Keeping Together In Time
This is the No Bell podcast where we talk about how to optimize your technology, life, and mind. We're joined by special operations veterans, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who have overcome difficulty to make it to the top of their craft by staying in the fight.
Rob Huberty:What's your name? Where'd you grow up?
Sam Alaimo:Sam Alaimo. I grew up in Dallas, Pennsylvania, which is Northeast PA, probably 20 minutes outside of Wilkes Barre, probably 45 minutes outside of Scranton.
Rob Huberty:What did you do growing up?
Sam Alaimo:Usually, I would look back at Dallas and say, it's not a bad place to grow up, but not a kind of place you wanna go back to. Middle school, I did I think it was, like, b team football. So So I naturally gravitated to football. I played soccer. High school, I didn't play any sports.
Sam Alaimo:I started working pretty early. I shoveled horseshit for $6 an hour under the table, baled hay for $7 an hour, worked at the mini mart down the street for, I think, it was, like, $9 an hour. So I worked through high school, whatever odd jobs I could. Failing hair is probably some of the best physical fitness I ever I ever had in my life. School was was Dallas High School, you know, couple hundred kids.
Sam Alaimo:Not a big again, not a bad place to go to school. Nothing to write home about.
Rob Huberty:Did you enjoy bailing hay, or did you hate it?
Sam Alaimo:I loved bailing hay. I actually loved shoveling horse shit too. How well could I shovel the horse shit and sift it from the wood grain that it was sitting in and then sweep the floors when I was done. There was something therapeutic about the manual labor. Like, I took some sort of, like, primal joy in how well I could sweep the floors of the horse barn, the corners, the floors where people didn't think they'd look.
Sam Alaimo:And it was just like this innocent joy in working, and I don't know why I had that. And then the bailing hay was just fun because it was sweaty and it was aggressive, and I was throwing them up on top of the loft. And I would I would do it I actually did it for free on a couple of cases just because I I actually like just shutting my mind off and getting after it.
Rob Huberty:Do you think that the meticulousness of shoveling shit, which seems the least meticulous thing that I could imagine, taught you something about what you do today?
Sam Alaimo:I I think so. It it probably it translated to everything in life, I think, and I still have it to a certain extent. It's just a challenge of how fully aware and immersed you can possibly be in whatever it is you're doing, whether you like it or not, whether you think it's impactful or not. Can you be there? And shelving shit.
Sam Alaimo:I was actually there, and I was actually enjoying the process. And if you could enjoy that, innocently as a kid not knowing much better, you could enjoy any of the trials that come after in the military business.
Rob Huberty:So I've known you to be someone who never complains. But when you're young, did you complain while you were doing that? You said you liked it, but I
Sam Alaimo:never complained.
Rob Huberty:That's interesting. What was it like growing up? What was your household like? What was your friend group like?
Sam Alaimo:Family, 2 sisters. Parents divorced when I was about 11. So my mom, my 2 sisters, aunt, 2 female cousins. So it's pretty much just me and women the whole time. They raised me.
Sam Alaimo:They took a lot of pride in raising me.
Rob Huberty:So you're growing up, basically, raised, you know, by females, by women. Were you straight and narrow, or did you get into trouble?
Sam Alaimo:I'd say a good mix of both. I I usually just didn't get caught if I did anything that was weird. But, know, I did get caught sometimes. I got a DUI when I was 17. That was probably the first time I'd ever been truly, truly drunk.
Sam Alaimo:Not like I drank 3 or 4 beers, but truly diabolically drunk. If I remember correctly, the last memory I had was at the the fire pit in the woods, middle of nowhere, like, 30 minutes from my house. And then I remember coming to vaguely as I was being pulled out of my car by the police of my my Jeep that had 3 flat tires. It was I was semi naked. I didn't have my wallet.
Sam Alaimo:And the Vegas thought was going through my head as they were putting the handcuffs on me to run, and then a bigger voice said, don't don't do that. And I had blacked out again, and it came back to you in the police station. So that was probably, like, the highlight of my childhood criminal record.
Rob Huberty:Who bailed you out of the police station?
Sam Alaimo:I called my dad for that one because I couldn't bear the thought of my mom getting that phone call. Why? Because she is the essence of, like, everything that's good in my life, and I didn't wanna put that on her or make her think that she has something to do with that.
Rob Huberty:DUI, 17 years old. Your dad picks you up. What did he say?
Sam Alaimo:He didn't say anything. He was actually kinda smiling a little bit because one of the reasons why I called him, I think he he just looked at it as you fucked up. Deal with it.
Rob Huberty:What does the Alaimo name mean in Dallas, Pennsylvania?
Sam Alaimo:Not much. The Alaimos, historically, when they came over from Sicily, settled down in Pittston, Pennsylvania, which is probably 30 minutes outside of Dallas, Pennsylvania, so there's quite a few Alimos there. That's all my father's side. He has a colorful history with, you know, the mafia. So they were they were pretty big back in the day.
Rob Huberty:Tell me a little bit about that. You've told me these stories before and, you know, kind of family history. How did that affect your upbringing?
Sam Alaimo:It didn't affect it that much. I think that was a a deliberate strategy on behalf of, I'd say, like, my mom to kinda negate whatever influence that would have been. Because the mafia is not what people see when they look at casino, but the godfather. It's not a beautiful institution. It is thoroughly corrupt.
Sam Alaimo:There's nothing admirable about it. It's trading in drugs. It's trading in human beings. There's nothing attractive about that lifestyle.
