#175 Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

What I learned from reading The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  "I don't believe he can live through the night," George Cherry wrote in his diary in the spring of 1914. A tough and highly respected naturalist, who had spent 25 years exploring the Amazon, Cherry too often had watched helplessly as his companions succumbed to the lethal dangers of the jungle. Deep in the Brazilian rainforest, he recognized the approach of death when he saw it, and it now hung unmistakably over Theodore Roosevelt. Less than 18 months after Roosevelt's dramatic failed campaign for an unprecedented third term in the White House, the sweat-soaked figure before Cherry in the jungle darkness could not have been further removed from the power and privilege of his former office.

• 0:44David Senra?

  Hundreds of miles from help, or even any outside awareness of his ordeal, Roosevelt hovered agonizing on the brink of death. Suffering from disease and near starvation, and shuddering uncontrollably from fever, the man who had been the youngest and most energetic president in the nation's history drifted in and out of delirium. He was too weak to sit up, or even to lift his head. Throughout his life, Roosevelt had turned to intense, physical exertion as a means of overcoming setbacks and sorrow, and he'd come to the Amazon in search of that same hard absolution. Deeply frustrated by the bitterness and betrayals of the election, he had sought to purge his

• 1:27David Senra?

  disappointment by throwing himself headlong against the cruelest trials that nature could offer him. With only a handful of men, he had set out on a self-imposed journey to explore the River of Doubt, a churning, ink-black tributary of the Amazon that winds nearly 1,000 miles through the dense Brazilian rainforest. In a lifetime of remarkable achievement, Roosevelt had shaped his own character, and that of his country, through sheer force of will, relentlessly choosing action over inaction, and championing what he famously termed "the strenuous life."

• 2:07David Senra?

  From his earliest childhood, that energetic credo had served as his compass and salvation, propelling him to the forefront of public life and lifting him above a succession of personal tragedies and disappointments. Each time he encountered an obstacle, he responded with more vigor, more energy, more raw determination. Each time he faced personal tragedy or weakness, he found his strength not in the sympathy of others, but in the harsh ordeal of unfamiliar new challenges and lonely adventure. After months in the wilderness, harsh jungle conditions and the river's punishing rapids had left the expedition on the verge of disaster.

• 2:51David Senra?

  Roosevelt and his men had already lost five of their seven canoes, most of their provisions, and one man had died. What lay around the next bend was anyone's guess. That was an excerpt from the absolutely fantastic book that I just finished reading, which is The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, and is written by Candace Millard. So this is the second, if you remember, all the way back on Founders, number 156, I read David McCullough's book, Mornings on Horseback. It's about the first 28 years of Theodore Roosevelt's life and all the struggles and pain that he had to go through. He lost his father, who was his idol. His father died early. He was in his 40s from a form of stomach cancer.

• 3:32David Senra?

  A few years after that, while Theodore was still in his mid-20s, his mother and his wife die on the same day, and he famously wrote in his diary that night that the light has gone out of his life. And even when he was a young man, after every tragedy that he had to endure, he would inevitably throw himself into these physical struggles to try to exhaust his body, to relieve his mind, all the stress and pain that he's in. And so now, this book takes place when he's in his mid-50s. He dies relatively young. He dies at 60 years old. And the same thing is happening. He just lost the election as the author was writing. And he decides, I'm going to go down and explore. He wanted adventure, so he goes down to South America.

• 4:17David Senra?

  And he's exploring an unknown and unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest. And so what you and I are going to learn today, there's a lot of metaphors as he goes through this crazy, near-death experience, this constant struggle that he elected into, that I think is going to be helpful when inevitably you and I go through struggles in our life. I want to talk a little bit about his emotional state right after he loses this election. He says, Roosevelt had never been willing to share his private pain with the public. In private, he admitted to being surprised and shaken by the scope of his crushing defeat. There is no use disguising the fact that the defeat at the polls is overwhelming, he wrote. I had expected defeat, but I had expected that we would make a better showing.

• 5:01David Senra?

  I try not to think of the damage to myself personally. And so just 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, 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 he's, for the first time in his life, he's shunned. He becomes a pariah. So it 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's suffered from what he called a bruised spirit. And a bruised spirit is a really kind way that he's describing, that he's depressed,

• 5:43David Senra?

  he's lonely, he's sinking into a deep depression. And so this is where we get into his chosen method of dealing with setbacks, with struggles in his life. He says, when confronted with sadness or setbacks that were beyond his power to overcome, Roosevelt instinctively sought out still greater tests, losing himself in punishing physical hardships and danger, experiences that came to shape his personality and inform his most impressive achievements. And this is one of the most important parts of the entire book, and really, one of the most important lessons from the life of Theodore Roosevelt. He's not alone in reaching this conclusion either, and I'll tell you about that in a minute. But this started from a very early age. His father was his hero. He was asthmatic.

• 6:25David Senra?

  He was like a sick, kind of weak kid, always beset by one sickness after another. And so, this is where he begins to realize that the mind and the body are not separate, right? So, he says, "Theodore senior sat his son down and told him that he had the power to change his fate, but he'd have to work hard to do it. Theodore, you have the mind, but you do 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 11 years old, said, accepting the challenge, said, "I'll make my body." Roosevelt did make his body, and he never again allowed it to grow weak or idle. On the contrary, what began as drudgery soon became a compulsion.

• 7:10David Senra?

  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's 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 in his autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom. He talks about this, and very few people have had more stressful lives than Nelson Mandela. But he said something in his autobiography that I've always kept, and I saved on my phone, and I read from time to time to remind myself. And he said, "My main interest was in training.

• 7:52David Senra?

  I found the rigorous exercise to be an excellent outlet for tension and stress. After a strenuous workout, I felt both mentally and physically lighter." And then, we also see the very same idea echoed by Sam Zemurray. He's the main character in the book that I read for Founders, episode number 37, The Fish That Ate the Whale. And something that separated Sam from most of the other banana executives and founders is that he would work in the fields with the men. While most people were in Boston or other cities, just in an office, he'd run his business from the actual, where the actual bananas were harvested. And he, the reason he said that, or excuse me, the reason he did it is because it says, "He believed in the transcendent power of physical labor,

• 8:36David Senra?

  that a man can free his soul only by exhausting his body." That is a really interesting sentence. Free his soul only by exhausting his body. If Theodore Roosevelt was alive and we could read him that sentence, I think he would agree with it. Let me go back, back to a little bit about Teddy's early life before jumping into this just amazing, amazing story. And just wait till you see, I've never read a Candice Millard book before. I just looked, she has two other books. I'm definitely going to order them because some of this writing in this book is just, it's, it's amazing. Wait till we get there. So this is after his father's death. Again, keep in mind, his father was his hero. He says, "The best

• 9:15David Senra?

  man he ever knew." So he goes, he starts going into throwing his, his physical body in danger in these, these dangerous excursions. He's still in the United States at this time. And so a doctor who's traveling with Roosevelt is telling other members in the party that, "Listen, you've got to be careful because he doesn't know when to stop." Says, "Look out for Theodore. He's not strong, but he's all grit. He's early twenties at this point. He'll kill himself before he'll ever say he's tired." Roosevelt emerged from that summer determined to survive any loss, and loss would come. And so what they're talking about there is the death of his mom and his wife, his wife on the same day. And I always go back to what Charlie Munger says, that if you live long enough, bad things are going

• 9:58David Senra?

  to happen to you. They're going to happen to everybody. And part of it is, many people don't know, ever learn how to deal with them, the inevitable bad things that happen in life. And people like Charlie Munger, Theodore Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, Samson Murray, they understood that and they found ways to deal with it. So this is now, he goes out to the Badlands in the Dakotas. This is the frontier at this point in his, in American history. It says, "Desperate to conquer his despair, Roosevelt resorted to the only therapy he knew: physical hardship and danger."

