Welcome to the Gritty Podcast. I am your host Brian Call and I am joined today by my brother, the Gritty Bromine. How are you Brent?

I'm well. Thank you.

Right on. So today's podcast, I'm looking forward to doing. It has some assassination attempts, some bullets flying. It's got a little bit of political intrigue.

Let's see. It's got some overcoming of adversity and challenges, weakness, strength. Like it's about Theodore Roosevelt.

And I'm just telling you folks, if you haven't, if you should listen to this series of podcasts I'm about to do on this book and I'll jump right into it.

It's called Theodore Roosevelt's darkest journey, the River of Doubt by Candace Moulard.

I read this book when it came out in 2005 and it's been on my mind ever since basically. It's an incredible story about Theodore Roosevelt.

And you've heard us talk about Theodore Roosevelt on earlier podcasts, some of you haven't, but if you're new, we've talked about Theodore.

There's a theme that follows him around everywhere he goes, which is he turns to the outdoors when things get tough.

And he wants to push himself physically, mentally, the more stressed he is at home in civilized life, the more he wants to go on some grueling, physically demanding journey or epic crusade that is physically harsh.

He loves the outdoors and it restores him, makes him sane again. So when he goes back to his hectic life as president, that's the only way I could deal with the crazy people you have to deal with as a president.

Yeah, he goes, he turns to nature for solace. And so this is the president who gave us all of our public lands. He's the one that made the North American model of conservation a thing.

He made it cool. He made it exist. The common man today can go and hunt big game. You might have to wait in line. You might have to draw a tag a lot over the counter opportunities though in a lot of states, but we have more game than we've had back in his time.

And it's open to anyone who wants to go. And many of it can be just bought over the counter tags and you can go and do it. We're trying to show that through the Gritty video series that we keep putting out.

These are really easy point draws are over the counter opportunities that adventures can be had on our public lands. People just aren't having because they just aren't aware of the opportunity that's there.

A lot of times it takes some kind of physical endurance to get to some of these places. That's why the opportunity is so great.

But when you think about the miles traveled that I do a hunt with like let's say Ryan on those miles are a minuscule compared to what they did back in this time period.

You know, it's he theater Roosevelt grew up on horses not in cars. So everything was a little different back then. But in this story in the book, I'm going to cover this journey that theater Roosevelt takes down into the Amazon jungle where he travels a river that's been uncharted.

It's never been on this river before called the river of doubt. It has a couple other names as well. But this is a spot in the Amazon that no one has been down a river that they don't know if it's even navigable like is there giant waterfalls is there crocodiles the size of dinosaurs like you don't know this is 1912 or 1913.

So there's it's a wild time. You don't really know what's going on in the Amazon jungle at this time. And you've got poisonous everything everything in the jungles trying to kill you.

You got diseases. You got native people that have poison dart arrows and this story is is like trying not to drown and die or die from poisonous animals or plants trying to find food to survive not get killed by it.

People with native native people with with poison dart arrows and it's like a real live Indiana Jones except it is Roosevelt had guns right when you look at.

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