Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio.

Guess what Will Ah, That's right, Will is not here today.

Actually, before this episode, Will told me he loves Teddy Ruxpin and Teddy Pendergast, but he has zero interest in Teddy Roosevelt, which is what today's episode is all about.

So of course I let him off the hook.

But me, I love Teddy Roosevelt, and one of the things I love most about him is that every story you hear about the man is better than the last.

He gave the White House its name, he invited the first black man over for dinner there.

He made things like national parks, but he also tried to bring hippos to the US as a meat source, like he actually wanted to farm hippos in the Bayou and get people into hippo bacon.

He walked his pet bear around on a leash, and one time in Montana this guy called him four Eyes, and even though the dude had two loaded guns on him, Teddy casually noted him out.

I mean, the stories are insane, but I have so many questions, from whether Roosevelt once actually climbed a mountain out of Spie to what were Teddy's productivity, life hacks and also what is big stick energy?

So we're diving into all of that.

Let's dig in.

Hey that our podcast listeners, it's Mangashi Dealer.

You're listening to part time genius and my co founder, co host Will Pearson, decide not to come in today.

It is such a mistake because Loel is wearing a shirt with the words Emily Spinach on it.

It's got a picture of a cartoon garter snake, and I'm guessing it has something to do with Teddy Roosevelt because he always plans for these things.

We'll have to ask our guests today about that.

But I am here with a wonderful Aaron McCarthy.

Aaron is the editor in chief of Mental Bloss, a position I used to have years ago, and she's an old friend.

Some of her interviews and articles are still some of my favorites on the site.

She's the one who told me all about jelly Belly's disastrous attempt to make a pizza flavored jelly bean, and also the oral history of Trafford Keepers.

But today she's here to talk exclusively about a different obsession, Teddy Roosevelt.

Hey, Aaron.

Hi, So I want.

To get into your new podcast, History Versus, which is all about Teddy Roosevelt.

And I'm not sure if you know this, but I years ago I desperately tried to get Teddy Roosevelt on the cover of Mental Floss.

I did not know.

I mocked up a version of him cutting like karate chopping aboard like in a judo up and no one else dnug it.

But it's still in.

The arts, I'm king.

So, tell me, how is it that you got so obsessed with Teddy Roosevelt.

So so I feel like when you work at Mental Floss, history is kind of your thing.

It's just like, yeah, I mean, it's just like it somehow becomes part of everything that you do.

And so, you know, I knew a little bit about him.

I was like, oh, yeah, you know, the conservation president.

He liked to hunt things, and that was sort of where my knowledge ended.

And then I took a fateful trip to the Strand Bookstore and I was just kind of wandering and looking at the shelves as I want to do, and I saw Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, and I was like, okay, I'll just like pick this up and I'll read this, Like, I don't know that much about Tart, it's going to be interesting.

I didn't know it was the third book in a trilogy.

So I read it and it was amazing.

I cried at the end on the subway, like a real weirdo, and so then I had to go back and read the others, and then it was just like, you know, full speed ahead from there.

I was just like, did you know that Theodore Roosevelt did this?

And did you know that he did this?

And now I just can't stop talking about him ever and making a podcast about it.

So that's great.

And it didn't confuse you to start with the third one.

It was like starting with Back to the Future three or something.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I was just kind of like, hmm, maybe I should have gone back to get the other ones, but I just did, like it just didn't even occur to me, and by then I had bought it, so I was like, well, you know, I'm just going to read this, Yeah, and then you know, you go back and I actually I feel like I read them.

I read the third one, the first one, and then the second one, so it was like, really weird, but I came out of it knowing so much more about him and just being totally obsessed.

So it's amazing how your series is structured, because it's like history versus and then different aspects that Teddy Roosevelt's battling.

And I want to start with time because I have no idea how he managed to get so much into a day.

Oh me either, me either, And it's just baffling, baffling, Like it makes you tired.

Yeah, when you read about how productive he was, I just strive for that energy every single day.

Yeah, every day.

Well, I mean even as a college student.

You think like college students should be lethargic or whatever, but like his schedule that you lay out is insane, right.

Yeah, And I mean that's part of what made him so productive was that he just had this devotion to a schedule.

And what he would do is he would block out his time, which allowed him to be more productive.

You know, I spoke with productivity experts and they were like, this is the key.

Obviously he had a lot of energy, which helped a lot, but you know, he was just really really focused and he blocked out his time and apparently all the super productive people in history.

Well, maybe not all of them, but many of them.

Yeah, do that.

You know, they'll say, this block of time is for reading my book.

And you know, he had the schedule from when he was on the campaign trail and it was literally every hour and a half an hour was blocked out.

He had something else going on, and that allowed him to be super focused and super productive.

