Founders - #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed)

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

What I learned from reading The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific by Alistair Urquhart.---Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book---(4:00) I hope that this book will be inspirational and offer hope to those who suffer adversity in their daily lives.(10:00) You might as well send a cow in pursuit of a rabbit. The Indians were accustomed to these woods. — Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership by Edward Larson. (Founders #251)(13:30) When you reach a large goal or finally get to the top, the distractions and new assumptions can be dizzying. First comes heightened confidence, followed quickly by overconfidence, arrogance, and a sense that “we’ve mastered it; we’ve figured it out; we’re golden.” But the gold can tarnish quickly. Mastery requires endless remastery. In fact, I don’t believe there is ever true mastery. It is a process, not a destination. — The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh. (Founders #106)(15:30) Invaders are always organized.(23:00) Stay at the front and do not look back.(29:00) Every morning I would tell myself over and over: Survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day.(32:00) On countless occasions I've seen two men with the same symptoms and same physical state and one will die and one will make it. I can only put that down to sheer willpower.(35:00) Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts (41:00) Dan Carlin's Nightmares of Indianapolis podcast episode(48:00) Alistair Urquhart was conscripted into the British military to fight during World War II. He was 19 years old.He was sent to Singapore. The Japanese invaded and he was taken hostage.He survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on The Death Railway and the bridge on the River Kwai.Most of the time he worked completely naked.He contracted dysentery, malaria, and tropical ulcers. A lot.He was transferred to a Japanese hellship.The ship was torpedoed.Almost everyone on the ship died. He survived.He spent 5 days adrift at sea until he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship.He was sent to Nagasaki and forced to work in a mine.Two months later he was struck by the blast from the Atomic bomb.He was freed by the US Marines shortly thereafter.He returns home to Scotland and finds out his best friend died in the war and the girl he loved got married and moved to Canada.At 90 years of age he wrote the book to inspire others to persevere when they are faced with hardships in their life.I think it is a great book for entrepreneurs.The story demonstrates the adaptability of humans, our fierce desire to survive, and puts the stress of building companies into the proper perspective.The entire story only takes 3 hours and 14 minutes----“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.” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----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. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I know that I'm a lucky man. I was lucky to survive capture in Singapore and to come out of the jungle alive after 750 days as a slave. I was lucky to survive my ordeal in the Japanese hellship and after we were torpedoed, I was lucky to survive five days adrift alone in the South China Sea. I was lucky to survive my close shave with the atomic bomb when I was struck by the blast at Nagasaki. For over 60 years, I have remained silent about my sufferings, about the unsettling tales of unimaginable torments. I am breaking my silence to bear witness to the systematic torture and murder

of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners. We were a forgotten force in Singapore that vanished overnight into the jungles to become a ghost army of starved slave laborers. We were starved and beaten, tortured and massacred in the most sadistic fashion. In the early years after the war, my nightmares became so bad that I had to sleep in a chair for fear of harming my wife as I lashed out in my sleep. My nose had been broken so often during the beatings that I could not breathe through it. The tropical diseases that wracked my body gave me pain for many years.

I have never been able to eat properly since being starved and then the lining of my stomach stripped away by dysentery. I developed an aggressive cancer linked to my exposure to radiation and Nagasaki. This skin cancer I am currently battling is unquestionably the result of slaving virtually naked for months on end in the tropical sun. Yet some good has come out of this. My ordeal has made me a much more patient, caring person. I vowed to spend the rest of my life helping others, and I am pleased to say that I have done so. I have tried to use my experiences in a positive fashion and have adopted a motto for them.

There is no such word as can't. I have not allowed my life to be blighted by bitterness. I have lived a long life and continue to live it to the fullest. I enjoyed a long marriage. I have been fortunate to have a family. I have remained fit and I still enjoy my passion for ballroom dancing. He is in his 90s when he's writing this. I hope that this book will be inspirational and offer hope to those who suffer adversity in their daily lives.

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you, it is important to keep your eyes on the prize. Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return. May health and happiness be yours. That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today and one that will be completely different from anything else that we've covered on Founders Podcast so far. That book is The Forgotten Highlander, an incredible World War II story of survival in the Pacific and is written by Alistair Urquhart. And the reason I want to tell you about this book and to make this podcast is because this book,

the actual audio book, has been a tool that I've been using for years. So it is very apparent, it's in these stories over and over again, the fact that a large part of entrepreneurship is a struggle with your own mental health. Marc Andreessen has the best description of this. He says that when you're building a company, you only ever experience two feelings, euphoria and terror and nothing else in between. And it is the inevitable terror parts, the parts where you're feeling discontented, where you're feeling down, where you're under unbelievable amounts of stress, which are the most dangerous because that is when you are prone to give up and to quit. And so as Charlie Munger says, if you live long enough, bad shit is going to happen to you. It is inevitable. I've read a bunch of stories about how people deal with this. So like if you read the autobiographies of people like Teddy Roosevelt or Nelson Mandela,

they would exhaust the body to relax the mind. Some people play sports. Some people go for long walks. Some people get sleep, whatever it is. One thing that has worked for me is listening to the audio book of this book. It is a near perfect audio book. It is three hours and 14 minutes long when I'm under intense amount of stress. And here's a weird thing that you probably experienced too. Sometimes there's no obvious reason for your stress. Everything in your life is going well. Your, your family is healthy and happy. You're fine. Your business is going okay, but there is some kind of weird reoccurring discontent and stress level that I think all entrepreneurs experience. And so when that happens, I felt, find it very helpful to step outside of myself.

