No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Warrior Philosophers: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Challenges with Sam Alaimo
Imagine harnessing ancient wisdom to navigate the complexities of modern life. Join us, three warrior philosophers—a Marine, a Naval Aviator, and a Navy SEAL—who have done just that. Sam Alaimo joins us to share personal stories of how the philosophies of Socrates, Aristotle, Seneca, and Epictetus have been vital tools in their transition from military service to civilian life. Experience firsthand how these timeless teachings provide clarity and guidance in facing existential challenges, not just for veterans but for all of us.
Technology and isolation are at an all-time high, but what can we learn from ancient thinkers to counteract these modern challenges? This episode tackles the pervasive disconnect fostered by social media and the comforts of Western civilization through the lens of historical figures like Musashi and concepts like Boyd’s strategic interaction. Discover how staying engaged with reality and community can combat the isolating effects of our digital world. We also delve into the complexities of identity within Navy SEAL teams, exploring how childhood trauma impacts performance and behavior, and discussing contemporary theories like the free energy principle and active inference.
Reflecting on the enduring bond between humans and dogs, we find profound philosophical lessons about cherishing the present moment. As we explore the literary inspirations of Tolkien and Lewis, and the concept of conflict theorized by John Boyd, this episode promises a journey through the intricacies of the human experience. Listen in to hear about the passion project "What Then," which integrates philosophical insights into everyday life, and uncover the relevance of these timeless ideas in shaping a meaningful and connected existence.
AGLX Confidence in Complexity short commercial
Stay in the Loop. Don't have time to listen to the podcast? Want to make some snowmobiles? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive deeper insights on current and past episodes.
Find us on X. @NoWayOutcast
Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@AGLXConsulting
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aglx-consulting-llc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandrivera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjmcgrath1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemccrone
Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
All right, warrior philosophers. There's three of them here on the show, all coming from three very different military backgrounds, but all from the naval services. We've got a Marine, we have a naval aviator, as usual, and now we're bringing in a naval special warfareation and you recommend us back, but yours is called what Then? And why don't you tell us the story of that? Because I don't think you can undersell the importance of philosophy and why people need to study the ancients.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, it's a weird origin story. So we were talking before about veterans, so I'll kind of begin there. When I got out of the military I was kind of looking. Getting out of the military was harder than getting into the military, so the transition was difficult to navigate and in that I wanted to find a way to replace the camaraderie, the brotherhood, the mission, the sense of purpose. And with that loss of of the teams or the military came like a loss of identity, came a loss of status, and it actually seems to be harder for the guys, for whatever reason, who don't do a full career, maybe because those guys kind of already have to do that, or at least from what I've seen.
Sam Alaimo:But getting out like in my late 20s I was getting my master's at columbia, new york, and I was losing my mind quite a bit and some of my buddies got into base jumping, other extreme sports, in an attempt to try to replicate the adrenaline that have on a mission, and to me it was. You know, that gets you, it gets you off to a certain extent, it tries to get you close to combat, but it didn't get close enough. So I went the completely different direction. I went towards the route of philosophy and going towards the ancients. I kind of learned a little bit more about Socrates and it's not really well known how much combat that guy saw. We know of a couple campaigns he was in in the Peloponnesian War and it made me wonder how much of his philosophy is about what he experienced in combat. And if you look at what he's doing, his method isn't propounding a new philosophy. What it is is deconstructing what people think they actually know. So if you think you know what leadership is or you know what justice is or you know what government is, what he's doing is asking a series of questions to make it known that you actually don't. And it's kind of level set. And I think where that came from was from seeing the effects of combat and realizing that the origins of a lot of that probably came from people thinking they knew something they didn't. So he waged a crusade against ignorance and you know they kind of reconciled a lot of what I was dealing with getting out and it kind of left a clean slate and from then on I was hooked.
Sam Alaimo:From Socrates it went to Aristotle. From Aristotle I started looking at Seneca until finally I landed on Epictetus, who is, you know, in my opinion, the one I resonate most strongly with, fast forwarding to what then. I wanted a way to integrate this ancient sort of philosophy into day-to-day life. What better way to do it than to write about it? I found a what then, earlier this year, in 2024. It's just been a labor of love. It's a pure passion project. I'll stop there. I kind of went off in a different direction.
Mark McGrath:No, that's pretty solid stuff. What's been the feedback, say, from veterans? I mean, you have two here that like your work, but, generally speaking, as you say, you took it in a direction that was very different from what a lot of other guys do. What's some of the feedback or responses?
Sam Alaimo:that you get all over the map. Quite a few veterans are subscribed. I don't write for the veteran community, I just simply write whatever happens to strike me as interesting. And the thing has taken a pretty major pivot, like if I could back up. I didn't actually found what then to solely write about stoicism. I actually had what I'll call an old testament that no one will ever read it. It was a book I wrote and it is still the Bible for my own internal philosophy.
Sam Alaimo:But it is of a nature that I can't put that completely out there, given the work I do with zero eyes. So I kind of have to de-conflict two modes of my life and the certain things I'm just going to stay away from. Until you know that personal connections cut off. But what? What happened was I, I found, until that personal connection's cut off. But what happened? Was I founded? What Then? To write about stoicism? But it's working its way back to my core idea.
Sam Alaimo:So in the essays I look at ancestral pre-state peoples, some of the extremes they've seen. I look at accounts of war from people from World War I, world War II, vietnam, iraq and Afghanistan and I'm trying to reconcile the mode of mind in these extreme situations, which I'll call ancestral. They're very ancient and we are wired for them in one way, shape or form, whether psychologically or physiologically, to what we see in the modern world, where you come up with a lot of you can call it existential ills, for instance, like depression that once served a function in the pre-state era to make you stop, ruminate on a particular issue you're dealing with. Fix that and then move on with your life. What happens when those ancestral stressors are gone that force you to orient to the world? You can then ruminate all the time, all day, every day, for days, weeks, months. That is my personal belief, why Stoicism and many of the ancient philosophies were invented in the first place.
Sam Alaimo:When you had the invention of the state, each individual is no longer crucial to the success of their group. They then became citizens, and Stoicism in particular. They think that it was modeled in Rome. It was manipulated to work in Rome in a way it didn't in the city-states of Greece To be able to show a citizen listen, you might be one small cog in a giant machine, you might be one small citizen in the Roman Empire, but what Stoicism teaches you is that there is an inner world that you're in complete control of.