• 10:28David Senra?

  He was out there for a few years. He was a different man when he returned. Two years later, he was filled with vigor and perspective after mastering an entirely unfamiliar world of danger on the American frontier and defeating by sheer energy and physical exertion. We're only a few minutes into this. How many times has that word, physical exertion, the phrase, rather, physical exertion popped up? And defeating by sheer energy and physical exertion, 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 rider whose pace is fast enough.

• 11:07David Senra?

  So his son Kermit is working in South America. He's going to actually join his father on this expedition. It's not the first expedition they had together. About four to six years earlier, they had gone on a year-long hunting expedition in Africa. And this is, there's just one part I want to pull out about this section because it's his advice to his son about their very first adventure. I think Kermit's 18 at the time, if I remember correctly. But I really think at the core of what he's saying here is really valuable advice for all of us, that you treat everything as a learning experience. So he says, now he's talking to Kermit, that you would treat it just as you would a college course. He's talking about the adventure in Africa they're going to have. Enjoy it to the full, count it as so much the good,

• 11:51David Senra?

  and then when it is over, turn in and buckle down to hard work. For without the hard work, you certainly cannot make success of life. So now they're talking about Roosevelt's idea of his whole life. Before he was a politician, before he wound up being an adventurer, going, 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 adventurer. He grew up in a time where there were still unmarked parts on the globe.

• 12:30David Senra?

  And so he realizes 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 he was, 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 tangled expanse of the Amaz-- excuse me, American, of the Amazon rainforest. And this is some background. There's a lot of people that had tried to explore the Amazon up to this point. A lot of them wrote books about them. And so I want to pull out some quotes from

• 13:11David Senra?

  these books. It says, "These men said that they had been working, they had been working, where they had been working, excuse me, so they're on the floor of the rainforest, okay. Where they had been working, 'the sun never shone, for the light was stopped on the unbroken green, which, except where the big rivers flowed, roofed the whole land.'" For Roosevelt, South America's vast, largely unknown and unexplored interior was perhaps the most important factor of all in shaping his decision to accept the invitation. With its primordial jungles and broad savannas, its soaring mountains and harsh extremes of climate and terrain, the continent offered the kind of unbounded, unfamiliar frontier

• 13:53David Senra?

  and harsh physical adventure that had attracted Roosevelt throughout his entire life. So what they're really saying, it's really spooky and at the same time alluring to him. Now, before we go any further, I need to give you some background. So this did not start out, he did not, he was traveling South America at the invitation of, I think, the Brazilian government. And he's going to give some speeches, he's going to go down the Amazon, but they had a, like a more benign itinerary, I would say. And then when he's down there, they suggest, hey, there's this river, has a great name, it's called the River of Doubt, no one knows where it goes. And it was just like this offhand suggestion. And Roosevelt completely changes the expedition. He's like, yes, we're going to do that. Now, that's a big problem because--

• 14:36David Senra?

  The person that was helping him plan the expedition was this guy named Father Zam. He's this, really, I would say, unlikable Catholic priest. It's a weird Catholic priest because he's a lover of luxury and alcohol. And you'll see that he's not one person that you're going to want to bring on an expedition that's extremely dangerous because he's really lazy and he wants other people to do the work for him. But what's even worse is that he's at like a, let's consider like an outdoor store where they sell camping and hunting equipment. And he's talking to a clerk that works there, this guy named Fila. And he's telling you about the trip that he's doing with the former President of the United States. And Fila's like, "I'll do anything. Can I please come with you?"

• 15:21David Senra?

  And so he hires this guy to plan all the logistics and bling all the supplies for this trip. And here's the problem. Fila is what I would consider like the anti-Shackleton. So, all the way back on Founders 144, I think. I covered the fantastic book. Tons of entrepreneurs have read it. If you haven't read it, I understand why a lot of entrepreneurs and investors read it. It's called Endurance. It's about Shackleton's failed expedition in the Antarctic, right? And where Shackleton proved to be a great leader of men and resourceful, even in failure, Fila had, he tried to go, I think, to the North Pole. I can't remember where he went. He went somewhere that was cold.

• 16:06David Senra?

  And he wound up being the leader, and almost everybody died. He survived. So this is a description of that. I'm just going to read two sentences so you understand. This guy's the anti-Shackleton, and yet he's the one that's planning this, planning what supplies to bring on this expedition. So it says, they're describing him as "an ill-conceived, badly managed, undisciplined venture, and its commander as utterly incompetent. He's a fairly good cook, but not a leader of men." And Fila and Father Zam are going to be so incompetent that even before they start embarking on the River of Doubt, Roosevelt kicks them both off the expedition. So I want to talk a little bit about, the person that winds up being one of the most valuable, there's a handful of people that are extremely valuable to the expedition.

• 16:51David Senra?

  One of them is the one, this person leading it, this Brazilian explorer named Rondon. I'll get to him in a minute. But Kermit Roosevelt winds up being extremely important, one of the most hardworking people in the entire expedition. And I think part of it has to do with the way that Theodore raised his sons. And so this is Theodore way before the expedition, on his expectations of his sons. Okay? And so he says, "I should regard it as unspeakable disgrace if either of them failed to work hard at an honest occupation for his livelihood, while at the same time keeping himself in such trim that 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.

• 17:34David Senra?

  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. You know, I think he's 24 when he starts this expedition. And so he's not afraid of hard work, and he has all these skill sets from his childhood that prove 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 this is, he's a very fascinating character.

• 18:19David Senra?

  I've already looked for a biography on him. But, so the person that says, "Dugama" had also offered to provide Roosevelt with a guide. "He promised him Colonel Rondon." That's probably not how you pronounce it, but that's the phonetical, that's what I'm going to go with. And this is a description of Rondon. "The heroic commander of the Strategic Telegraph Commission." The 48-year-old Rondon had spent half his life exploring the Amazon and had traversed roughly 14,000 miles of wilderness that was not only unmapped, but largely unknown to anyone but the indigenous peoples who lived there. So the two leaders of this expedition are going to be Roosevelt and Rondon. Roosevelt is going to defer mostly to Rondon. He's an extremely fascinating figure,

• 19:02David Senra?

  something I want to, somebody I want to read more about because I think we can learn from him. He grew up extremely, I mean, poverty is not even the word for what this guy had to endure. And so I'll describe a little bit about his early life in a little bit. This is more on Roosevelt's, like, why he's doing this. "The ex-president had come to the Amazon for neither tourism nor sport, but for scientific aspiration, 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

• 19:44David Senra?

  and intelligence, much more initiative and intelligence than an express package. 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 in lazy humans, right? All the attributes that he won't himself allow in his life and he won't let, like, 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,

• 20:29David Senra?