Well, the other thing was that he was also like, not only was he reading and doing all these things and writing letters, but you're just giving speeches NonStop too, all the time.

It's insane.

I wonder if he ever got tired of the sound of his own voice, because, like, I sometimes get tired of this as I'm sitting in the studio podcasting, like ugh, I.

Read somewhere that he had a distinctive voice though too.

Right, he did.

He spoke with this really distinctive style, and some people actually think he had a speech impediment as a kid.

But he had this kind of high pitched voice and he would distort words.

So there's this story that Edmond Marris tells about how when he was in the New York State Assembly, he would just yell mister speaker, mister speaker, like forty times, just over and over until the speaker would acknowledge him.

You know.

So he was he was a weirdo.

They always talk about his teeth.

One of my favorite things that I learned from this podcast is that people talked about his teeth all the time.

And so when he was police Commissioner of New York, Vendors Street Vendors used to make these whistles and they were Roosevelt whistles and they had his teeth on them.

Yeah, And I mean, I'm assuming they were really cheap because I can't find any of them on eBay.

I've looked, but yeah, like his teeth were just so distinctive, you know, just like really white and square, and he was always just like chomping on words.

That's funny because I I guess if you think about like the caricatures of him, they do have that, but it's not something that I picked up on.

Well, now you're gonna notice, Well.

He also used to put those teeth to good use for meals, right, Like he was a big eater.

Oh, a big eater, huge eater.

Yeah, and you know, like pretty plain stuff.

He wasn't like into super duper fancy foods.

But yeah, he ate a lot, so when he wasn't being as active, he got kind of chunky and it made him sad.

Yeah.

The other thing I didn't realize was how much coffee he drank.

So much, so like a gallon a day.

Yeah, I mean, and what was his his son something that said something like his coffee mugs resembled a bathtub.

Yeah, it's more in the nature of a bathtub.

And actually, if you go to the birthplace in New York, they have like a tea cup of his and it's huge.

It's huge.

Really, Yeah, it's really, it's really big.

And now at the gift shops in some places they actually sell a bull Moose coffee mug that's like really big.

So I obviously bought one and I drink my coffee out of it exclusively now because I too have a bit of a caffeine problem.

Not that badly, but pretty bad.

Well, tell me a little bit about his childhood, because I feel like you think about Teddy Roosevelt and you imagine him as this super rugged person, which he was.

But he grew up in New York City partially.

Yeah, so he was born in New York City in eighteen fifty eight, and you know, he was born to a very wealthy family.

His father.

The family business was plate glass importing.

Really but yeah, it's weird, right, And I think his father was eighth generation Dutch New Yorker.

But his father, THEI was basically a professional philanthropist.

He gave money away like crazy, and he supported a lot of causes like the Newsboys lodging house, and he would bring the kids along to go down there.

So service was like a really big part of his life growing up.

His father also was part of the founding of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So like this guy was just give away money, making it rain towards worthy causes all the time.

So Tir was born.

He was the second child, first son.

He had his first asthma attack at age three, and he had asthma so badly that he would have to sleep sitting up.

His parents really didn't think he was going to live to see his fourth birthday.

They would make him drink black coffee and smoke cigars to try to get him to like breathe, which makes no sense, but you know, at that day it was or in that day it was.

You know, that was the cutting edge.

And you know, when your kid is sick, you're willing to do basically anything that you think is going to help.

So you know, his father would put him in the carriage and go for these wild rides down the road trying to force air into TR's lungs, Yeah, to try to get him to breathe.

And you know back then, I mean asthma is still it can be fatal today, but back then it was it was really bad.

So yeah, he was this sickly little kid, but well traveled.

So you know, they lived in New York and the family would go out.

They would spend summers in New Jersey or out on Long Island just to kind of get the fresh air.

Tir and his mother would go to these like health spas where they would take the waters or do whatever it is that you did in that day to try to make yourself healthier.

And they toured Europe and they did the same sort of thing over there.

So yeah, he had this kind of crazy, crazy childhood where he was all over the place and you know, just like a sick, sick little kid.

And then when he was a teenager or just about to be a teenager.

His father said to him, you have the mind, but not the body, and so you have to build your body.

And so now we think of him as this robust guy, and he really built himself up to be that robust guy.

He basically they built a little gym out on the piazza and he would be out there, like lifting weights and pull ups and yeah, I mean, yeah, basically, like that's kind of what it was like.

Although I guess there was like a beautiful garden in the back yard or whatever, so he would be like lifting weights and looking out over the garden.

And then he took up boxing because he actually took this trip up to I want to say, Moosehead Lake in Maine.

But he met these kids on the stage coach on the way up there, and they just beat the crap out of him, and so you know, he's like, I've been lifting weights for two years, why can't I like take on these kids.

