YouSaid · the spoken record

Alistair Urquhart

lines on the record: 35
first: 2023-08-27
most recent: 2023-08-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“To work in a mind. 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 ninety 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 fourteen minutes.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which he did, and he says, And at 90 years of age, I'm still working on my foxtrot. And so now I want to put the book down and I want to read to you my summary that I wrote to myself the first time I had read the book. And so this text I'm about to read to you, I will put it down below in case you want to copy it. Because also when I'm stressed, I find rereading this helpful. And so here's what I wrote to myself and for myself many, many years ago. Alistair Urquhart was conscripted into the British military to fight during World War II. He was 19 years old. He was sent to Singapore. The Japanese invaded and he was taken hostage. He survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on the death railway and the bridge to the river Kwai. Most of the time he worked completely naked. He contracted dysentery, malaria, and tropical ulcers. A lot. He was transferred to a Japanese hell ship. The ship was torpedoed. Almost everyone on the ship died. He did not. He spent five years adrift at sea until he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship. He was sent to Nagasaki in Fortnite.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say it's probably 2021 when he shows up at the door. One day in July 1946, there came a knock at the door. I had visitors. I came downstairs, opened the door, and almost fell over. 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. He also survived 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 Freddie never came out of the camps, and he drank heavily to forget. He would die within ten 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 ninety.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 his struggles were 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, wounded being the best rehabilitation for him, wind up, that's how he winds up meeting his wife. That's why he winds up building up his strength. And he just said the best rehabilitation I could have ever asked for was ballroom dancing. And then unexpectedly he has a reunion with Freddie. Freddie was in the war when he was like 15 years old.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 asks 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Americans were visibly upset at the sight of us and the pathetic state we were in. They lifted up men's shirts, shocked by the angular and protruding ribcages, bloated bellies, and infant waistlines. So they're giving them food and allowing them to clean themselves. I undressed and stood straight under the water. It was the finest shower I had ever had in my life, and my first proper wash in three and a half years. When I left Aberdeen, that's as little as the city he lived in, I weighed a healthy one hundred thirty five pounds, but here in Nagasaki, on the steel yard scales I was reduced to a skeletal eighty two pounds.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 has endured 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A miracle, he was actually reunited with Dr. Matheson. This is going to become important. She said, I spent time at the hospital hut. Dr. Matheson and I spoke for hours on all topics. He imparted a lot of his medical knowledge and wisdom to me. He warned me this is life-saving advice that he's going to use later. This is a reoccurring theme in his life. All these learning as much as you possibly can, being physically fit. You have no idea how that'll 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, you know,”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the 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 we wasn't doing this.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew from my Boy Scout training that's 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, our 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 Carlins Hardcore History Adendum Feed, not his main feed, his second feed, which you can just find by searching hardcore history addendum. Number five, Nightmares of the USS Indianapolis. I think it's like an hour and a half, two hours long, you will not believe. The amount of soldiers eaten by sharks”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 than in the distance came a 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 horse. It was a terrifying black pit, claustrophobia and panic gripped the men. These ships became infinite 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. In three and a half years I had never had a proper bowel movement. Vomit, sweaty bodies, weeping ulcers, and rotting flesh.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 unknown is one of the things your humans are usually most scared of. The days turned into weeks and then into months. There seemed no end to our misery. Then one day while working on the docks, we were suddenly heard and onto a large ship. None of us were given any prior warnings. The liner, essentially these are like massive tankers, right? The liner they're putting them in, the ship that they're putting them in, had two holes. Both were both of the holds were obviously not made to accommodate human beings.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 back. 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”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he's nearly dead, but he had good karma. Remember when back in Singapore, they dropped off this 14, 15, and 16-year-old kid to like take care of him. They all looked up, even though Alistair was on five years older at him. He 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 Freddie kid. Freddie, he was like uncontrollable in the sense like he would explore the camp. He was extremely outgoing. He'd make relationships with everybody. He was a good smuggler. He's like this little kid. And so the reason I say he had good karma is that Freddie and his brother had been put at this hospital camp the whole time and they were healthy. And so they were able to smuggle Alistair extra food to help him recover, food that other people were covering in the hospital camp did not get access to. The supplements to my diet of two egg omelets, molasses, coconut.