95. Strengthening the Defense Industrial Base, Future of Global Combat, and Building Product for Value with Mark Holden (Teledyne FLIR, Shield AI, Axon)

[00:00:00] Mark Holden: Because every day I was on a short call team, ready to bring the prompt delivery of hate and discontent anywhere around the world, because everybody's willing to do the same. And on any given Sunday afternoon, I had a whole bunch of bad guys all trying to kill me along with everybody else in the United States military.

And the dangers were clear and they were very present. And so for me, I knew, and that's all we knew was warfare. And of course, going into forever war and spending 20 years at war, like You just, you don't realize that there are these quick and little skirmishes and that like pro prolong and protracted wars are bad for us.

That was just it. Right. And it was so righteous.

[00:00:35] Brock Briggs: Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast. I'm your host, Brock Briggs, and each week I bring you stories and tactics from the world's greatest military veterans, both of history and of today, all at the top of their craft. The show is going to do a few things for you.

It's going to make you informed about interesting vets, their industries and careers. It's going to get you asking questions of yourself, both personally and professionally. We want to grow here. If you're listening to this podcast, I would consider you part of this community, and I expect that you are looking to better yourself every day.

And if you aren't, then the show and community is probably not for you. And the last piece that this is going to give you is it's going to give you specific steps on becoming more lethal in your life and business. Why we break this down as simple as we possibly can so that each episode you can take something away, learn from it and implement it in your personal life or in your business.

Today I'm speaking with Mark Holden. Mark is a former Navy Corpsman and today is the founder and CEO of Holden, a consultancy business that assists with prototyping, productizing, pricing, and advising in the defense technology space. Expect to hear about the current and desired future states of defense tech.

Mark has worked on the front lines, both from an operational perspective and product perspective, his entire career. So his pulse on the weapons of yesterday and those of tomorrow is incredibly sharp. We talk about what's missing in our defense tech portfolio as a country and the weapons he's excited about.

We get into the state of hybrid warfare, why counterinsurgency is over, the looming threat of China's invasion of Taiwan, and the evolving battlefield as activity begins to play out in the South China Sea. Mark gives us a master class on the most important elements of product management as well. He held senior product roles without any secondary education.

I might add at Teledyne, FLIR, Shield AI, and Axon, and has strong points of view about what it takes to make a great product manager, managing hard tech and defense, coping with military budgets, and importantly, why veterans make great product managers. And lastly, we get into his personal mission, serving after service, why vets need to actively define who they are and how to answer the question.

Who am I when I am no longer myself? This episode is incredibly dense, so you're going to want to set aside some time to work through this. Buckle up, Mark really lays it on thick. You can find this episode as well as the video version, transcripts, other written content to keep learning all at scuttlebuttpodcast.

1. Please enjoy this conversation with Mark Holden. So you were just saying that you are actually pausing all of your business development and going all in on content. Talk to me about What is guiding that decision? What brought you to the conclusion? That's exactly what you need to do. And I guess maybe talk to me about what you're doing to pursue that from like the professional context.

[00:03:30] Mark Holden: Of course. Yeah, I appreciate it. So like any product market fit, super important. And as I was going off on my own as a solopreneur, eventually an entrepreneur to run a small team, trying to figure out where I put my energy in the near, very, very like early phases of my businesses. It's direly important to me after spending a lot of time on the road, engaging with clients, engaging with customers, a couple of things are abundantly clear.

One, people find me on LinkedIn and they could reach out to me on LinkedIn because of my content on LinkedIn. And yes, I found myself in the first couple of months, my first two weeks, two months of my business, just busy with like discovery calls and building the book of business and things like that.

But a couple of things became very abundantly clear as I start to pull the audience of how did you find me? Why would you like to work with me? Well, that kind of stuff, and it's very clear content is king. And as I look towards some of the work, certainly we're doing across the defense industry, I've done a lot of public speaking and things like hybrid warfare.

And I have a line that. It's not the coin, it's not oil, it's not the petrodollar that is the most valuable currency in the world. Attention is the most valuable currency in the world. And when I, when you put that into a small business owner, trying to like break out and become a commonplace in the defense industry, I choose to do that through content.

When I quickly realized that when people see your content, whether it's video, whether it's just me, like posting about a trip, I went to a coffee store or things like this. People see you, they trust you. They begin to start to follow your story. They track and trust your content's one of those things that, Yeah.

Like I may put a killer piece of content out and I may get a couple of phone calls for some new business prospects and new business opportunities going forward, but it's abundantly clear that people who reach out to me have been following me for a year, longer than that. And that people had no idea that we're even following me, reach out to me.

So finally, when they're ready to come off the sidelines and do some business, they reach out to me. And yes, like for the next few weeks, I'm just going to be focusing on a very robust content strategy. I've changed and moved all my discovery calls. I've closed all my bookings for the month and September for me.

And for months of October will just be one generating content, but to generating a viable content strategy. That will really set me off on the proper azimuth for not just incredible growth, but a lot of trust to do some really fun business with some really fun folks in the space going forward. And that's why content for me.

Why now? And I'll be real with you, man. It is, it didn't come naturally. It was one of those things that I've, for those who've been following me for a while, it's just been fumbling around. And of course, like every content creator has the imposter syndrome challenge and the, the self narrative that you keep in your head about your content sucking and things like that.

But. It's abundantly clear from the audience and I hope they're watching this now that like more content helps create a brand people like brands and whether you're employing that brand to help your pricing in your product portfolio for the defense industry, or whether you're buying a pair of shoes or something like that, like brands matter and people gravitate towards brands.

And so for me, like, I've had a lot of great business opportunities, but I'm tracking, I'm tracking the power of the brand. And so for me going forward, I focus on content creation.

[00:06:35] Brock Briggs: It's so funny. You talk to like young kids these days and they like my wife's brother is young or like junior high age, and he's always like drawing what he's going to be when he grows up.

And it's funny because it's like, he draws YouTube. He said, Oh, I want to be a YouTube, like a gamer. Or that's like kind of a. Job category that is like a slightly different than the astronauts and like the firemen that I think that a lot of people around closer to our age or like aspiring to be so it's interesting to see that is Becoming a role that like a job.

What's interesting to me is that. I think a lot of people confuse creating the content with actually having something to create it for people are like, really, that's an aspirational title, but. The really successful creators, we'll call 'em, are actually, they're having something to market already. They have something to talk about rather than, they're just like throwing random stuff at the wall.

And you have, you have a business, you have all of this experience to talk about. And now if I am, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you're now trying to take that. years of experience and put that into a place where people can build trust as, would you say that's accurate?