And so then he was like, I'm going to take up boxing.

So he became a lifelong boxer at least until he got punched in the eye and lost part of the site in his eye.

As President the White House, yeah, just crazy, Yeah, and then it was like no more boxing, so that's when he took up judo, anything to stay active.

It reminds me of the Jersey Shore where like all these people can't fight, but they lift weights to say, yeah, but if you have that much focus towards any activity, I'm sure you just get great at it, right, Like if you had that same focus as a child.

Well, and I mean like and he applied that same focus to everything he did, like all throughout his life, so you know, and I mean I think it helped that his father was the one to kind of push him.

He worshiped his father, and you can sort of see how that plays out throughout the rest of his life in a lot of really interesting ways.

But his father told him weakness is a shame and often a sin.

And you can imagine if you worship your father and your father tells you that, what would happen or how you would act down the line to kind of not be not show your weakness.

So whenever he has any kind of major tragedy in his life, he just is like he doesn't show it, he doesn't talk about it, he acts like it didn't happen.

And I think you can trace that back to not wanting to show weakness.

Ah, there's so much good stuff, but we need to pause more with Aaron after the break.

Okay, So we're here with Aaron McCarthy and of Mental Floss talking about Teddy Roosevelt as a child.

I know from the podcast that he had a snapping turtle that he like strapped to a sink or something.

Yeah, and he tried to train a woodchuck is Yeah.

Yeah, so he was that possible.

I mean, I don't think it was, but you know he was going to try, so he you know, growing up in New York, you sort of feel like maybe you're not going to see a lot of nature, but there's actually a lot of nature all around you in New York, which I can attest to.

So one day he was walking down the street.

He was going to get strawberries from the market or something, and he saw a dead seal at the market and it just kind of like changed his whole life in New York.

Yeah, it had been swimming in the harbor and somebody killed it and which poor seal.

But you know, they brought it up and they I guess we're trying to sell it or something.

Sure, And so he saw it and he was like, I need to know everything about this seal.

So he was measuring it and he really wanted to bring it home with him, which I can only imagine what people would have thought at his house.

But he ended up bringing the skull home, and then that sort of kicked off this obsession with nature, and so he would just bring things home living dead.

He keep them in his room.

He had the snapping turtle.

I feel like there was some squirrels that he raised by hand or something.

I mean, he was just obsessed with obsessed with nature.

And it's a funny thing too, because you know, I think today we kind of think to ourselves, like, well, how could someone who loved nature so much go out and hunt like he did?

As someone told me, that's very like twenty first century attitude.

Back in the day, there wasn't a difference between being a hunter and a scientist.

You know, if you wanted to know about animals, if you wanted to study them, you kind of had to kill them and see what made them work.

And so he did that a lot.

Yeah, so no, it's hard to reconcile those things.

Right it is now, yeah, but not back then.

It was just it was it was the thing.

One thing that I think is interesting that came up in the course of researching this is that, you know, a lot of hunters of that day were the first constan deists because they could see, you know, that animal populations were depleting, and so they said, you know, we need to take care of these like if we want to still be hunting them many years in the future, we need to make sure that the populations are managed.

And so you'll see that, and you'll see that today.

Like if you are a hunter and you pay for a hunting license, a lot of times that goes back to conserving animal populations.

Protecting animal populations, you know, so if you pay for a permit to shoot a bear, which makes me sad, but it's a thing that happens that goes back to helping bears.

So it's one of those things.

I'm actually surprised more people didn't yell at me about that Nature episode because I'm a big believer in scientific collections.

Yeah, that's a thing that's kind of controversial these days.

Yeah, I mean, they inspire so much wonder you know, and just being at the museums and stuff, and if you couldn't have seen all these wonderful taxidermy things, right, Like, it's hard to imagine being as interested in animal at least for me.

Yeah, and you know they have in the back rooms of museums they have just drawers and drawers filled with specimens.

For me, once we went to see like the hippos hippos skulls, which was incredible.

They're so cool, They're massive, they're huge.

It's like, how can you figure out, for example, if mercury levels are rising in the world's oceans.

Well, you can go back and you can look at the feathers of seabirds in scientific collections and you can prove that mercury is rising in the ocean.

Yeah.

If you didn't have those specimens, you couldn't make that discovery.

So that's kind of important.

The way that scientists collect today is not like it used to be.

I mean, I feel like, especially for tr he would go out and he would just.

Be like, bag stuff.

I'm a bag everything I can bag science.

In high school, I saw Bill Clinton was going to Africa and they were contrasting his trip there with like Teddy Roosevelts, and it just listed out all animals he shot.

Hundreds, like hundreds, five hundreds of animals.

Yeah, yeah, And they went to the Museum of Natural History, they went to the Smithsonian.

