The Man Who Survived 47 Days on a Raft Has a Lesson for Every Investor

In this archival episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner sits down with Louis Zamperini — World War II survivor, Olympic runner, and the man whose story inspired the bestselling book Unbroken. They talk about why the people who overcome the most become the hardest to beat, and why the moment everything in your portfolio drops 50 percent is actually the most important moment of your investing life.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on July 5, 2026.

Louis Zamperini: Every time you overcome an adversity, I'll tell the kids this. Every time you overcome an adversity, you become more hearty, so don't think of adversity as bad. If it's there and you've got to face it, overcome it, and you become more hearty and more hearty.

Bart Shannon: That was Louis Zamperini, decorated war hero and subject of the best-selling book and movie Unbroken. I'm Motley Fool producer Bart Shannon. Motley Fool’s CEO and co-founder, Tom Gardner, interviewed Zamperini back in 2011. They spoke about Zamperini's World War II service, leadership, athletics, mentoring young men, optimism, and so much more. Zamperini died in 2014 and leaves an incredible legacy. Hope you enjoy.

Tom Gardener: Mr. Zamperini, thank you very much for taking the time today.

Louis Zamperini: Well, here I am.

Tom Gardener: It's a real pleasure. I have about eight questions for you. The first question that I wanted to ask you is, I think of you having been put in a number of incredible leadership roles through tremendous, tremendous crisis. I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about the role that some of these things played in your survival and in your leadership through crisis.

Louis Zamperini: I think you hit on the head. Survival, I think the greatest survival course you can take is Eagle Scout. You go to everything. When you hear about people climbing Mount Hood every year, two or three guys die up there, and they're called experienced climbers. Well, that doesn't mean anything. They have survival training. That's the main thing in any outdoor activity. Then that woman last month that hiked up on Baldy. Oh, we're not worried she's an experienced hiker. Well, has she had survival training? She didn't, found her dead. The first thing about survival is always do thing in pairs. In case something happens, you can send for help, like 127 Hours where the guy cut his arm off.

Tom Gardener: Exactly.

Louis Zamperini: Well, I didn't see the movie, but people saw, yes, they emphasized the fact that you should have somebody with you. Now, we had an attorney on a big case in LA, big case, I think, like OJ. He lived in Ohio, and he went hiking up Sespe Creek alone. He didn't show up for the child, and somebody found him two weeks later laying in the stream. What he did, he fell and hit his head against a rock. Knocked him out, and his face went in the water. You don't dare go anywhere in the wilderness, even local mountains without somebody with you. This is absolutely essential, and that's what I really trust kids on. Take as survival courses as you can. Now, in Hawaii, there are 27,000 servicemen, and they had a special at the university on survival in South Pacific. Out of 27,000, 15 of us showed up. What I learned there came in handy on the life raft. Survival training, if it's going to be on the sea, I would take it survival training on both land and sea, then you're pretty well covered.

Tom Gardener: How much do you think your survival was supported by just your sense of optimism in life?

Louis Zamperini: Well, when you've had survival training, you have no doubt about yourself. You have no doubts about surviving. You have a positive mind about living through it. You never think about death. Now, people ask me, Did you ever think about dying on the raft? I said, No, I was too busy staying alive. Not only did I have a lot of survival training, but when you're in an unknown place like the South Pacific on a raft, you invent because of your survival training, you're able to invent new methods of survival as you go along. In other words, how to catch a fish. Well, when I ran out of the proper hooks for fish, I took the bigger hooks that tied one to my little finger, index finger, and my thumb. When a shark came by with a pile of fish, I would reach in and grab the pilot fish, and of course, the harder I tried to get away, the further the hooks dug. That's not in the books because of your survival training. You invent things that go along. Your mind is active, and you're able to create new methods of doing things.

Tom Gardener: Do you think that your sense of ingenuity and your survival instincts were made stronger by your pursuit of mastery as a runner in high school?

Louis Zamperini: Anything comes in handy where you have to persevere. Then running, first of all, you learn how to train, and you don't break your training, you don't dissipate, so you develop that sense of accomplishment. If you're going to do anything, you got to go for it all the way. If you're going to be an attorney. You shouldn't be happy. You should go all the way, study everything you can to be the best. In survival, yeah, I taught survival on both land and sea, glacier climbing. I skied glaciers in New Zealand and climbed 14,000-foot glacier in Wyoming and then climbed it again two days later and skied it. The ranchers there, 1957, had never heard of anybody skiing that glacier. But I only did that because I had a lot of survival training, and I know exactly how to live in the snow and dig a snow cave.