Sam Alaimo:No matter how much control you lack in this Roman Empire, no matter if Caesar's upset with you and wants to cut off your head later that day, stoicism is there to tell you that you are still in command of yourself and that it is still yours, at the very last second, to choose how you're going to respond to that situation. So it started off with just digging into this stoicism, which the stoicism of Epictetus in particular it's like crack to me. But then, pivoting that back to my original interest in what does it mean to be a human in these pre-state hardcore situations versus the modern world where we're not forced by nature or by a traditional government to act a certain way? And in that freedom which then becomes something of a burden, people are left wondering what's the point? What am I doing? And that's where I think philosophy can come in and give some direction.
Mark McGrath:Talk about you mentioned, sort of the you know, keeping people from ruminating. It sounds to me like in times past, orientations were able to be shattered and thus they had to be updated by the person in order to thrive, which seems to really resonate with John Boyd, who, by the way, read all the stuff he was a big Stoic philosophy, meditations, others these things are on his list, and it sounds what you've described was almost as if that the environment in those days was such that one must force themselves to constantly revise and update, or else yeah, it was very binary Either you pull out of your rumination and focus on survival or you die.
Sam Alaimo:That was just the reminder every single day. And then they lived in a truly physical environment. So when you're not able to regulate your temperature, for instance, to 68 degrees indoors and outdoors, the extreme cold is going to get you outside of your head and focus on getting warm. The extreme heat is going to focus you on getting out of the sun into the shade, having to get your food, which, on average, I think the pre-state man or woman walked an average of 10 miles a day. That keeps you active, it keeps your blood moving, it keeps your mind oriented to the real world around you and not to what's going on solely inside of your head. So the depression served a function. Something went wrong. You made a fool of yourself, somebody died. Your brain's trying to force you to hone in on it, or so evolutionary psychology teaches us and then it's a productive outcome. You're able to do something by focusing on the problem, but today, without those external stressors, you're then able to focus solely on that rumination, and that rumination can start to branch off in a million different directions. And I felt that we all I'm sure we've all felt it in some way, shape or form. I think you know I'm not on top of the science, but people are finding now that exercise is as powerful as SSRIs in a lot of cases for depression, for mental illness and I think, just from my own, as an end of one myself, if I'm ever down, if I'm ever ruminating, going for an hour run completely banishes it. I feel like a brand new human being 60 minutes later. So there's got to be something to it, and that is also where philosophy kind of flushes it out.
Sam Alaimo:The models that the ancient philosophers give us are able to cut through that. And what does that mean? One example would be Epictetus was really good at thinking at extremes and one of his sayings was the door stands open, and what that's basically saying is nature has given you an out and what it's doing is reframing everything that's stressing you. So most of his students were affluent young men who had the leisure, the family, money to be able to sit there and learn philosophy all day. And these were the kids who wanted to become consuls, they wanted to become military generals, they were ambitious, they wanted possessions, they wanted gold, wealth, land, and they would become stressed out about these things, very much like we become stressed out about everyday matters we want to attain. And what Epictetus would do is basically ask you why are you stressed out when every single thing you're doing is a choice?
Sam Alaimo:And then to prove that he's like life is also a choice, like nature has stood the door open for you. And if this is ever too much of a burden for you, if you ever think you have to complain about this because this burden is too much to bear, leave, walk out the door. So the choice between life and death was built into every single model. He had to show that, no matter what you're suffering, it's really not that bad, because you're doing it by choice. It's not forced on you, you're not a victim. You're choosing to be here, you're choosing to get on with it. So why then make a big deal of it? Just just carry on with the mission. You know those models are as effective now as they were 2 000 years ago. We're the same people when.
Mark McGrath:So you come from a world where these sorts of values and ideas would serve you extremely well through the you know, the you know, through buds and hell week and and frigid cold water, and then still qualification training and then going out to your team and then being in combat. Were the ancients something that you came into contact with? After that experience, during before, put it in relation to your experience as a SEAL when did you start to come into contact with these thinkers and these ideas? Because it seems to me that the things that you talk about would have been very practical, certainly to think about or to reflect on when you're going through those sorts of challenges and tell us.
Sam Alaimo:I'm going to teach you to use your mind before you learn to use a sword. I was the diametrical opposite, so I went in there, learned the warfare, conducted the deployments. It wasn't until after war that I learned rationality. I mean, that was one of the things that spurred me is coming back from my last tour to Afghanistan Very much like Socrates, realizing what I didn't know and how little actually most other people didn't know. I'm sure we could talk about the war and some of the travesty that happened there, especially at the end, but that was, if nothing, a lesson on brutal ignorance. And the ancient philosophers, their sole goal in life was to eliminate ignorance, was to teach you that, hey, it's better to admit you don't know everything than to assume that you do. The catastrophic consequences of thinking you do know something. It doesn't just impact you, it impacts everybody around you and your society. Um, I wish I did know epictetus or you know, socrates has seen through plato or xenophon before getting into the military. It probably would have changed the experience radically. I wish I had more the william wall Wallace path than the path I did. What's interesting is that the principles are the same as anybody who has gone through buzz or hard selection processes, or has had cancer or has gone through a hard car crash. All stoicism did was take what's unique about how humans overcome suffering and put it into words and teach it. What's unique about how humans overcome suffering and put it into words and teach it. It's just a program that literally codifies what humans have been doing for millions of years. So I didn't know Epictetus. I never read Epictetus. But in going through Hell Week, for example, the same mental tricks and the same sort of perspective that gets you through. It is exactly what he's writing about there.
Sam Alaimo:That's the beauty of the ancient philosophy. That's one of the reasons why I like writing about the pre-state people is because they didn't need stoicism. They were already living it. They were living it every single day and every single second of every single day. They already knew the value of every second.
Sam Alaimo:So they didn't need what would be called, in stoicism, a last time meditation, which is saying, hey, what if this second is my last second on earth? But do I want to act like a beast or do I want to act like a good human being? Pre-state people already got that, because every second already was almost the last second. People who go to combat, get that they understand what it's like to think. Maybe tomorrow I won't be here, which means that the meal I have today, or the book I'm reading, or the last phone call home, that takes a level of meaning and significance that otherwise wouldn't happen outside that dangerous area. So that's the beauty of this philosophy, is it's teaching people who you know, given the gift and the luxury that is the first world, that is Western civilization, maybe don't know what it's like to live on the edge like that.