There are some like I guess ticks that came from those animals are in a collection of ticks down in Georgia or something.

Yeah.

Crazy, And I was like, I want to go there, but maybe one day.

Well.

The other thing that's interesting to me is that Roosevelt.

You think of him as such a collector, right he has this like little museum in his house or in his room or whatever, and and he's always contributing to things and whatever.

Jefferson also kind of had that inclination, right, like he collected fossils and whatever.

But Roosevelt did not like Jefferson.

Hated him so much, hated him.

Why is that?

Well, one, Jefferson was a constitutionalist, right, so he really believed, at least my understanding of it is he believed that the president's powers were limited to what was written specifically in the Constitution.

And I think he kind of bent the rules a little bit for the Louisiana purchase, but otherwise it was basically like the Constitution is what it is.

And Tir was a Hamiltonian and he sort of thought, well, you know, if it's not expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution, I can kind of do what I want.

And he did so I think it has something to do with that.

He also had an issue with the way that Jefferson dealt with George Washington, or like tried to undermine George Washington, and Washington tr held up to a pretty high He put him on a pedestal, not as high as the pedestal he put Lincoln on, but you know, he thought Washington was pretty great.

Well, that was a funny line in your show, was talking about how, you know, he loved Lincoln but less enamored with his neighbor Jefferson.

Jefferson hated Jefferson so much.

And what's so funny is that at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt's Long Island estate, there is a portrait of Jefferson hanging I think like on the second or third floor.

And as we were touring it, I said to Tyler Coloberta, who's the education technician there, like, what's what's this doing here?

And he goes, you know, I have no idea.

That's really funny.

He just needed some things, I know, I know it's like somebody's fooling around here, somebody's playing a little trick.

That's pretty funny.

So tell me about his obsession with Lincoln, because it starts when he's pretty young, right.

Yeah, well, so his father actually worked with Lincoln.

I get so confused about the times, like the fact that he like his he kind of interacts with Lincoln because of the lack of heir in some way, right, But also like, doesn't he have like a Doctor Seuss incident as well?

I feel like he does.

His trick is so strange in terms of how far it.

Expands, and basically it's like if something crazy happened in the time when Theodore Roosevelt was alive, Theodore Roosevelt was basically there or involved in some way.

But start with the Lincoln Lincoln.

So his father worked with Lincoln on this program that would okay, well, let me back up.

So Theodore Roosevelt's father did not go to war and didn't sign up for the Civil War.

He paid someone to go in his place.

Sure, and that is because yes, or at least partially because well yes, but not really.

I think he probably still would have gone except that his wife was a Southerner and her brothers were fighting in the war, and she could not bear the idea of her husband potentially fighting her brothers.

And I think she also did a little bit of the guilt trip, like, you know, if you died, I've got all these kids, and like, please don't go to war.

So he didn't.

He paid someone to go in his place.

You know, there was probably a little bit of guilt there, sure, And so what he ended up doing was working with the Lincoln administration to create this program that would allow soldiers to send money home to their families.

And so he actually traveled a lot during the war signing soldiers up for that program.

So he wasn't home a lot, and when he wasn't home, TR's health took a nose dive, which is a whole other thing.

So he worked with Lincoln in that capacity, and they even went to church together one time.

So Big Theodore and Little Theodore both big Union guys not so much.

And her mother and sister were in the house as well, so it was like a nation divided and a house divided.

So it was kind of a delicate time.

So he really revered Lincoln for that, and he also revered Lincoln for keeping the country together in a time of great strife, and so his when he was sworn in for the first time, he was elected, so he assented to the presidency when McKinley was assassinated, but then when he was elected of his own right, his secretary of State, John Hay, gave him a ring with Lincoln's hair in it.

And John Hay had been lincoln secretary of State as well, and so he kept that his whole life, and it's at Sagamore Hill, along with a portrait of Lincoln that's basically looking down at his desk.

So he really loved Lincoln.

He thought he was like the perfect person.

It is interesting to me that Teddy Roosevelt not only took his presidency so seriously right, like he'd never take a photo of himself in tennis whites, all these things.

But can you talk a little bit about how he and Taft had a falling out because they were really good friends.

Right, Yes, they were extremely good friends, very very close, and actually Taft was TIR's handpicked successor to the presidency, and so as soon as they decided like Taft is going to be the guy, taf didn't even want it.

Taft wanted to be a Supreme Court justice.

It would have been cool with that, but his wife was really ambitious and she was like, you have to be president and I was like fine, which I is kind of indicative of how Taft was with everything, right.

He kind of let himself be bullied or pushed into things.

And so the minute that Tir decided this is going to be the guy, he starts sort of coaching him, you know, like, don't let people see you golfing.

It's bad form, you know.