Rob Huberty:Where did the military come in? Dallas, Pennsylvania is not on the ocean. Where did the SEAL teams enter it?
Sam Alaimo:When I was about 14 or 15, I can't remember the exact age, but when we moved to that other small town outside the area where I grew up in, I I think from the youngest age possible, the trajectory of going from school to college to job, it didn't appetize me. And I I think when I was 14 or 15, what was going through my head was, like, I don't feel like something's right here. Like, there's probably more to this than I'm aware of. School bored the hell out of me. And I I basically did a a primitive Google search, whatever it was called back then.
Sam Alaimo:What's what's the hardest thing you could do? And it it came up with Navy SEALs. And I was I said, alright. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna I'm gonna dedicate my brain and my body to that one overarching goal.
Sam Alaimo:And I I literally started reading every day. I started doing push ups every day. I started running every day. I started getting in the pool, and that was it since I was a little kid. That was what I wanted to do.
Sam Alaimo:I wanted to tie it all together, and I wanted, like, a a a legit brotherhood. I wanted a legit community that would literally go to war with me, that would trust me, and I could trust them from that young age, and that was what that was how I crafted my mind and my body from about 14 or 15. Initially, I tried to go the ROTC path. My mom wanted me to go to college. So I gave that a shot.
Sam Alaimo:I did school for about a semester, and I I quit and I enlisted. I started talking to the recruiter in Colorado, which was weird because I signed up for the recruiter there in Colorado. I got a seal challenge contract, which is basically if you sign that, they guarantee you you get to go straight from boot camp to BUDS assuming you pass your physical test. So when I wrapped up college, moved back home to Pennsylvania, worked out like a madman for the, I think, the 3 or 4 months I had before boot camp, and I had to fly back up to Colorado to go be shipped out to Chicago for boot camp because that's where I signed the paperwork. Describe what navy boot camp is.
Sam Alaimo:Honestly, it's not that vivid to me. I think it was 8 weeks. It was a lot of sitting around. It was a lot of bed making. It was learning the core fundamentals of how to operate as a member of a unit on a ship.
Sam Alaimo:So the whole time, you felt like you're on some fake ship in in Great Lakes. What I did enjoy was learning how to function, like, as a unit. I think there's something pretty primal about, like, when they had you're in a line and you had to pass a bucket to and fro, and you just had to smoothly take the bucket from the person to your left and give it to the person to your right. And there was something beautiful about, like, how simple that was, how fundamental you were. This guy wrote a book.
Sam Alaimo:I think it was McNeil. It's called keeping together in time. And it was a theory that would allow humans to to develop the capacity to work together to cooperate on a far greater way than than chimpanzees ever could wasn't actually the ability to reason. It was keeping together in time. It was dancing.
Sam Alaimo:It was drill. It was singing. It was the things you do with other people that don't require cognitive thought, but that allow you to gel with them and read them and become a member of the whole. And that was kinda what I found at boot camp, which is ironic because Buds is totally separate from that. Buds is radically different from that whole conception.
Sam Alaimo:But that that that particular part of boot camp, I enjoyed the rest of it. So
Rob Huberty:I've heard SEALs say that they would rather do Hell Week again than boot camp again, and a lot of it is because it was so stupid. It was so basic that it was numbing. So I I don't know that I totally agree with that because Hell Week that undersells what it is. But one lesson that I learned, I'm curious whether you did the same thing because you're talking about the buckets and it brought this up. At one given point, we had to go through some series.
Rob Huberty:We had to take ammo cans, and we had to it was, like, 200 ammo cans or something like that. Maybe it was even more. It was a lot of weight. I think it was, like, £40,000 of ammo cans or something like that. Like, something crazy.
Rob Huberty:And there's I think, there's, like, 80 people in a division. And so you try it 2 different ways. 1, you do a assembly line where everybody hands it, hands it, hands it. And the other thing is you walk in a line and you go pick them up, and then you walk out. So what like, you just literally walk the whole course or you just pass it 2 feet at a time.
Rob Huberty:Did you participate in that? I I don't recall. So it's one of those things that almost every box truck I've ever unloaded for the rest of my life, it changed how I unloaded box trucks be because it turns out that the assembly line took, like, triple the time than it did that everybody walks in and grabs something and everybody walks all the way out. So you literally do the whole task, you know, 50 times as opposed to you touch every single ammo can. And I walked away with you have to think things more critically.
Rob Huberty:So you're through boot camp. You show up to BUDS, 19 years old. Typically, BUDS has success rates for a little bit older. All this stuff changes. I was older when I went through out of my college degree.
Rob Huberty:You were probably one of the younger guys in your class. What was BUDS like? What was it like to be a 19 year old going to BUDS?
Sam Alaimo:It was it was heaven. It was everything I thought it was gonna be. Like, I remember landing in California. The BUDS instructors are there with the blue and gold T shirts. The bus was waiting for us.
Sam Alaimo:I remember seeing my first palm tree, and it felt like it it was game on. This was the thing I'd spent up to that point 4 years of my life preparing for. The I remember the blue skies. I remember the bus ride. I remember them fucking on my name on purpose just to fuck with me.
Sam Alaimo:I remember getting there, checking into 618, running over to the mini market to get, like, calories and food and water to get stocked up. I had spent so long thinking about it and, like, mentally preparing for it that it initially didn't meet my expectations. Like, it wasn't the the overwhelming thing that a kid's mind makes it out to be. And it wasn't until, I think, Tuesday of night at Hoegh until it was finally, like, alright. You you did good.
Sam Alaimo:This was where I thought it was gonna be.