Mark McGrath:About a month ago you wrote an article called what Musashi can teach us about social media and isolation and I thought that this was a. This was great for a lot of reasons. One I think that there definitely has been a lot of challenges. There's the beautiful side of social media, but then there's also the not so beautiful side. But also to that, uh, the book of five rings was one favorite. Walk up, walk us through that article and we'll put that one on the show notes page. But I thought that one was particularly important because what is interesting about a lot of the Stoicism? I think there is also a connection to Eastern philosophy, sometimes especially Tao. Maybe Buddhism. Help us understand the intent behind that one and why people should read that particular article.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, if you look at existential philosophy, one of the major ills that they existentialism focuses on death, on meaning, on the nature of freedom and on the nature of isolation. And in that essay I wanted to focus on isolation. And there's three different kinds of isolation that you can feel from an existentialist point of view. Number one is isolation of self versus others. So, like you're not one with a group, the other one is self and self. You don't really know who you are. You're kind of isolated yourself from yourself. People who've suffered trauma get that one. And then the third one I focused on in that essay with Musashi is isolation of self from the universe or nature or whatever you want to call it, the whole. That is the one that is interesting to me because it's maybe the last one people think about when they hear isolation, generally they think not having physical contact with other people, but this disassociation of the self from the universe, from the whole, that I think religion provides, philosophy provides that In pre-state, the tribe provided that with their origin story and the oral tradition. I think that's not just bad now, with the state at its pinnacle, but also with the advent of technology, because the technology that opens up your whatever social media platform or whatever it is you happen to be doing online, that opens up a virtual world that, in what I was trying to posit in that essay, becomes almost like a substitute universe. But the problem is that that universe isn't the one governed by dark matter or god or nature or whatever you want to call it. That's governed by models. It's governed to take your attention. It's governed to monetize your attention. It's governed to kind of scramble your brain and keep you coming back for more, for a dopamine boost, and I'm like all right. What's the diametrical opposite of that and this goes to the eastern sort of philosophy, which would be an example would be musashi.
Sam Alaimo:I can't imagine anyone in history, with the exception of major philosophers, who, from the book of five rings, from the incredible novel which I think is as true to his life as it can possibly, be Musashi. He literally merged with the universe because their goal was to be completely immersed in the present moment. And if you are literally the present moment, if your life is this second in time, every second, if you live as he did, which was expecting some sort of epic, worthwhile, noble fight by the end of every day, he was in the zone. There was no separation between who he was internally as a self and the universe around him. He was literally completely in coordination with it.
Sam Alaimo:He didn't want the universe to be anything it was. He wasn't angry with the universe, he literally flowed with it. He wanted everything to happen exactly as it was, because if you're going to have a fight, by the end of the day you need to accept it. You can't just sit there and complain about it. You can't wish it were something else. It must have felt good to be in that zone. I maybe had a touch of it in combat, where you had to roll with the punches. There was no room for self, there's no room for doubt, there's no room for God. Why did you do this to me? But Musashi had it. So in that essay anyway, I was trying to describe how Musashi was able to be an example for what's happening today, with the individual getting cut off from reality because of technology.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, boyd. So Boyd talked about the strategic game being one of interaction and isolation, that we ought to choose interaction over isolation. And, as you very aptly described, I think that this is probably his most important work, where we see a lot of those Eastern ideas come out. But he would say that physical isolation occurs when we fail to gain support in the form of matter, energy, information from others outside of ourselves, in the form of matter, energy, information from others outside of ourselves. And maybe that's the first one that you talked about, like the self from the group.
Mark McGrath:Then the mental isolation occurs when we fail to discern, perceive or make sense out of what's going around ourselves. And then the last one was moral isolation occurs when we fail to abide by codes of conduct or standards of behavior in a manner deemed acceptable or essential by others outside ourselves. And I think that when you describe it and you start talking about social media, it is really quick to isolate yourself. It is really quick to allow yourself to be isolated such that your own personal strategic making, your strategy making senses you can't function because you're being created by somebody else. And then I also think a lot of what you're saying ties in with some of the work that we've been dancing around with lately around Marshall McLuhan, that the medium is the message and a lot of that environment that's created and the technologies that created. There can be a high level of interaction where we're learning and we're gaining more perspectives that allow us to have sort of that flow of thinking, but then there's also the very dangerous risk of being cut off from the cosmos, you know.
Ponch Rivera:I want to build on this. I'm going to build on this, mark. What Sam just shared with us is necessary for flow states, for being in the zone. Right, so being present is critical to all that. Complete concentration. Right, you need that. Clear goals, autonomy. You need feedback from the system and the only way to get feedback from the system is be connected to it. Right, and I think that's clearly articulated by Sam and what you just brought up Warfare. You have novelty, you have complexity, risk, unpredictability true, in anywhere we operate now, in business or just day-to-day life. And Sam brought up technology. So being present, I think that's what we're going to get out of the book of five rings.
Ponch Rivera:I think that's what the OODA loop really tells us is, in order to be aware of what's going on, we have to have and Sam brought this up, he was a warfighter first. He learned the tactical side before the philosophical side, so he had that implicit guidance, control. His body knew what to do, he was trained to do that, but it's that implicit guidance and control that gives us the ability to be in a flow state. Right, you can't be learning on the job per se. You can't be out there learning how to use a weapon, you have to be proficient at it before you get out there. Same is true with team science.
Ponch Rivera:We talk about that quite a bit. You can't just go out there and try to figure out how to work as a team. I mean you can, but that's a waste of energy. Why not learn ahead of time? So that's a lot of lessons that SEALs and aviators have really brought to the business community is that ability to learn how to work and operate as a single unit, as a team. So I think there's so much more that I just learned from Sam and what he experienced reading the book of five rings that connect to flow, flow states being present, things that we're missing out on because of technology, because we're context switching, because we're going after that dopamine rush. So, sam, thank you for that. I never heard that aspect of Book of Firebrings before and I think there's so much more to pull from that.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, yeah, Appreciate it. That's awesome about the flow state too. It's an ancient concept that's against, one that was normal for most of human history until things no longer required us to be in a flow state and like. That is a beautiful luxury we get to enjoy, because some people get to then pursue a flow state and whatever they want whether it's writing or reading or business or whatever but then it's also incumbent upon you to do that. Many people don't have that necessity and they never even know what it is to be in a flow state. That is like. One of the major challenges of our time is how do we get people especially if you start talking about universal basic income or AI taking jobs how do you instruct people to do something that they give a damn enough about and find interesting enough to get into a flow state on a daily basis on something productive? That's going to be an interesting problem to tackle.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so now we're talking about group flow states as well, and I was mainly looking at the individual flow states. Now we get shared goals. Right, we were going to move from autonomy. We have to be familiar with each other. We have to blend egos, and some people will argue and I'm one of them that blending egos is like creating that psychological safety, removing fear in the organization, creating the ability for anybody to speak up, finding equal participation, giving voice to people.