And the way I step outside of myself as I listen to this audio book, I don't know, I've probably listened to it five, six times. I don't know how many times. And I think to myself, if Alistair endured this, if he survived this, if he didn't let that stop him from living life to the fullest,

then you have no excuses, David. And I'll give you a summary at the very end, what makes this maybe the most remarkable story that I've ever read. I have not come across another book like this. So I'm going to jump right in. He's living in Scotland. Just a few days after my 20th birthday, the dreaded letter came from the war office. This is the beginning of World War II. He's going to be drafted and conscripted into the army, and they don't tell him where he's going. I was to report to the Gordon Highlanders

headquarters. That's the part of the military he's going to be in. That's why the book is called The Forgotten Highlanders, because they literally disappear part of the military he's going to be in. That's why the book is called The Forgotten Highlanders because they literally disappear into the jungle and they slave away for over 750 days, but naked. Just wait. Just wait till you see what this guy had to endure. I will lose my job. So this is his actual, his first reaction to being drafted into the war was not, oh my God, I may be going to war. I may die. He's like, oh no, I'll lose my job. He had been working full time since the age of 14 because his family didn't have a lot of money. The family simply could not pay for me to attend school. I was thrilled to be working because I was contributing financially to my family at home. He knew he was one of the fortune

ones to actually have employment. This is right during the Great Depression. I loved my job and did everything I could to keep it. In those days, there was not a lot of employment. The shipyards, textile factories, and paper mills had all been badly hit by the Depression, and we lived in constant fear of becoming idle. And so most of the things I'm going to share with you today, it's just the details of like all the stuff that he had to suffer through and to like persevere through. But I do want to pull out a couple examples where we see this a lot. I call this using the world as your classroom. He develops all the skills and knowledge that he doesn't use right at the time, but they wind up becoming beneficial later on. And in this case, he was just he had nothing to do when he was a young man.

They didn't have a TV. There was no radio. He's living in rural Scotland. So what he did is like he had a lot of energy. He kept himself unbelievably physically fit. And he didn't know this winds up saving his life later. This is why I'm telling you. And he didn't know. This winds up saving his life later. This is why I'm telling you. But he didn't know how fit he was until he got to boot camp. And he's going through all the PT, all the physical training. And he's like, oh, my God, I'm like way more fit than anybody else. This also helps him survive later on.

So he talks about what he did to keep busy. He's not looking at screens, right? He's playing football. So we'd call that soccer. I'd play football. I'd be swimming. I played rugby and cricket on Saturdays. I played rugby in the morning. Then I'd play football in the afternoon and then I do gymnastics in the evening. I could not have fitted much more into my schedule if I tried, but I never thought anything of it.

On Sunday mornings, he'd go down to the swimming club. They jump into this freezing cold water. This is going to save his life later. Every Sunday at 6 a.m., I'd be there and I'd be shivering. Later, all these swimming lessons would really be a lifesaver. He already mentioned in the introduction that he's going to be on a Japanese hell ship. It is going to be torpedoed by the Allies, and he's going to be stuck and drift at sea for five days. So I want to skip ahead to when he gets sent to Singapore.

They don't tell him where he's going. And I guess I should bring up something, too, as well. So I was actually listening to the audio book while I was reading this book. I bought the paperback so I could make a podcast on it. I didn't know. Whoever edited the audio book, they took out large chunks of this book. So if you want more detail, buy the paperback. I would go for the audio book though, because I think they did an excellent job of actually editing. They probably edited away maybe 60% of the actual book. And so I want to go over a couple of things because a main theme of this book is that incompetence, there's a penalty for incompetence. In some cases, it can get you killed. In business, it can cause bankruptcy. Think about the pain

inflicted on those around you if your business goes under and the financial hardship that you potentially incompetence could put your family through, right? But in this case, so that's like the metaphor that me and you and I are using. But in this case, incompetence can get you killed. And so they send him to Singapore. And there's going to be like a year and a half, maybe two years before he gets taken captive. And he's just noticing the arrogance and the complacency and the incompetence of the British military at this point. And here's the first example. He arrives where he's going to be stationed. And he's like, this is kind of weird. I noticed immediately that the fencing did not extend all

the way around the barracks. And it seemed a rather sleepy haven. And then he talks about the training and the equipment. They wasn't adapted to the environment. I think about this all the time because Ed Thorpe says, Charlie Munger says the same thing, the only way to win in business is to play games where you have an edge. There's a line that stuck out. I read this biography of George Washington and Ben Franklin. It's called Franklin and Washington. It's episode 251 if you haven't listened to it. I'm going to tell you a line from there in one second because it talks about, hey, the military police would literally pick you up and put the soldiers in jail if they weren't wearing the proper uniform.

They're in the tropics. You know how hot Singapore is? And listen to what they're having them do under penalty of arrest. If we were spotted without wearing our proper uniform, including our thick red checkered wool caps, despite the intense heat, the military police would pick us up. There's an excellent line that I've never forgotten in the Franklin and Washington biography.

It's actually what led to Ben Franklin meeting George Washington. It's the fact that George Washington was helping the British soldiers fight the Native Americans. The British soldiers took what worked in Europe and tried to transport it into a completely different environment, thinking that would win a war against the Native

Americans. And the Native Americans were just destroying them, which Washington wrote about and was published in the newspaper. That's how Ben Franklin met and became aware of Washington wound up meeting him. The line from the book is, you might as well send a cow in pursuit of a rabbit. The Indians were accustomed to these woods. The Native Americans were playing within the circle of competence. The British soldiers were playing within the circle of competence. The British soldiers were not. And so you know who's going to win that game. We see a very similar example in Singapore right during World War II.