Rob Huberty:The way that Buds usually works, you go through an in indoctrination or whatever it is. There's different things that you build to it. You don't just start hell week or anything like that. It's easier and then phase starts and usually phase, you know, that's, you know, week 1, day 1, and then how week is usually
Sam Alaimo:I think I think mine is a 3rd week.
Rob Huberty:Something like that. Right? I I I'm sure it's the same all the time. I don't even know what it is, but, like, the kick in the teeth and you break out is Sunday. And usually, like, people quit.
Rob Huberty:So you're saying Tuesday night. Where was that? What did that look like?
Sam Alaimo:It was after the first hour of sleep. I think that happens Wednesday. I don't know. I don't know. I think you get 1 hour of sleep Wednesday, 1 hour Thursday.
Sam Alaimo:So it it was Wednesday afternoon. There was a guy I forgot to mention after boot camp, I did the pre buzz thing. I was on the 1st class to go through pre buzz.
Rob Huberty:Didn't exist when I went through it.
Sam Alaimo:That was a that was a new thing to try to, quote, unquote, increase the pass rate of buzz, which is ironic. So you you spend 1,000,000 of dollars on a program to increase the pass rate on a program that's extremely inexpensive buzz, and it failed miserably. Just send more people to buzz. Anyway, so that was interesting. The guy who ran that program was a was a master chief, unbelievably aggressive.
Sam Alaimo:And for whatever reason, during my whole week, he decided to fly out and oversee the whole week and be an instructor. And somehow he was there pretty much the whole week. He he was demonic. It was it was amazing. And I remember going to sleep for that 1 hour in that tent, just lay down like a like a corpse.
Sam Alaimo:And then I I woke up because someone kicked my foot. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He looked in my eyes to make sure I was still alive. My pupils are dilating. And he just looked at me and said, hey.
Sam Alaimo:The fucking surf. So I got up and ran to the surf. And and then we all met in the surf. We were all low crawling on our hands and knees in the surf. Having just woke up from that hour going nonstop since Sunday afternoon.
Sam Alaimo:And he was just walking backwards just looking at us like pitiless. And I I actually I almost cried because I was like, I I can't believe that this is actually illegal. How I feel right now is condoned by the US government. And then it was like, that was the full moment. Like, this is this is great.
Sam Alaimo:Like, this was the thing I wanted so bad. This was everything I had right now, a low crawl on this water with this this sadistic son of a bitch right in front of me walking backwards, loving every second of it.
Rob Huberty:The demonic, the pain that lived up. So I think a lot of that you asked me, did you ever think about quitting?
Sam Alaimo:No. I remember all all the guys, like, I had who were who were, like, my friends, they all quit from, like, prebuds and stuff. So I've known them for a few months. And I remember I think it was, Monday afternoon, we were lined up on the berm looking at 618. And for I think it was a deliberate strategy.
Sam Alaimo:That was the first, like, 10 minute block when the instructors left us completely alone. They just disappeared. And we were just standing there on the berm, you know, jackhammering Colt looking at 618, and I saw one of the guys who had just quit standing on the window looking out at us. So I was on the berm was 20 feet high. He was on the 2nd story, 100 meter gap.
Sam Alaimo:I'm standing here shivering. He's in the window, and the look in his face was, I I can't believe what I just did. I'd rather be out there.
Rob Huberty:He got the puppy dog eyes.
Sam Alaimo:It was huge puppy dog eyes. I think it was even a Snickers bar. And I was like, man, I'm not quitting. Like, that was the vaguest moment I had because, like, it must have felt nice to take that hot shower, but no.
Rob Huberty:I would never eat that Snickers bar.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. I'll I'll take this any day.
Rob Huberty:Very interesting. So the I think few things in life live up to expectations. Did BUDS ultimately live up to your expectation?
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. It did. It it did too because remember the instructor saying, we are leading up to Hell Week and during Hell Week, if you think this is bad, just wait till it comes after. And I was like, no. You're you're just you're you're playing mind games.
Sam Alaimo:Fuck you. Like, it's not gonna be any worse than this. And it certainly got worse than that. I'd say there were moments in second phase when it was worse. We got jogged up twice.
Sam Alaimo:There were moments overseas when it was exponentially worse than anything Buds could have thrown at thrown at me.
Rob Huberty:I think a misnomer is that BUDS becomes a gentleman's course after a hell week.
Sam Alaimo:That was a misnomer. That is a definite dilemma. Think it too though?
Rob Huberty:Do you think that, like well, now that I've done this, I have the respect. My class was, I think, like, 350 because they skipped a class and they they were trying to do, like they skipped the winner one and whatever it was. So it was a very big class. And I think that we finished and we were, like, 60. Like, it was way low, and we ended up graduating, I think, in the thirties.
Sam Alaimo:During Hell Week, like, people the things people tell themselves to make it through are remarkable. The dumbest things that you think would mean nothing. And to me, it was to get the brown shirt. Until you make it through Hawaii, you wear a white shirt, and then the brown shirts are post Hawaii people. You think, like, that's the next level of status.
Sam Alaimo:I wanted that brown shirt, and I wanted to move back into 618. So there's different buildings you live on in base. I love 618. I was living in a small room on the beach of Coronado that was paradise. Those are the 2 things that kept me going, which sound ridiculously stupid.
Sam Alaimo:But, like, in the moment, those are the meaningful things that got me through through. Your point about more difficult after, though, no. And I I honestly I honestly question the wisdom of that because SEALs have a an obsession with making things harder. The harder, the better. The more you beat them, the better.