Ponch Rivera:Right, these things I think you experienced on the teams, right? I mean, that's how you operated almost every day, right? In order to do that, you have to have these types of triggers within a group, and we know this because, as we study group flow triggers, they're essential for again tackling those high consequence environments where we find novelty and how we create innovation. So you know, my question to you, sam, when you're looking back at this and reflecting back your time in the teams or maybe you can do that now is this is what I'm saying does it resonate with what you learned in the teams and what you know? When you're reflecting back on that now? Is this really where you're pulling this from and making the connection to not just Masawi, but to Boyd as well?
Sam Alaimo:I want to answer that question, but you said blended ego, which I've never heard before and I dig it. But I want to make sure I know what you're talking about. Can you define blended ego?
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so let's in the art and science of debriefing. If you go back to that, when you enter a room and it's time to do a debrief, it's nameless and rankless. We take all that off. We're blending our egos. Maybe there's another way to say it is ego dissolution. We're losing those egos when we go into a group setting to understand what happened from multiple perspectives and if you think about like, let's see, we'll talk different modalities here yoga, mindfulness, even psychedelic assisted therapies what you're doing is you're pushing that ego down and you're getting access to more novelty within your space. You can see more right. So that's what we're trying to do when we blend egos or dissolve them within a group or create that psychological safety.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. I think that goes in the form of isolation of the self and others. And if I go back to the SEAL teams, it's almost impossible to have isolation of self from universe, like when you have a grenade thrown at you. It becomes very clear you're part of the universe. Unavoidable, it's almost impossible to have the isolation of self from group. This, this blended ego, you'll never make it into the teams. If you can't do that, if you can't strip away who you are and then participate in a debrief and say, hey, I fucked up x, y and z. Here's how I did it, here's what you can learn from it too. I won't do it again.
Sam Alaimo:That requires a severe tamper, like a serious tampering of whatever's built up in you to resist that, and it ties you closer with the group, especially when everybody reciprocates it. But in that kind of environment it is possible, from what I've seen, to also have the separation of self from self. So it's kind of strange. You could be in that tight-knit group, be completely one with the universe, almost musashi mode when you're on a on a on a mission, completely one with the group, to the point where you don't need to speak. We can clear an entire village or inside of a building without saying a word, just with body posture, just with how tense you are on your knees or the direction you're pointing your rifle or the movement of your eyes.
Sam Alaimo:That is a magical thing. Like I missed that so much. It's not even funny. But at the same time you can still play games with yourself and I did it with myself. I know everybody does it to a certain point. I don't know why that is, you just made me think about it with the blended ego. So you can blend your ego and merge with a platoon of 16 guys, but at the same time there's sometimes a barrier between yourself and yourself where you never really admit it.
Mark McGrath:That would be fun to think about for a while. Sorry, that was a different tangent, but that's what I got. That's the point of this show, sam is to learn and to think and to do exactly that. This is what Ponch and I do. I know that you do too, so I thought we'd have a great conversation. I mean certainly-.
Ponch Rivera:Let me, let me. I want to go back on this. So, if I'm hearing you correct, sam self with others, self with the universe, can exist without self with self. Okay, I buy that. I buy that.
Sam Alaimo:Think about it. I'm going to like have to think about it when we're done with this podcast. I never thought about it this way. But a lot of guys who I'm only speaking about the SEAL community, because that's the only one I know, it's the only one I was in. So, if I forgive me for the like not talking about all the units, but like Hell Week, like my buds class, we had like 250 guys at the beginning of what's called indoctrination and then about 40 made it through Hell Week.
Sam Alaimo:And it makes you wonder what guys made it through and why. And I was stunned how many guys made it through who had some sort of trauma earlier in their life, especially in childhood, and a lot of those guys were driven by that insecurity or whatever that trauma happened to be and never dealt with it. So that trauma gave them the power to make it through a hell week type situation for whatever reason. It gave them the power to excel in war. But what we're learning now, when people come back and they start realizing, how do I transition back into the civilian world? How do I deal with everything I experienced over there?
Sam Alaimo:That was good and bad? And a lot of guys are turning to psychedelics, and the fascinating thing about these psychedelics I even did a trip down to Mexico with this group is when these guys are having these psychedelic experiences to try to navigate what they think they're dealing with from combat. The vast majority of what comes up from the psychedelics is from childhood, not combat. Yes, and that makes me wonder how deep is that gulf between the self and the self in these extremely high performing individuals that is only opening up now?
Ponch Rivera:This is great, sam. So I don't know if you know this, but one of my good friends is running one of the houses down there in Tijuana right now. So I'm very familiar with many of the organizations that are sending our veterans down to Mexico for this. So let me give you some insights here and, I think, our listeners too.
Ponch Rivera:One of the reasons we talk about the free energy principle and active inference on our podcast is because that comes from the entropic brain hypothesis. It comes from Steven Kotler's work in flow and flow states and in search of Superman, the art of impossible stealing fire, how to change your mind the book that came out about four or five years ago. It talks about this thing as well. And when you talk about blending egos, what we're doing is that rigid, the way we perceive reality. Right, it protects us to that, and within OODA loop, it's implicit guidance, control that moves from orient back to observe. That's that pathway there. But if you get it, if you find something that suppresses that, you get access to more novelty, and that novelty could be something in your past that you've just been suppressing forever, and that's where a lot of this is coming from.
Ponch Rivera:What you said about maybe there's a correlation or connection to the guys that make it through buds that they may have had some type of childhood trauma that's been suppressed in their subconsciousness or consciousness. However you want to look at that and again, I'm not saying we're doctors or anything, but this is what we've been learning over time on our show is that it's there right and that may actually provide the purpose for doing what they do right, for going out there. It may emerge into things like I don't want to get too, their behaviors as adults, the drinking behaviors, the higher rate of divorce in our communities, that type of thing right. All these things could be contributing factors and not the fact that you're an aviator or you're Navy SEAL. It's what happened to your background. Am I not reading that correctly? I've never heard this before. This is just fascinating to me that there's something going on in the subconsciousness with the guys that are trying to become SEALs that actually propelled them to become fantastic operators.
Sam Alaimo:I think that's a phenomenal summary. I think that's it.
Ponch Rivera:Okay.
Sam Alaimo:I don't know if like universally, that's it, but from what I've seen, the majority of the cases after the military are trying to navigate. All right, something's not quite right. When I got out, what is it? It's deeper than just hey, I went to war. I did 12 combat deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. A lot of times, after this deep work has been done, that's looked back. That is the greatest experience of my life. War was even for me personally, the best experience of my life. The things that that that get to me, the things that I still spend time thinking about after having digested all these experiences, came, came before the war. So I think you're right. To what extent that gulf between the self and the self that happened early in life influences their, their drinking or their, their success with relationships or not, their performance in war or not, their performance in a group. I don't know. I'm assuming it's probably significant, but that would be worth a study right there. That'd be worth a book.