I don't let people take a photo of me and my tennis whites.

And that's one of the things that makes him a modern president was that he cared very much about his image and the image he projected and how people perceived him.

And Taft didn't care.

He just wanted to golf and fish and do what he wanted to do.

And so he ascends to the presidency or he's elected president.

Tir goes off to hunt in Africa for a year and he comes back and Taft is sending him these letters where he's basically whining about how he can't get anything done and he can't lose weight, and you know, oh, Teddy come visit me, and Tir is like, no, I don't think it's a good idea for you know, a former president to come down, you know and visit a current president or whatever.

He's like, it's just unseemly.

Yeah, but I guess the real falling out and there are people debate about why it happened, but the people that the experts that I spoke with, one of them at least thought that it was the firing of Gifford Pinchot, who had been TR's chief of forestry, that was the break.

And then there were also issues with US Steel and Taft went after US Steel, which is a merger that Tier had approved, and it was just like a whole mess, and then they were just at each other's throats for the rest of TIR's life.

Basically.

I feel like there was one time when they ran into each other somewhere and they like shook hands and kind of put on a show, but they were never close again after that.

That's kind of crazy.

Yeah, And I remember from the show some of the like curses and man banter they had for each other was kind of awful.

I mean awful but also awesome.

I don't know, it's like this old fangle, like.

There's nobody who's better at crafting an insult than Theodore Roosevelt.

And you know, Taft got some good ones.

He called him a puzzle whit and a fat head and brains less than a guinea pig.

And I mean he would know because his children had so many guinea pigs.

But you know, his favorite or my favorite insult of his is he called William Jennings Bryan, a professional yodeler, a human trombone, which is like.

Human trombone's pretty great human trombone.

It's so good.

So you know, I just look for excuses to use that all the time.

There's so much good stuff there.

We need to pause more with Aaron after this break.

So we're here with Aaron McCarthy of Mental Floss talking about Teddy Roosevelt.

So I do want to talk about I'm sure you get asked about the story all the time, the one about the bear.

But the thing I didn't realize was in the chronology what had happened right before, right ca, Can you talk a little.

Bit about that.

Theodore Roosevelt went on this bear hunt, and it was partially to sort of smooth feathers over because he had had Booker T.

Washington over to the White House for dinner, and back then it was just really not considered proper to have dinner with a black man because it basically meant that you were saying that this black man could marry your daughter.

Tr just kind of didn't really care about that.

Or when he went out to send the invitation, he was like, he hesitated for a minute, and then he was like, no, I got to send it, like I'm ashamed.

I can't believe I hesitated.

So he sends it.

Booker T.

Washington comes for dinner.

He has dinner with a whole Roosevelt family, and it's like a working dinner too, but you know, the kids are there and Edith is there, Tierre's wife.

And then the next day someone put it in the paper and it was just chao chaos.

I was gonna I was going to use an expletive, but I was like, what's the word that doesn't have give it?

Yeah, it was pretty bad.

And actually it never died down, really, I mean people kept bringing it up and bringing it up and bringing it up long after Tir was out of office, basically up until the day he died.

Did he feel like he'd made a mistake or how did he know?

He was just comfortable with that.

He never talked about it again, and he never invited Booker T.

Washington to dinner ever again.

So but you know, I afterwards, he sent a letter that was basically like, I don't understand why everyone's so upset, and you know, I'll have him back to dinner anytime I want.

And then he just never did because I think he realized that politically it was a little bit of a risky move.

Sure, and he was always very attuned to his image.

Yeah, And I mean, I I don't know if he cared so much about his image, Like he was very progressive, you know, like he fought against segregation in New York when he was governor, and he certainly appointed a few African Americans to prominent positions.

But you know, it just became such a thing that I think he was kind of like that.

I'm sure it slowed policy and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, and you know he then had to go smooth feathers is that a phrase?

I think?

So?

And making things up for you know, So he went down there to try to make amends a little bit.

So what do.

He goes down to Mississippi.

He goes down to Mississippi on a bear hunt, and they're led by this legendary bear hunter who supposedly has killed thousands of bears.

It's probably more like a few hundred, but sure, thousands of bears, apparently.

Tr from the start was like, this is bad news because there are a million people with us, and you know, this isn't really a bear hunt.

His perception of hunting was, you know, you go out with a few dogs, or you go out on your own, and and you know, you do it that way.

But there were a whole bunch of people with them, and so he was like, this not my version of it.

But he went ahead and did it anyway.

It was at the invitation of the governor of Mississippi or one of the senators.

But so he goes down there and he's everybody has shot a bear but him.

And so he comes back to the campsite and they've tied up this kind of sickly bear that has already killed some of the dogs, and they're like, here's a bear for you to shoot, and Tierra was like, no, I won't do it.