  and he disposes of them rather rapidly. So this will be 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 had in mind was one of the great remaining mysteries of the Brazilian wilderness. Absent from even the most accurate and detailed maps of South America, it was all but unknown to the outside world. In fact, the river was so remote and mysterious that its very name was a warning to would-be explorers: the River of Doubt. No one who knew, excuse me, no one knew Roosevelt would have been surprised to learn

• 21:09David Senra?

  that he quickly chose that one, which, in Rondon's words, 'offered the greatest unforeseen difficulty.'" So he's choosing, remember, he's still depressed, he's still despair. He's, there's a few paths in front of him, and he's choosing the one that had the greatest unforeseen difficulty. So if you're curious about this, there's a couple documentaries on YouTube about the River of Doubt. But even if you pull up Google Maps and you could put River of Doubt on your phone, you can actually see it. There's actually, there's images. There's people fishing on it now, but it's been renamed the Roosevelt River. And I think this is Roosevelt's, let me just read it. This made me chuckle. Roosevelt's admission that his new plan was slightly more hazardous than the original was the understatement of the century. Wait until

• 21:54David Senra?

  you, I go back to what we talked about, I think it was on Founder's Number 172 with the book Liftoff, which is on the first few days of SpaceX, which really crystallized this idea that we've read about a lot, right? And it's that business is just essentially a bunch of problems, right? So you think of the most successful companies become their effective problem solving machines, right? It's not that they don't have struggles, it's that they figure out how to identify problems and then how to solve the problems. So really, I wanted to read this book, and I think a lot of lessons are metaphorical, is that you're going to run into troubles, like what do you do when that happens? And seeing it in this great adventure and seeing other people go through much more difficult paths

• 22:37David Senra?

  than even lay in front of you, I think is inspirational and also puts into like our own problems into like the proper perspective. And I think it helps us like deal with that mentally and more importantly, never give up when you do run into the eventual obstacle or if you even want to call it a problem. So here we have people like Roosevelt saying, okay, no, I want to struggle. I want the more difficult path. And if you listen to Founder's Number 144, or if you've already read that book Endurance, I really do think there's a lot of parallels. What Roosevelt's about to encounter in Amazon, it's almost like the tropical version of what Shackleton had to deal with, right? And the funny part, or I guess an interesting or amusing part to me, was that they're occurring at the exact same time, just on very different parts of the planet. So it says, "Sir Ernest Shackleton

• 23:22David Senra?

  and his men, in a legendary attempt to cross Antarctica, narrowly escaped the same fate two years later, the same year that Roosevelt would set off down the River of Doubt." And it's been over 100 years since Shackleton tried to go on his adventure, and I just can't tell you how many, how many times he's been mentioned in the books that we've been reading, or mentioned by entrepreneurs in interviews or podcasts, whatever the case is. There's clearly something that resonates with reading about people's struggle and their refusal to give up, that even 100 years after the fact, people find it valuable to read and learn about these experiences. And I think once you're the River of Doubt, Is, I think, less well-known, or at least it was less well-known to me. Like, once you know about it, I think you're gonna be curious.

• 24:05David Senra?

  You're gonna see the value in studying it. And I think this book is a great opportunity for you to do that. I cannot recommend this book enough. It was absolutely fantastic. Okay, so let me go back to the story. This was very fascinating, too. Maybe surprising, maybe a better word, is that Roosevelt was just not afraid of death. And he mentions it in different contexts over several different decades of his life. And the reason I always talk about why it was fascinating, because Roosevelt pops up as like a supporting character in a lot of these books. He was William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Politz, or J.P. Morgan. He went to war with a lot of these people. In fact, I read an entire book about him and J.P. Morgan having a fight and then having to collaborate. It was The Hour of Fate, Founder's Number 142.

• 24:50David Senra?

  And the reason I wanted to study and learn more about him is because even as a supporting character, like, whoa, this guy's more interesting than the main character. And the reason I believe that is because he fit so much life into 60 short years. And I've even mentioned that, I think I mentioned it on Founder's Number 142. And what I love is that Roosevelt knew that. And I've never found this quote from him until I read this book. Let me read this to you. And really, what he's saying is, "I will gladly die for adventure." Roosevelt wrote, "Tell Osborne, 'I have already lived and enjoyed as much life as nine other men.'" So I've had nine lives full of, nine lives, nine lives full of experiences in my one life, right?

• 25:32David Senra?

  "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 they get to the river, they have to traverse something like 400, I want to say like 470 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 goes up in like the wilderness.

• 26:17David Senra?

  There's Indian Brazilians. There's, there's all these different people that are at war. He, there's a, there's a like a literal battle that's taking place where he's living. His mom, I think he's two years old at the time. His mom picks him up and they have to escape. Shortly thereafter, she dies. Her, her, 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, of his uncle. So he realizes from a very young age, okay, no one's coming to save me. He has an extreme regiment of discipline. And so I think at the age of 16, he elisks 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, as a future

• 27:02David Senra?

  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 at military school. And nearly a year passed before he feel, he, he began to feel comfortable there. So he was a loner. He went through such tragedy and violence in his early life. He was kind of wary of other humans. Like he was, he winds up being a great leader of men, but not, you know, he's, he was very comfortable being silent by himself on these expeditions. Okay. Rondon was serious and driven. He was also poor beyond anyone's understanding. He woke up at 4:00 AM every day to swim in the sea and was back in his dark room by 5:00 AM, studying by the thin light of a lamp, while the other students, most of whom had been out late night before, were sleeping in their beds.

• 27:47David Senra?

  Besides his extraordinary discipline, Rondon's extreme poverty and rural background made him an outcast. He was too poor to even afford the textbooks. And so as you can imagine from that description of a young Rondon, Roosevelt's gonna, he's gonna admire him. So it says, for Roosevelt, Rondon represented the kind of man he had championed and admired throughout his life. A disciplined officer who thrived on physical challenges and hardship and accomplished great feats through sheer force of will. A conspicuous contrast between the two men was in the philosophical conclusions that each drew from his experiences. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time today telling you about the different philosophies because I found that very interesting and how you could still, again, there's not one right way to do things, and how they would

• 28:31David Senra?

  approach problems differently, but they also, some of their traits overlapped and there was a lot more similarities as well. For Roosevelt, the lessons of nature and human history proved the need for assertive action, even when action entailed bloodshed or conflict. He had a politician's pragmatism, which meant a flexibility in tactics that favored results over process. For Rondon, life spent at the edge of Brazil's frontier and at the margins of its society had instilled a powerful mistrust of imposed solutions. Rondon did not welcome conflict, but rather sought to avoid it at all costs, and they call his motto, he has a personal motto that

• 29:14David Senra?

  he makes his men adhere to, suicidal, and I'll tell you more about that in a minute. So he didn't welcome conflict, but rather sought to avoid it at all costs. Both had developed their beliefs over a lifetime of experience and thought, and both would be remembered for the passion with which they put those beliefs into practice. Okay, so the journey's already begun. They're trying to work their way towards the River of Doubt. Things are extremely slow. The Father's Am and Fila, they had, they bring all these, like, they're, they pack like a feast. They didn't, I mean, let me just read this to you. So it says, "To Roosevelt's growing frustration, the expedition remained practically immobile. Not only were the pack animals not cooperating, but the already massive amounts

