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

This is an episode unlike any other episode that I've done before. Before I jump into it,

I just want to tell you a few things. First thing, I'm doing a live show in New York City on October

19th with Patrick O'Shaughnessy of Invest Like the Best. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the

world's best investors and founders on his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest

entrepreneurs for mine. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting,

sharing our favorite stories, and then doing a live Q&A. If you live in New York City, I think it's

a no brainer to grab tickets. This would be a very, very unique conversation, but I've also heard

from a bunch of people that are flying in for the show. So I think it's a great excuse to visit New

York City as well. I will leave a link down below so you can get your tickets and you can also find

them at founderspodcast.com. Second thing, I want to encourage you to become a member of the private

founders AMA feed. You can email me questions directly. You actually get a private email address

in the confirmation email that I read myself. I read every single one of the emails that come in

myself. The questions that I get from those emails I answer in these short AMA episodes,

and with your question, you actually leave your name and a link to your website so you can actually

promote your company to other members. And I already heard from people that got new customers

that discovered their business through an AMA question. I've made 37 of these episodes so far.

You can listen to them immediately when you become a member. The link to do so is down below in the

show notes and available at founderspodcast.com. And the last thing that I want to tell you about

before we jump into this episode is Vesto. Vesto makes it easy for you to invest your

business's idle cash. I know the founder of Vesto, Ben. I've spent a bunch of time with him. He

actually listens to this podcast and he meets one-on-one with every new customer of Vesto.

They can help businesses of all sizes with their treasury management. What that means is you can

actually earn interest on your cash while it sits there. When you own US Treasury bills,

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than if he was just sitting at a bank account, this enables him to extend his runway. And I also

have another founder friend who bootstrapped his business has got a bunch of cash and he uses

Vesto to get a better return on that idle cash than he would just sitting at a bank. If this is

something you're interested in, I highly recommend you go to getvesto.com, schedule a demo with the

founder Ben and make sure you tell him that David from Founders sent you. 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 continued 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 any stories

over and over again, the fact that a large part of entrepreneurship is a struggle with your own

mental health. Mark 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 is 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 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 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 Highlander's 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 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 love my job. I 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 wound 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. But he didn't know how fit he

was until he got to bootcamp. 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'd 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 6am, 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 hellship.

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 had 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 by 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 play 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 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 when I'm meeting them. 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 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 is another example. Bizarrely

each day between 1pm and 3pm, 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 out of 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. 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 and 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 Washington's 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 sleeping? 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 luxurious dinner parties that the governor's mansion people show up in tuxedos and are eating

like caviar and all the 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 Alistair and some of his fellow soldiers that are paying attention what's going

on, they're getting terrified and 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 is rooted in the fact that they thought they 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 to it was inconceivable that the greatest empire that the

world has known could be defeated. This is their their line by little yellow men, all kinds of this

mumbo jumbo is 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

going to be a few weeks of this bombing until he's actually captured it 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. 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 Freddie, 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 me to 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 to leave 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

seeing. 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 bayonetting people, they're chopping people's heads off, and he's out in the blazing sun.

Remember, these are, they're 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 summarize this at the very end. Everybody has dysentery

which torments 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 just 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 them, he doesn't even know he's on the

death march. This is some famous event in World War II. He's going to eventually build the, they

called 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 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, this, 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 setting 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 then it says dust came in

to the container and it just 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 happens several times throughout the book. There are several examples

of other prisoners because the captors are lying to them. They're 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. And so there's several examples in the book of other prisoners

believing that their captors would eventually treat them humanely. And Alistar just observed

their existing behavior. And 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 Alistar said, 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 is 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, okay, 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 will 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 ban at them on the way out. 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 nonstop march. He does have a piece of advice that stay at the front

and do not look back. I think that that idea of 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 and malaria and he's just terrible feeling terrible at this point.

But he would stay towards the front because if 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, 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 survive 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 through 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 very

deep in the remote jungles, where Red Cross inspectors are representatives of neutral foreign

powers could never find us. So this is the part of story where they discover a new disease called

rice balls. At this point, most of the prisoners have berry berry malaria, dengue fever and

dysentery. A new illness had also started to ravage some prisoners. It was called tenea. 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 when you feed 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. I don't, it was like, it was far. Let's say 10 miles,

maybe 15 miles, something 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, tried to fix something,

and it hit like a, like it 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 you 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 head from his neck and his head

and his back had been completely ripped off. Cause think about it, like you're just swimming,

right? You're doing like stroke, like your swim stroke through the ocean. Again, you know,

there's waves, there's sun, there's salt water, it just rips off all the skin. You're completely

dehydrated. And just this idea where it's 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, stumbles 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 is, he's winds up saving all sorts of life a bunch of times, but he's a doctor, but they have no,

they have no supplies. And so he's, he's racking his brain about how he can help these people.

