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

Well, thank you. Today's podcast is the next part of the River of Doubt with Theodore Roosevelt,

book by Candace Milard called Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, The River of Doubt.

And we're going to jump right back into this story. I like today's story, Brent. It's got some piranhas in it.

Piranhas in it? Piranhas, little jungle stuff, Indians, like...

Kind of Indians. Amazonian? Like...

Are those considered Indians? Yeah. Indigenous-like Indians.

Okay. Yeah. That's what they call them in the book. Okay.

That's what Roosevelt calls them. That's a colloquial term. They have a tribal name. We're getting to that later.

Macara or something like that. And these are the type of people from Apocalypse Now sort of stuff.

Like they shoot poise and narrows. You know, they're a little warrior-like.

They're pygmy though. They're pretty small folks. Pygmies are odd to me.

They're not like pygmy folks, but they're average height and size much smaller than your average...

Like Scandinavian white dude.

Different skin tones like all that. Like, you know, your Amazonian jungle type were your guy.

And it's pretty intense. What we're going to read today, it's pretty cool.

We're going to learn a little bit about the rest of the journey.

So last time when we spoke about this, I'm just going to do one more update for those who haven't...

You know, who are just jumping in on this episode for the first time and haven't fallen along.

Theodore Roosevelt basically decides to go down an uncharted river in the Amazon.

Basically going on an exploration as far as they know. No white person, European, no non-Indian person has ever gone down this river through the heart of the Amazon.

At first, it's just a little trip they plan on the side, but eventually it kind of grows.

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