Sam Alaimo:And I almost wonder if if it would be a little bit better to keep them humble after whole week, but not obliterate them in 2nd and third phase because 6 months is a is a massive deficit to come out of. It could take years to recover from that properly if anybody ever does.
Rob Huberty:I actually thought I was gonna get rolled during Hell Week. Like, my legs were balloons. So, like, my legs were so swollen. So I've heard people talk about skin grafts, and I I was very close to getting skin grafts. And, like, I had to go to medical and walk week for me was profoundly difficult because I was really messed up.
Rob Huberty:And I was like, there's no way they're gonna make me continue. Like, I'm gonna get roll. I made it through, but they're gonna roll me. And then they didn't. And then I had to, like, go do a 4 mile timed run where I thought I really couldn't, like, walk.
Rob Huberty:Yeah. Like, the I they do wheelchairs now, but it took me something like an hour and 45 minutes to walk from 602 to 618, which is about a quarter mile. So Buds more or less lived up to it. Did being a Navy SEAL live up to it?
Sam Alaimo:Some of the best moments of my life in the teams, I'd say that the brotherhood lived up to it. The obsession with the mission lived up to it. Many of the experiences overseas lived up to it without a doubt. It was a perfect no. And if Aura wouldn't be as good, I think.
Sam Alaimo:It it was scrappy. It was figured the fuck out all the time. If you didn't have the money due to an evolution because the armored vehicles couldn't get there, you ran around pretending you were in a jeep doing maneuvers. Like, you just kinda figured it out.
Rob Huberty:Get in the helo van?
Sam Alaimo:That's right. You get in the helo van, drive around your your van as if it's a helicopter to complete the evolution. There was something there was something beautiful about that. I would say, yeah, focusing on tightness to the community and then actually putting those skills to work overseas, that did live up to expectations.
Rob Huberty:What, if any, lessons do you have from Buds? Is there anything that was profound that was learned that changed you as a character other than it was really hard? What what is there any takeaway from Buds that you remember to this day that you apply, perhaps the way that shoveling shit did?
Sam Alaimo:I wouldn't say it was a a takeaway. It was more of a confirmation. The clearest moment I have of buzz was Wednesday night of Hell Week. It was the last surf torture. So you know there's gonna be, like, 3 or at least there were at the time.
Sam Alaimo:This was the last one, and we were linking arms, you know, shivering. Beautiful, cold night. And the the moon it was a full moon. I remember looking at the moon before we were walking into the water for our last one. It struck me that this moment was, like, absolutely flawless.
Sam Alaimo:It had pulled everything out of me to the point where I had exerted every ounce of effort. I knew there was nothing left I had to give. I knew the people I was doing it with dug it. They were going through the same thing I was. And to be there under the moon with that cold water and that circumstance, knowing that, like, at this point, no one's gonna quit in a week, like, I kinda, quote, unquote, made it despite 2 more days of misery coming.
Sam Alaimo:Like, that's inside of me now. So whatever came after buzz, like, that image of crystal clear perfection is is there. No matter how bad it gets, you'll always have that internal, like, fortitude, I guess you can say, even up to the moment, I suppose, when everything goes wrong and you're you're near the end, like, that that's the sensation I'm going to have. That that was good.
Rob Huberty:What is it like chasing the fight?
Sam Alaimo:It's the best thrill I've ever known in my life, especially, like, the direct action one was one thing, but the VSO, the build stability operations.
Rob Huberty:So define these. Direct action means what?
Sam Alaimo:Direct action means killing or capturing specified individual or group of individuals. VSO, village stability operations, was you basically drop into enemy controlled territory. And working with the locals, you establish security governance and development. You help them build their own little police force, help them get their economy up and going. You live with them.
Sam Alaimo:You share their their life. 2 radically different challenges. There there was something to be said for the direct action. That was, like, bread and butter seal stuff. The VSO was different, and I'd never felt more engaged and more alive than knowing that, like, just over there, right in that green zone by the mountain, 247 was a group of people who literally just wanted to cut my head off.
Sam Alaimo:Like, that was truly motivating. It was pure. Because it was it was almost like back to the pre state hunter gatherer days. That was it. You just had to eat.
Sam Alaimo:You had to train. You had to fight for those around you and get the mission done. I had never slept better in my life. I never felt more clear in my life. It was just hunting, like, on a on a grand scale.
Rob Huberty:So you're saying that that was more in the VSO?
Sam Alaimo:I had that more in the VSO. Why? Because you you were constantly in it. Like, I didn't shower for 4 months, and I was sleeping in a tent with 20 other guys who reeked. And your weapon system had to be up because he could be attacked at noon.
Sam Alaimo:He could be attacked at 2 in the morning. You had to make sure the generator is running if you wanted to have any sort of electricity. You had to make sure the batteries are constantly charged from the generator for the communications. Your whole life was dependent upon you just being aware and going through the basics and shoveling the horseshit. And there was something beautiful about that that necessity.
Sam Alaimo:Everything you did was a necessity. There's nothing frivolous about it.
Rob Huberty:I think it's interesting because I think most people and it it's always gonna be deployment dependent. Right? The direct action is the thing that I think that people wanna do. The VSO is a little bit more of a green beret thing than it is a Navy SEAL thing.
Sam Alaimo:So look at it from a knuckleberry perspective. I liked it for the experience. I don't think that it was an a wise mission set. It didn't work in Vietnam. It hasn't literally worked anywhere.