[00:07:56] Mark Holden: That is accurate. And I'll be the, I'll be the first to say, I was the last person to expect to ever be in the content creation game.

And you hit the nail on the head, even to a fault, People's Republic of China weaponizing. TikTok to diminish the youth in the United States of America, right? You go ask the kids who use TikTok in China, who can only use it in the mornings and the evenings, only can use it for a certain time period of day.

What do you want to be when you grew up? They'll tell you. Be an astronaut. I want to be a mathematician. I want to be an athlete, right? I want to. do something significant in this world. And you ask the kids who again, China uses TikTok in the United States to ensure that those kids get to just focus on silly dance challenges and things like that.

You ask the kids who use TikTok in the U. S. What do you want to be when you grew up? They'll all say the same thing. I want to be an influencer on TikTok. And that there leads into the creator's deliverance. Cool. Can I create crafting, entertaining, enjoyable content for my Audience like, of course I can, but how does that propel me forward as a business owner?

How does that yield anything other than ad revenue? It was certainly the plan. And so for me being able to take technologies that I liked. gear, tactics, techniques, procedures, like soldier systems, things that I've kind of got experience with and I'm relatively knowledgeable about, create something that is entertaining, yet at the same time, take a step back from the satire, take a step back from the entertainment and say, okay, like this is the type of gear that was used during this skit because here's how it works in real life.

Or when you're conducting this type of Operation in the real world, although we may have used it for a skit. Here's the breakdown of the gear that was used. Here's the breakdown of the tactics, techniques, and procedures and the why. And let's, for some of these, the products themselves, like why could I only use this product or how do I make a better product?

How to give a, give my audience an understanding of how they can localize their products, especially for folks in the defense industry for their audience. Cause too often. A lot of these companies, just like toddlers, trying to mash the square peg of a product into a round hole of a market. So ideally throughout these relatively entertaining videos that'll start making their way on the internet, I found an opportunity to educate my audience and establish myself as a voice in the industry to start helping folks achieve product market fit, at least through enjoyable, satirical video.

[00:10:06] Brock Briggs: You were talking about why brand is important. Do you think that brand is more important than individuals? Nowadays, do you think that is, what are your thoughts about the balance between those, because it seems at least to me, there is like a massive shift happening to where people know names more so than like the Nike or the Apple or whatever.

What do you think about that?

[00:10:32] Mark Holden: I 100 percent correct. You look at the breakdown of social media profiles and economics. Like there is like Tim Cook, right? Significantly more Twitter followers or X or whatever, wherever on now, then the company he works for. Same thing, Elon Musk, then the sum total of the companies he works for.

I believe that the brand is certainly important, but that brand can be an individual person, right? Steve Jobs had a very specific brand on the companies that he touched. And I think people gravitated towards the companies that in the products that he worked with, because. Of his general understanding of what you need to do to innovate in that space and how it became a voice of a particular brand, whether it be Apple, whether it be Pixar.

And if you stayed alive or whatever brand he hitched himself to that would find it. But for me as a creator, what's more important than brand is affinity. Right. So I look towards the users and I look at them. Are they, do they, are they just buying stuff because they need to like take shoes, for instance, they need a pair of shoes.

So of course everybody needs a pair of shoes, buy a pair of shoes, but do I have an affinity for the new balances of the Nike use that I'm wearing? Or is there an opportunity for me as a brand to start, or, or for one of the companies that I work with to start challenging the lack of affinity in a particular market space, and to be able to use content to drive.

Fan based drive consumers into a particular brand that they have the opportunity to establish an affinity with. And I believe that that affinity, when, when used almost as the grassroof movements of social media has the opportunity to greatly eclipse any one creator, any one brand.

[00:11:58] Brock Briggs: It's interesting. You see a lot of the big podcasters, YouTubers, there's also this kind of other shift happening, exactly what you're saying.

They are using the affinity for them as individuals and driving them to things, and particularly in instances when they have equity stakes in the companies. I was listening to a podcast yesterday where Andrew Huberman, and I'm sure you're familiar. He has. Uh, stake in Athletic Brains, and then he talks about Athletic Brains on his podcast.

And so then he drives business and says, Hey, go do this. And then that's also like a very capital light thing for him. He just puts money into it and then can use his built in distribution from the podcast or video or whatever it is to make money. You were talking about, Ad revenue being the sole part of that, is that something that you see as material to you, or do you see yourself having more to gain on like maybe partnerships with equipment, reviews, several of the other things that you could have mentioned there that are other than ads?

[00:13:04] Mark Holden: Yeah, no, so while ad revenue is certainly part of the calculus, it is not a main metric or main driver. I believe there's a viewership elasticity at play when you monetize certain media at the source, at the platform, meaning I go onto YouTube and I click on my videos. Yes. Monetize them. Yes. Don't monetize them.

There's certainly an elasticity level where if I do not monetize them, I'll have more, but if I monetize them up to a certain point, I'll have potentially less viewers for me, not here to grab. A couple hundred bucks a month off ad revenue. I'm here to make significant partnerships with other companies that are out there.

And yes, there's opportunity for channel sales through affiliate links and through things like that. But for me, the lion's share of the value in creating content is being able to establish myself as a formidable brand voice inside of this defense industrial base for folks who are. Discriminatory about the professional services in which they employ to make sure that their brand's effective.

And so for me, I'm not going to come out of the gate with a bunch of heavily monetized content. Although I recognize the strategy, right? You talked about Huberman, like Joe Rogan did this with Onnit and heck, Mr. Beast is the savant when it comes to the stuff with Feastables and Beast Burger. And he cracked the nutties.

I can make anybody. entertained on YouTube, but I can now make, now that I have eyeballs, like there's a whole bunch of people without brand affinity on what type of cheeseburgers they buy and what type of chocolate bars they buy, hence Feastables and Beast Burgers started finding their way in. And we saw this with Chicken Loaf and Paul with Prime and energy drinks and things like that.

And yeah, it's like, Hey, there is like a heavily heavy YouTube monetization piece. Like I'm trying to thread the thread, the needle somewhere in the middle.

[00:14:35] Brock Briggs: You've got an interesting opportunity to, as you target the defense space, because when people think of defense. Or at least for me specifically, there's not even a name that comes to mind.

I just think Boeing, Lockheed. I think of the big primes and there's not individuals at least that are at the forefront of that. So maybe that's you.

[00:14:58] Mark Holden: Maybe that is. And yeah, I'm not, I'm not here to contest in a red ocean, right? If this was a very busy brand space and there was a whole bunch of creators, like vying for influencer space, like I probably wouldn't throw my hat in the ringer, but I take a look at a man in all warfares based off of surfaces and gaps, and I look towards the hard, well defended surfaces.