Yeah, this isn't sportsmanlike and so that's where the teddy bear comes from.

Someone from a toy company came to him and said, can we use your name for this teddy bear?

And he said sure, okay, and then it became a thing.

But I think what most people don't necessarily realize is that it's not like they let the bear go.

Somebody else killed it with a knife.

Oh godd So I know it's like, oh.

Yeah, So I want to talk a little bit about his family because I'm kind of fascinated by his sister Baby and how he relied on her.

Can can you talk a little bit about that.

Basically, anytime he had a big decision to make, he would bounce it off of her, which is wild, you know, because he's the president and that was not really something that was done at that time.

But she was very involved in his political career.

She was always writing letters for him and sort of making connections for him.

And I think his sister Karn also helped, but to a lesser extent because Bamy was down in Washington and he just relied on her and her judgment a lot, which was rare for that time.

Yeah.

I think in the show you said he referred to her as like the second White House.

Her house is the second White House, which is crazy.

Well, I want to hear just a few of the fun stories that maybe you haven't gotten to talk about on the show.

Oh my god, there's so much.

Okay, So we've kind of discussed a little bit about how the Roosevelts had this insane menagerie of pets.

So Emily Spinach obviously was Alice's pet garter snake that she would carry around in her purse.

Yeah, low loves loves.

But my absolute favorite story about their pets is they had a bear, a small black bear named Jonathan Edwards.

The kids named it Jonathan Edwards because of its calvinistic tendencies, but then also I guess Edith was somehow related to Jonathan Edwards.

But they used to take it for walks.

They had like a leash, It was a chain basically, and they would walk it with a club, which is a club.

Yeah, I mean I guess it would get out of hand, you know, And I could see it getting out of hand pretty quickly.

And eventually they gave it to the Bronx Zoo.

And when they did, Tir was like the whole household breathed a sigh of relief, except for the dogs because the dogs love to chase it and it would give them the thrill of the hunt.

But yeah, I mean they had so many, so many pets.

He got a hyena which he named Bill from some diplomat.

They had a hyena for a little while, so lion cubs, a zebra, they had lion cubs.

They had lion cubs for a little bit.

Yeah, it's crazy.

A pig named Maud.

I know, the names are incredible, really good names.

They had a badger named Josiah.

This was a gift from a little girl who named it after her brother, and they would just carry this badger around.

And then all the guinea pigs who had names like father O'Grady.

So they were really, really good at naming animals.

And I feel like if anybody out there needs an animal name, just look up what tr named his pets and go with it, because they were really good at naming animals.

So that's one story.

It's funny.

I don't know if I told you this or not, but my granddad was one of the heads of forestry in India and he had a similar not entirely similar, but also ended up shooting animals because yeah, you do in the jungles.

But but also there was a bear that couldn't give milk and wish hot my grandfather, but they found because it was attacking like villagers or something, and they found the three cubs and so my granddad brought him home.

And so my mom has no fear of animals because she had like a pet bear like as a kid.

They didn't have a club to walk around with, but certainly played with the.

Fi Oh my god, I can't imagine, like cats are about as wild as I can get.

Yeah, it just seems a little intense.

Yeah.

One of the things I had no idea about until I heard your podcast was that Roosevelt lived in North Dakota for a while.

So why does he end up there?

Yeah, so he I believe in eighteen eighty three he went out to the Dakotas to go hunting for bison.

So he basically had a list of big game animals he wanted to hunt and get rid of of, you know, yeah, yolo, And so he went out to the Dakotas to hunt bison and he gets one.

But while he's out there, he is staying with these cattle ranchers, and so he's having discussions with them and he decides he's going to invest in a cattle ranch pretty impulsively.

What does he know about cattle ranching, literally nothing, but he's like, whatever, I'll just throw some money at this and become an investor.

So he gets this cattle ranch, and then in eighteen eighty four, his wife and his mother died on the same day, which was horribly traumatic, as you might imagine his first wife, Alice, who is Alice's mother.

And so he goes back to the New York State Assembly and he's got kind of like a rough last term because the Mugwumps, which was a faction of the Republican Party, wanted him to support the Democratic nominee for governor and not the Republican nominee for governor because the Republican nominee was super corrupt, and tr made some comment that ended up getting out into the press and it was like a whole big mess.

And so after his term was done, he was like, this isn't for me.

I'm going to move to the Dakotas and become a cattle rancher.

And so he just like up and moved to the Dakotas.

He bought another ranch that was more solitary.

The first ranch he invested in was called the Maltese Cross Ranch, and it was sort of on a thoroughfare out of town.

I mean as much as a thoroughfare as you can have in the Dakota's side time, but you know, it was pretty People would come by, and you know, he was like, I don't want to talk to anybody, you know, kind of just want to be by myself.