The quartermaster handed me my rifle. I thought he was kidding. I stared at this antique gun with utter disbelief. I saw that it was dated 1907. It was a bashed up relic from before the First World War. Remember, this main theme is that incompetence can get you killed. This is spread across many pages. This is another example. Bizarrely, each day between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., the whole camp came to a standstill for a siesta.

Every man had to be in his bunk during that period. So they're taking a nap. I disagree with this from the start. The enemy seemed unlikely to suspend hostilities to allow us time to rest during the hottest part of the day. It was hardly suitable training for jungle warfare, but our superiors thought differently. This ridiculous routine was typical of the complacency that served the British so badly in Singapore. Moving ahead, another note I left myself, a main theme of this book, never underestimate human incompetence. So now they're training, they're trying to train them for this fight that they'll likely take place in the jungle. And they're not realizing that your ideas aren't going to work here. Their tactics seemed antiquated and obvious.

And they would have us weaving through the jungle. The enemy would have seen us coming from miles away. The officers were completely out of their depth. And so he makes the point over and over again. This was incompetence combined with overconfidence. The British is the largest empire in the world at this point. And he thought it was weird. He's like, on the ground, I'm seeing all this like these stupid ideas.

We have terrible antiquated weapons. We're in these ridiculous uniforms that just make our job, make doing our job even harder. We're in the tropical sun. Our officers are drunks, which I haven't even got to yet. And yet, if you read the local newspaper, there's all these headlines saying Singapore is impregnable. They would run lengthy articles on the fortress Singapore and how it was completely secured by the British and there's no way it could be ever invaded or overtaken. And he said the more that they trumpeted their impregnability, the more I began to doubt it.

Remember, this is coming from the greatest empire on earth at the point. And so Bill Walsh in his book, The Score Will Take Care of Itself, says, When you reach a large goal or finally get to the top, the distractions and new assumptions can be dizzying. First comes heightened confidence, followed quickly by overconfidence, arrogance, and a sense that we've mastered it. This is exactly what is taking place in this book. We figured it out. We are golden, but that gold can tarnish quickly. Mastery requires endless mastery. In fact, I don't believe there is ever true mastery. It is a process, not a destination. The British are treating it like it was a destination. And so as time goes on, Alistair

keeps getting promoted. And yet a lot of times when he meets his new superiors, they're like, he calls them imperious boozers. They're just all drunk. And he still sees more and more examples of what we're being told is not matching up what I'm experiencing on the ground. And here was the thing I guess would scare you the most. The pace of evacuations of the local population of women, children, and other civilians was increasing ominously. Why are all the locals leaving? Again, the British army is complacent. The military is complacent.

Why aren't you asking? What's happening? What do they know that is causing them to flee? And we're just carrying on like it's an everyday thing. Talks about they're having at the exact same time this is taking place. They're having these like crazy over-the-top uh luxurious dinner parties at the governor's mansion people show up in tuxedos and are eating like caviar and all this other crazy stuff it's like this is kind of weird like this is what you guys are doing and yet all the civilians and all the local population is getting

the hell out of here and so alice and some of his fellow soldiers that are paying attention what's going on they're getting terrified they're like i'm scared to death and they're getting terrified. They're like, I'm scared to death. And they're like, okay, well, maybe the Japanese are just as disorganized as we are. And then the response at the lunch table, this guy says a line that, in my opinion, is one of the best lines in the entire book. He says, invaders are always organized. And so they would complain about this, but their superiors would say this is impossible. And a lot of this was rooted in the fact that they thought there was like, they were, what's it, racial supremacy over the Asian forces. So he says there was an undercurrent of complacency and racial supremacy, too. It was inconceivable that the greatest empire that the world has known could be defeated. This is their line by little yellow men. All kinds of

this mumbo jumbo was repeated in relation to the Japanese and their alleged weaknesses. And this kind of attitude carries right up until the point where there is no turning back. On the 8th of December 1941, it was a normal day in Singapore, just like any other day, until there was a tremendous explosion just 50 yards from my small office that sent me diving under the desk for cover. Japanese bombs started raining down on us. This was it, I realized. War. I could finally learn why my father's hands shook during thunderstorms. His father had served in World War One. And so there's gonna be a few weeks of this bombing until he's actually captured. And in the middle of this, one of his superiors comes to him and they drop off. Alistair's, I think, 21 at this

point in his life. Maybe, I think he's 21. 21 and so they give him he has to care for these kids that you have to remember them because they're going to pop up in the story a few times and so they bring over this 14 year old named freddy his elder brother james who's 15 and then a 16 year old kid john and so alistair's like what the hell am i supposed to do with them and they're like you have to watch over and take care of them so he puts him in the basement they're going to be there for a while until the Japanese actually come into the office and lead these guys away at gunpoint. This is what he's experiencing this whole time.

All my previous experiences in Singapore, the arrogance, frivolous behavior, sheer ineptitude suggested that we were no match for anyone, let alone a well-organized and determined aggressor. And that is exactly what he's saying. He's like, we look like amateurs. They look like professionals. And they're just running through us like a hot night through butter. And now we get into this

unbelievable torture that he's going to be under for the next five years. So they come in, they take everybody at gunpoint. They're bayoneting people. They're chopping people's heads off. And he's out in the blazing sun. Remember, these are broadly Northern European, right? They're not supposed to be this close to the equator. As we stood there in the blazing sun without food, water, or shelter, the horrible reality broke over me in sickening, depressing waves. I was a prisoner. It was a gut-wrenching realization to think that my liberty was gone and there would be no telling for how long it would be so. This was the worst moment of my life. Essentially, he's saying, I have no freedom.