Now, digging a snow cave is not enough, so I take one of these. They call them the water run Disney. They give you a little packet, a little plastic coat, and you put that on the kids do so they don't get wet. Well, those things are so lightweight. It's a few ounces, and I keep one of those in my backpack. Then if I'm up on the mountain and a blizzard comes in, I can just dig a snow cave. That takes the chill factor off you, but it doesn't prevent your body from throwing away heat. But what you do, you put this plastic little thing over your body, and then you get in the snow cave. Now, the heat is dissipating into the plastic and goes back into your body. Now, why these guys don't do that, I've been priest to for years, and I have about 30 or 40 of those packets. I keep one in the car. I went to New York to get an award. It was a black tie affair. We had to walk two blocks to the Ellis Island Ferry, and I had one of those in my suitcase. Everybody's out there walking in the rain, I put that on. I'm the only guy that got there dry, so that's survival on a small scale, but it's still survival, and people should really especially in this world today, with everything that's happening, earthquakes and iPhones and tsunamis, they should everybody should take a survival course, both on land and sea.

Tom Gardener: Now, in your experience in the Japanese POW camps, you face something that is 1 million times worse than the average person will ever face in their life, and yet all of us have our days of reckoning and all of us suffer. I'm wondering what advice you would have for anyone who's going through a period of suffering in their life.

Louis Zamperini: Well, that helps you. When there's nothing you can do about it, you have to grin and bear it. That's all you can do, and the fact that we all have an inward desire to live, that's probably the strongest thing that's going to keep it going, but some guys do give up. We've had guys turn coat and tried to escape, knowing that if they escape, they would line up officers and shoot every other one. Escape was not a real possibility without harming other members of the group.

The best thing is an example, I got a letter yesterday. This guy, it's a nurse wrote me a letter, and this guy is on dialysis 3 hours at a time, and he just wants to give up. This is really bugging me. I wanted to give up on it. You read my book Unbroken. Till I got the levy yesterday, the nurse said he said to me, If that guy's apparently can spend 47 days on a raft, I can handle my 3 hours of dialysis. When I get live like that, five or 10 a day of people who use your story as an example of perseverance. You got to persevere and overcome adversity.

Every time you overcome adversity, I'll tell the kids this. Every time you overcome an adversity, you become more hardy. Don't think of adversity as bad. If it's there and you've got to face it, overcome it, and you become more hardy and more hearty. My generation, I don't like to term “the greatest generation.” We were the hardy generation. Because we had nothing but obstacles, adversities, we had to forage for food, running out of money. We had to go out and shoot rabbits, to have rabbits caught your try. Have you down the beach and bring home abalone, which was the poor man's food in those days. Now it's $100 a pound. We learned a lot during the depression years in the early days, and I think that's what made so hard until we were able to survive and live to ripe old age.

Tom Gardener: It's not just that companies become too big to fail, and we bail them out, although that's happening. It's not just they become too big to jail, but they become too big to care. These companies, they eliminated the competition. They and their advisors, the economists who said monopolies are good and efficient. They're today just absolved of all responsibility. Shopping really hard doesn't solve monopolies. We warned them at the time. They did it anyway. The Ishidogenic policy environment is what created this.

ADVERTISEMENT: Do you hear why the Internet keeps getting worse, check out episode 1280 of the Jordan Harbinger show.

Tom Gardener: Can you remember the moment when you turned from being a teenager that was getting into trouble with a very mischievous nature and maybe little petty crimes to being a young man who is pursuing mastery as a runner?

Louis Zamperini: Oh, yeah, because you see the main thing is recognition, I was a kid. I had no interest, except gang-related interest. If someone had taken me aside and taught me how to play tennis, basketball, soccer, or everything else, when you're standing around up at, you say, Oh, let's go play soccer. Let's do this play tennis. But I had no interest, and I got no recognition. I got my recognition by stealing things, not that my name's in the paper. The fact that it says Minders Pie shop raided again, but that's recognition to me, without my name. That's what I do on my camp program. I take kids out of the youth authority. I take them up at the Sears. I always keep my eyes open for a kid that is ignored and shunned, and I give him all my attention and bring him into the into the fold and I'd say. Otherwise, the kids are gonna suffer. He could ruin the camp program. Well, I know from experience.