Ponch Rivera:Actually, we were kicking around an idea of using a sensemaker capability scan from Dave Snowden into the psychedelic assisted community community and I think this is something we need to look at. Is that childhood connection? So I thank you for that. That's a phenomenal connection, thanks.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I think I mean let's just use a common example Like you ever read Goggins' biography, can't Hurt Me, david Goggins. But to your point about childhood trauma, I mean good Lord, I mean the descriptors of his upbringing that he has in that book. It almost seems like anything that he's going to face after that is. You know, those things are forever embedded with him, that he's able to negotiate all the challenges. And I want to say that he went through hell week three times, like he got rolled back twice and he completed hell week three times.
Sam Alaimo:That's not good for your. That's not good for your body.
Mark McGrath:Well, no, and he's still doing. You know the crazy stuff that he does that you see him doing all the time. But, um, but I do wonder that that role of uh, of trauma, is interesting, though you know there is a lot of study on trauma that it's. These are things that we construct in our head. The book that comes to mind is the courage to be disliked. If you've ever read that and I can't pronounce the author's names they're from Japan, but basically it's an Alfred Adlerian approach to psychology. It was like the top-selling business book in Japan, forever the Courage to Be Disliked. But we can skip that one for now. How many people made it all the way through, sam, when you got filtered all the way down to the final BUDS graduates? What was the beginning to the end? How many people?
Sam Alaimo:It's hard to say. What happens in BUDS is a certain number of people, just from injuries and overuse from Hell Week, get rolled back to prior classes. But like mine I think it was about 250 at the beginning of indoctrination About 40 made it through Hell Week. I think like eight or 10 of those ended up having to roll back from Hell Week. One guy had like horrible cellulitis. I got a broken leg. That's just standard stuff. I think. Out of like the 250 who actually stayed without getting rolled back and ended up graduating from BUDS six or seven months later, something like 20, 20, which is a sub 10% pass rate, and then out of the you know, out of that maybe, maybe 10 or 15 more ended up making it through in the next couple of classes.
Mark McGrath:And those 20 were. Were they in your assessment? Were they the strongest and the fastest and the toughest, or were they the ones that had they were the most mentally together, the most morally and mentally together, that that had the desire and wanted it more than the ones that didn't, you know, tap out or ring out?
Sam Alaimo:or wash out. I would say neither. I wouldn't say that they were physically or morally or mentally superior. I never would have, in a lineup, picked who would have made it out of that entire lineup. I didn't. When I looked at a lot of the guys I'm like how the hell the hell am I going to make it? When I saw guys quitting along the way, this guy was a monster. He was 5'9", 195 pounds, pure muscle, college linebacker, just like a specimen, like a stud, and he quit on day two.
Sam Alaimo:And it kind of reframes your mind on what is it that gets people through and what doesn't. And they've tried many different types of personality tests the Myers-Briggs, you name it. They tried it. None of that picks who's going to make it. They've built a pre-BUDS training program in Great Lakes, illinois, to get people into bootcamp. Go to this thing where they have these professional athletes, former professional athletes running this program to get you in the best shape of your life Swimming, running calisthenics like prepare you for carrying a telephone pole and having a boat on your head. It didn't. It didn't change the pass rate. Like there's something internal in the head that enables you to get through it or not.
Sam Alaimo:And you said something before about Goggins. I don't know his story, but it when I talked about the guys who had the childhood trauma that isn't like a a woe is me kind of thing A lot of times that childhood trauma prepared them to be able to do, endure whatever it is they came across in life. Because to your point, it's a matter of perception. It could have been a somewhat minor incident when you're a 13-year-old, but as a 13-year-old it was an existential crisis. And if you're able to overcome that crisis in your head, what is a little bit of cold and what's telephone pole and what's? Uh, someone screaming in your face, hey, fucking quit, it means nothing after that. So there's a lot of good that can come from that too. So any some good thoughts coming up?
Mark McGrath:this is good yeah, and it seems to be that that structure, that approach, um, which I told you on your podcast is, you know, the marines and the seals. I think that we have a lot, a lot of synergy and a lot in common. You guys just take it even even further. But I think that that is reminiscent of the types of things that you talk about from classic warrior cultures, from from the ancients, whether they're samurai or whether they're Greek hoplites, that this more or less was a was, was a, a broader part of our culture, rather than now, where there's very few Marines and SEALs, there's very few warriors. It was just a different approach on how we function in our world. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Ponch Rivera:Hey, sam, I got a zinger for you man. I don't know if you have an answer for this and this is kind of some recency bias for me. John Boyd writes quite a bit about mind space time or mind time space, and one of the books that he read and I have in my hand is the Tao of Physics, right here, right, and it's about the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. One of the chapters I was reading this morning I was communicating with Mark about in that space time. Have you had any time to reflect on what that means? You know we're talking to space as far as the space between things, how the interactions, strange entanglements and things like that and the idea of time from your time in combat and what you're looking at now.
Sam Alaimo:Space time you mean like the fabric of the universe and time dilation, or are you talking about something a bit more surreal?
Ponch Rivera:That's right there. You're right on it. Have you been thinking about this at all? What does this mean? What did you experience in warfare or combat that really made you realize that things are connected and that maybe time is really a construct? And if you don't have an answer for it, that's fine. I'm throwing this out there because Mark and I were talking about this this morning.
Mark McGrath:This is the mutual learning aspect of the show.
Sam Alaimo:This is yeah, time slows in combat.
Mark McGrath:This is what happens by the way, this is what happens when three lifelong students get together, so in a good way, it's all good.
Sam Alaimo:So is it along the lines of time slowing in combat. Is that a good starting point?
Ponch Rivera:It can be. Yeah, yeah, I mean I just want to get your thoughts on this. We've had Professor Bijan on to talk about the physics of time, how that slows down as we get older. And then when you think about a flow state, you know when somebody's in a car accident they can remember every particle moving around, every part of the car moving. That's kind of I don't know if that's really time slowing down or our brain just picking up more sensory signals, but yeah, that's something. That's a start, I guess, again, I don't have an answer and I don't think Mark has an answer.