I have no autonomy. I have no control. So they make them start to watch. They make them start to march, rather. A horrific sight confronted us. We came face to face with a thicket of severed Chinese heads speared on poles on both sides of the road. For the rest of our march, spiked heads appeared at intervals in this way. They are forced to march over 18 miles and on both sides of the road for 18 miles. You have people's decapitated heads on spikes. And so they

are immediately put into these squalid conditions. He is going to have a bevy of tropical diseases. I'll go through all of them and then I'll like summarize this at the very end. Everybody has dysentery, which tore at your stomach lining and had you running to the latrines dozens of times a day. So he's got dysentery. At the same time, he gets his first bout of malaria. He's going to get dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers over and over again. I didn't know what a tropical ulcer was before I read this book. And then I made the mistake of doing a Google image search. I remember the very first time I searched for it, Google used to show it to you right away. Now they have the thing where if you do a Google image search for tropical ulcers, you know, they kind of like

pixelated. They're like, are you sure you want to see this? Essentially, your flesh is eating away and you can see the bone. That's going to happen over and over again. I suffered my first bout of malaria with no sprays and mosquito nets. The place was alive with insects. And so let's go back to this feeling of, hey, I have no autonomy, no control. They don't tell you what they're going to do with you. You're just marching one day. Now they're going to put him, he doesn't even know he's on the death march.

This is a famous event in World War II. He's going to eventually build the, they call it the death railway. And then the bridge over the river Kwai, they've made movies about this, but this is how they transport them. They put, there's these, these trains and there's these shipping containers that are about 18 feet by 10 feet. And they throw them in there with 30, 40 other men. If you don't get, if you refuse to get in the train, they'll bayonet you. And then they close the door and it's like, oh, he says, this felt like a death sentence

in a stifling steel box. We stood there for hours before the train started moving. The heat was appalling. Dehydration set in quickly and coupled with the malaria I already had, I was suffering. There is no space to lay down. The smell inside the carriage became unbearably foul. Without toilets, the men had to relieve themselves where they stood. Several were

very ill with malaria, dysentery, and diarrhea. People vomited and fainted. And it says dust came in to the container and it is added to our unbearable thirst. It was 36 hours before we were let out of the wagon. When they were let out of the wagon, it was just a stop to give them like a measly portion of rice. He says the only thing he could see was the jungle. And so after several days, they finally get to another camp. It kind of looks like civilization. Now, here is the interesting thing that happened several times throughout the book. There is several examples, OK, of other prisoners because the captors are lying to them.

Like, we're going to send you to this, you know, this vacation camp or whatever. It's going to be a lot nicer, just complete like psychological warfare with them. Right. And so there's several examples in the book of other prisoners believing that their captors would eventually treat them humanely. And Alassar just observed their existing behavior. He's like, there's no way. So they've been doing this to us for now weeks and sometimes months. And you think they're going to suddenly change and deliver on these fake promises. And so there's all these conversations happening

with other soldiers around him. He's like, yes, thank Christ this is over. This doesn't look so bad. At least we're not in the jungle. No, this will be fine. We might even get some time off to go downtown and see some girls. And then Alistair said, I did not share their optimism

and was proven correct. And so they load them back, I did not share their optimism and was proven correct. And so they load them back on the train. And this is just days after days. You're standing there. People are sick around you. They're having diarrhea. They're vomiting. The smell's intense. You can't, it's like unbelievably hot in there. There's no wind. And this is the first time he's like, I need to kill myself. I cannot, I can't possibly do this. He doesn't know he's still got another five years before he's going to be freed. I felt doomed and resigned myself to death. It would have been a blessing.

I considered suicide and began to fantasize that the train would jump its tracks and that I would be killed swiftly without any more suffering. He didn't know that was the beginning of his suffering. The train journey eventually finished, but we had yet to reach our final destination. And so they're like, OK, get out. It's completely dark. They're in the middle of the jungle and their captors are saying, hey, you have a 50 kilometer march ahead of you and we have to complete it that night. That is a lie. It is way longer than 50 kilometers. And so this is known as the death march. I think 600 people start. I forgot. I think a couple hundred

people die along the way. And so there's different ways that they'll die. Some of them just fall behind. They're too exhausted, too sick. And so either the japanese leave them to die or they'll like bayonet them on the way out uh some people when they stop to have like a little bit of rice they'll just walk out into the jungle to die but this is going to wind up being an 11 day nearly non-stop march he does have a piece of advice that stay at the front and do not look back i think that that idea of uh don't the advice of don't look back is smart and applies to more than just this. He was more physically fit than anybody else, even though he's got dysentery, malaria, and he's just terrible, feeling terrible at this point, but he would stay towards the front

because you notice if you're in the back, you see the people quit, and you're like, oh, I should quit. There is something to this. The benefit of being near the front was that you saw fewer men surrendering to fatigue, illness, and death. He's thinking, okay, it can't possibly get worse. It gets worse. After 11 day hike through the jungle, they get to this like weird clearing in the middle of the jungle. And they're like, oh, this is your ultimate objective. This is your camp. And they're like, what are you talking about? There's nothing here. There's not even a single hut. They're like, yeah, here's a bunch of tools. Here's some pickaxes, some shovels, and some saws. Now you have to make your home. You have to build your own hut huts because all men that survived will work on the railway.

And they're like, what are you talking about? What railway? A railway, a railway here in the middle of nowhere. It seemed mad. Now, here's the crazy thing. There was some British engineers, I think like a decade, decade and a half before this, had considered building a railway to the jungle. And they said he couldn't be done without a massive sacrifice of life. And so the Japanese are like, yeah, we know. That's what the POWs are for. And so this is what he's building. It was just the first of 750 days I would spend as a slave in the jungle. We were to begin construction on the infamous death railway. It was 415 kilometers long through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. Over 16,000 British, Australian, Dutch, American, and Canadian prisoners died on the railway. We did this on starvation rations with no access to medicines of any kind.