Now, the first recognition I don't was my first race, I didn't care if I won or lost. I'm coming down the homestretch. All of a sudden, the kids from my school in unity are screaming, Come on, Louis, come up, my God. I didn't know anybody knew my name. Boy, I did the first I could. I passed. I came in third. But that started me on a whole new road in life, and that was becoming a runner. My brother said, you want to keep on being a bum all your life, or you want to accomplish something? He said, You got a lot of recognition in the race today. You got to make up your mind. Before I fell asleep, I said Pete, I'm going all out. I quit chasing around smoking and stealing liquor from the bootleggers, and I became a fanatic trainer. I was just the opposite. Within a year, I booked the state record in the 1320, the next year, I booked the Iva scholastic or Wilds record in the min high school. There was Silver junior, and then I beat all the college runners as a junior in high school. That's how my life changed, you got to get something that you can put your heart into and go for it.

Tom Gardener: It's just a stunning example of what happens when you get recognition and you have something that you can build toward. The change from not being a runner at all to beating college runners and setting a national standard for the mile in such a short period of time is just such an incredible example of the power of recognition.

Louis Zamperini: Once you go for it, you got to throw your heart into it. But when Laura Hillenbrand got the idea for my book, she was doing research on Seabiscuit back in the ‘30s, she kept seeing my picture on the same page. A couple of runners, I used to lay on the grass Mc Colosium and they would stop football again and track match when he ran. I'd lay there and listen to the race and run mine the same way. Then she saw an article on the same page where Los Angeles Times called or coach Dean Cromwell and said, Louis hasn't lost a mile race for five years. If he loses this year, who do you think will beat him when the coach said, Biscuit. No, she thought that, I got to call this guy, so that how started, and then we became real close friends.

Then also, about 40 years ago, I quit going to movies because I wanted, what I get a taste of accomplishment. The first accomplishment was a runner. Then I wanted to be everything I could be. I took typing, and I hated stuff like that, but I took it. It was an accomplishment. It helped me through college, and then I took up other sports. But then about 40 years ago, I quit going to movies. I decided to become as many things as I could. I become 84 different things as a profession or licensed in or an expert in. I've been everything. I've been a deputy sheriff under Biscuit. I've been a lifeguard under Red Cross, a key instructor, and you name it. I'd been 84 different things and listen. That all happened with Cart as a kid, I had no accomplishments. Now I got 84 things to my credit, and I tell you, I can look back and start reminiscing on those things, and it just trolls my heart to think that I have done that, but I had to quit going to movies to do it.

Tom Gardener: What is one of the 84 things that is most surprising, even to you that you master?

Louis Zamperini: One thing I like a lot, now, I just spent some time with Robert Duvall, and twice we met last week for hours and hours, and we're like a couple old cowboys. I often like to be alone, because when you're an athlete, as John and Abril testified, people were always around you, and I love the West, the Old West. In fact, I still have my saddle downstairs. I wanted to become a real cowboy, so I worked on the Vanderhof ranch every summer, and then the Willis ranch in White Salmon, Oregon. I tell you, getting up there alone, riding the fence, on a good horse and searching for a lost cow and then patching the fence up. It takes all day long. You leave early in the morning, come home at night. I'm around people all the time so much. That was a real treat for me to get off a lawn and just meditate and take of the past and make plans for the future.

Tom Gardener: A lot of us like to see the forces of evil defeated, and we like to see the bad guys suffer. When we read your book and your life story, Mutsuo Watanabe is obviously such a dark force. Yet your perspective on him is transformed through your life. I just would like to hear you speak a little bit about that, so those of us who face something dark in our lives might actually take a different perspective on it.

Louis Zamperini: Well, yeah, when I came home, I was so filled with rage over the bird, after what he did to me over a period of a couple of years that I was trying to make money. I could go back there, secretly seek him out, and do him in. I really wanted to do that. I had probably the worst case of vendetta that you ever heard of, and yet, after receiving Christ it with Jeff Alt, I wanted to go back and give the guy a hug and tell him I forgave him. But did go back, I went into Sugamo Prison, 850 war criminals, and they asked the colonel asked the men that knew me to come forward, and I looked for the bird. He wasn't there. They said, Well, we believe he committed harakiri. I assumed he was dead until CBS found him just before the inaugural Winter Olympics, and then they sent me over there twice to do a video, not only carrying the torch alongside of my former slave labor camp, but to meet the bird. Then they started to do 60 Minutes on him, accused him of all these crimes. His son and grandson were standing there, and boy, they didn't like it. They didn't know he had committed those crimes, and they said, No more of this, so they could never get back to him again. But they did a video that won an Emmy Award, and that shows him the only footage ever taken of Watanabe is in that video. When you find someone like that to restore back into fellowship with God.