And what he realized was he starts giving people, they're like deathly ill, they're like death's

door. He starts giving them objection, injections of, it's like water with a little bit of salt in

it. And he tells them like it's a, 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, that placebo effect actually worked. And so that is insane. And again, that, I think

that is the main point of reading this book of listening to the audio book 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 suffered 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, our plain rice diets. He only ate rice for

like three and a half years. All of us had fallen victim to berry berry that gave us a swollen tummy

and a tremendous pain in your joints. Sometimes the side effect of berry berry was blindness.

So he's got berry berry. 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. 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, just Google image search 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 raton around their ankles and their wrists and then tie them to stakes in the

ground. As the raton dried, the ties would slowly mash into the skin because they would get tighter.

So they actually used this. This is the way they built their huts. They would wet raton. All right,

might be ratan. They would wet ratan. And then when it dries, it would, they would wrap it around

bamboo sticks. And then when it would dry, it would, it would like kind of seal the structure for the

huts. And so they would do this for your ankles and your, and your, 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 raton dried, the ties would slowly mash 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 Alastair

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 got to go to latrines. This is how this is

crazy. Listen to what I'm about to say to you. This is insane. So the doctor says, yes, go, 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 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 in 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 Alistar, 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. 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 recurring thought. It's just simply

cannot get any worse. It's impossible and it always gets worse. They had reduced this 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 starting. 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 woke with dysentery.

I raced the little trains 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 and about. He was

talking frantically and then pointing down in my mid-drift to my horror. I realized that he was

becoming frisky. Jiggy, jiggy, he was saying. No, I shouted 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 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 as after having cholera, malaria,

dysentery, kidney stones, tropical ulcers, all very, very all at the same time,

the unexpected lucky break, he's actually too sick to work on the railway. He's lucky they

named 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, berry berry and gaping ulcers

heading golf both ankles and lower calves. I could no longer even move my legs.

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. They're like, take care of them. They all looked

up even though Alastair 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 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 Alastair 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 focused 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 U.S. 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 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 turn 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 were, 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. Clostrophobia and

panic gripped the men. These ships became infamous in the annals of Second World War II history as

hell ships. 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 hell ships. 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 and 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 a distance came a

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 hell 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. This is what I mentioned earlier, right? How

you pick up ideas, skill sets, earlier 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 is 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

on. 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. 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. So he 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 rib cages, 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 where 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 Alastar 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 are 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 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

was 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 90s.

And that actually, like getting into something he loved, wanted to be the best rehabilitation

for him. That's how he winds up meeting his wife. That's why he winds up building his

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 was like 15 years old. He's probably, let's say 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. Freddie 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 were 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 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 US

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 1000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon.

I'm glad you made it to the end. Founders listeners are not quitters. If you have not already signed

up for the Founders AMA private feed, I highly recommend doing that right now. I will leave a

link down below, but it's also always available at FoundersPodcast.com. Because the insane amount

of research that I have done over the last seven years for this podcast, I have a very unique

set data set that's available nowhere else. There's over 20,000, I've read over 100,000 pages

where I like 300 and 15 books, something like that. I have somewhere between like 20 and 21,000

highlights and notes from this project. 90%, probably over 90% of my highlights and notes

never make it onto the podcast, yet the information contained in them is excessively valuable. So

what I did is like I constantly getting questions all the time, right? And I look at them like

they're unique prompts to try to get some of this information out of my head and out into

the world. So it's actually useful to you. And one way to do this so everybody benefits is by

actually making a private AMA feed. So if you become a member, you'll be able to ask me questions

directly. There's a private email address that you get in the confirmation email after you sign

up. Do not share that email address because I read every single one of these emails myself.

I don't have an assistant doing it. I'm the only one that has access to that email. So I read

every single one myself. Now the questions that I get from these emails, I turn I answer,

and I turn them into short AMA episodes. So that allows other members to learn from the

questions of other members. You can also add a name and link to your website with your question

so that other members can check out what you're working on. I've already got I've already heard

from subscribers to the AMA feed that they've actually got new paying customers from people

that discovered their business from an AMA question. I plan on making several new episodes

every week. If you are an enthusiast of Founders Podcast, I highly recommend that you become

a member. You can join by using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player or we're

going to FoundersPodcast.com.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.