We lived in camps buried deep in the remote jungles where Red Cross inspectors or representatives of neutral foreign powers could never find us. So this is the part of the story where they discover a new disease called rice balls. At this point, most of the prisoners have beriberi, malaria, dengue fever, and dysentery. A new illness had also started to ravage some prisoners. It was called tinea. It was also nicknamed rice balls because the hideous swelling had the tormenting tendency to attack, crack, and inflame the scrotum.

And it's not like when you were sick, they let you stop working. You had to work on the death railway while you had everything, while you had all these diseases. There was one interesting line that I want to pull out, though. The fact that if you can convince yourself that the mind is a powerful place in which you feed it affects it affects you in a powerful way. Right. The people that had lives to live for something else to live their life for above themselves, not just themselves. So trying to get home to their family, trying to get home to their kids, whatever the case is, you would think it's counterintuitive. The younger, like the 19 year olds or 20 year olds died at a faster rate than like the 30 and 40 year olds because the

30 and 40 year olds had something to live for. A lot of the men were married and would talk about their families back home. These slightly older men in their 30s and 40s survived in much greater numbers. Surprisingly, it was the young men who died first on the railway. The older men had families that they had to live for. And when I reread that part, maybe I heard this crazy story on a podcast years ago. There was this former NFL player who used to play for the Miami Dolphins.

I can't remember his name at the moment, but he was by himself. He was like taking his boat. I think he was like 17, let me say 10 miles offshore. It was't it was like it was far. Let's say 10 miles, maybe 15 miles. I'm like that offshore. He was taking his boat from one spot to another. It was on autopilot. He was by himself. He went to the back, try to fix something. And it hit like a like hit a bump. And he had fallen out of his boat and the boat just kept going. And he's like, oh shit. And so he had no choice but to start swimming to shore, like I said, 10 or 15 miles away. And so he goes on this insane journey all throughout the night. So he starts swimming at maybe like mid morning. I think he doesn't get to shore till the next day at like five in the morning or something like that. And he tells the story and all he could think of was i have my daughters i have my daughters i

have my wife like the amount of pain when he survives he goes to the hospital like all the skin like had from his neck and his head and his back had been completely ripped off because think about like you're just swimming right you're doing like oh stroke like your swim stroke through the ocean again you know there's waves there's sun there's, it just rips off all the skin. You're completely dehydrated. And just this idea where it's just like, I have to survive, not for me, but for my young kids. And like that, that, that the amount of motivation and like mental fortitude that that gave him, you know, he lands the next morning, tumbles up the beach and knocks on somebody's door. He'd been gone so long and they had found his boat that his wife was already resigned to the fact that her husband was dead. And she was waiting till the morning to tell their kids that their dad was not coming back.

We do not understand the power of the human mind. That is so apparent. And we forget that we don't understand the power of the human mind. In fact, there's another character in the book. I don't know if I'll get to. His name is Dr. Matheson. He winds up saving Alistair's life a bunch of times. But he's a doctor, but they have no supplies.

And so he's racking his brain about how he can help these people. And what he realized was he starts giving people that are deathly ill, they're on death's door, he starts giving them injections of water with a little bit of salt in it. And he tells them like it's a special medication. It's going to get you better or whatever. You know, it's going to kill all the bacteria and everything else. And the people, just that placebo effect actually worked. And so that is insane. And again, I think that is the main point of reading this book, of listening to the audiobook, of just realizing, man, you are so much stronger.

You can endure so much more than you think you can. Let's go back to this. He has one mantra. Survive this day. Every morning I would tell myself over and over, survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day.

We all suffer from depression. Men were taking their own lives. Men cut their own throats or simply walked into the jungle to die. That is the consequence of not having that kind of mental fortitude. Going back to all kinds of diseases that they're forced to work in. Remember, he's in a jungle naked. He's doing this naked. Due to the lack of vitamin B in our plain rice diets, he only ate rice for like three and a half years,

all of us had fallen victim to beriberi. That gave us a swollen tummy and a tremendous pain in your joints. Sometimes the side effect of beriberi was blindness. So he's got beriberi. He's got malaria. He's got dysentery. Guess what he has now? Kidney stones.

Kidney stones were brought on by constant dehydration. And then he's got more pain and suffering because they're getting beaten every day. Beating stones were brought on by constant dehydration. And then he's got more pain and suffering because they're getting beaten every day. Beatings were totally routine. Guards would strike the open tropical ulcers on your legs with a bamboo stick, causing intense agony. Again, if you want to just Google image, there's tropical ulcer. Each time I took a beating, it chipped away, not just in my bones, but at my will to endure them. These were some of the most sadistic and evil people on the planet. And this is what he means by that.