• 29:57David Senra?

  of baggage, 360 enormous boxes and countless smaller ones, had been increased significantly." So as they do this tour, he's doing a speaking tour before the adventure. He also gets a bunch of gifts from different politicians in Brazil. And this is really, like, they're, they're going slow, right, because they have all this stuff, right? When I read that, I thought of, this was the opposite of what Shackleton had learned from studying past expeditions. So let me read that quote from the book Endurance. This is one of my favorite quotes in the entire book and something I think about constantly because I think it applies to a lot of other things. So it's talking about Shackleton, right? "From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that

• 30:38David Senra?

  burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed." And he wound up being right and that saved his men's life, right? So let me read that to you again. "From studying the outcomes of past expeditions," which is exactly what we do on this podcast, right? "He believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those who had sacrificed total preparedness for speed." So the way to think about that is, success is a function of time and lightness equals speed, so less time. This is where we hear Teddy talk about, you know, everybody has to contribute. He does not accept, not only on this expedition, but in life, he doesn't

• 31:21David Senra?

  like freeloaders. "All for each and each for all is a good motto," Roosevelt said, "but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as to not be a burden to others." Now, you've got to remember this part from later on because you combine what he just said, can't be a burden to others, and then his willingness to die. He's gonna do something extremely surprising later on, but it's a combination of those two ideas. So we reach the part where Father Zom is about to be kicked off, and this is for the better. I mean, this is outrageous, what this guy's about to suggest. He's hated by all. Remember, really what this section is, you've got to lead from the front. There's a reason why Bob Noisette in Intel didn't have an office, why Steve Jobs talked about Gail Emilio, he made fun of him because he's like, this guy's supposed

• 32:06David Senra?

  to be a turnaround CEO. He has lunch in an office on fine china. You're not even with the people. So it says, "Given the discomforts of traveling, the priest explained, 'The best solution would be for him to ride in a chair on the shoulders of four strong Indians.'" He tells this to Rondon. While the Brazilian Colonel kept his composure, something that, one of the main lessons from him, he just would not, he was not guarded, excuse me, he was not guided by his emotion. Even when setback after setback, or even Roosevelt asked him to do something he doesn't like, he just deals with it. While the Brazilian Colonel kept his composure, he made it perfectly clear to Zom that they would not submit to such

• 32:51David Senra?

  degrading and subservient work. Zom's response is that it's a, an honor. Because he's a member of the clergy, they should be honored to carry him. So then, he gets shot down, so Zom goes to Roosevelt. And so Zom appealed to Roosevelt, a decision that proved to be his undoing. He says, Indians are meant to carry priests. Roosevelt chose his words carefully before replying, "But you will not commit such an affront to my dear Colonel Rondon's principles," he said. Roosevelt had gone to great lengths to show his Brazilian commander every courtesy and mark of respect that his experience and position, as well as his character, deserved. Not only did Roosevelt admire Rondon's accomplishments

• 33:32David Senra?

  as an explorer and a military man, but he respected his philosophical beliefs. Roosevelt insisted that he and Rondon be treated as equals in every way. And Rondon also mentioned this. He says, "Mr. Roosevelt declared to me that as long as he was in the wilderness, he would accept nothing and do nothing that might have an appearance of special attention to his person." So there's only like two chairs, they brought along two chairs, one for Rondon and Roosevelt. Rondon refused to sit in something that his men didn't have access to. Roosevelt refused as well, so he sat on the floor, just like everybody else. Guess who sits in the chair? Father Zom. So this is, anyways, Father Zom's on his way out. So Father Zom is being sent back from here. He showed himself so completely

• 34:13David Senra?

  incompetent and selfish that he got on everyone's nerves. So just a way to think about what just happened. Lead from the front. Don't demand luxuries that you're, the people that you're leading, the people that you're working with don't have. That's ridiculous. They were all tormented by hordes of gnats, sandflies. Oh, this is on more problems of the expedition. And just more problems they're gonna have to deal with and eventually overcome. And in this case, they don't really ever overcome them. They just have to endure it. They were all tormented by hordes of gnats, sandflies, horseflies, and small stingless bees. The bees swarmed around their hands and faces, congregating at the corners of their eyes and buzzing about their lips with maddening persistence. The most difficult part of every day ride, however, was the rain, which was now falling.

• 34:57David Senra?

  This is a description written by Kermit Roosevelt. "Mournfully, dismally, and ceaselessly, in a sort of hopeless, insistent way." So the water gets in everything. It gets in their supplies. It never stops raining. They have to sleep in it. Their clothes wind up, they're always constantly wet. Their clothes wind up disintegrating. They get foot rot. Their socks, their feet are constantly wet. So you get all kinds of sores. The water's relentless, I guess is the way to think about it. But something I want to bring to your attention, though, is that, you know, struggle adjusts your perspective. This is struggle that they elected into, right? And so sometimes they're sleeping out in the, they're still haven't reached the river, by the way. And so sometimes they're sleeping out in, you know, the forest, in the rainforest.

• 35:41David Senra?

  And sometimes they're able to get in these like, simple little huts. So they're following the path. What Rondon had spent his life doing is they're laying telegraph wires all through the Brazilian wilderness, right? And so that's what he was doing. He's going out, he's encountering tribes that have never seen other humans. And so obviously, people are gonna get killed. There's a lot of, you know, violence in this book. And there's description of that as well. And the different cultures they run into. And just, there's a lot of just fascinating things about the different ways, these, these isolated tribes, like the different philosophies on life that, that they would come up with, right? Up until this point, they're following this previous path that Rondon was the one that blazed. And it's this telegraph, the Strategic Telegraph Commission.

• 36:23David Senra?

  And I'm just gonna read a few sentences for you, but really, I think that the lesson here is that struggle can adjust your perspective and that's something that you wouldn't, given the same circumstances where you are now, you might not want to stay in a little hut. But when you've been sleeping outside, you're constantly wet, you're getting attacked by bees, now a little hut seems like a luxury, right? It's very interesting how our perspective can change and it's much more malleable than we think, I guess is my main point here. "The men were always relieved to stop at a telegraph station. Their accommodations would again be a simple hut with a thatched roof and plenty of cracks for sandflies to find their way inside and torment them throughout the night, but it was better than spending another miserable night in rain-soaked tents." So, think about that.

• 37:06David Senra?

  They're describing a hut, it's a very simple hut, still gonna get bit by flies, and yet it's a relief compared to what they were forced to struggle with, to struggle through previously. So, a big part of this book is the fact that they cannot see, like, the entire time they have to deal with going down a river, all the wildlife and everything they have to encounter and overcome, there's dangerous snakes, flies, crocodiles, jaguars, everything you could possibly imagine that wants to kill you, right? But the entire time, they're being observed by tribes they cannot see, because they've been bred in this environment, and one of the main, a lot of what I'm gonna talk to you about is, there's a lot of metaphors for the evolutionary environment in the rainforest that I think applies to a lot of different domains.

• 37:49David Senra?

