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 hell ship and after we were torpedoed I was lucky to survive 5 days a drift 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 t 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 racked 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 denter 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 odeal 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 uh World War II Story of Survival in the Pacific and is written by Alistair ort 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 mark andreon 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 un 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 merer says if you live long enough bad [ __ ] 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 Audi book it is 3 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 stressed 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 F find it very helpful to step outside of myself and the way I step outside of myself as I listen to this audiobook I don't know probably listen to it five
six times I don't know how many times and I think to myself if Alistar 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 just 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 is going to be in that's why the book is called The Forgotten Highlanders because they dis 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 uh the family simply could not pay for me to attend school I was thrilled to be working because I was 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 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 Idol 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 and to like persevere through but I do want to pull out a couple examples where we see this a lot
I call this uh using the world as your classroom he develops all the skills and knowledge that he doesn't use right at the time but they went up becoming beneficial later on and in this case he he was just he had nothing to do uh 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 he's 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 boot camp and he's going through all the PT all the 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 Tucker uh I'd play football I'd be swimming I played rugby and Cricket on
Saturdays I played rug rugby in the morning then uh 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 uh every Sunday at 6:00 a.m. I'd be there and itd 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 a drift at sea for 5
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 I guess I should bring up something too as well so I was actually listening to the audiobook while I was reading this book
I had I bought the paperback so I could make 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 Audi 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 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 the the pain inflicted on those around you if you if your business goes under and the financial hardship that you potentially incompetence uh could put your family through right but in this case so that's like the metaphor that me you and I are using but in this case incompetence can get get you killed
and so they they send him to Singapore and he there's GNA 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 Dorp says Charlie merer 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 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 cuz talks about hey the the military police would literally pick you up and 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 Washington biography it's actually what led to Ben Franklin meeting George Washington is the fact that George Washington was helping the British uh soldiers fight the Native Americans the British soldiers took what worked in Europe and try 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 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 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 uh 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 as 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 that'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 on the ground I'm seeing all this like these stupid ideas we have terrible uh 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 uh they would R run L lengthy articles on Fortress Singapore and how the it was completely secured by the British and there's no way it could be ever invaded and over
and taken and he 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 wal 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 dizzzy first comes heightened confidence followed quickly by overom confidence 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 go goes on alisher 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 they're what we're being told is not matching up what I'm uh 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 and everyday thing talks about that 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 Alis and some of his fellow soldiers that are paying attention to what's going on they're getting terrified they're like I'm scared to death and they're like okay well maybe the Japanese are just as d as disorganized as we are and then the response at the lunch table uh 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 uh what's it racial Supremacy over the Asian forces so he says there was an undercurrent of complacency in racial Supremacy too it was inconceivable that the greatest
Empire that the world has known could be def defeated this is their 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 I and so there's going to 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 is 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 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 alisar is like what the hell am I supposed to do with them and they're like you have to watch over to take care of them so he puts them in the basement they're going
to be there for a while until the Japanese actually come into the office and and Lead these guys away at gunpoint this is what he's experiencing this whole time all my previous experiences in Singapore the arrogance F frivolous
Behavior sheer inaptitude 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 5 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 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 a or 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 the squalet conditions he is going to have a a bevy
of tropical diseases I'll go through all of them and then I'll I'll like sumarize this at the very end everybody has dentary which tore your stomach lining and had you run to the latrines dozens of times a day so he's got denter at the same time he gets his first bout of malaria he's going to get denter 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 of tropical ulcers you know they
kind of like pixelated it they're like are you sure you want to see this essentially your 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 or 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 some a famous event in World War II he's going to eventually uh build the they call the death Railway and then the bridge over
the river Quai 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 ft by 10 ft 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 Bayon at 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 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 un unbearably foul without toilets the men had to relieve themselves where they stood several were very ill uh with malaria dentary and diarrhea people vomited and fainted and it says dust
came in uh 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 issue interesting thing that happened several throughout the book there is
several examples okay of other prisoners because the 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 alisar 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
aliser 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 5
years before he's going to be freed I felt doomed and resign 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 uh 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 km March ahead of you and we have to complete it that night that is a lie it is way longer than 50 km 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 ban at 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 a lot applies to more than just this uh the Bennett he
he was phys more physically fit than anybody else even though he's got dentar malaria and he's just terrible uh 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 get
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 um British Engineers I think like a decade decade and a half before this had considered building a railway through the Jun the jungle and they said it couldn't be done without a a massive sacrifice of life and so the
Japanese are like yeah we know that's what the PS 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 4 15 km 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 are 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 berry berry malaria Denay fever and denter a new illness had also started to ravage some prisoners it was
called Tena 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 the the the mind is a powerful place in which you feed it
affects 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 case is you would think it's counterintuitive the younger like the 19-year olds the 20-year olds died at a faster rate than like the 30 and 40y olds because a 30 and 40-year-old had something to live for a lot of the men
were married and would talk about their families back home these slightly older 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 oldermen had families that they had to live for and when I reread that part made me I heard this crazy story on a podcast years ago there was this former uh NFL player who's used to play for the Miami Dolphins I can't