They'd find interesting ways to torture the prisoners. So they would tether prisoners to the ground, spread eagle. They would wrap wet rattan around their ankles and their wrists and then tie them to stakes in the ground. As the rattan dried, the ties would slowly gnash into the skin because they would get tighter so they actually used this this is the way they built their huts they would wet rattan all right might be rattan where they would wet rattan and then when it dries it would uh they would wrap it around

bamboo sticks and then it would dry it would it would like kind of seal uh the structure for the huts and so they would do this for your ankles and your and your um and your wrists and then it would dry there's nothing to stop it from constantly constricting you and so it would like tear into your bones put it around your ankles and your wrists and then tie you to stakes in the grounds as the rattan dried the ties would slowly gnash into your skin drawing blood and tearing into cartilage as it pulled limbs from their sockets they would leave these people there all day going back to the tropical ulcers the cuts in my feet and legs had turned into tropical ulcers. They rotted your flesh, muscle, and tendons. Flesh simply fell away. This is the first time that Dr. Matheson gives

him advice. This is not the last time. This is the first time that he gives Alistair advice that saves his life because he's like, listen, I have no medicine for you. He goes, you know what's in the latrines, right? So that's where obviously everybody's defecating and peeing and everything else. There's maggots in there. You gotta go to latrines. This is crazy. Listen to what I'm about to say to you. This is insane. So the doctor says, yes, go down to latrines, pick up the maggots. They fix you right up. Go down to latrines, find yourself a handful and sit them on your ulcers. They will chomp through the dead flesh and before you know it, you'll be right as rain. And it actually works.

He says, I can still feel the sensation to this day. They literally eat away at the dead flesh, and you have to get them out of there. You have to count how many maggots you put in there, because they can cause even more damage if you leave them in there. So you wait until they're done, and you have to pull them out.

And this is the advice that Dr. Matheson is giving you, the power of the mind. On countless occasions, I've seen two men with the same symptoms and same physical state, and one will die and one will make it. I can only put that down to sheer willpower, the power of the mind. He's telling Alistair, don't you dare. Don't you dare give up. Do not let them beat you.

This is going to be hideous, but you can survive it. And it's glad that he did. to dare give up. Do not let them beat you. This is going to be hideous, but you can survive it. And it's glad that he did. He winds up going back to Scotland, gets married, has children, has grandchildren. And so he goes back to this idea that he keeps having this reoccurring thought. It just simply cannot get any worse. It's impossible. And it always gets worse. They had reduced us to the Stone Age. There were no positives, no haircuts, no days off, no vegetable stews, no fried duck aids. He's like fantasizing about food because he's always starving. No song. There was not even a single book in the entire camp.

It was work, work, work, and more work. It simply could not have been any worse. The same thoughts went through my mind. We have been used up. We're no use to them anymore. We're all going to be massacred. And we know it's going to get worse. What do I mean by that?

A guard tries to rape him. And then he's put in solitary confinement. One night, I awoke with dysentery. I raced to the latrines in the dark, but on my way back to my hut, a guard stopped me. He yammered in my face. I had no idea what he was saying on, what he was going on about. He was talking frantically and then pointing down in my midriff. To my horror, I realized that he was becoming frisky.

Jiggy, Jiggy, he was saying. No, I shouted at him. Jiggy, you,gy, he was saying. No, I shouted at him. Jiggy, you, me, Jiggy. I told him no again firmly. He carried on trying to grab me. So without hesitating, I kicked him as hard as I could, square between his legs. He collapsed, groaning in agony. And so because he hit a guard, they throw him into solitary confinement.

It's completely dark, completely black. He has no idea how long he's going to be in there for. Most people that are put in there do not come out alive. And he talks about this every minute of every hour throughout the night was pure torture. As day broke, I was a hopeless mess. When I lost consciousness, they threw buckets of water over me and kicked me. They bashed my eyes until they were sealed shut. I had heat exhaustion. I prayed for a bullet through the brain. In the darkness, the sense of isolation was devastating. Day came and went, the only notion of time provided by the arrival of a watery bowl of rice once a day. Malaria struck me down, pain that was diverted

only when tropical ulcers and kidney stones reared to the fore. I had counted six or seven bowls of rice by the time they allowed me out. Then he survives long enough to start working on the bridge of the River Kwai, which there's a movie about. And then here is the big problem. The River Kwai harbored a killer even more lethal than the Japanese in our starvation diets. As an inevitable consequence of the lack of sanitation and tens of thousands of dead bodies buried in shallow graves are dumped in the jungle, the river system was loaded with cholera. I just finished reading this book called Shantaram, which is heavily recommended to me. And I learned there's a cholera epidemic in

that book as well. It's like a deadly killer. I learned that I think it said the word cholera is like Greek for diarrhea or something like that, or Latin for diarrhea. But the crazy thing is how fast it can kill you. So what cholera is, is essentially explosive diarrhea and violent projectile vomiting, usually at the same time. The first 24 hours were crucial. If you could survive a day and night, you would probably live. Most men who succumbed did so in the first few hours. That's the crazy thing. Men who threw the bodies of cholera victims on the funeral pyre in the morning could easily contract the disease, die, and be thrown on the pyre themselves in the evening.

And it's after having cholera, malaria, dysentery, kidney stones, tropical ulcers, all at the same time, the unexpected lucky break. He's actually too sick to work on the railway. He's lucky they didn't bayonet him and just kill him and leave him in the jungle. The next thing I knew, I was being carried down to the river on a stretcher and loaded on a 40-foot barge. We arrived at a hospital camp. It was then I realized how lucky I was. There were nearly 10,000 survivors gathered in the camp in various states of decay. Cholera had been the final straw for my health. I could no longer walk. He has to relearn how to walk. Dysentery, malaria, beriberi, and gaping ulcers had engulfed both ankles and lower calves. I could no longer even move my legs. He has to relearn how to walk.

And so he is nearly dead, but he had good karma. Remember when back in Singapore, they dropped off this 14, 15 to 16 year old kid to like take care of them. They all looked up, even though Alistair was only like five years older. He like genuinely cared for them and protected them. And so he hadn't seen them. And I don't know, it's been like a year and a half or something like that. And so he winds up running into the younger kid. The kid is like 15 or 16. That's the Freddy kid. Freddy, he was like uncontrollable in the sense like he would explore the camp. He was extremely outgoing. He'd make relationships with everybody. He was a good smuggler. He's like this little kid. And so the reason I say he had good karma is that Freddy and his brother had been put at this hospital camp the whole time. And they were healthy.