ADVERTISEMENT: Head to the beach in Abercrombie's latest summer drop. New 100% linen shirts are perfect for breezy days by the coast. They're easy to layer and go well with our new sea faded shorts. For days spent on the water, pair the ANF resort shirt with your favorite swim. Outfit your summer with Abercrombie in the app, online, and in stores.

ADVERTISEMENT: Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news the Vantaagent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16,000 fast moving companies like Synthesia, Nandos and Granola, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI Risk. Get started at vanta.com. What are a few things that you want to achieve now and add to the list of 84 forms of mastery that you've gathered up in your life? What accomplishments are you pursuing now?

Louis Zamperini: I gave up skateboarding on my 81st birthday, and I gave up skiing on my 91st. But I'm so active now speaking. I'm a motivational speaker, and I speak at universities. I just spoke at USC last week to 300 athletes. Then I do lecturing on board cruise liners, and the idea is to motivate people to work hard for their cooperation. Not as they're giving away their life because when you work hard and appreciate your work, you're getting the benefit, the benefit of we'll say the white corpuscles, bring your immune system. You just don't get sick, and by the way, when you're working hard for your company, you keep them solvent. It's a good idea for people to have both things in their mind. You work good for your own benefit, and you work good for your company. You both benefit from it. Then doing good.

When you do good, you feel good. If you feed a guy on the street or buy somebody a meal that a homeless portion, you feel good. That feeling is your immune system being flooded with white corpuscles. That's the secret of longevity and that's the secret of my life. People say, Well, how can you help a great memory at your age? Well, that's one thing that helps. The other thing is memorizing. I memorize the great passages from the scriptures and other things I think could be pertinent in my work with young people, memorizing your under intense concentration, and I keep you from going senile and becoming a scatter brain.

Tom Gardener: I suspect that you feel that things happen for a reason in life.

Louis Zamperini: I do. I accept anything that happens for your own benefit, but if things are going to happen, why cry over it? Why fight over it? The thing is accept everything and do the best you can with it and use it as a learning tool. Because we're always learning, and every time we overcome a hardship, we're not only becoming more hardy, but a learning tool. The more hardship to go through, the more you learn. That's why our generation, not the greatest generation, the hardy generation, because that's all we did was overcome. I tell young people, when you have a problem, think of it this way. When you overcome that problem and lick it, you're a better person. You're more hearty and you'd be surprised when kids take that up. I'm never going to give up again. I get all these letters from the book and I always sign my name with Be Hardy, Louis Zamperini.

Tom Gardener: Louis, I don't know how much you know about our company, The Motley Fool, but we teach people how to save and invest. When I talk to young people about it, I tell them that the best thing you can do is actually to make your first investment. Actually, the best result you can get from your first investment is that it doesn't succeed for you because you will end up learning why rather than congratulating yourself for your good fortune out of the gate. That lesson of accepting failure and difficulty as a challenge, an opportunity to learn and improve yourself, is just such a great lesson. I genuinely mean that I could sit and talk with you for the next three hours, but I don't want to take any more of your time. But this has been a thrilling moment for me and my life to be able to.

Louis Zamperini: Well, this statement made great. That is great. When you teach overcoming. That's fantastic. That's in your company policy?

Tom Gardener: Yes, it is. I mean, when you invest, you are going to definitely have periods of time like we had a few years ago where everything goes down 50% in value, and that's either the time that you cry in your soup and give up or that you double down, try and learn more and get smarter because of it.

Louis Zamperini: That's good. That's beautiful. I like it.

Tom Gardener: Louis, I'll tell you this has been a real thrill for me, and I'm gonna send you a Motley Fool baseball cap.

Louis Zamperini: Hey, great. Hey there, thanks a lot. But sure nice talking to you.

Tom Gardener: Thank you very much.

Bart Shannon: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Bart Shannon, and we will see you tomorrow.

The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.