And then I look towards the undefended flanks, and I see an undefended flank in this industry. And I think speed to market super important. So I'm gonna try to get there pretty quickly, but there is certainly opportunity to start partnering with some of these defense players. And as you say, like, there is no one strong brand voice to, uh, to rule them all.

Now, I believe there will be, and certainly in the future, people are gonna start gravitating more and more to YouTube. And I think As the Twitter X saga continues. And as meta starts challenging consumer privacy rights and the stickiness of their brand new social media platforms, like we are at a ripe age where there's a lot of chaos in social media right now.

There's a couple of longstanding brains like LinkedIn and YouTube that will reign supreme over the next few months. But because. We're rapidly changing. I see opportunity because with chaos comes an opportunity. And again, I'm the last person a couple of years ago that I told you that would have ever thought about being content creator or ever focused on a new business through YouTube or something like this.

But for me, it's not, it's like the eyeballs are really important. Being part of a brand name is really important. Seek it more, more, whatever your metrics of performance, metrics of success are, whether that's subscribers or views or followers or things like that. But for me, Good putting out quality content.

I won't monetize it out front, and I'm really just going to demonstrate my past performance and see what, what sticks with brands.

[00:16:32] Brock Briggs: You said that you would have never thought that you would have been going down this road. Maybe now would be an app time, maybe take two to three minutes. Give me like a high level overview.

You've got a crazy long background. We could probably spend the whole conversation on just that, but give me the high level overview. What gets you here? And then we'll take it from there.

[00:16:49] Mark Holden: Yep. Yeah, sure thing. I grew up in New England, come from a long line of aviators. Aviation is certainly a passion of mine.

Joined the military fresh out of high school to help support the global war on terrorism. Spent a short career in the military. My, my, my operational experience could be driven into about, uh, about three different buckets. One, just special operations medicine. There as a, As a medical practitioner, as a Navy corpsman initially with some of the big pushes in Afghanistan transitioned off, going to graduate it up into counter terrorism spend a good couple of years, just crossing names off the kill capture list, along with many who are running the counter terrorism counter insurgency mission in Afghanistan at the time.

From there transitioned off to really focus on some of the technological challenges, more like asymmetric threats on the battlefield and how we as a fighting force can either Bring to bear material or non material tactic techniques and procedures to counter these new threats or what new technology exists within the U S defense industrial base that we can take forward and localize for the United States Department of Defense.

Once my operational time was done, I was very fortunate to have be a part of a number of high growth startup teams have been been part of relatively new teams that have brought brand new zero to one technology to the market. Some of the great products like the RED Skyraider was very fortunate to have a very influential hand on and still see great.

Returns from that product out, out today, been part of some great venture capital back teams. I was VP of product at a company called shield AI, where we were doing some awesome work to put an artificial intelligence into maneuver operations for mainly things that fly everything from small backpackable quadcopters, all the way to putting fighter automated fighter jet fighter, dog fighting behavior inside F 16s and things like that.

And then most recently, we just left as a head of product at a company called Axon. We're doing great work taking the next generation of body cameras, digital evidence management software, uh, the less than lethal smart weapons and bringing them into the forefront of the federal marketplace. And so having transitioned off to, to run Holden, a professional services firm full time in the last few months, I find myself splitting my time between, Denver and Colorado when I'm not on the road and the sum total of my experience, again, we could spend some time talking about it and really available for the folks that I work with, but primarily for the folks that consume my content.

And so that's me and yeah, just appreciate it over.

[00:19:01] Brock Briggs: You have a really interesting personal mission statement, which I think you see the fingers of in all of the different roles that you've had. Talk to me about what that is and why that exists.

[00:19:15] Mark Holden: My name is Mark Holden. I'm here to reduce organic tissue damage on the battlefield.

For me, I, like I said, I come from a long line of aviators. I wanted like, for me, I was destined to be a fighter pilot. By the time I was six, I was running radios and radars in my dad's planes. And by the time I was 12, I was logging some pilot in command time. And by the time I went to go test for the driver's license exam for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I was already licensed and certified some larger aircraft, but, uh, when I looked to When I look forward to like how I was gonna serve the military in its time of need, when the global war on terrorism was kicking off for me, I was just called to support in, in this like medical sense, right?

Battlefield medicine, like the places where the people needed to help the most, I was just called to it. And. I didn't grow up wanting to be a doctor or a paramedic or anything like that. I just, I completely stumbled into the role and I realized very quickly that my mission just became to help people on the battlefield and just help reduce the organic tissue damage and save lives and livelihoods were able.

And so throughout my operational time, I did that. In industry, I focus very much on robotics, both air and ground and maritime robotics to be able to take the dull, dirty, dumb, and dangerous jobs that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Space Force guardians are doing. Be able to have robots do it.

And in the future, I would love to just have a, some warfare where there's just a bunch of robots fighting robots. Right? Metal gear on metal gear would be awesome because that means people aren't dying. And so for me, all the work I did in the military was for that. The, all the work I've done in industry have just really been to push un crewed or unmanned robotics systems into the battlefield to be able to improve the survivability of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines in the battlefield, and some of the.

The work that work, I'm incredibly proud of the work we did at Axon was bringing the next generation of taser to the industry, right? Like less than lethal technology gives our forces options when they may not have many. And when the stakes are high and our adversaries will push our limits overseas, we need.

Options. And for me, the work, my personal mission grounded in the work I was doing over at Axon was to bring the next generation of Taser into the, into the fold and just incredibly proud of that. And while I work primarily with companies that are robotics, they're smart weapons and some of the stuff that I've done in the past, I continue to take that mission statement of reduction or organic tissue damage in the battlefield and just continue to protract that across my, my industry and commercial experience.

[00:21:37] Brock Briggs: I'm sure that serving on the front lines of the global war on terror, you're exposed to a lot of that organic tissue damage and no doubt a ton throughout the GWAT specifically, there were so few casualties comparatively to some of the previous wars that we've experienced. In your opinion, was that still too much though?

And maybe you can give this, give me a history lesson and compare and contrast which working front lines and like, why is that important?

[00:22:12] Mark Holden: Sure, we are trending in the right direction. We're not taking large fields of conventional troops with muskets and putting them against nothing, thousands of people on the battlefield and having these bloody battles.

World War One World War Two, we just saw the same thing, like just said waves of bodies in when you juxtapose Even parts of Vietnam and mainly, mainly World War II with some of the casualties we had in the G WAD. It was pro they were protracted casualties. And they were casualties that would occur when you're fighting an insurgency, you're not fighting a uniformed enemy.