And so they were able to smuggle Alistair extra food to help him recover. Food that other people recovering in the hospital camp did not get access to. The supplements to my diet of two egg omelets, molasses, coconut, papaya assisted in my recovery and probably helped save my life. And so he still cannot walk yet. And so this is where he's learning mind control. This is where, again, he's writing a book at 90 years old, detailing every single thing that he went through to inspire you to not give up. Think about the kind of mind control that you have to be able to do something like that. There was nothing to do but sit and wait it out. By now, I could shut down my mind more easily than before and ignore my terrible thoughts. So once he's nursed back to health and able to walk again, his captors are not going to sit there

and let him, you know, he's not going to be hanging out at the hospital camp anymore. He's put exactly, but he's put back to work. They take him back to Singapore and now he has to work at the docks. It says, I had decided to stay apart from everyone else and focus totally on survival. I lived a day at a time in my own little world, a private cocoon. To survive each day required maximum concentration. It also meant that you had to conserve every possible ounce of energy. I was so damn tired all the time. They're working from sunrise to sunset many times after night, right? They're being starved. They don't have enough

calories. He winds up, I think at the beginning of the war, he's like 135 pounds. When the US Marines rescue him at Nagasaki, he's like 82 pounds. He looks like a Holocaust survivor. You sleep, but you're never fully recovered ever. And then your body's energy is also drained by all these tropical diseases that he has too. This is when he's working at fully recovered ever. And then your body's energy is also drained by all these tropical diseases that he has, too. This is when he's working at the docks. And again, there's no autonomy. There's no control. There's no predictability.

They just keep moving him around. And that's one of the, like, the unknown is one of the things your humans are usually most scared of. The days turned into weeks and then into months. There seemed no end to our misery. Then one day, while working on the docks, we were suddenly herded onto a large ship. None of us were given any prior warnings. The liner, essentially these are like massive like tankers, right? The liner that they're putting them in, the ship that they're putting them in had two holds. Both of the holds were obviously not made to accommodate human beings. This is the Japanese

hell ship. And he says, nothing in all of our suffering had prepared me for anything like this. And even today, I can scarcely find the words to describe the horrors. It was a terrifying black pit. Claustrophobia and panic gripped the men. These ships became infamous in the annals of Second World War II history as hellships. Men driven, this is insane, men driven crazy by thirst, because there's no water, killed fellow prisoners to drink their blood. There is cannibalism and vampirism, which I didn't even know was a real thing taking place in these hellships. Men drank their own urine. Sick prisoners were trampled to death and suffocated. The heat down in the hold was unbelievable. I was suffering from dysentery and dehydration. In three and a half years, I had never had a proper bowel movement. The smell inside was indescribable. An overpowering mixture of excrement, urine,

vomit, sweaty bodies, weeping ulcers, and rotting flesh. The men who died were not taken away, their bodies lay among us. Six days of this and I wondered how much more I could take, then in the distance came an explosion. We had sailed into a trap set by the American submariners who were determined to sink as many of the vessels as they could. We suddenly felt a tremendous blast and an explosion tore through the hold. Two torpedoes would send the health ship to the bottom within 15 minutes. The noise was horrendous. The pressure of the water pushed the hatches wide open. Water rushed into the hold straight away with incredible pressure. It pushed me up as the ship continued to tip over.

By some miracle, the water washed me out of the hatch and I rushed out into the sea. I popped out of the ship like a cork out of a champagne bottle. I knew from my Boy Scout training, that's what I mentioned earlier, right? How you pick up ideas, skill sets early in your life. You never know that you can use them later on. In this case, it saves his life. I knew from my Boy Scout training that I had to swim away to avoid getting pulled down by the suction. I swam for my life. Drowning and dying men called for their wives. Their children are mothers. Men said things like, Daddy will be home soon, and then disappeared beneath the waves. How little could a human being survive on? I was about to find out. Suddenly, the thoughts of sharks came into my mind. There's an actual excellent podcast episode I'd like to

recommend to you, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Addendum Feed, not his main feed, his second feed, which you can just find by searching Hardcore History Addendum. Number five, Nightmares of the USS Indianapolis. I think it's like an hour and a half, two hours long. You will not believe the amount of soldiers eaten by sharks when these ships were torpedoed and sank. Somehow he survives five days on this raft that is big enough to fit one person. At some point on that fifth day, there came a lot of shouting around me. I was lifted into a small boat and then onto a Japanese whaling ship. I was as close to death as I've ever been. I was then dropped

off at a port where other shipwrecked POD survivors. As punishment, we were paraded through the village stark naked. So now he's actually on the Japanese mainland. Even in this terrible condition and after all we had been through, my comrades, ravaged by exposure, naked and in slavery, were defiant, their spirits unbroken. They sent us to a Japanese prison camp. It was a few miles from a seaport. That seaport was called Nagasaki. We were put to work immediately. This time we had to labor in a coal mine.

We had to fill coal carts with our bare hands. Anytime when he wasn't doing this, by a miracle, he was actually reunited with Dr. Matheson. This is going to become important. She said, I spent time at the hospital hut. Dr. Matheson and I spoke for hours on all topics. He imparted a lot of his medical knowledge and wisdom to me. He warned me. This is life-saving advice that he's going to use later. This is a reoccurring theme in his life. All these, like learning as much as you possibly can, being physically fit, you have no idea how that will benefit you later in life.