remember his name at at at the moment but uh he was by himself he was like taking his boat I think he was like 17 let me say 10 miles off shore 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 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 [ __ ] 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 whens up 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 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 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 stumbles up the beach and knocks on somebody's door he had been gone so long and they 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 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 um his name is Dr mat he is he winds up saving oler's 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 that are like deathly ill they're on like death's door he starts giving them objection uh 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 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 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 manra survive this day every morning I would tell myself over and over survive this day survive this day survive Sur 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 uh going back to all kinds of diseases that they're forced to work in remember he he's in a 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 3 and a half years all of us had fallen victim to Barry 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 denter 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 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 ratton around their ankles and
their wrists and then tie them to stakes in the ground as the ratton dried the ties would slowly Nash into the skin CU it would get tighter so they actually used this this is the way they built their Huts they would wet ratton might be Rattan they would wet retan 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 staks in the ground so as the ratton dried the ties would slowly Nash into your skin drawing blood BL 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 feets 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 mat gives him advice this is not the last time this the first time that he gives Alistar 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 every obviously everybody's defecating and peeing and everything else there's maggots in there he goes you got to go 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 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 pick you have to count how
many maggots you put in there cuz you can actually like 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 mat is giving you the
power of the mind on countless occasions I have 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 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 reoccurring 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 duads he's like fantasizing about food because he's always uh 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 denter I raced to the lrin 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 midrift 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 four 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 Quai which there's a movie about and then here is the big problem the river Quai 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 or dumped In the Jungle the river system was loaded with chalera I just finished reading this book called shantam uh which is heavily recommended
to me and I learned there's a collar out epidemic in that book as well it's like a deadly killer I learned that I think it said the the word colar is like Greek for diarrhea something like that or Latin for diarrhea but the crazy thing is how fast it can kill you uh so what colera is is ESS 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 colera victims on the funeral p uh in the morning could easily
contract the disease die and be thrown on the py themselves in the evening and is after having chera malaria dissenter kidney stones tropical ulcers all berry berry 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 40ft 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 chera had been the final straw for my health I could no longer walk he
has to relearn how to walk denter malaria berry berry and gaping ulcers had engulfed 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 they dropped off this 14 15 and 16y old kid they're like take care of him they all looked up even though Alistair was only like 5 years older him he like genuinely cared for them and and protected them and so he
hadn't seen them 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 uh he he was like uncontrollable in the sense like he would explore the camp he 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 alisar 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 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 but sit and waited out by now I could shut down my mind more easily than before and ignore my terrible thoughts so once he's nurse
back to health and able to walk again his captors are not going to sit there and let him uh 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 uh 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 lb when they when the the US Marines rescue him at Nagasaki he's like 82 lbs 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 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 the like the the the unknown is one of the things you 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 hted 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
the ship that they're putting them in had two holds both were uh both of the holds were obviously not made to accommodate human beings this is the the Japanese hellip 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 horse 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 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 dentary and dehydration in 3 and A2 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 6 days of this and I want 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 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 this 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 by searching Hardcore History addendum number five Nightmares of the USS Indianapolis I think it's like an hour and a half 2 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 shipwreck pod survivors as the punishment 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 sea port that sea port 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 Dr mat this is going to be in come important she said I spent time at the hospital Hut Dr mat 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 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'll benefit you later in life he warn 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 FES putting it on top using it as you know manure putting on top of tomato plants and it says it made tomato plants like the size of apples he was he was surprised at how well this worked so he's doing that that halfway through this Tas 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 endured later on in his life but it also leads to his rest resue a few days later while working in the hospital I heard a commotion outside I caught my first glimpse of US 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 Wast lines 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 3 and A2 years when I left Aberdine that's his little city he lived in I weighed a healthy 135 lbs but here in Nagasaki on the steel yard scales I was reduced to a skeletal 82 lb 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 Alistar 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 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 still is too sick to work and then he had this
love before the the war of ballroom dancing something he's still doing uh 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 wind up being the
best Rehabilitation for him wind up uh he 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 like the best Rehabilitation I could have ever asked for was ballroom
dancing and then unexpectedly he has a reunion with Freddy Freddy was in the war when he was like 15 years old he's probably let's say he'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 have to survive mentally not let it inhibit you living the rest of your life for the rest of his life Freddy would phone me every night no matter what was happening in either of our lives but Freddy NE never came out of the camps and he drank heavily to forget he would die within 10 years of returning of therosis 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
1/2 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 Fox Trot 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 Alistar urkhart 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 Le working as a slave on the death Railway and the bridge to the river Quai most of the time he worked
completely naked he contracted denter malaria and tropical ulcers a lot he was transferred to a Japanese hell ship the ship was torpedoed almost everyone on the ship died he did not he spent 5 years of drift at Sea until he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship he was sent to Nagasaki and forced to work in a m 2 months later he was struck by the blast from the atomic bomb he was freed by the US shortly thereafter he
returned turns 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 3 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 the paperback uh 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 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 Founders podcast.com because of the insane amount of research that I have done over the last 7 years for this podcast I have a very unique set data set that's
available nowhere else there's over 20 thou I've read over 100,000 Pages we're at like 300 what 15 books something like that I have somewhere between like 20 and 21,000 highlights and notes from this project 90% oh probably over 90% of my highlights and notes never make it onto the podcast yet the information contained in is excessively valuable so what I what I did is like I'm constantly getting questions all the time right and
I look at them like their 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 uh 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 to 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 going to Founders podcast.com