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 forty foot barge. We arrived at a hospital camp. It was then I realized how lucky I was. There were nearly ten thousand survivors gathered in the camp in various states of decay. Cholera had been the final straw for my health I could no longer walk. Yes I relearned how to walk. Dysentery, malaria, berry berry and gaping ulcers had engulfed both ankles and lower calves. I could no longer even move my legs.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then he survives long enough to start working on the bridge of the river Kui, 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 had left.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 ducades. He's like fantasizing about food because he's always starving. No song. There was not even a single book in the entire camp. It was work, work, work, and more work. It simply could not have been any worse. The same thoughts went through my mind. We have been used up where 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 is put in solitary confinement. One night I awoke with dysentery. I raced to the latrines in the dark, but on my way back to my hut, a guard stopped me. He yammered in my face. I had no idea what he was saying on what he was going on about. He was talking frantically, and then pointing down at my mid drift, to my horror I realized that he was becoming frisky. Jiggy, Jiggy, he was saying, No, I shouted at him.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it would like to tear into your bones, put it around your ankles and your wrists, and then tie you to stakes in the grounds. As the ratan dried, the ties would slowly gnash into your skin, drawing blood and tearing into cartilage as it pulled limbs from their sockets. They would leave these people there all day. Going back to the tropical ulcers, the cuts in my feet and legs had turned into tropical ulcers. They rotted your flesh, muscle, and tendons. Flesh simply fell away. This is the first time that Dr. Matheson gives him advice. This is not the last time. This is the first time that he gives Alistair advice that saves his life because he's like, listen, I have no medicine for you. He goes, you know what's in the latrines, right? So that's where obviously everybody's defecating and peeing and everything else. There's maggots in there. He goes, 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 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 ratan around their ankles and their wrists, and then tie them to stakes in the ground. As the raton dried, the ties would slowly gnash into the skin because they would get tighter. So they actually used this. This is the way they built their huts. They would wet ratan might be ratan. They would wet ratan. And then when it dries, they would wrap it around bamboo sticks. And then it would dry, it would kind of seal the structure for the huts. And so they would do this for your ankles and your wrists. And then it would dry. There's nothing to stop it from constantly construction.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day, survive this day. We all suffer from depression. Men were taking their own lives. Men cut their own throats are simply walked into the jungle to die. That is the consequence of not having that kind of mental fortitude. Going back to all kinds of diseases that they're forced to work in. Remember, he's in a jungle naked. He's doing this naked due to the lack of vitamin B in our plain rice diets. He only ate rice for like three and a half years. All of us had fallen victim to 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineers, I think like a decade, decade and a half before this had considered building a railway to the jungle. And they said they 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 sixteen thousand 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is smart in a lot, it applies to more than just this. The benefit he was more physically fit than anybody else, even though he's got dysentery, malaria, and he's just terrible, feeling terrible at this point, but he would stay towards the front because 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 weird clearing in the middle of the jungle. And they're like, oh, this is your ultimate objective. This is your camp. And they're like, what are you talking about? There's nothing here. There's not even a single hut. They're like, yeah, here's a bunch of tools. Here's some pickaxes, some shovels, and some saws. Now you have to make your home. You have to build your own hut huts because all men that survived will work on the railway. And they're like, what are you talking about? What railway? A railway. A railway here in the middle of nowhere. It seemed mad. Now here's the crazy thing. There was some British...”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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'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 bayonet them on the way out. Some people, when they stop to have 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 idea of advice of don't look back.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would eventually treat them humanely. And Alisar just observed their existing behavior. It's like, there's no way. So they've been doing this to us for now weeks and sometimes months and you think they're going to suddenly change and deliver on these fake promises. And so there's all these conversations happening with other soldiers around him. He's like, yes, thank Christ this is over. This doesn't look so bad. At least we're not in the jungle. No, this will be fine. We might even get some time off to go downtown and see some girls. And then Alistair said, I did not share their optimism and was proven correct. And so they load them back 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 smells intense. 