He warned me that when I got out of the camp, I would have to be careful what I ate. Your stomach has shrunk so much that you have to be very careful. Anything too substantial, eaten too quickly, could kill you. It would prove life-saving advice. And so at this point, he's helping out in the hospital hut. He says, the 9th of August, 1945, began like any other day. I began my daily chores. It was around midday that I undertook my most hateful task, emptying the latrine cans into the tomato plants. So they're taking human feces, putting it on top, using it as a manure, putting on top of tomato plants. And it says it made tomato plants like the size of apples.

He was surprised at how well this worked. So he's doing that, that halfway through this task that he hates, there came a tremendous clap of thunder from the direction of Nagasaki. A sudden gust of very hot air blasted into me and knocked me down. So just think about this. Everything this guy had to endure, and yet somehow he winds up a couple miles away From when the americans drop the atomic bomb on nagasaki

The radiation causing cancer that he has to endure later on in his life, but it also leads to his rescue A few days later while working in the hospital. I heard a commotion outside I caught my first glimpse of u.s. Marines. For a stunned moment, I gazed at them. We stood and watched them in amazement. Men were shouting and screaming, throwing things in the air, weeping and kissing the earth, lost in emotion. Some of the Americans were visibly upset at the sight of us and the pathetic state we were in. They lifted up men's shirts, shocked by the angular and protruding ribcages, bloated bellies, and infant waistlines. So they're giving them food and allowing them to clean themselves. I undressed and stood straight under the water.

It was the finest shower I had ever had in my life and my first proper wash in three and a half years. When I left Aberdeen, that's his little city he lived in, I weighed a healthy 135 pounds. But here in Nagasaki, on the steel yard scales, I was reduced to a skeletal 82 pounds. There is a multi-month journey for him to get back to his home in Scotland. He had been, there's been a couple times where he was able to write home and tell his family that he was still alive. He winds up getting to the train station. They introduced me to their new baby boy born just a few months before. They had named him Alistair in my honor. They had thought I had been killed. His mother, his brother, his sister, his aunt, his father thought he was dead.

None of the half dozen cards or so that I had sent from the camps had ever arrived. I was back from the dead. And yet it continues to get worse. He asked about his girlfriend. I asked about Hazel. And without looking at me, my mom said that she had married and moved to Canada. Then she cleared her throat and told me nervously, you should also know that your friend Eric didn't make it. That was his best best friend his best friend died in the war i felt ill he was killed on his first mission over europe it was all too much yet another kick in the face nothing prepared me for the loss of such a close friend all i could think was why then am i still alive i hated myself i knew they were trying to be there his family was trying to be there for me but all I wanted to do was be on my own. I had lived a solitary and sorry life for so long that love only suffocated me. For months, he struggles with trying to be a social person,

trying to get healthy. He still is too sick to work. And then he had this love before the war of ballroom dancing, something he's still doing. He passed away a few years ago, but something he was still doing even in his nineties. And that actually, getting into something he loved wound up being the best rehabilitation for him. That's how he winds up meeting his wife. That's where he winds up building up his strength. And he just said, the best rehabilitation I could have ever asked for was ballroom dancing. And then unexpectedly, he has a reunion with Freddie. Freddie was in the war when he's like 15 years old he's probably let's say it's probably 2021 when he shows up at the door one day in july 1946 there

came a knock at the door i had visitors i came downstairs opened the door and almost fell over freddy stood there with his trademark grin this is very important because some people never recover from the war so it's one thing to survive right physically you also survive mentally not let it inhibit you living the rest of your life for the rest of his life freddie would phone me every night no matter what was happening in either of our lives but freddie never came out of the camps and he drank heavily to forget he would die within 10 years of returning of cirrhosis of the liver still a young man and so he talked about this motivating himself to not let the same thing happen to him. Yet I owed it to myself and to the others who never made it back to make the most of my life.

And he brings it up to the 90 year old version of him. My two children grew up and I took great pleasure from their success as I did when my grandchildren came along. Life continued to throw up challenges. After my wife, Mary suffered a stroke, losing the power of speech. I nursed her for 12 and a half years. Do all of this. My sufferings as a prisoner taught me to be resilient, to appreciate life and all that it has to offer, which he did. And he says, and at 90 years of age, I'm still working on my foxtrot.

And so now I want to put the book down and I want to read to you my summary that I wrote to myself the first time I had read the book. And so this text I'm about to read to you, I will put it down below in case you want to copy it, because also when I'm stressed, I find rereading this helpful. And so here's what I wrote to myself and for myself many, many years ago. Alistair Urquhart was conscripted into the British military to fight during World War II. He was 19 years old. He was sent to Singapore.

The Japanese invaded and he was taken hostage. He survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on the death railway and the bridge to the River Kwai. Most of the time he worked completely naked. He contracted dysentery, malaria, and tropical ulcers. A lot. He was transferred to a Japanese health ship. The ship was torpedoed. Almost everyone on the ship died. He did not.

He spent five years adrift at sea until he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship. He was sent to Nagasaki and forced to work in a mine. Two months later, he was struck by the blast from the atomic bomb. He was freed by the U.S. shortly thereafter. He returns home to Scotland and finds out his best friend died in the war and the girl he loved got married and moved to Canada. At 90 years of age, he wrote the book to inspire others to persevere when they are faced with hardships in their life. I think it's a great book for entrepreneurs. The story demonstrates the adaptability of all humans, our fierce desire to

survive, and puts the stress of building companies into the proper perspective. The entire story only takes three hours and 14 minutes. I hope this podcast serves as a reminder that we're all way stronger than we all know, and I hope I can convince you to buy the audiobook. If you want more details than buy the paperback version that I have, which is much, much longer, I will leave a link down below. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 318 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.