And instead of having an airborne division go try to assault a runway and then for whatever reason they're having a hard they incur a ton of casualties because they were just assaulting this very complex objective. For us, it was like 12 people died today because of a roadside bomb for a war that we've been in for 12 and a half years.

And You know, what hurts more the platoon of folks that died trying to take a very complex target or the folks who are still there doing the clear whole build mission, and then just happen to die because they went along the wrong road when the wrong guy had the wrong trigger finger on the trigger. And so the war was definitely different.

We saw a lot less casualties one because of course, like we're up, we up armored our vehicles and we had IFAX, the individual first aid kit was a huge technological advantage for our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that were fighting GWAT because we had the opportunity to have decent medical care, tactical combat, casualty care on the front lines.

I thought we did a great job as a nation and as a fighting force training. TCCC or combat casualty care, like all the way down to the lowest common denominators on the battlefield. And everybody at least knew how to run, run a tourniquet and some quick clot. And that saves a lot of lives as well. Is it too much?

Yeah, man, it's, it's always too much. It's 12 people die, 1200 people, 12, 000 people, 120, 000. Like it, there's still too many. And I, it's a, it's a lot to say that in coming from the theaters of combat, we Certainly as a functioning member of the defense industrial base, who's continuing to perpetuate the problem, I recognize some of the challenges, but we're getting better.

We're changing in the right direction. Tactics and technology helps, but a world where there's just a bunch of robots fighting robots is what I'm striving for.

[00:24:18] Brock Briggs: You just were alluding to perpetuating the problem with the defense industrial base. That is the, a very common complaint of especially young millennials who.

Like certainly not vets, but people who want to point the finger at the big primes and say, you're the reason why we're in this war. And there are just countless books pointing to this industry that thrives like the on war and makes money and profits from that. What do you think about that? Cause I, I struggle with this in a big way.

It's like, we, we need that. We defense is so critical because our enemies are not sleeping right now. And if we were to just put a blockade on R and D at these big companies, and certainly the small ones as well, that are bringing those zero to one technologies that you were talking about to market, we're going to be behind fast, if not already there, so what do you think?

What do you tell people who want to point the finger at that entity, that big amorphous thing?

[00:25:19] Mark Holden: I'm generally one to point the finger as well, right? Again, I make my living off the defense industrial base, not here to create, commit career suicide by, by calling out the defense industrial base. But we do not have a history of being good stewards of the taxpayer's dollars or the lives and livelihoods of the service members in this industry.

I don't have, I got a seven foot whiteboard next to me. Like I don't have some mad grand plan of how, how the defense industrial breaks is the reason we stayed in Iraq. And for all those reasons, like I, I surely have opinions and, but having served on both sides. Couldn't, you couldn't tell me the defense industrial base was doing anything bad.

Because every day I was on a short call team ready to bring the prompt delivery of hate and discontent anywhere around the world, because everybody's willing to do the same. And on any given Sunday afternoon, I had a whole bunch of bad guys all trying to kill me along with everybody else in the United States military.

And the dangers were clear and they were very present. And so for me, I knew, and that's all we knew was warfare. And of course. Going into forever war and spending 20 years at war. Like you just, you don't realize that there are these quick hit little skirmishes and that like pro prolong and protracted wars are bad for us.

That was just it. Right. And it was so righteous because it was revenge for 9 11 and then WMDs in Iraq. Right. It was like proper reasons. And so when I look back at how we're like the future and really how the defense industrial base may be making some missteps, one, things are getting really expensive.

It like pound for pound, we are losing the fight, an affordable mask. And that's not necessarily, that's not necessarily to say like the entire industry wholesales are doing terrible things, but it's not uncommon. Like you look back at like Apache is a perfect example, right? You look back at these companies that take very specific measures to ensure that the parts are made.

That are like there to keep aging platforms. They're there. They're very expensive. They're incredibly, they're increasingly more scarce year after year. And that this large logistical tail is there to support these products. I think a lot of the problems with the large defense industrial base is their margins, right?

Lockheed Martin, 60 gajillion, 60 billion a plus a year. But like their margin is not what the small boutique firms are running. And so because their margins are so skinny, they've got to squeeze every. Outs out of every contract. Ensure every contract is as sticky as possible. Ensure every option year is executed because the amount of money that they have coming in and profitability relative to top line revenue is very small.

Cause they don't sell on value. They sell on price. They're all back into the price. And I've got a sinking feeling that if these companies can solve for profitability and so on, start selling on value a little bit better, which again, where I try to commend to my business consulting world, like with these companies can start solving on value, not on price, then they have the opportunity to start delivering a more compelling solution to the warfighter, but in turn, something that's more like ideally more capable with.

Well, still being affordable, right? You hear this thing get thrown around. F 35 is awesome. Not, I'm not an aircraft in the, in the world's inventory. I know what that would want to go against it other than an F 22, but two very expensive aircraft. And then we have to ask ourselves the question is, is it, is it one F 35 or like a hundred smaller, cheaper aircraft?

Like we're seeing this smaller nation start to make these tough decisions, but we as a defense industrial base are not doing. Not not doing the best we can to ensure that the taxpayers have an opportunity to save a few bucks during their procurement. Like these companies in the end, they're running companies, not religions, they're here to make money.

And in turn, you absolutely see like the perpetuation of a lot of these big conflated big expensive defense budgets. So these larger standing defense industrial based companies can ensure that they remain a member of the financial as a buying financial member of the defense industrial base.

[00:29:06] Brock Briggs: You were talking earlier about sending robots to the battlefield.

That's like a much simpler version and preventing the loss of life on the battlefield. Do you think that we're going that way where that's like obvious and clear? And I think that as a whole, that's a good thing. Do you think that makes us more prone for engagements, like more frequent engagements when there isn't the question of life?

To be worrying about it's just Money and on the DOD side, like there is a money equation to a service member. There's the cost of all of that. There is money. There's a dollar value written down for the cost of that, but it's probably less. At least at scale for some of the robotic systems that they want to put on the front line.

So I guess, do you think that makes us ready to fight more?

[00:30:01] Mark Holden: I believe it does. Yeah. I'll draw upon. President Barack Obama's use of unmanned systems to start bringing in, bringing in hate and discontent among the germ personal effect list or the killer capture list. This is hellfires fired off of predators and reapers.

Like once that technology started making its way into the limelight, we've started using it. Now we started using it for an interesting reason less about a service member losing his or her life in the cockpit and more about potentially not having to worry about the political implications of putting like an actual human in combat in a particular area.