Sam Alaimo:I'm just trying to do is find how to take that mode of mind that was experienced in war which to me was something ancestral, something that was probably experienced far more often in the ancient world and then consciously bring it up into day-to-day operating today. And I look at, I look at combat. So, like a lot of the books I've read about these, these warriors, I like the, I like the memoirs, I like hearing the firsthand thoughts of what someone had crawling through a tunnel in Vietnam or what someone had walking through the surf on Omaha beach in Normandy. And then even just from my own experience, like I could remember what, what it looked like for a bullet to hit the dirt and then for a little flex of goat shit to fly in the air near me. Like it I could. I could the sound, the feel, and just like the burning sensation in my face, realizing like it's getting hot, time slowed down and things became clear. So it sounds like a horrible situation, but at the same time it accessed something in the brain that feels really good. That like I wish I could replicate right now, every second of every day. I wish I could have that same conscious awareness of all five senses of what it's like to be here right now and then just snap my fingers and have it whenever I want.
Sam Alaimo:So I think about it, I write about it. How do you access that space? And that again is where philosophy comes in. There's a lot of practices you could do. Even something as simple as a gratitude practice, I think, can make time slow down a little bit. When the phone is thrown across the room and the computer is shut and it's possible to just like sit there on the floor and just be thankful for anything, whether it's a prayer or meditation or whatever. To a certain extent you can access some portion of that time slowing down and the appreciation of that present moment. So I do think about it from like how to be a better human, like aspect. I don't get the metaphysics of it, but I experienced it and it's been. It's kind of a mission to try to get that back. Yeah, I don't know where to go with that one.
Ponch Rivera:It's something fascinating no, well, let me try this uh, as the nature of warfare changes and we're going to go towards more uh, machines fighting wars, we, we could potentially take the human out of the the fight. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, it just is or could be. Okay, I'll start here. I think that's a bad thing, right? Not that we want to fight more wars, that's not what we're saying at all. It's just that I think our experience over the last 20 years or so is such that we don't want to see any more war. Right, our generation of war fighters do not want that.
Ponch Rivera:How do we ensure, 100 years in the future, that the next Sam Punch and Mark are not having whatever type of podcast talking about the exact same thing, right? So how do we take these lessons that not just only from our generation, but thousands and thousands of years of warfare? How do we capture them? And I think it's conversations like this. So you know, the open question here is the nature of warfare is changing. You know, are humans going to have that experience that you just had or you just shared with us about what's it like to be alive, right?
Sam Alaimo:I don't know the war in Ukraine. I think everybody in the world is watching that war because that is the pivot towards what people have been talking about and hoping for and fearing this whole time is the transition from humans doing certain jobs to machines doing the certain jobs. Let's just reduce it to absurdity. Let's take it to the extreme. What happens if some I know a lot of people who invest in companies. They think it's inevitable that at some point only machines are going to conduct warfare? Ukraine would send in their machines, russia would send in their machines and then that's it. Best machine wins. I don't think that's possible and like this is a really pessimistic view, but I'm going to stick with it. I think that let's say we did that. Everybody just had machine warfare. It wouldn't stop there like, okay, I beat your machines, give me your land now. It's always, it's going to always come back down to the human element. Um, one, because you're not really going to win anything without taking the people off of a particular land and they're going to fight for it. But two, I think if we actually had machines doing all the fighting, I I do believe and this is a personal opinion that we are inherently violent.
Sam Alaimo:I think our history gives enough evidence of that. We will find one way or another to bring violence back, whether it's in a healthy outlet or not a healthy outlet. Who commits most of the crime in America, for example? Is it the people who came back from war, who know how to shoot and know small unit tactics and have been shot at and have been trained to conduct warfare in a tight-knit group? Or is it people who've never in their life been in a military unit or rolled on a mat doing jujitsu or hung out in a boxing gym? It's the people who've never been instructed in violence who wage the most violence. So if we try to take violence out of human behavior across the whole globe, I think it's going to open up a level of violence that we've never even conceived of. I'll stop there.
Mark McGrath:No, I mean, you think too of the decisions that were made to send dudes like us to places. The people that have made those decisions, what kind of skin that they have in the game? Had they ever been there themselves? Did they have kids that were serving alongside of us? And what's their ability to relate and display empathy towards the you know soldier, sailor, marine? And they're not capable of doing that.
Mark McGrath:And I think probably one of the root causes is the fact that the things that you're talking about, that used to exist within the state where there were more people that were. You know, you used the term barbarian. I think a lot of people weren't necessarily just barbarians. They were warrior, poet, philosophers, I mean. These were thinkers, these were people that were engaged with nature, they understood the way the universe works, and a lot of that has been curbed and curtailed, let alone using the warrior class as a sort of a means to somebody else's end. And again, I think there's a disconnect of the you know sort of the philosophical and the empathetic aspects of this or the skin in the game thing. And you know we're not advocating violence here.
Mark McGrath:As Ponch said, nicholas Taleb, who wrote Nassim Taleb, that wrote Black Swan and Anti-Fragile in the book Skin in the Game. When the CEO was gunned down not far from here in Manhattan, the UnitedHealthcare CEO Taleb's tweet about it was skin's back in the game, you know. Tweet about it was skins back in the game, you know. And it is interesting to think that maybe sort of that pre-state world that you're describing, particularly in the age of monarchies, there was skin in the game because people were fighting over inheritance, they were fighting over land, right like kings were fighting their, their cousins, because they were arguing and disputing over who is what. But they did have, they did have significant skin in the game.
Mark McGrath:And Alexander, where did he lead from the front? Where did a lot of these kings that were in battle, where did they lead from the front Versus decisions being made so far removed from the physical business end of things that you know the three of us have been involved with or seen in peacetime, war and war that they don't have the ability to empathize and understand what it is that's actually being done. And I think that that's again it goes back to this idea how will the people understand the philosophy of it all? How many people are thinking of it? And to your point you made earlier. These, these principles are universal and these have been handed down for thousands of years. You know the things that musashi was operating on, or or aristotle was operating, or alexander operating on. That stuff's all there. Nothing's changed and from a scientific standpoint, we're all still subject to entropy and incompleteness and uncertainty and everything else.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, it's a fascinating thought and I think if we don't figure out a way to replace that as a society, things probably aren't going to look that good. And it doesn't mean it's going to break out into an orgy of violence. It might mean a fentanyl. It might mean more TV consumption. It might mean more social media consumption. It doesn't mean it has to lash out and it could be internal destruction as well. And the violence one is interesting to circle back on that.
Sam Alaimo:I think a lot of people probably wouldn't agree with me. But at the same time, just look at, like popular culture, look at, look at Harry Potter. Would Harry Potter have been written if there weren't Voldemort, who was trying to kill a baby boy, who then killed the baby boy's mother, who gave her life for him and then had a clan of Death Eaters to go after the baby boy the rest of his life? It is inherently violent. Would the Lord of the Rings have been written if Sauron weren't there trying to take over the entire world and slaughter everybody? No, violence is inherent in it.