  And so, I need to tell you more about Rondon's philosophy of dealing with tribes, because they're not, it's not like they're one collective unit. You have to deal with them all differently, and yet he applies the same philosophy, which that's philosophy of nonviolence. And this is why some people consider his motto suicidal. So, it said, "Rondon had strictly forbidden his men ever to take sides in a tribal battle, no matter how seemingly brutal or unjust." So, not only are they, some of the tribes, killing the people laying the telegraph wires, but they're also witnessing Different tribes going to battle. And there's a lot of description of that in the book. So it says, "Rondon's injunction against violence directed toward an Indian, any Indian, for any reason, was categorical.

• 38:34David Senra?

  In fact, he valued the lives of the Amazonian Indians above his own life, or the lives of his men." This is his philosophy that's going to wind up being in conflict with Roosevelt. Okay? Surely, there was not a soldier in the commission who could not recite by heart his Colonel's now-famous command. This is it. This is a crazy sentence I'm about to read to you. "Die if you must, but never kill." Rondon's success in the Amazon had depended on this dictum. It was the only reason the Indians had ever dared to trust him. So there's many examples in the book where he just refuses, never violates this rule, that he'll never, even if, again, even if they're attacking him, he's like, "You can't fight back." That's how extreme it was.

• 39:18David Senra?

  He would constantly try to gain their trust through giving them gifts. In some cases, they would be shooting with arrows. Rondon would just turn around and try to leave. But even if they were attacking him, he would not, he was so dedicated to this because he wanted, he understood that to complete the objective he was given by the Brazilian government of laying this telegraph line, he has to have the cooperation of the people that already lived there. And the natives have been there much longer than any Brazilians, right? And so he would tell his men, "If that means that you have to die, you can't strike back because it gets in the way of our goal." This is a very extreme character. So now we're going to see Teddy's the exact opposite of this. This just says, "Rondon's passive, pacifist approach was alien to Teddy's entire way of thinking.

• 40:01David Senra?

  He was much more inclined to conquer than to be slaughtered." So let's go back to this idea of success being a function of time, and that you're better off going, sacrificing total preparedness for speed. They're already running into the fact that they don't know how long the expedition's going to take, and they're already going through their food and their rations really, really fast. So it becomes a race against time from the very, very beginning. "Even in the best of circumstances, the remaining rations would not come close to feeding them." Roosevelt was forced to cut his own and the other officers' rations in half. So that, so there's these people called the camaradas. These are like people serving under Rondon.

• 40:39David Senra?

  That are doing a lot of like, they're cutting down trees, they're picking up the canoe, stuff like that. They have experience, they've worked with Rondon for a long period of time. So Roosevelt's realizing, hey, they're more valuable than I am, I'm gonna 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." 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's profitable, so then your runway's 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

• 41:22David Senra?

  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 on three, they could go bankrupt. They wind up pulling it together and getting it right on the fourth one. But there's very much a race against time as well. So that's what I mean. A lot of these lessons in this book are metaphorical. There's just so many different things that you, if you take them out of the book as an abstraction, you can apply it to so many other, it can alter the way you think about so many other things. I think that's a lot of the value in studying these expeditions, like the River of Doubt, or Endurance, or any of these other examples. Here's another metaphor for you. There's two things happening on this page. Let me read the first sentence,

• 42:06David Senra?

  and I'll tell you what that is. "The scale of that achievement, which is putting the River of Doubt on the map," remember, it was unmapped. That's what they're going down there for. He wants to put something on the map. He wants to add some knowledge to the human species that what did not exist. "The scale of that achievement would be directly proportional to the sacrifices it would require." It's a really interesting sentence. So that made me think, great achievements are supposed to be hard.

• 42:33David Senra?

  If it was easy, everyone would do it and it would be great if everyone was doing it. Here's the second part. "The difference between Roosevelt's expedition and those of other countless rubber tappers." I'm gonna skip over this whole part of the book about rubber tappers. These are the people that are going out. They're almost like, uh, like homesteaders on the, the American pioneer. Where they go out, they, they try to cultivate the land. They're trying to, in this case, to get, uh, get the, the main ingredient for rubber. But they're, they're largely, maybe it's one person, maybe they has their family with them, maybe a small group of people. But they're all over the unexplored Amazon, trying to find a way. And they're eking out, it's not like they're becoming rich. They're just eking out this existence, but they're called rubber tappers. Okay, so it says, "The difference between Roosevelt's expedition and those of the countless rubber tappers, who have tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the Amazon's wild tributaries,

• 43:19David Senra?

  was that Roosevelt was going to descend the River of Doubt, not attempt to fight his way up it. This strategy would allow him to harness the river's great strength, rather than oppose it." That is the most important sentence, I'm gonna read it again. "This strategy would allow him to harness the river's great strength, rather than oppose it. But it represented a gamble of life and death proportions, because, from the moment the men of the expedition launched their boats, they would no longer be able to turn around. The river would carry them even deeper into the rainforest, with whatever dangers that might entail." That, that no left myself was harness the phenomenon, instead of fighting against it. What does that mean? Last week, we talked about Bill Gates realizing, hey, uh, the internet's the most important thing.

• 44:03David Senra?

  In that famous memo that he wrote, uh, it was towards the end of that podcast, where he talks about the analogy between the internet and the PC, and that everybody that tried to fight against the PC, were basically steamrolled by that powerful phenomenon. That was a movement that was gonna happen no matter what. And so you're better off getting in front of it and riding on it, instead of fighting against it. And he realized, oh shit. If I don't do this, the same thing is happening in the PC is happening in Microsoft with the Internet. And the Internet is going to roll over everything. So we're taking all 20,000 Microsoft employees and we're turning you on a dime and we're saying, we're going all in on the Internet. Because he understood, when you try to fight against the phenomenon, you get ran over. You need to ride on top of it. That is exactly what Theodore Roosevelt's doing.

• 44:47David Senra?

  And it's in direct opposition to these small little, they're not even explorers, small little homesteaders, let me call them that, that are trying to fight against the river. He's using that power, but that doesn't mean you're guaranteed success. It means that you're all in on that, just like Bill Gates was all in. If he was wrong and the Internet wasn't as fundamental as it wanted to be, well, he just dedicated all, every single resource he had to it. The outcome of his life would be vastly different. Roosevelt's making the same decision, except his decision is life and death. This 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 from his earliest childhood.

• 45:32David Senra?

  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 approach to 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 with long days

• 46:10David Senra?

  on muleback, nearly constant downpours, illness, worry, death, and sorrow, the men were exhausted, homesick, and weary, and that is their condition at the beginning of the River of Doubt.

• 46:26David Senra?

  And now, there's even greater writing when she's describing the rainforest. And really, she draws the analogy about the economy. I'm glad she specifically does this. It's really, it's about the rainforest, but it's about the world at large. It's about the economy. This is just fantastic. So I'm going to read this to you. "In the early morning light, the scene that Roosevelt beheld was a breathtaking tableau of timeless nature, tranquil and apparently unchanging. That impression, however, could hardly have been more dangerous or deceiving. For even as the men of the expedition gazed in awe at the natural beauty surrounding them, the creatures of the rainforest were watching back, identifying them as intruders,

• 47:06David Senra?

  assessing their potential value, surveying their weaknesses, and preparing to take whatever they might have to give. Far from its outward appearance, the rainforest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though frequently impossible for a casual observer to discern, every inch of space was

• 47:47David Senra?

  alive, from the black, teeming soil under Roosevelt's boots to the top of the canopy far above his head. And everything was connected. A long, linked mat of fungi under the soil consumed the dead and fed the living, completing an ever-changing cycle of remarkable life and commonplace death which had throbbed without pause for millions of years, and of which Roosevelt and his men knowingly or not..." Had now become a part. That is just fantastic writing. She continues on the next page. And this is where she ties in the behavior. And you see this a lot, where a lot of people draw inspiration from nature and how it can teach us about other systems. And she talks about the economy here.