Now as you look towards the future hybrid warfare, this like period between peace and full time warfare, which is what we're in right now with China and parts of Russia, we as a nation are probably more likely to employ Robotics, uncrewed unmanned systems. This includes like tomahawk missiles and everything to affect an objective.

Then it would be to send a U S service member boots on ground overseas to conduct this type of operation. So I think we're going to start to see more and more of them. I think robotics gives us a, a significant reduction of risk. to mission and reduction of risk to force to allow us to have more of a propensity to start prescribing uncrewed or unmanned systems for these type of actions and strikes.

Yes, it definitely will for the next 10 years while we prepare for little combat in the South China Sea and continuing unified land operations in the European continent. When we as a nation start figuring out how do we action some of these more hybrid objectives that are out there, it's not a full blown, I'm going to put a tomahawk through that, that country's military strategy center.

Like, how do I put a listening post outside of countries? Harbors? How do I conduct reconnaissance operations? Like we will continually look towards manned, sorry, uncrewed or robotic. platforms to conduct these missions. One, because of deniability. Two, because of the less political capital we have to use if something goes wrong.

And three, the likelihood of certainly reduction of risk and reduction of force to the mission and the crewmen on side of it.

[00:32:01] Brock Briggs: Let's get into the hybrid warfare and some of the interesting battlefields you see us playing into in the next five, 10, 20 years. It probably Would be apt to start with the fact though that what in our first conversation you were telling me that GWAT and counterinsurgency are over.

Let's start there. Why is that? And then bring me up to What is like the bigger threats that the U. S. is facing?

[00:32:28] Mark Holden: Of course. Yeah. For 20 years, we fought global war and we fought the global war on terror. It was 20 plus years, right? It was a regionally focused fight that had troops that were globally aligned while there was work in Iraq and Afghanistan that got done, we still carried out operations across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, things like this pretty regularly.

Now with named operations. Named being Operation Enduring Freedom or Iraqi Freedom being done and we don't have any contingency operations currently in no named conflicts in these areas. Let me be very clear, like counterinsurgency and counterterrorism absolutely still happening. Just, we don't have the mass force alignment that we did.

It's still reserved for your very specific individuals, your folks who are trained in foreign internal defense, your folks who are particularly trained in counterterrorism operations and who are there for those as generally your special operations forces or your potential conventional forces that are geared towards foreign partnerships.

Now, when you have the rest of the force that's now opened up and you don't have everybody focused on counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, what do you focus them on? And the answer is the great power competition. And we were very much focused on the next great power competition against China. This is littoral combat in the South China Sea, eventually going up when China eventually tries to, to take Taiwan.

We're also looking at the European continent and we're looking back at continual problems. Like we were looking in the eighties force and force tank on tank warfare against Russia. This is like the fold a gap problem that folks studied for back in the eighties, like the same mechanized. Force on the European continent is something we're certainly look at.

And so if you look towards the late 2020s for our littoral combat kickoff, and you look towards potentially early 2030s for our European adventure kickoff, where we're conducting unified land operations for us. We have a number of growing threats just between the time of peace, which is now, and the time of a full blown shooting war, which could come as early as 2027.

For us, what are the threats that are available? One, we talked about it, which is social media. And that's using Systems like TikTok to be able to program our youth, to be able to track our citizens, to be able to waste time with our youth. That is an example of not a direct, direct kinetic attack, but certainly a non material attack on our, on our citizens of these, this United States.

Propaganda is a huge thing. We have to be very aware of the propaganda that's going to be used against us. It's very challenging for us as a nation to be able. to command the global presence. We have 800 and something, 804 check, check this number, but 804 ish bases overseas. Like we, we at the U S are stationed in an incredible number of places.

And in order for us to continue this power projecting projection, it's very easy for us as a force to slip up in these nation states to be able to be contested and challenged and given with a protest or somebody conducting embassy security or somebody conducting a Gate Guard operation at a forward training base in Africa.

It's very easy for me as an adversary to look to the vulnerability of a US Service member serving overseas and abroad away from the continent of the United States or North America. And to be able to use some of my hybrid warfare actions, like throwing stones, like setting up, setting up riots or civil unrest, and to be able to force the hand.

To be able to take that individual and force them to use lethal force against me, thus shortening the period of peacetime and warfare and wartime. For us, when we're looking forward to the technology that's going to be used in the next generation of battlefields, space is definitely going to become an increasingly more of an opportunity and a challenge space is going to be very contested, but it's going to be something that will allow us to scale our forces and the communications of those forces.

I look towards hypersonics while hypersonics aren't new. We've been putting stuff back past Mach five for quite some time. Steerable hypersonics are, and that's the scary stuff. And that's what I believe, like the advent of steerable hypersonics is likely what'll make or break that conflict in the South China Sea, depending on which side brings it up.

If you look towards the history of all of our really, since the advent of gunpowder, you look towards how did wars end? And it's usually because one. Significant piece of technology found its way on the battlefield that was not there and not developed before the war actually started. This is the arrow.

This is the nuclear weapon with Oppenheimer and all the stuff like it usually requires a war we can't win to create a technology to overcome this tactical disadvantage. And so while I can sit here and retort grand conjecture on the advent of hypersonics in space, effects and I can double click on the importance of undersea warfare and surface based warfare and things like that.

I know, and I stand rough and ready to be able to answer the call of when the nation is in that conflict, that we have the hardest problems ahead of us that we have, we as an defense industrial base have to come together, stack hands and create the next solution to that next battlefield problem.

[00:37:25] Brock Briggs: You seem pretty confident that China is going to invade Taiwan and that's going to be a major pain point for us going forward.

What, why, what gives you that confidence? And like, why does the U. S. seem like they're not taking it seriously? in the way that maybe we ought to.

[00:37:43] Mark Holden: I will happily be wrong on this. And I welcome the opportunity to eat my words. However, I am confident that the People's Republic of China will make a move for their version of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and that includes taking the island of Taiwan.

I feel very confident about this for a couple of reasons. One, they 100 years ago. 1927, China looked towards the opportunity for globalization. They looked at the economy, economic opportunities they've had. They look at the need for defense industrial base, and they planned for a hundred years. They planned.

And they said by 2027, we're taking Taiwan. And so I just listened to them and said, well, I'm going to listen to them because I'd rather not stick my head in the sand and I hope they're wrong. But if they're not, we've got a pretty scary future ahead of us with potentially a lot of Americans, a lot of folks in the South China Sea, a lot of individuals from China that are just like, are going to be subject to this particular conflict and we will lose a lot of people.