Sam Alaimo:What about the Hunger Games? Like everybody loved the Hunger Games, that's literally a gladiatorial game to the death of prepubescents or teenagers who were literally stabbing and shooting each other to death, or the same people who like this kind of stuff, oftentimes, who think that violence is barbaric, should never happen. But it's inherent in everything we do, everything we watch. There's a violent aspect to it that draws people into it, and I guess what that?
Sam Alaimo:What I guess I'm trying to say is there is that human fascination with it and to a certain extent that's catharsis, which is good, but sometimes it's going to express itself. And what happens when the opportunity isn't? Maybe what happens when the catharsis isn't there, or what happens when a boiling point is reached where that needs to actually be acted upon? I don't know. It's just it's interesting that violence is such an inherent part in everything we do, literally all around us, even in the, even in the children's stories, and people think that it doesn't need to be prepared for, when in preparing for it, it sometimes makes it less likely for it to actually manifest itself in a negative way.
Mark McGrath:What's interesting? The examples that you gave, like, I think, of Lord of the Rings. I would contrast the two and I would say more Lord of the Rings, less Harry Potter. And I would compare and contrast JK Rowling's experience in life, which I don't know entirely, but I know that JR Tolkien was an officer in the trenches in World War II that suffered and I think he had PTSD and he was gassed. Also the same for CS Lewis. Cs Lewis was another World War.
Mark McGrath:I vet that had been through that and a lot of their writing was reflective of what they experienced firsthand as officers in the trenches, be it trauma, be it the camaraderie. A lot of their writing was reflective of what they experienced firsthand as officers in the trenches, be it trauma, be the camaraderie, a lot of the camaraderie. Amongst the guys in the Fellowship of the Ring you know he's writing about what it was like to be in the trenches and things like that and they also understood abject evil. They had seen the countless slaughter of frontal assaults on the Somme and the Meuse and other places. So I wonder if I would distinguish between the two. But your point's not lost though. I mean, I think you you know the the violent aspect that doesn't go away. I mean, it's just that that's the nature of that's the yeah, the, the tolkien one's fascinating.
Sam Alaimo:He, yeah, true warrior, I mean even samwise gamgee was based off of his like batman, his, his attendant in the trenches, like the loyal country of, just like a noble, innocent type of person who wasn't overly educated, who was just there and dependable on warfare. And you know, he saw that true destruction in the trenches and that is a good equivalent of like you know, let's not go that path. Love the Lord of the Rings. It's like Gandalf, probably one of my favorite characters. He had a great quote later in the book when he was talking to Denethor and Denethor was basically saying you know, I'm the first wall against Sauron.
Sam Alaimo:Like I have Minas Tirith, we stand in the way If we're lost. What happens Like this is what we're going to fight for. And Gandalf came back and said got it, you're for Minas Tirith, but I'm for everything that's good on this earth and I won't stop fighting until every last green blade of grass has a chance. And I think only a man who's been in the trenches the way Tolkien was can truly get that. It's not about one city or one group of people, it's literally a noble fight to the end. And that is so deep and it's so all-encompassing that like that is worth dedicating an entire life to. I think that's.
Mark McGrath:The power of witnessing some of this conflict firsthand gives you a pretty deep view on life do you think too that those differentiations of, say, tolkien and cs lewis that had been through that they also had a redemption quality? Right, there was a redemptive story to that, like there? There there was a. You know, both have been well I. I guess CS Lewis was more outwardly a Christian writer. It's no secret that Tolkien was a very devout Catholic and a lot of the characters, like Galatriel and others you know, represented certain people from theology and forget the religious aspect of it in the capital sense, but in the bigger picture sense that there was kind of what we started talking about. There is meaning, they, they, they, they were searching for meaning and purpose and truth and vision and it was connected to that and all those behaviors and the fighting and all the things that they do serve something that was greater than themselves, with with a redemptive end in mind.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, it's an interesting thought what did Boyd ever discuss? I guess did he ever discuss, from a theoretical standpoint, the value of violence, not saying violence is a good thing, but the value of violence in regulating behavior and giving perspective? Did it ever come up?
Mark McGrath:Well, I'll start, ponch, help me out. But I would say that Boyd's discussion elevated more to conflict, and conflict could take the form of violence, but it wasn't necessarily limited to violence. In other words, violence is an expression of conflict which occurs at so many different levels. One that you might like, sam, is Rules of Victory by Jim Gimien James Gimien and Barry Boyce, and we had him on the show, and it's basically Sun Tzu's rules of victory for life, and he's using the Denmark translation to show that conflict affects us all. Conflict is not necessarily you and me squaring off in a samurai battle. It could be. I'm wearing what I'm wearing today because in Manhattan today is 13 degrees right, and the coat that I selected today. We're constantly making decisions because we're constantly in conflict with our environment, with other people, so it's almost like it's elevated beyond. Now, violence is an expression of conflict or can be a manifestation of conflict, but I don't think it's necessary. I don't think that Boyd was limited in that respect. Would you add anything to that, ponch?
Ponch Rivera:No, you can almost connect destruction and creation to that. You know, sometimes you have to go through those cycles, right Well?
Mark McGrath:yeah and this is also, too, where kind of say what you and I talked about on your show. I mean, this is where Boyd gets misunderstood, because it's only as if it was a linear formula for violence. And it's not Like's, it's an understanding of our operating system, which is used for conflict. From the minute you enter the world for the minute you exit, you're constantly in conflict. Right, it's, it's. It's a much bigger, it's a it's a much bigger thing than violence, which is why there's so many applications beyond war fighting, you know, and we've explored them in business. We've explored them in, you know, public relations and athletics. But both of you have spoken to someone who uses it as a special needs parent with children with nonverbal autism. So these applications are not necessarily limited to violence.
Sam Alaimo:It's fascinating.
Mark McGrath:Because, as you say too, the struggle is where. It's not necessarily external. The struggle is here. I feel like a lot of the Eastern guys are more focused on what's inside of us. The Stoics it's what's inside of us. It's less of what's external to us. Violence is external.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, and even zooming out, I guess, from violence, hardcore engagement. I think what they were trying to get at is, you don't need to be surrounded by a firefight at all times when you can go within and find that same sort of intense focus, ultra focus, not trying to predict a problem, but prepare for that problem, and then there's meaning in that preparation itself. It goes back to, like musashi, the way of the sword, like it wasn't, I have to get into a fight. It was a method of living that allowed him to utilize his mind, to maximize his mind, to make it in tune with the world around him, and he probably got what I'm trying to find, which is how do you live in that sort of combat mindset without being in combat all the time? It's got to feel good.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I think that that's really it. I mean, how many people in the Pentagon think, hey, we could win this without ever firing a shot, we could win this without. We could take the approach of doing something without actually doing anything kinetic. I mean, that's a very rare, that's a rare view, but, like, say, sun Tzu, the best thing to do would be to not have to shoot, to not have to kill anybody and to win without doing that.