And so he heard about this other parcel of land that was thirty five miles away from Medoro, which was near where his other cabin was, and so he bought the rights to that land for four hundred bucks, built a cabin out there, and he lived out there off and on for a few years.

He was never like fully fully out there, but he did intend to go out there and stay there permanently.

It just didn't work out that way because people were still pulling him back to New York.

You know.

Like when he moved to the Dakotas, he left his daughter Alice with his sister baby, and so he would go back to see her and sort of take part in political things and then he met or reconnected with his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kurmit Crow, who had become a second wife, and so he was back and forth a lot.

So he didn't move out there permanently, but he was out there for quite some time.

And I think one of the funniest stories he bought this buckskin suit, fringed buckskin suit, and you know, I mean his thinking was, oh, it's really soft and comfortable, and you know, you can wear it and move through the brush and it's really quiet.

But people in the Dakota's didn't really wear that kind of stage.

And so he shows up in this get up pretending to be a cowboy basically, and they're like, this dude from New York.

And he also had glasses, which at that time people took as a sign of weakness, so they would pick on him and then he would just pop them right in the face and they would realize like, oh, well, I shouldn't have done that.

And he was like a boss man out there, and so he was never quite I think the cowboy that he portray himself to be.

But he also wasn't a person who was afraid to get dirty.

So he would spend thirteen hours out in the saddle with the rest of his men and work really hard, just like just like you know, the men.

So they really respected him.

They came to respect him, not at first, but well efectually.

That's one of the questions I had, is like where does he feel most comfortable, because he's obviously like he grows up with well, he goes to an ivyley school, he's in the army, he's like, you know, like he's in so many different scenes.

Like where is he most at home?

I mean, I think he always felt the most at home in nature.

You kind of see a pattern when any tragedy occurs in his life where he works himself to the point of exhaustion, I think, basically trying to keep himself from thinking, and then he just goes and he retreats to nature and that kind of heals him after every major death in his life.

That's the pattern he follows.

So I think he always felt most at home, you know, when he was like in the dirt and the mud, you know, doing some kind of physical activity.

One of the questions gave throughout to me is he wanted to know is it true that tr once climbed the matterhorn out of spite?

True, So what's that strue?

I saw that question, I was like, what.

Yeah.

So on his first honeymoon, tr heard some British climbers in the lobby of the hotel he was staying in, basically like bragging about it.

And so he just decided that he was going to summit the matterhorn to show them that he could climb just as well as any brit could.

And he did it.

And the matter horn is like, is like a really difficult like many people have died.

And of course he had guides, but he was pretty much an amateur, and he was just like, I'm doing it force the personality exactly.

And you know what's wild is that he was still having asthma attacks at this time.

I mean, he kind of created this myth that he defeated his asthma, which is not true.

He suffered from asthma for the rest of his life, for his whole life.

But you know, he basically was just like, I'm not going to let this stop me.

I'm not going to show that I'm weak.

Just the stories of his physical exertion make me.

It's inspiring and also exhausting.

He would go to Maine and just like climb mountains and moccasins when he lost his boot in a stream, which is like not an easy thing to do, you know, or they he'd hunt caribou for thirty six miles in the snow with just like a blanket.

He was a crazy guy.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Well.

One of the things I always hear Doris Kurnce Goodwin say about him is that like he wanted to be the baby at every you know, risks or whatever, and the you know, I feel like he was always the center of attention.

How did he fare with being president and then not being president?

Oh?

Not well, not well at all.

One of the experts that I spoke with, Clay Jenkinson, who's the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center, was basically, just like after he left the presidency, he was the most unpleasant guy because he just he felt like he should be the guy.

What happened was in his second term, early on he said, I'm not going to run for reelection for a third term because people will be tired of me, and you know, two terms is enough.

And it's like a very stupid thing to do, because people loved him and he could have had a third term, but instead, you know, he said early on that he wasn't going to run again, and so at the end of it he was like, nope, I said, I wasn't going to run again.

I'm done.

And then you know, Taft kind of didn't keep up his reforms in conservation, he went after us steel.

I think he also sort of apologized to the Colombian government for helping Panama pull off a coup so that the Panama Canal could happen.

He was just furious, furious, and he really hated Woodrow Wilson like so much.

His entrance into the nineteen twelve presidential race is what led to Woodrow Wilson becoming president.

And then he just hated Woodrow Wilson for being a pacifist.

So you know, he just was bitter, bitter, so bitter, so mad.

Yeah, he just really wanted to be president.

You know, he always thought that he could do a better job, and I mean maybe he could have.

Yeah.

Well, I liked that you refer in one of your shows to his political style is big stick energy, which I thought was really funny.

I feel like that belongs on a T shirt.