So I feel pretty confident about that because they've been calling that shot because they've been building this mass. Huge defense industrial base because they've been building an incredible amount of capabilities just localized in the South China sea. Like I'm not worried about their super carrier lack because they have islands that they can repair.

We as a fighting force have to, a couple of Navy vets here, like we can talk about the shift in tactics and techniques and procedures that are going to be required from the Navy in five or 10 years from the Navy we were used to, which is the basis of the carrier strike group now has to disband and everybody's got to fight in a decentralized manner.

I look towards all of this. I feel pretty confident. Just judging by the buildup of China, the, the last hundred years of globalization, the strict focus that in and around 2027, they want to get after it. And again, very public knowledge. And like, I have some secret information or I like read a government report or anything.

Like I, I am just a well informed citizen. Like the rest of the crew that just has been reading the tea leaves. And I'd rather prepare for the likelihood of it. Now, why can't America do that? One, calling, calling somebody out like that, saying China, I know you're going to invade. It's really damaging politically, like political capital that's wasted.

It's tough. And it's really hard for a nation state leader to come out and just start ahead of a country committing those types of acts to start like preemptively pointing the finger at them in the world stage. It wouldn't be good to, from an economic standpoint. We do import a lot from China and like, um, I have half the fricking tools I've have in this tool chest over here, probably made from China.

And if I had a bottom in the U S it probably cost three, three times as much. So I'd have half as many tools. Right. And so I appreciate, of course, I'm not like, I'm not on TikTok, but I'm not. Like making sure everything we buy isn't from China. But I recognize that the U S recognizes that the second and third order effects of like, just even calling them out on the world stage hinders that potential cheap globalization that they've got established right now.

Additionally, we can't agree on a four year basis in the U S let alone a 400 or a hundred year basis. If China's got a thousand year war plan, like we can't agree. For a fiscally year at a time, like we are, we just, we, because of our political system, because of the opposition inside of it, because of the, just the fanatical nature of our politicians over the last 48 years, like four to eight years, we, we just cannot as a country, as a global base agree on a singular threat.

And we know that no matter what work we do every four years, it has the opportunity to get unraveled. And so that's why I think China, that's why I think now. And that's why I think the United States just. Won't be able to stack hands and align on a common enemy until it actually presents itself. And it's, then we've got to be reactive.

[00:41:14] Brock Briggs: I'd love to hear your thoughts on something you just mentioned offhandedly, the disbanding of the carrier strike group methodology. Earlier this year, the Navy announced that they are reopening the Subic Bay base in the Philippines, which is right in China's backyard. And that's like maybe inadvertently not getting up on the global stage saying, Hey, we.

Think that you're going to do something, but inadvertently, I think that does send some sort of message and puts a lot of, or just the amount of people it will take to get that back online, a major naval installation and port like that. Talk about what that strategy you think might look like in terms of ships movement.

What kind of things should we be thinking about and give a lesser informed person An idea about what to be watching for maybe.

[00:42:05] Mark Holden: Yeah, sure. When you think about naval warfare and how our Navy is structured around the almighty carrier strike group and the almighty carrier strike group has submarines and guided missile frigates and like destroyers and cruisers and weapon ships and like all of the ships that carry weapons and armory and things like that.

Like all this, this massive group of naval vessels all there for one thing and that's to protect the carrier. And a couple of reasons why that's probably not gonna work out well for us in the future. One, we don't have enough naval forces to be able to bring the fight to China and be able to have the right prescribed ratio of naval forces to enemies if we leverage the carrier strike group, meaning I have to prescribe one carrier strike group to another group of enemy forces.

Ships and then everybody's got to fight from one centralized location in all of those war wars that we talked about unified land operations in the European continent and littoral combat in the South Chad to see three things will cause utter success for those who employ that and that first one is dispersion.

Lethality and survivability, mobility, lethality, and dispersion. We can figure out those three things, mobility, lethality, and dispersion. Our forces will fight and win in the next comp, next theater of battle. As long as we can figure it out faster and better than our enemies. Now, when it comes down to the naval forces, our naval forces, in order to ensure we can match the numbers of China, let alone the technologies, we've got to ensure that our individual frigates, our carriers, our cruisers, each individual Item inside of that carrier strike group has the opportunity and the ability to fight in a decentralized manner, fight on its own, fight independently of the carrier strike group, these destroyer squadrons and things like that.

Like we have to, if we put a large cluster, a large group of naval forces on, in a battle space, we invite a singular target and a whole bunch of hypersonics that are out there. Again, we are, we have carriers in place for the aircraft that they leverage. And while we recognize that air superiority is a really important thing for us, especially in the first 48 hours of any conflict, there's going to be a lot more to winning the South China Sea than just to put airplanes on the sky.

Right. We've got Marines that'll have to take the islands and that's littoral combat ships. That's a number of littoral elements from the Marine Corps. We've got a number of increasing threats, both on the surface and under the sea. For that, our submarine forces and our submariners need to be able to operate away from that carrier strike group to be able to be the forefront and the eyes and the ears.

And we have to recognize that any shit we put in, we have to be ready to lose with a steerable hypersonic weapon that could find its way on the battlefield at any time. Because while we have the opportunity to track them and identify them, we may not have the opportunity to defeat them. And for us, when we look at The technological advantage and the overmatch of our enable forces relative to China, like how is China solving for their supercarrier problem?

They've only got a couple of them. We talked very quickly about those islands that are occurring in the South China sea when I've got all of my forces, my nuclear capable jets and my naval strike forces all on one supercarrier and one or two hypersonics take that thing out, screwed that everything goes down to the drink.

And the deep sixes, everything goes to the bottom of the ocean, David Jones locker. But you look at how the Chinese are leveraging these islands. It's not only are the runways very long. And if I, if I take out these particular islands, like I have to get past the suits, the surface to air missiles, the radars, the patrol boats that are around there, but if whatever, if I get lucky and I put a warhead center mass on that island.

There's a whole bunch of construction crews, a bunch of coral, sand and coral, like ready to repair that Island to get it back up into the fight again, where again, like you mentioned, we've got bases in like the Philippines and South Korea that we use for that. However, mobily the, the Chinese aircraft care, like the floating aircraft carriers that they have in these man made Islands are a very formidable flow.

So, and for a number of different reasons, one preparing for littoral combat, island hopping, just like we did in World War II with the Marines. And just to get over the sheer numbers, we have to be able to ensure our forces are able to fight and win as an independent unit, one destroyer to rule them all, one cruiser to rule them all.