Ponch Rivera:I want to challenge that, mark. So right now, if we're talking about violence and warfare, when it's time to go to war, when it's time to fight, you don't want to prolong it. However, our system is not designed to go short, it's designed to go long. Why we have a military industrial complex that is very dependent on ensuring wars take forever right, and that's not the way we're trained as warriors. We're trained to be violent as possible and win a conflict in a short amount of time. So I think we have a conflict here in the US, which is the business side of war, prevents the warriors from getting the job done.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, no argument for me.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I mean imagine, go back to the scenarios that Sam's talking about, you know, in the ancient Greeks and things, and then think about if there was a military you know the Sarissa was the weapon of the Macedonians. I mean, if you owned a Sarissa factory, like right, you know what did you want everybody? Yeah, I want you to invade Persia. Sure, yeah, we'll make more Sarissas. We're going to make a killing. You know I'm in the chariot business. We're going to make a killing in the chariots. Why, well, alexander's going to Persia.
Sam Alaimo:More than you bargained for. Yeah, I agree with that. There's the business. That's right. Where do you want to go from here?
Mark McGrath:Well, I think we're all like now, we're all in this deep pension.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, yeah.
Mark McGrath:Talk about dogs, sam, your article about dogs that brought tears to my eyes Anybody that's ever owned a dog. I encourage you to go on Sam's site and read his article about dogs. Why are dogs important to the human experience? What's the philosophical value of?
Sam Alaimo:a dog. Oh my God, a million ways you can go to that one. One of the pieces I wrote on it was it looks like dogs were potentially domesticated 20,000 years ago, probably in Siberia, and the example that I tried to highlight the essay with was we domesticated dogs before we domesticated wheat or olives or grapes. We literally domesticated another living being that didn't really have a whole lot of utility for us. And when you kind of look at it from a 20,000 year window, the relationship between us and the dog 20,000 years ago is the same then as it is today.
Sam Alaimo:But everything else has changed, the environment has changed, and I'm like when you look at a dog, you're looking at what a human looked at 20,000 years ago and all of a sudden all of the things at least for me, bother me the glowing screens of the laptop and the phone, the emails I have to get to, the stockpile of text messages and missed phone calls and voicemails, having to go to the grocery store, my profession, my worries all that shit goes out the window when you look at that fucking dog. Like the dog makes us ancient, like that's one way to look at it, but like they're incredible, incredible animals because they are literally just pure. They're literally just there to share this one moment in time with you, and nothing else. Like, if I have my phone in my hand, my dog will literally smack it out of my hand with his paw and say, hey, what the fuck are you doing? Like you should be with me right now, and that that's something beautiful in that you could riff on that all day.
Mark McGrath:Well, the, the pain that you suffer when you lose a dog is, uh, you know, you had a quote in the uh, in the article about like living this pain without dying, without ever knowing it, and I I think that the pain comes from the unconditional love that a dog has. And you know, the first dog that I ever owned raised four children. You know, I mean there were, there were four children that came into the family and learned that experience and that value and that, yeah, to your point, I mean trying to think of the oldest dog in the world I think is the Afghan hound that's from Afghanistan, like those are like the oldest dog in the world. I think is the afghan hound that's from afghanistan. Like those are like the oldest dogs. But when you think about it and you look at these ancient, ancient paintings and ancient uh, uh, I don't know carvings or whatever, where are the dogs? Right there with the. They're right there with the people.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, I think those afghan dogs are awesome. By the way, they're beautiful animals. But like going back to your point about losing the dog and the pain of that, the first essay I wrote, I applied an Epictetus quote to it. Epictetus was talking about a child, but the same principle applies and it's one of his most brutal quotes. People read it and they're like God, he's a cold bastard.
Sam Alaimo:But the point wasn't to be cold. He said you know, when you, when you kiss your child at night, you should, you should whisper to yourself tomorrow you may die, and that is that is brutal to think of as as a parent. But his point wasn't to turn your emotions off. His point was to remember the value of what you have right now, and then it won't be there forever. And if you do that, then at the end, when your dog dies or whatever, you could look back and say I truly spent every second with that dog or with that child, fully aware, fully appreciative, fully grateful for it. And he was trying to get ahead of that moment to alleviate that suffering and make sure you kind of took full advantage of it.
Mark McGrath:Well, I want to quote this, the one article how dogs add value to both life and death, because this is the one that really hit me. And again, if you've been a dog owner, I encourage you to go back and read this whole article. That's the one thing people know. They'll get me every time about talking about my first dog. But the dog presents us with a divine dilemma. If I end up well off and can say that I left the world a better place and I found it, I will want the dog by my side. On the other hand, if I end up broken, a failure, I will still want the dog by my side. What then? What more could I need?
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, there's some fundamentals to human existence To me. I look at Carson, my dog, right now. There is a bit of Epictetus, there's a bit of ancient philosopher in every dog. That's basically telling you that same thing every single day think about what matters, remember time is short and keep things in perspective.
Mark McGrath:yeah, I don't see too many people walking around with a therapy cat no, no so anyway. Well, why don't we pause there, sam? I mean we could. I think we could. We could. We could wax eloquent for hours on philosophy. Make sure that we're zeroes in on where we need to go to work.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, wwwwhatthenorg. What then? That was Epictetus. When he was teaching. He would say tiun almost every other sentence which means so, what or what? Then that's where I got the name from it, and it was his method of basically breaking down first level analyses until you finally get to the heart of a matter, finally get to the heart of what's bothering you, what you actually mean, what you really think, what's the point of what we're doing here. So that's it. What thenorg? Check it out, it's free Subscribe, and I do an essay every week.
Mark McGrath:Well, we'll continue to send people your way. I'm a very happy subscriber. I highly recommend particularly those in, say, military and business, because, again, philosophy is so important and you should be weighing these questions out and thinking about these things and, sam, you do a great job of bringing all that to light. So thanks for coming on, no Way Out, and we'll do this again soon.
Sam Alaimo:Really appreciate it. Guys Also really dig your work. Thank you, Thank.
