. And so he picks out this spot in South America. It had been suggested to him previously, but I think at the time he was still president. So he obviously couldn't do that. But this is a description of where they're going. There was a blank unexplored spot on the map of South America. That's the size of Germany. And within it lay the vast”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And defeating by sheer energy and physical position, the grief that had threatened to overwhelm him, and this is what his own description of why he does this. Black care, he explained, rarely sits behind a writer whose pace is fast enough.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not have the body, he said, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it. Theodore, then only eleven years old, said, accepting the challenge, said I'll make my body. Roosevelt did make its body, and he never again allowed it to grow weak or idle. On the contrary, what began as drudgery soon became a compulsion throughout his adult life Roosevelt would relish physical exertion, and he would use it not just as a way to keep the body fit and his mind sharp, but as his most effective weapon against depression and despair, and that is what he's going through right now at this point in the story. He is extremely depressed and he's in the pit of despair. So this is something that I've noticed in other books that I've read. The two that came to mind when I read that paragraph was first was Nelson Mandela's”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The defeat at the Poles is overwhelming, he wrote. I had expected defeat, but I had expected that we would make a better showing. I try not to think of the damage to myself personally, and such as a brief background there, he decides he can't get the Republican nomination, so he decides to run as an independent that splits the Republican vote, the Democrat wins. So a lot of the people that he thought were friends, and Teddy's an extrovert by nature, so he's going to be extremely depressed because for the first time in his life, he's shunned. He becomes a pariah. So says friends and colleagues who had once competed for Roosevelt's attention now shunned him. For the first time in his life, he was a pariah and he was painfully aware of it. Roosevelt was famous for his almost overbearing optimism and confidence, and now he suffered from what he called a bruised spirit, and a bruised spirit is really like a kind way that he's describing that. He's depressed, he's lonely, he's sinking into a deep depression. And so this is where we get into.”
2021-04-11 · Founders · #175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source