Then it is just being a mass carrier strike group. We have to win in numbers, awareness, and again, mobility, speed, dispersion, mobility, lethality, and dispersion. Three things that we could solve those things. We should be able to fight and win the next war.

[00:46:26] Brock Briggs: What's the basis for those three things? Is that, it sounds like you are citing those out of a textbook or some sort of study of war, like, where's that coming from?

[00:46:36] Mark Holden: Yep, so I spend a lot of time, that's coming from me, I spend a lot of time traveling around, listening to various military leaders, four star generals, senior executive services in the various armed services, combatant command, commanders, and I sit and I listen and then I start asking questions and usually one of the questions that I warm up to asking him is, tell me about the things that keep you up at night.

And then I usually it's the stuff that keeps them up at night is the stuff that we can't do is the stuff that we as a fighting force need to train on need to equip on what do we need to train and equip on and then like where are the big standing long tooth problems that we inherited and carry with us from GWAT into this next great power competition and how are those going to hinder us and what are we going to have to do to be able to fight and win relative to the new threats on the battlefield and again, These things just come from these discussions I have with a lot of these generals and, and just recognizing that there is a capability gap.

There is a technological gap between what we have and what we need to be able to fight and win wherever that next theater of combat is. And for us, those three things are the things that always come to mind. If we can solve for those three things, we as a fighting force will be much better off than if we hadn't.

[00:47:44] Brock Briggs: You were talking about hypersonic missiles, specifically steered or guided ones able to be controlled as a, maybe a big step change in terms of things that we ought to be thinking about defending against and or using maybe give me the download on hypersonic missiles to the extent of your knowledge there.

And like, why is that such a big deal?

[00:48:09] Mark Holden: So reaction speed to reaction, super important for us to be able to detect, detect a threat. Thank you. Identify that threat and then in turn, defeat it, provide a countermeasure against that threat, what you need to do to counter that threat, and for us, when you look at hypersonics, like hypersonic is anything that goes faster than Mach 5, when we think about hypersonics, we all think about Maverick, we think about Top Gun, Maverick, and we think about Captain Pete Mitchell hanging out in the Lockheed Martin Darkstar doing Mach 10.

Yes, that is super, super fast. And yeah, missiles will go higher into the Mach numbers and things like that. And while we, this is, we've been putting people in space have been doing Mach five as a human race for quite some time. But the advent of steerable hypersonics is really the scary stuff. When, when you look at the ICBM intercontinental ballistic missile problem, when I have a.

Conventional for a conventional rocket with relatively unconventional warhead, like a Merv warhead or a multiple reentry vehicle, nuclear tip warhead. Generally, I see it launched. It was like missile command, John Connor, Terminator two stuff. Like I see it launch, Skynet has the decision to react. They say, okay, potentially two or three hours, New York's gone.

So what do we do? I was like, okay, let's call the satellites. Let's have the satellites try to burn it down. We've got the doomsday plane up and they got all this things we can do, but. We recognize like when the reaction time goes from an hour to a minute, and then they're not going in. So essentially like when a hypersonic missile comes out, like we, we think about the air defense.

Of the United States as like a coastal problem, like, yep, East coast, West coast. We'll be, we'll be able to stem off any air coming in from the East coast or West coast, and we just got to make sure we can stem off ground attack from Canada and from Mexico and we're good. We got all four corners set.

Right. But when we started thinking about a hypersonic missile that we don't know the intent of. Right. We've detected it, but we haven't identified it as a threat. We don't know if it's a launch towards us, towards somebody else. Like we can't react right away because now we know once they've launched and once they left the tubes, those things can steer anywhere.

And so the scary part about steerable hypersonics is that you've got a hyper, you've got a very fast missile that can do a lot of damage that is not going in conducting a shot poke through the coasts. Like you shoot this thing and you stick it, you stick it to Brazil. Right. It goes from whatever South China Sea over Brazil comes a little bit inland in South America, and then just has a 90 degree turn North and then strikes Galveston strike someplace in Texas or middle America someplace that we don't have a lot of defense artillery for.

And that becomes a very scary concept. And when you think about the reaction time of a potential domestic strike being taken down in minutes, what is the reaction time of a battlefield hypersonic? It's like seconds and you might not even know it's there. And when it comes in, it's going to come in fast.

It's going to become a quick and the technology we have available to us. SeaWiz, the Gatling gun, things like that. Being able to try to take it out with lasers. Yes, there are some great party tricks to be able to take them out, but it's hard enough to take one steerable hypersonic out. The real scary thing comes in.

We start talking about taking out multiple of them, and then that becomes the same challenge that Israel has with the Iron Dome. It's like, yeah, I can take out all Hamas rockets until they've, until my Iron Dome dispensers are empty. And now I've got to start slinging some more in and so for us again that the scary thing for us Looking at the next war whether it is land or maritime based.

It's steerable hypersonics.

[00:51:26] Brock Briggs: What are the primary? Defenses for those from coastal perspective, obviously the sea whiz from like a ship perspective, but if there's not something that's patrolling on either coast, that's just happened to be there. Like they're probably not going to be firing the sea was off from port.

So what is it that they, like the U S is thinking about in terms of defending against those. And I don't know, is there a reason we don't, I don't know where those are. That's probably an important thing to keep secret.

[00:51:57] Mark Holden: Yeah. So we're like, We don't know where they are for a good reason. We're not going to be talking about where they are for a good reason, but yes, you're absolutely correct.

Sea Wiz, the ship based Gatling gun, like good and poor. They have Sea Ram, which I believe since 2010, so it was deployed to forward operating bases to take down mortars and things like that. Like, The, they will not be able to act fast enough for these hypersonics where we're looking for is like being able to disrupt them one with other hypersonics.

Can I send another hypersonic in to conduct a synthetic detonation and intercept? Can I have another hypersonic go in and like missile command style blow itself up to be able to nuke these things out? Can I use lasers to disrupt it? This is like. Very powerful lasers to be able to disrupt these very fast systems coming in.

These lasers can be air based, they can be ship based, they can be ground based. We're also looking at from a, from like a cyber standpoint, is there a way I can apply, employ cyber electromagnetic effects to be able to steer this thing off course? Can I provide an opportunity to steer this thing on mid course or what do I have?

And to be real, like those are some, you know, Some stuff we're trying, but when you look at the modernization priorities, it's still how to, we are still trying to figure out as a fighting force, how to solve for this new threat of hypersonics being used on both sides. Like we talked about the challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan, the global war on terror, but we weren't fighting conventional fire forces.