Sam Alaimo:We've ever tried it, especially because we weren't trained for that. That wasn't our our bread and butter. That was, like you said, we
Rob Huberty:were right. Action. We were built for direct action.
Sam Alaimo:So we
Rob Huberty:And and marathon.
Sam Alaimo:We figured out ways to implement direct action into VSO. So in the day, we were conducting the the hand holding missions. At night, we were doing the assault.
Rob Huberty:What was, like, the best day in the field teams?
Sam Alaimo:The best day? Probably some of the missions. Some of the schools freight, though. I mean, I I loved I'm not gonna name names, but, like, what or or Buddy who I went to JTAC school with, like, just the time spent with him in JTAC and the nearby cities. I loved sniper school.
Sam Alaimo:That was everything I thought it was. Like, as a kid growing up with the face paint and the Gilly suit and the stocking and the long the shooting that thousands around today, I I loved I loved every second of that. I loved the engagement.
Rob Huberty:It's the worst.
Sam Alaimo:The worst would be the the death, without a doubt. The missions that go wrong.
Rob Huberty:How do you live with that? How does that inform who you are as a person, though?
Sam Alaimo:So we were talking about, September 21, 2010. It was it was my first mission first hour of my first mission on my first deployment. We had a helicopter go down. We lost a couple of SEALs. Adam Smith, Dennis Miranda, Brendan Mooney, Blake McClendon was a support guy.
Sam Alaimo:We lost him. Another guy got injured, still alive, fortunately. But, like, that was the moment, like, when I was up on that hilltop, like, that moment defined the rest of my time in the SEAL teams, and it it made me angry. So, like, for the the duration of the time I was in the SEAL team is what what really animated me a lot with anger. Like, in hindsight, you know, that's pretty destructive.
Sam Alaimo:I think it was a natural impulse. And pretty much everything I did from that point on was just uber ultraaggressive as it could possibly be, and I was shaped more by that experience than I would have ever admitted at the time. That was hard. That was really difficult. That that that made everything real in the most dramatic fashion in the first instant of my first combat exposure.
Sam Alaimo:That was the hardest day for sure.
Rob Huberty:So you said anger. Like, I felt a lot of those same things, and we we were supposed to be a QRF for that, and we didn't they didn't let us go out. Because, like, we're getting ready to get on the helicopter, and it was like, that's it. If I see a person, they're done. And, like, I I didn't know, like, it was a brown ad.
Rob Huberty:It wasn't shot down, and we didn't know that at the time. You know, we're, like, they're attacking us, and, like, they killed, like, my brothers. Like and, like, the people that, like, I love. Like, some of the people that I thought I'd be with the rest of my life that should be in this room with us right now. So, like, somebody had to pull me aside that night and you're like, you need to take, like, 50 wraps off.
Rob Huberty:Like, you're Yeah. You are not going to make good choices right now. And I think to a large extent, they didn't let us go out for that because we were like,
Sam Alaimo:yep.
Rob Huberty:We're gonna kill everything. Like, that's it. Everybody is dying tonight. And they're like, you guys are not the right people to go. It was hard to take, and that that anger was the most of my entire life at that point.
Rob Huberty:Right? So are you angry today?
Sam Alaimo:No. No. I got that out of my system. The combat, the training, the missions, I I definitely got it out of my system. I'm I'm more calm now than I ever thought I would have been able to achieve at any point in my life.
Rob Huberty:Is the Sam that's sitting before me right now the same Sam from even at the end of your career?
Sam Alaimo:No. No. Very, very much different. So I decided to get out. It it was kind of a mix of deliberate and spontaneous.
Sam Alaimo:So like you, I I was, like, gonna go either go to green team, which I was accepted to, or Columbia University for my master's, which I was accepted to in the same month. And during my second deployment, I was kinda weighing those two options. And that was a really intense deployment. And just from the intensity of it from certain circumstances, they went down. Like, for instance, I was on the driving the Bobcat outside of a little VSO, and I I, you know, I was talking to the the c 847 to come drop off the goods.
Sam Alaimo:Like, alright. Come on in. He was coming in from the north. I'm like, you probably shouldn't do that. You usually wanna go uphill in your land so you don't crash into the base.
Sam Alaimo:He said, no. We're good. So I I turned the bobcat around, and I'm waiting because the the dust is coming. And then I I hear him getting closer and closer and closer, and I start getting a little worried. And then the propellers are above my Bobcat, probably about a foot above the middle of the Bobcat.
Sam Alaimo:And then I hear an explosion as he crashes into our base, hits the grenade launcher. I figured what it's called. That was our base security.
Rob Huberty:The ALGL.
Sam Alaimo:The ALGL.
Rob Huberty:It exploded. Grenade launcher again?
Sam Alaimo:That exploded. The propellers went everywhere. They nicked a buddy of mine in the shoulder. I drove the bobcat out of that that shit storm, and they tried to blame it on me. Like, it was just like a minor dramatic thing even though you crashed the helicopter in the prior 6 months.
Sam Alaimo:So I
Rob Huberty:was in I remember all of this, and I was not there. Literally, I've never heard that, like, the guy in the bobcat was a problem, like, the,
Sam Alaimo:you know because he said I I called him in from the north. I'm like, dude, take
Rob Huberty:a fucking
Sam Alaimo:black box, bro. So I was like, you know what?
Rob Huberty:That was daytime too. Right?
Sam Alaimo:It was middle of the day. And I I sent the email that day. I'm like, alright. I I accept the offer at Columbia. I'm good.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, wow. Yeah.