Yeah, I can't take credit for that.

My researcher, Michael Salgarolo came up with that and he was like, please use that, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna so, thanks Michael.

He wins a Nobel along the way, right.

Yes, he was the first American to win a Nobel prize of any kind, and it was partly for his mediation between the Japanese and the Russians during the Russo Japanese War, which some people call World War Zero because it was like an early mechanized war and they were killing each other in huge numbers.

It had the potential to really sort of unsettle things in the Pacific, and so he stepped in and he was sort of a neutral mediator, sort of not There's this one great scene where he calls the Russian diplomat over to Sagamore Hill to tell him how he thinks he should negotiate, and he's playing tennis, and he doesn't stop playing tennis while he's talking to this Russian diplomat, you know, like in breaks from the game.

He comes over and he says, well, here's what I think you should do.

Here's what I'd recommend, and then he goes back to play.

Some of the tennis and then he comes back and this went on for like ninety minutes, and I have to imagine what the Russian diplomat was thinking.

He was like, this guy's crazy.

That's amazing, But you know that was his style.

Yeah, so I do want to hear it.

Do you know anything about that Doctor Sue's story.

I do so.

I can't remember the exact date.

I feel like it was nineteen eighteen, but Theodore Roosevelt went to this small town where he was going to hand out awards to boy scouts who had sold one thousand dollars worth of war bonds, and Theodore gaise El doctor Seuss, was one of those boys.

All the boys are standing up on stage, there are ten of them.

Tier only has nine medals.

Somebody messed up, and so you know, he's pinning medals on the lapels of all these kids and he gets to Theodore guys all he doesn't have a medal, and he says, what's this boy doing here?

The boy scouts master, which is didn't say anything.

He just like ran guys all off stage.

And then apparently that gave doctor Seuss stage fright for the rest of his life.

That's incredible.

I know and horrifying.

Yeah, I mean, like it makes sense.

It would be so humiliating.

And you know, it wasn't his fault, wasn't TR's fault.

It was just just a thing that happened, and uh and there were there were implications.

So tell me, have you been inspired by Teddy Roosevelt to change your life in any way or have you taken any sort of uh inspiration from all these stories?

I really want to try to be more productive and sort of block out my time.

Like I'm a big believer in a to do list, but apparently that's not enough.

That doesn't help you be productive enough.

So I think in twenty twenty, I'm going to start blocking out my time and seeing how how that goes.

Or maybe I'll take up Judo.

We'll see.

I like that.

But no carrying a badger around.

Or no, no, no, no, no, Chuck no.

I mean my cats they're about all I can handle.

I mean, Pearl kind of looks like a badger, So Pearl Woolfie, it looks like a badger.

So Ada tell everyone where they can find the show and what episode they should start with.

Well, I mean, I personally think you should start from tir versus Weakness, which is the first one because it kind of lays the groundwork for everything that comes next.

But in terms of my favorite episode, Tier versus Time is a big one.

I like Tier versus Language just because it gets into the whole simplified spelling debacle, which is one of my favorite stories of all time.

Tear versus Corruption is really fun because I think you get a really good sense of the unusual style he used to take on corruption.

They're all kind of close to my heart, to be honest, and.

It's crazy everything he's involved in, from like everything football, and I.

Mean, like there's so much we couldn't even get into, you know, like I could go forever.

But you know, every time I said, like let's add an episode, no, no, no, no, Yler and Dylan were like, Aaron, you're crazy stuff.

Tear versus Nature is I don't know, they're all fun.

They're all fun in their own ways, and I mean, I think, what's children.

I can't to make the choos, But you know, I think what's good about this is that you know, you read the biography is about tr and everybody kind of focuses on the thing that they want to focus on doing a podcast like this in this format has kind of allowed us to drop in and out of his life, to feature different things, and I think it's actually allowed us to get into some of the not so great stuff, you know, and explore that in a way that I hope is enlightening and thoughtful.

So you know, we'll see people respond.

It's a really excellent series and really really fun.

And you can get History Versus for Mental Class everywhere from iHeart to Spotify, the Stitcher to wherever you get your podcasts.

But what's next for the series.

So we are looking at an explorer for the second season.

I don't want to say who, I don't want to spoil it, but not the explorer you're probably thinking of.

Huh.

So that's fun.

And then for the third season, I have an author i'd like to feature.

Awesome, and we'll see.

And there's kind of a Theodore Roosevelt connection to all to both of those nice I mean, of course there is.

I mean, yeah, like he was involved in literally everything.

Well, Aaron McCarthy, thank you so much for being here.

That's it for Part Time Genius this week.

We'll be back next week with an episode on elevators.

I think it's going to be great, I promise, And in the meantime from Will Gabe Lolami, thanks so much for listening.

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