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My name is Sam Alaimo. After multiple combat tours as a US Navy SEAL, I attended Columbia University for my master’s, and co-founded a company dedicated to ending mass shootings. A passion for ideas and human meaning has underlined everything I have done.

I call this platform What then? after a question Epictetus asked with faintly maniacal repetition: “τί οὖν”. This translates to “So what?” or “What then?” He did this because it forced the individual he was interrogating—or, if there was no one else to interrogate, when he interrogated himself—to dig one layer deeper, to keep asking questions until ignorance was stripped away and the mind was grabbed by its shoulders and shook awake. He did this mercilessly.

It is a practice I bring to bear in my wiring.

But unlike Epictetus, these essays are neither self-help nor instructional. I rarely write about the how. My writing is not designed to go viral on the internet. Rather my loves are the why and the what. Why self-help, self-destruction, civilizational atrophy, and meaninglessness define our age. What the most awake and alive expression of human experience once looked like—and could look like once again.

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Plank Owner

A Plank Owner is a Navy expression to refer to the members of a crew on a newly commissioned ship. When ship decks were made of wood, a Plank Owner would receive a small piece of the wooden plank when the ship was decommissioned after sailing the high seas. A Plank Owner had soul in the game. They were part of something real, new, and daring. This is the highest form of support for What then? You gain access to all pay-walled essays and once my book is published, I will mail you a signed copy.

Let’s get to it.