Rob Huberty:I didn't I've never heard that story from you. Yeah. So here's here's a question. You told me that you went in without a college degree, and then you just told me roughly, you know, 6 years later you did, how did you get a college degree?
Sam Alaimo:Military is phenomenal with education if you're willing to, like, lose sleep for a little bit. So I did it's called tuition assistance, or it was at the time, where if you want, they'll pay for your credits at a online university. Or if you're based somewhere in land, you could do an in person school. So I maxed that out. And then the Navy Seal Foundation, phenomenal organization, they gave me extra money to expedite finishing my degree.
Sam Alaimo:So I was doing 5 semester years, 3 or 4 classes per semester on top of the workups or on the deployments. So I was doing that to max out my bachelor's degree on top of studying for the GMAT to get into business school. And I managed to wrap up the GMAT and the undergrad leading up to that second deployment.
Rob Huberty:Where did you do the school?
Sam Alaimo:University of Maryland had a really good online program, so I did political science. Really interested in the politics, international affairs, why the wars break out, justifications for them, different government types. Really, really enjoyed studying it.
Rob Huberty:What was it like getting your degree while you're doing a work up and why, like, life is on the line and all of those things and doing American government, you know, 201 or whatever it is?
Sam Alaimo:It it was cool for that reason because I got to tie in the academic understanding of what it is for to be a country going to war to justify the war, the different stuff popping up popping off in the Middle East. But I would say I may have done it a little too intensely. If you do that much school on top of preparing for war, it it I think it it strained me a little too far, a little too far to the point where both were slightly degraded. It would have been optimal. I think that maybe cut the academic in half, but that's the hindsight 2020.
Rob Huberty:How long from driving that Bobcat were you sitting in, you know, whatever it is. It's, like, close to Harlem. Right? Like, Columbia?
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Morningside Heights. So I'd say 2 months after I got back from that deployment, I was sitting in class at business school in Manhattan.
Rob Huberty:What was that like?
Sam Alaimo:I would say it was actually harder than the teams for a number of reasons. I didn't realize what I had in the SEAL teams until I lost it. I didn't realize how important the brotherhood was to me, how important that network was, how important literally the guys you were with would fucking die for you. And I went from that to Manhattan. I didn't have any continuity.
Sam Alaimo:I wasn't married, didn't have kids. I didn't know anybody. And it was like my my soul had just been ripped from my body. And I dealt with the same thing everybody does where there was now, like, this entity in my head called the teams, and they were judging me. And it was like this concept that was watching everything I did and saying, you know, you you fucked up.
Sam Alaimo:You you got off the freight train. You should still be in the fight. And so there was, like, a heavy measure of kill. Even though the war was dying down, it's one of the reasons why I got out. And then on top of that, I was dealing with some health stuff that I didn't even realize I had at the time, which was which made it diabolically harder.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. That whole period is difficult because everything that began that day I got out of the military, that that vacillation between, I'm I fucked everything up, or I think I'm on the right path. We want to do everything we can to be in the fight with those guys, especially when it's bad. And to think that you're voluntarily leaving that and then having to define yourself as not a team guy, but just a guy. Like, I was Sam Alaimo all of a sudden.
Sam Alaimo:Like, what the fuck does that mean? I it almost feels selfish to be Sam Alaimo when I should be a team guy, when whatever I do should be as a member of the platoon. It was a really weird thing, and I didn't I didn't even remotely expect it because, like, back then, they didn't have the awesome programs I have now to help people transition out.
Rob Huberty:So you get out. You're in business school. You're struggling in your health. Tell me about that.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. The health stuff is interesting. So at some point, I got sick on on one of the deployments, and it started to manifest itself as reactions to certain foods. It started with, like, wheat and sugar. I thought nothing of it.
Sam Alaimo:I was in the mindset of the the seal of mind over body. It's just you being weak. Get over it. But that in conjunction with the transition was difficult because I I began to attribute the physical manifestations of autoimmunity with being the result of psychological weakness from the transition. So on top of the difficulty of the transition, as my colon was basically eating itself and it started to impact my heart and it started to impact my muscles and my joints.
Sam Alaimo:I literally attributed that to mental weakness. So not only was my body attacking my body, my mind was attacking my body, which I had no doubt made it worse than it needed to be.
Rob Huberty:How did you learn that it wasn't psychological, that it was physical?
Sam Alaimo:It took years. It took years of it getting worse. I went to see doctors. They they couldn't quite figure out what was going on. One doctor, you could argue, misdiagnosed it in 2015, which if he had caught it then, I probably have avoided all of this.
Sam Alaimo:But he didn't. He he said it was microscopic colitis, which ended up not being. And I know that because in 2018, when I was at the end of my tether and literally thinking, like, I I don't know if I'm going to actually be able to make it through this thing because no one can tell me what it is I'm not eating. I wasn't even able to function at that point. 2 weeks before I went to the Mayo Clinic, a doctor in South Carolina said, I don't know what this is.
Sam Alaimo:Your body's going through something. Here's a cocktail of antibiotics. 5 days into that antibiotics, it was like the clouds cleared. And all of a sudden, my stomach worked again. From that moment on, I stopped getting worse.
Sam Alaimo:So he killed whatever it was inside of me, just a normal course of antibiotics, metronidazole, ciprofloxacin. Most people get that for whatever complaint they happen to have. That was what cured it for me. So when I got to the Mayo Clinic, they did every test for bacteria, virus, fungus, everything you could imagine in blood, in fecal matter, in urine, you name it. And they said, we don't can't find anything in there, but we can see your your colon has post infectious colitis.