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was suffering. There is no space to lay down. The smell inside the carriage became unbearably foul. Without toilets the men had to relieve themselves where they stood. Several were very ill, with malaria, dysentery, and diarrhea, people vomited and fainted, and it says dust came in to the container and it is added to our unbearable thirst. It was 36 hours before we were let out of the wagon. When they were let out of the wagon, it was just a stop to give them like a measly portion of rice. He says the only thing he could see was the jungle. And so after several days, they finally get to another camp. It kind of looks like civilization. Now here is the interesting thing that happened several times throughout the book. There is several examples 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 psychological warfare with them, right? And so there's several examples in the book of other prisoners believing that they're cat.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. They're just marching one day. Now they're going to put him. He doesn't even know he's on the death march. This is a famous event in World War II. He's going to eventually build the, they 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, 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this way, they are forced to march over eighteen miles and on both sides of the road for eighteen miles you have peoples 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 torch 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 belt of malaria. He's going to get dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers over and over again. I didn't know what a tropical ulcer was before I read this book. And then I made the mistake of doing a Google image search. I remember the very first time I searched for it, Google used to show it to you right away. Now they have the thing where if you do a Google image search for Tropical Search, you know, they kind of like pixelate it. They're like, are you sure you want to see this? Essentially, you're...”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look like professionals, and they're just running through us like a hot. So they come in, they take everybody at gunpoint, they're bayoneting people, they're chopping people's heads off, and he's out in the blazing sun. Remember, these are broadly Northern European, right? They're not supposed to be this close to the equator. As we stood there in the blazing sun without food, water, or shelter, the horrible reality broke over me in sickening, depressing waves. I was a prisoner. It was a gut wrenching realization to think that my liberty was gone, and there would be no telling for how long it would be so. This was the worst moment of my life, such as he's saying, I have no freedom, I have no autonomy, I have no control. So they make him start to watch to march 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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'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. 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 and take care of them. So he puts him in the basement. They're going to be there for a while until the Japanese actually come into the office and lead these guys away at gunpoint. This is what he's experiencing this whole time. All my previous experiences in Singapore, the arrogance, frivolous behavior, sheer ineptitude suggested that we were no match for anyone, let alone a well-organized and determined aggressor. And that is exactly what he's saying. He's like, we look like amateurs.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I played rugby and cricket. On Saturdays, I played rugby in the morning. Then I played football in the afternoon, and then I do gymnastics in the evening. I could not have fitted much more into my schedule if I had tried, but I never thought anything of it. On Sunday mornings, he'd go down to the swimming club, they'd jump into this freezing cold water. This is going to save his life later. Every Sunday at 6 a.m., I'd be there and I'd be shivering. Later, all these swimming lessons would really be a lifesaver. He already mentioned in the introduction that he's going to be on a Japanese hell ship. It is going to be torpedoed by the Allies, and he's going to be stuck and drift at sea for five days. So I want to skip ahead to when he gets sent to Singapore. They don't tell him where he's going. And I guess I should bring up something to you as well. So I was actually listening to the audiobook while I was reading this book. I bought the paper back so I could make podcasts on it. I didn't know whoever edited the audiobook, they took out large chunks of this book. So if you want more detail by the paperback, I would go for the audio.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have not allowed my life to be blighted by bitterness. I have lived a long life and continue to live it to the fullest. I enjoyed a long marriage. I have been fortunate to have a family. I have remained fit, and I still enjoy my passion for ballroom dancing he is in his nineties 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 Erquart.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 softened 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 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.”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. The early years after the war, my nightmares became so bad”
2023-08-27 · Founders · #318 Alistair Urquhart (Listen to this when you’re stressed) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source