• 48:30David Senra?

  "As in the development of a modern economy with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets, each increase in competition among the inhabitants of the rainforest has itself been a powerful source of further speciation, rewarding entrepreneurial variations of life that can exploit skills and opportunities that previously went unrecognized or did not exist." The same thing that we do if we start, when we start companies. We start new services and new products happen every day and have happened every day for millions and millions of years in the rainforest. I'm glad she actually explicitly said that because up until I was reading this book, I'm like, wow, there's, there's so many metaphors for the world at large, for the economy. Let me read that, that last part again.

• 49:15David Senra?

  I just love this. "As in the development of a modern economy with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets." Now, I was thinking about how, how much more specialized and how much more. The internet has massively broadened what people can do for a living, right? And I think most people have not caught up to this. If you're listening to this, you obviously know that, right? Most people don't. And when you, like, when I talk to other parents, the same advice they're giving their kids now in 2021 or whatever it is, it's the same advice their parents gave them 20 years ago. It's like they haven't updated their software, right? So this idea, "with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets," which now we see have, has accelerated in our lifetimes and will, as far as we can tell, will only further accelerate, right?

• 49:58David Senra?

  "So with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets, each increase in competition among the inhabitants of the rainforest has itself been a powerful source of further speciation." So every new opportunity begets more opportunities, essentially what they're saying. That could be a good opportunity and a bad one. Could lead to more life or more death in the case of the rainforest. "Rewarding entrepreneurial variations of life," differentiation, right? "that can exploit skills and opportunities that previously went unrecognized or did not exist."

• 50:29David Senra?

  Now she brings us full circle to Roosevelt sitting on the banks of a river, looking at this 150-foot-tall tree. This is going to sound very familiar to Founder's Number 70, "The Tao of Capital" by Mark Spitznagel. The second chapter of that book is about conifer trees. I've listened to that chapter, I listened to it a couple of days ago, because after I read this part, I gotta listen to it again. I don't know, I lost count dozens of times at this point, because he draws the parallel between, and this is like the oldest living, some of the oldest living species on Earth, I think like they've lasted, they think like 300 million years, something like that. Anyways, about the strategies of conifer trees, how they echo strategies of new companies. It's extremely fascinating, new investment vehicles in his case.

• 51:14David Senra?

  So let's go back to that, or let's go to it right there. "Soaring more than 150 feet above Roosevelt's head and out of sight in the green canopy were giant emergent tree species that had secured their survival by putting all their resources into the effort to outrace their competitors for the sunshine." So they've optimized for speed, because if they're not the fastest, they're not going to get the sun. If they don't get the sun, they're going to die. Now, there is a, it's not like, oh, you can't just blankly say optimize for speed, just like, even though we know, okay, if you study past expeditions like Shackleton, optimize for speed over total preparedness, right? Well, in this case, they're optimizing for speed, but then they also have to find a way to solve for the stability that they're giving up if they grew slower, okay? So it says they put all their resources and efforts

• 51:58David Senra?

  to outrace their competitors to the sunshine. "For fast-growing trees, this trade-off for speed is inadequate defenses against insects and vulnerability to storms that cannot reach the lower, more sheltered layers of the forest. Unable to sink deep roots in the thin forest floor, canopy trees are also generally obliged to develop elaborate support systems at their base. If they didn't, they'd fall over." It's not very different from the deciding, hey, I'm going to grow my company slowly and deliberately over time. My foundation is stronger, to somebody that's like a hypergrowth startup, right? You can grow really fast, but we've seen in the past, sometimes when it grows really fast, it also falls really fast. "On the forest floor where the sky is all but obscured by such tall canopy trees, smaller plants or trees with limited resources must develop increasingly refined strategies to find a place in the sun."

• 52:42David Senra?

  That is the difference between a small company, right? Or, excuse me, you have a few giant trees in a rainforest, and you've got millions of tiny little trees, and I guess, yeah, they're all trees, I was going to call them plants. Plants or trees, right? That's a metaphor for the economy. Not every company is going to be the size of Microsoft or Facebook. There's millions of tiny, tiny little companies that we can build and start by defining this little niche that is neglected by the giant 150-foot-tall trees. The most obvious of these strategies is to avoid the cost of building a structure capable of reaching the canopy by simply climbing a tree that has already done so. So it's talking about the opportunistic strategy of something like a vine, which again is another metaphor here.

• 53:26David Senra?

  This is, I love this book. This opportunistic strategy adopted by vines, remember, I'm not going to build a structure. So how many people have used, like, let's use the most obvious example. You have this existing platform out there. We've seen this in two different domains that we've studied on the podcast. I think of oil spectators, like the people in the Big Rich book. They would go out and they're called wildcatters. They'd find and spectate, but really they're just trying to find holes that are off in the cut, no one's really paying attention to. They confirm it has oil, then immediately turn around and sell it to somebody else. We also saw it with, I forgot his name, The Big Score, Robert Friedland, The Mining Book. I don't know which founders it is, but I think he makes like $600 million in 18 months in mining securities.

• 54:11David Senra?

  So we've seen that. And then you also see the technological equivalent is obviously people building or using big social platforms, Google, not even social, but big technological platforms, Google, Twitter, Facebook to build for customer acquisition. They're building, they're not a giant tree capable of reaching a canopy, but then they can jump on top of these platforms that already exist and pull out resources that they need. And that's exactly what a vine is doing. This opportunistic strategy adopted by vines can prevent a newcomer to remain anchored in the fourth floor while growing rapidly to the canopy. But since even vine construction requires substantial resources, it entails complex choices about which tree to climb. What business to start, what product to offer, right?

• 54:55David Senra?

  A requirement that has produced astonishingly sophisticated traits. And this is something Candace does throughout the entire book, constantly using the way the rainforest operates for metaphors about life in general. And I would say this is, note it up myself on this page. I think I've already said this to you, but this is a description of the rainforest, but it could also be a metaphor for the world at large and the economy. Weak companies are ruthlessly killed. Okay, so it says, "As they were quickly learning, the greatest challenge they faced from the rainforest came not from any creature or adversary that they could confront and defeat, but from the jungle as a whole. In the ruthless efficiency with which it appropriated food and nutrients,

• 55:37David Senra?

  in the bewildering complexity of its defense mechanisms, and in the constant demands that it placed upon every one of its inhabitants, and in the ruthlessness with which it dealt with the weak, the hungry, or the infirm." The danger of what Roosevelt and the people he's with are trying to do can't be overstated, rather. It can't, just can't be overstated. They wind up losing a bunch of supplies, a bunch of rations. Three people die from the expedition. I mean, I think they started with like 22 people, something like that. So it's extremely dangerous. And really, I'm going to read this paragraph to you. It describes some of the dangers that they're in. And it made me think of Warren Buffett's, why he would constantly turn down opportunities he didn't understand.

• 56:22David Senra?