Sam Alaimo:There was an infection on my colon for years that was running rampant, and I'll never know what it was because it was killed by those antibiotics. So ever since then, it's been a a a never ending trial and error AB test for me to figure out how to get back to optimal living without taking drugs, without taking immunosuppressants. I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life drooling on myself, And that was where I I did the elimination diet. I basically cut all foods down in 2015 to a few meats and vegetables, and, like, that was it, to get some sort of relief. And then over time, after about, like, a 30 or 45 day period, start replacing each one of those with a different food to see what made me feel good, what didn't.
Sam Alaimo:That took that took years to dial in. I thought it was gonna be a 30 day experiment. I still eat that way. I was down to about 12 foods. I was eating for about 4 years.
Sam Alaimo:So when I got the Mayo Clinic, there was some issues with my the balance of micronutrients in my body because of how weird I ate. But ever since then, I've been able to add foods back. So I got a couple dozen foods now. It expanded my fruit selection. I was able to eat sockeye salmon after that.
Sam Alaimo:Right now, I still have a pretty compared to most people's sport and diet, but I've learned to love it. It's very pure. It's odd how optimized the body can be on that. I experimented with fasting, the 7 day water fast. They got some extraordinary relief from that.
Sam Alaimo:I did a fecal microbiota transplant, which is basically they have these donors that give healthy fecal matter to these institutions. People who've never had antibiotics in their lives, they're they're healthy. Basically, 8 bowel movements or some young girl's fecal matter put into my colon.
Rob Huberty:So you had someone else's poo. Clean living injected to you. So instead of, you know
Sam Alaimo:Correct. To replace the gut microbiota. That was interesting. I did all sorts of stuff, then I got into the mindfulness. You name it.
Sam Alaimo:I've I've tried it.
Rob Huberty:What was your first job out of business school, and what was that like?
Sam Alaimo:Sort of a search fund with our our now CEO, Mike Wave, which is like you you raise a small amount of money from investors. They give you money to find a company to buy. If they like that company, they then give you more money to buy that company. You run it in return for equity. Did that for 2 years.
Sam Alaimo:We just we we didn't end up buying your company from it. I went into private equity as an operating partner and helped run a company, one of their companies in South Carolina. It was a waste management company. They bought it with a couple million EBITDA, and it was a direct and firm confirmation that that was not for me. I needed to get back to working with with guys like yourself.
Sam Alaimo:I needed a noble mission because without that, I struggled to find the point for pretty much anything. As I was dealing with the health, as I was dealing with the transition, the same problems you were with meaningful needed a noble mission. That was when I got the call from Mike about 0 Eyes.
Rob Huberty:So 0 Eyes, I think we've heard everybody's perspective, so why piezores for you?
Sam Alaimo:I thought it was easy, man. They got to work with you. They had to work with Mike. They had to work with Dusty and Tim, the other founders. We got to build a team that aligned with our mission, that aligned with our culture, that contributed to the culture, and it was a good fight.
Sam Alaimo:We were standing outside Mike's house like, is this gonna work? And the answer was it it doesn't matter. It is a good mission, and it's with the kind of people I would do anything to work with again. And it was time for another another good fight. We had no guarantee this was gonna work out.
Sam Alaimo:We put our own capital, our own time into it. We didn't collect paychecks from it. That sacrifice felt pretty good. It was stressful, but it was good. It was meaningful.
Sam Alaimo:It made it even more meaningful. That filled that gap that I was definitely feeling from the transition.
Rob Huberty:So you're an expert in sales and marketing, so you decided to be the expert in sales and marketing for us. Right?
Sam Alaimo:Far from it.
Rob Huberty:Basically, as we came together, we you know, I did I literally did operations at Amazon, but, like, I'll do operations. And, honestly, like, that's probably the the the most military direct one anyway. So it's difficult. I'm I'm won't say that it's, like, easy, but, like, I'm I'm the most familiar probably for all of us, right, where we naturally do that, where I think that the sales thing, none of us spoke that language or whatever. What was it like taking that over and building that?
Rob Huberty:What have you learned?
Sam Alaimo:I get the levers. I get the mechanics. I get the intent. I know how to structure it, but I can't tell you that I know how to sell. Like, I don't think I could sell as well as our best reps can.
Sam Alaimo:What I would say the number one factor is is you hire extraordinarily talented people, and then you bend over backwards to enable them and give them everything they need. And if if you don't know the intricacies of the fine points of marketing and all the diverse platforms you need and how to tweak those little levers and where to place money where and all the iteration that goes into it, which takes a a career of work decades of work to really get good at. You need to find the right people, and you need to enable them. I think that's honestly one of the only reasons I can claim to have any success as a CRO is I hired smarter, extraordinarily driven human beings who are willing to figure it the fuck out.
Rob Huberty:How'd you identify those people?
Sam Alaimo:We initially tried the idea or I initially tried the idea, I'll take this one, of hiring industry pros, industry salespeople that just sold for decades. And while they were able to sell to a certain extent, they were so contrary to the culture that we were building here. It ended up actually causing more harm than good. So that that was that was test number 1, The bouncing off test number 1, I said, alright. What if we take people who have the raw cultural fit?
Sam Alaimo:People who are military backgrounds, law enforcement backgrounds, interesting backgrounds who just cared, who just cared about stopping mass shootings in America. What if we took those people and gave them the rudiments in selling? And don't even call it selling. Just call it educating. We're not selling anything.
Sam Alaimo:We're telling people we exist and then just send them forth into the world to talk to schools and talk to businesses and talk to military bases. That ended up working. So what that means is that when you take this cutting edge new technology that no one has ever sold before, you don't even know there's a market for it. You could assume so. Who do you get to sell that thing?
Sam Alaimo:It's not the people who've just been selling things their whole life and can't wait to get their their on target earnings and make a a a ton of money at the end of the year. You sell it to people who literally are willing to believe for your mission because they care so deeply about it. Because like us, they're also looking for that meaningful thing they could sink their teeth into. They weren't just looking for a job. They were looking for something to care about.
Rob Huberty:Kind of like a a little lightning round. I'll ask similar to what you've asked me. What are, let's say, 3 movies that either changed your life, changed your mind, or made you who you are?
Sam Alaimo:Braveheart, just just epic. Like, you had the plot, you had the fight, you had the romance. The little guy against the big guy, that that was that was life changing. It still is life changing. The one that impacted, I guess, the course of my life would would be tears of the sun.
Sam Alaimo:That'd be the the Navy SEAL movie, which, in my opinion, is the best SEAL movie ever made because it was the bread and butter of the unconventional seal mindset of I I get you're telling me the mission is this, but I'm gonna do this. And they they kinda went through with that. 3rd one. I'd probably go with Apocalypto, another Mel Gibson movie. So that was a beautiful movie because he like, literally in the space of 2 or 3 hours, however long it was, you you go from the transition of pre state hunter gatherers in, like, this lush green rainforest, eating healthy food and fish and telling stories around the campfire to this slow walk into, like, the peak of civilization in Latin America where they were cutting people open and holding their hearts out to the sun god.
Sam Alaimo:And you got to see that that whole human evolution in, like, a matter of 2 or 3 hours in the native language. That was beautiful. It was intense.
Rob Huberty:Alright. Three books.
Sam Alaimo:Lord of the Rings was one of the biggest. I've read it probably every year for the last 20 years. Probably 20 times I read those books. Love them. I would say Epictetus.
Sam Alaimo:I I love the discourses of Epictetus. Probably a weird one, but, like, I read a biography of Hitler by Ian Kirshaw. It was a 2 volume biography of Hitler. And it, like, it was so impactful that, like, it it eroded the quality of my life for, like, the 2 weeks it took me to read it. Like, I I became dark and, like, depressed and hopeless reading about it because it was so deep into his psychology and who he was and what he impacted in the world and how grand the scale was that, like, it it I needed to go through that little mini crucible to understand that this exists, that it really happened, and that it could happen again, that book really changed my life quite a bit.
Sam Alaimo:Humana will be forever changed because of 1 individual and his charisma and his dreams and his ability to communicate to other people, and that was all he had and that was all it took. But to know that and to be able to see those patterns at other points in history, if they may come up in the future again, it's good to know the worst things that could happen.
Rob Huberty:Is there any advice that you have in your life that that changed you?
Sam Alaimo:I would say it would probably be want every single thing to happen exactly as it does happen.
Rob Huberty:Tell me about stoicism.
Sam Alaimo:Stoicism is great because it gives you a general template from which to look at life holistically. And what I mean by that is, like, there's there's 3 ways to break it down. They look at it in 3 3 topics or 3 disciplines. 1 is the discipline of desire. You could think about that as like physics.
Sam Alaimo:Your place in the universe, and, basically, that's where that tenant comes from, accepting whatever it comes that's very passive. Just accept it because nature brings it. The second one would be the discipline of action. So how do you actually act? And they they call that duty, basically duty to yourself.
Sam Alaimo:Do you take care of yourself? Do you eat right? Are you fat? Are you lazy? Are you making yourself a productive person?
Sam Alaimo:And the second part of that is duty to to others. How are you acting as a brother, as a sister, as a son, as a father, as a mother? And the other part is duty, they say, to to God, which to them is nature. How are you acting as a member of a whole? And then the third tenet is the discipline of judgment.
Sam Alaimo:How do you use your brain? So to them, you have sensation. So, like, I see my phone, and then what happens is your brain produces an impression of that. So what my brain says is there's that thing over there that that contains information. It contains emails and Slack messages and phone calls and texts that I have to get to.
Sam Alaimo:But in reality, is that impression real? And that have you turn that impression around and look at it and see what it is. In fact, it's just a piece of plastic, and whatever I'm feeling is me generated. So if I come on to master my mind, you're you're not you're not beholden to any external object anymore. You're gonna be beholden to what you assess the world to be.
Sam Alaimo:So if you look at everything in those three lenses, you could basically recraft, reshape, rewrite your mind and your script in a way that's more productive for yourself and everybody around you. So it's like a it is a beautiful philosophy that is grounded in in reason, in nature, and it gives you a way to live a life.
Rob Huberty:Where can people read your stuff?
Sam Alaimo:It's called what then, which is epiphetist when he would assault his student to say, which is basically so what or what then? And it was his way of getting them dig a little bit deeper, ask another question. Don't stop. Don't stop until he gets to the court. So he would constantly pepper them with what then.
Sam Alaimo:So the the publication is called what then dot org. I just basically try to take stoic concepts and apply them in a concrete way to a real life circumstance, not regurgitating Epictetus, but actually applying it to see what it looks like. Those 3 those 3 disciplines applied to war or applied to a certain thought or or certain failure. That's the mission. That's it for this episode.
Sam Alaimo:If you wanna check out more from the podcast, head to zero eyes dot com slash Nobel, where you can see show notes, read more about our guests, and suggest guests or topics of your own. Until next time, stay in the fight. Don't ring the bell.