  And because he understood how complex the world is. And he's like, "I need to stay within my circle of competence," right? And Roosevelt and the people he's with, as a byproduct of the dangerous environment, and they're outside of their circle of competence. "Within such an intricate world of resourcefulness, skill, and ruthless self-interest, refined over hundreds of millions of years, Roosevelt and his men were, for all of their own experience and knowledge, vulnerable outsiders. Most of the men were veteran outdoorsmen, and many of them considered themselves masters of nature. They were stealthy hunters and experienced survivalists. And given the right tools, they believed that they could never find themselves in a situation in the wild which they could not control.

• 57:05David Senra?

  But as they struggled to make their way along the shores of the River Dout, any basis for such confidence was quickly slipping away."

• 57:14David Senra?

  Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all clumsy, conspicuous prey. 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 like 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.

• 57:59David Senra?

  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, the reason I said this powerful transformative process, properties, rather, 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 they're 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 in 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, that we can eat. Hunger has powerful transformative properties.

• 58:44David Senra?

  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, the 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. The jungle was, they now knew, inhabited by a group of Indians that had had no contact with the outside world. And they let themselves, they'll never let you see them, but they'll leave signs that

• 59:29David Senra?

  they were there, they'll have trails, they'll have huts that you'll pass by, and you realize, oh, like, the fire's still going, they saw you coming, you never saw them. They went up killing Ronan's dog. At one point, they let them hear their, like, war cries in the jungle. It's just, I mean, it had to be absolutely unbelievably terrifying. But through it all, Roosevelt does, I really do, he developed like this, this even keel sense of, like, he would just, almost like a stoic, like, acceptance of their fate. I'm either gonna succeed and do something no one has ever done before, or I'm willing to leave my bones in South America, right? And really, what he's about to say here, he's admiring how everybody's, even in the roughest environments, they're still doing the best they can. And

• 1:00:11David Senra?

  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 were, look at the way the work was done, this is now a direct quote from Roosevelt. Looking at the way the work was done, at the goodwill, the endurance, the bull-like, the bull-like strength, and at the intelligence and unwearied efforts of their commanders, he wrote, "One could not but wonder at the ignorance of those who do not realize the energy and the power that are so often possessed, that you so often possess, and that may be so readily developed."

• 1:00:56David Senra?

  So now I'm gonna give you a flashback, because Kermit is, is also somebody that Roosevelt's admiring. He's like, "Look at this son, look at my son. He's, he's leading from the front, he's usually in 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, I don't, it doesn't say if he led his daughters or not, but he definitely led 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.

• 1:01:38David Senra?

  Roosevelt used these excursions to attack his children's wilderness fears, which he referred to as "buck 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 it 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 Rondon had learned when they lured him with the wine of the spider monkey,

• 1:02:23David Senra?

  the Senra Larga were talented mimics and could recreate nearly any animal call." So let me pause there. This is the tribe that killed Rondon's dog. And so he's out in the forest looking for, they're trying to kill monkeys, right? For food. And he hears the spider monkeys, and he's like, "Oh, wow, okay, I gotta go." So as he goes towards them, his dog runs ahead, and then he hears like a yelp. Then the dog runs back, and he's got two arrows in it. And so the Senra, the tribe, had seen Rondon, he didn't see them, and realized, "Hey, like, let's lure him in, he'll follow where the monkey is." And instead of, unfortunately, the dog winds up dying instead of Rondon, but if Rondon had gone ahead and said the dog, they would've just shot and killed him.

• 1:03:08David Senra?

  So it goes, "One of the great frustrations," and this is more about the tribe, that the fact that they're adapted to their environment, right? "One of the greatest frustrations that the men of the expeditions faced on the River of Dout was that they were descending a river crowded with fish that they could not catch. Those same fish, however, were easy prey for the Senra Larga. The Indians made up for their lack of..." Now, this is very interesting. They don't have fishing poles, right? Or what we would, like, how would we fit? You think of fish, when you think of fishing, you think of like nets and fishing poles, right? "Those same fish, however, were easy prey for the Senra Larga. The Indians made up for their lack of poles, lines, or hooks with a type of fishing basket." More important, they had timbo. This milky liquid, which the Sintalarga extracted from a vine by pounding with a

• 1:03:53David Senra?

  rock. The timbo stuns, or depending on the quantity, kills fish by paralyzing their gills. They use it in slow-moving inlets and pools. The timbo allowed the Indians to spear or scoop up the fish as they floated to the river's surface. There's always another way to solve a problem. And so in the past, I've read a few books on Native Americans, and I just find that the way of living and their culture is extremely interesting, and how, you know, it kind of evolved in seclusion. So they came up with different conclusions than, say, Europeans, for example. And so there's this quote from a book that I still might read. It's by this guy named Gordon McEwen, and this is what he wrote.

• 1:04:37David Senra?

  The book's called "The Incas: The New Perspectives." So it says, "Incas lacked the use of wheeled vehicles." Again, from a Westerner's perspective, I'm like, "Oh, like, they're primitive. They don't even have wheels and the stuff we have." It's like, "But, okay, but there's always another way to solve a problem. You're just looking at it from the perspective that you know, right?" "The Incas lacked the use of wheeled vehicles. They lacked animals to ride, and draft animals that could pull wagons and plows. They lacked the knowledge of iron and steel." So they're naming all the things they lack, right? "Above all, they lacked the system of writing. Despite the supposed handicaps, the Incas were still able to construct one of the greatest imperial states in human history."

• 1:05:21David Senra?

  There's always another way to solve the problem. Okay, let's go back to this constant state of extreme hunger. This is about the extreme hunger and its effects on Roosevelt and his crew. "In its intense and remorseless competition for every available nutrient, the Amazon offered little just for the taking. To the extent that they were obliged to rely on the jungle for food, the men of the expedition were destined to do without. As a result of their restricted rations, the men were beginning to feel the effects of a near-starvation diet. As is common in instances of extreme hunger, they began to obsess about food. When they were not looking at it, they were talking about it, or looking for it. And when they were not talking about it, they were thinking about it.

• 1:06:03David Senra?

  Like castaways on a desert island, the men discussed and delicious detailed what they were going to eat when they got home." By this point in the expedition, with drowning, disease, Indian attack, and starvation waiting to claim their lives, all of the men understood that they might never again see home. So now they're having to deal with external forces, but internally, they're extremely worried. And really, this section is that the fact that struggle exposes your true self. The accumulation of disease, hunger, exhaustion, and fear had begun to wear the men down, and their true selves were starting to show. There is a universal saying to the effect that it is when men are off in the wild that they show themselves as they really are, Kermit wrote.

• 1:06:48David Senra?

  As in the case with the majority of proverbs, there is much truth in it. For without the minor comforts of life to smooth things down, and with even the elemental necessities more or less problematical — that's a weird word — the inner man has an unusual opportunity for showing himself. And he is not always attractive. And this is where one of them winds up stealing food. He gets caught. The person that caught him, that guy that stole food winds up killing him. So we see extreme, like, obviously, struggle was going to reveal extreme behaviors. A man may be pleasant companion when you meet him in dry clothes and certain of substantial meals at regulated intervals, or regular intervals,

• 1:07:30David Senra?

  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 a... He jumps in the river to try to save, like, I think it was a canoe or some food getting away, or whatever the case is. He busts his leg open. There's a huge cut. It's a leg he injured like a couple of years earlier in a trolley accident that never, like, one leg was already messed up. The leg he injured in the Amazon was the one that was giving problems all the way back in America. And as you can imagine, you've got a cut wide open. There's bacteria everywhere.

• 1:08:15David Senra?

  You're in an unclean environment. He starts getting an infection and gets malaria. This is where he gets to the point where he's almost dead at the beginning of the introduction. Before I get there, I want to tell you his personality, though. So this is back when he was younger. I think it might have been at... Yeah, he was in Harvard. So he's early twenties. It says, "When a doctor told him that his heart was weak and it would not hold out for more than a few years unless he lived quietly, he had replied that he preferred an early death to a sedentary life." And the reason I bring that up is because what's going to happen on the next page where he, well, let me, let me read it to you. "Before he left New York, he had packed in his personal luggage a small vial that contained a lethal dose of morphine.

• 1:09:00David Senra?

  I have 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 at once, without going through a long, drawn-out agony from which death was the only relief." So it shows that he's not afraid to die. This is when he's laying on a cot. He's almost, he has a fever, his cherry, and it's the naturalists that really respects him and develops a close relationship with Roosevelt on this trip. He'd spent decades 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,

• 1:09:44David Senra?

  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 journey. Cherry, I want you and Kermit to go on. You can get out. I will stop here.'" And I spent a lot of time talking about Roosevelt's expectation of his kids, how he raised them. And this is the reason I spent so much time telling you that. Because this is his son's Kermit, his response. "For the first time in his life, Kermit simply refused to honor his father's wishes. Whatever it took, whatever the cost, he would not leave without Roosevelt's. In the fraction of a second that passed between Roosevelt's grim declaration

• 1:10:27David Senra?

  and Kermit's reaction, father and son reversed the roles that had defined their relationship in which neither of them had ever questioned. Over nearly a quarter-century, through lectures, letters, camping trips, grand adventures, and strong example, Roosevelt had molded Kermit in his own image, creating a young man who, given a goal, would fight with everything he had to achieve it."

• 1:10:54David Senra?

  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 came—this is now a direct quote from Roosevelt—“It came to me, and I saw that if I did end it, that would not—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 too.

• 1:11:39David Senra?

  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.” There's so many thoughts that came to my mind when I read that section. Given a goal, he would fight with everything he had to achieve it. There's a—Arno Schrössinger gives the same talk over and over again, and I think it's valuable because repetition is persuasive, right? And he talks about—that so many people drift around that—he talks about the importance of a goal, that a lot of people are unhappy because they don't have a goal. He uses a stat, like 75% of people don't like the work they do, and they're unhappy as a byproduct. He says that if they didn't have a goal, and if you actually had a goal, that it's like freeing in a sense.

• 1:12:23David Senra?

  Yes, you still have to work really hard, but you have somewhere—you have a destination in mind. And that given a goal that you'll fight with everything you have to achieve it, and that actually gives content and meaning and happiness to your life. And then the other thing I thought about that, I was like—because that's a very powerful sentence she wrote there. He created a young man who, given a goal, would fight with everything he had to achieve it. That's not—that is rare. Most humans are not like that. They give up on everything. The people that they write books about don't. That is the main difference here. And for some weird reason, it made me think of this Alan Watts quote that I think about all the time, and I make sure that I read frequently. And so I'm going to read it to you. Let me pull it up real quick. So he says, "When we finally get down to something which the individual says he really

• 1:13:08David Senra?

  wants to do, I will say to him, 'You do that and forget the money.'" Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is, to go on doing things that you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short—this is still Alan Watts. This is gonna sound like Theodore Roosevelt, isn't it? Better to— I didn't even make this connection till I just read that sentence right before I read the sentence in my mind before I said it out loud. "Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way." And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is. Somebody's interested in everything, and anything you can be interested in, you'll

• 1:13:49David Senra?

  find others that are. But it is absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on doing things you don't like and to teach your children to follow the same track. See, what we're doing is we're bringing up children, educating them, to live in the same sort of lives we're living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. So it's all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there, and this is the most important part. And so therefore, it is so important to consider this question: "What do I desire?" And so at this point in the story, what is Kermit's desire? He desires his father to live. He idolizes his father, just like Teddy idolized his. So no matter

• 1:14:34David Senra?

  what—what did he just say? "Created a young man who, given a goal, which is, 'I'm gonna 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 the description of the group on April 15th. They are 11 days from being rescued. They wind up—Rondon had the—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 bend, maybe 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, and there was no sign of Rondon or Roosevelt or anybody else, they

• 1:15:17David Senra?

  were convinced that they were all dead. But this is—there are 11 days from being rescued. To anyone who had not spent years in the wilderness, the men who would have looked, would have looked almost, the men would have looked almost inhuman. After weeks of surviving on little more than a few bites of fish and a single biscuit each night, they were gaunt and hollow-cheeked. The clothes on their back, the only clothing they had left, were in tatters. And wherever the skin appeared, it was bruised, cut, sunburned, and peppered with insect bites. They were filthy and wild-eyed from disease and fear, and their American commander was barely clinging to life.

• 1:16:02David Senra?

  That was April 15th. By May 26th, Roosevelt is back in New York. He never physically recovered. I want to give you a description of this, and then I want to talk about something that I think is extremely important. We've talked about before, default optimism. Although sick, frustrated, and broken-hearted over Quentin's death, so his, 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, about a year and a half to two years before he's gonna die, okay? So it says, although sick, frustrated, and broken-hearted over Quentin's death, he continued

• 1:16:42David Senra?

  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 mourning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness," he had written. "Yet there's nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow, which nothing we can do will change." 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."

• 1:17:26David Senra?

  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 US 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.'" And this is what Cherry, his friend Cherry, said. This is, he was on the expedition with Roosevelt, winds up living to a ripe old age. He died many decades later when he was in his 80s. And he's given a speech about the expedition and about Roosevelt. And this is what he said. "The aging naturalists became lost in the memory of a distant jungle and a friendship

• 1:18:10David Senra?

  forged at the limit of human endurance. 'I've always thought it strange,' Cherry said quietly, 'since I had had the opportunity to know him and to know him intimately, how any man could be brought in close, personal contact with Colonel Roosevelt without loving him.'" As he continued, his audience of dignitaries realized that the man before them, a man whose calloused hands had fought off cavalry charges, smuggled guns, and catalogued nature's most dangerous mysteries, had begun to weep. "I was in the consulate in Venezuela when the consul received the cable announcing Colonel Roosevelt's death.

• 1:18:55David Senra?

  He handed it to me without a word. When I read that message, Cherry said at last, the tears came to my eyes, as they do now." That's where I'll leave it. I highly, highly recommend you buy the book. This is, this is books at their very best. It takes you on an emotional journey. It teaches you things. The writing is fantastic. The story is unbelievable. If you want to buy the book and support the podcast at the same time, there's a link in the show notes. You can also go to founderspodcast.com. If you want to buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you have a friend or a coworker that you think would benefit from Founders, you will buy them a gift subscription. I'll leave a link in the show notes to do that as well.

• 1:19:40David Senra?

  That is 175 books down, 1,000 to go. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll talk to you again soon.