Yeah. Insurgency was terrible. Like it was a nightmare to conduct counter terrorism operations against an insurgency. But our counterinsurgency operations against consurgency, but we weren't fighting conventional forces with strong electromagnetic capabilities, with calm, complex, hard targets. We have 20 years of warfighting experience in a rebellion.

Yeah, some small unit tactics and some close quarters combat, but we don't have a lot of experience going toe to toe against these conventional forces with this stuff. And so we haven't been figuring out how to solve for the hypersonic threat for the last 20 years. Like some, some countries have. And like, I think we all, we, as a human race are trying to figure out what to do with this increasing speed of technology and speed of battle.

But. For us, for hypersonics, lasers, awareness of when they're getting launched, where they're getting launched from, and things like microwaves and electro and cyber electromagnetic effects are what we're looking towards. But again, Jerry's still out on what that magic bullet will be on those things. And we may not figure it out until the, the threat manifests itself on the battlefield.

[00:54:16] Brock Briggs: It's so interesting how we are coming out of this 20 year war and engagement. and potentially on the doorsteps of another fight. We'll just, I'll put it simply, another fight that will probably look nothing like anything we've ever experienced before. It's not that the, so much of like war and practice is it's, you're gearing up for the next thing and assuming that what you're going to do in the future will look like How it worked in the past.

It's like, you can only prepare for what you know about. And I think what you're describing is scary for a lot of reasons, because it's. We maybe have never encountered something like that before, and it's difficult to train, difficult to practice for. And especially just like a brief little thing about recruiting here, like rolling into quote unquote, peacetime people, not want enlistment numbers way down, that's not a great place to be in.

[00:55:20] Mark Holden: No, I mean, there is a hemorrhaging of troops. that survived and lived GWAT. They've seen their wars come and go, and they realized and they looked at the future of the Great Power Competition or being part of a peacetime military and said, I just don't want to do it. So not only is we have just like hemorrhaging talent out of the military, but we're having a hard time getting people into the military.

Recruitment numbers, like no one can meet the recruitment numbers. And not only is it because we're perpetuating the challenges of the economic follies of the defense industrial base over the last couple of years, not only do we have the woke culture and some of the political challenges that comes with signing your name up, being part of the military now, but that, that is exactly why the United States Department of Defense's budget is growing the technology budget by 40 percent year over year.

We are just increasingly spending more and more on technology. So we can offset these, this, the smaller numbers and troop strength, troop strengths. And when you look at the glory of robotics, when you talk about this stuff, I have one, one Marine with one rifle is one rifle in a battle space, but one Marine with 12 robots, all conducting a collaborative mission, all with various amounts of sensors and weapons and things like that, that's a force multiplier.

And so that's exactly, so yes, it's very scary that we will not have the troop strength. And it's scary because there are things like drafts that are going to have to occur and they are inactive ready reserves that may have to get called up again. We've seen this in the past, but you're absolutely correct.

Like we are going to create and we are going to interact with new threats that we've never prepared for. And the speed of battle, Will be dizzyingly chaotic and scary battle is so confusing. Combat is this like very scary, confusing thing that like communication is certainly really important part of it.

And when you look towards a real big unified land operation in the European continent. Coalition force interoperability is going to be paramount. This is the various forces, Poland and UK and Germany, and like everybody talking on the same network, understanding where their battle spaces are, potentially a Polish tank being used to fire a German piece of weaponry that's guided in by a British technician.

Like all of these things are very possible for us and interoperability of our systems, speed of battles is going to be very dizzying. And. Because the, I'm not painting a very, this isn't a very exciting war. It's a very like challenging, chaotic war that without a nine 11, like you can't rally a whole country behind it.

It is challenging having a hard time meeting recruitment numbers. You've got a lot of opposition against the vastly ballooning defense industrial based budget line for the year. And for a lot of different reasons, we're having a hard time grabbing people.

[00:57:56] Brock Briggs: You're right. I want to talk about some of the interesting products that are being built in defense tech.

You've alluded to a couple, we've talked about hypersonics, you've got an extensive background in unmanned vehicles. I would love to just pick your brain a little bit on what you're seeing. That is. Being developed now, whether it's on the battlefield or not, and maybe how that can fill some of the gaps that we've been exposing here, we we've got the whole U S military issue, we've got them all diagnosed on this conversation.

Yeah. We're open for bids on helping with that. So talk to me about products. What is new and hot in defense tech in your mind?

[00:58:38] Mark Holden: Sure. So we've talked about robotics and stuff like that quite a bit. And the hardware that's associated with it for me is a very big focus on the software that governs those robots, the artificial intelligence that will tell them how to conduct that maneuver operation when they're in the frame, when they're at the point where those systems are actually being used in combat.

A couple of assumptions can be made. One, we will not have GPS, so they will not know where they're at. Two, we will not be able to talk with them. So they're going to have to be armed with the, if this, then that kind of logic to be able to fight and win. It just completely disconnected from the human operator who gave him that mission set.

[00:59:13] Brock Briggs: So when I look towards, hang on a second, why did you, sorry to interrupt. Why did you say they'd be without GPS?

[00:59:20] Mark Holden: Yep. The 10. 23 megahertz square wave form subcarrier of GPS signals is something that we have an incredible heavy reliance on and it's something that is beyond easy to snip. So GNSS, the global navigation satellites systems, like they are, like the common carrier wave is something that we as Society use for everything from getting my food delivered to procreating, right?

You've got folks who met all their significant, they're all, everybody meets their significant others on like Tinder or some proximity based, like dating app or something like that. So not only do we leverage that pretty heavily to eat and. Procreate and things like, and then get around and things like that.

But in warfare, it is an essential step to our navigation. We use GPS to navigate. We use GPS to call in bombs. And like when, what happens when a smart bomb is no longer smart, it's just relatively obedient. And when you got a smart bomb, it doesn't know where to go. It's now a dumb bomb and when you've got and you chase that down, yeah, you take out GPS.

So you want a new idea, read an old book, you go back to what we did in desert storms with the advent of laser guided bombs. So now we start focusing on laser guided munitions. But now there's a whole other problem set where laser guided munitions just become commonplace. I think. Center for new American security did a pretty good study some time ago where they looked at the, at the, any country's ability just to knock out GPS, knock out precision weapons, knock out military navigation in an entire country.

It's like pretty easy to do. We can do it. Our adversaries can do it. We're certainly seeing that occur in, in the Ukraine right now with an active conflict. And so it's very safe to assume GPS won't be available. And now when we have all of our forces, they're, they're now have to start Focusing on a different, like more traditional ways, potentially maps and compass and like binoculars and how to, how to navigate, but then calling for fire becomes this giant imprecise thing.

Hence the leverage, the opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence to enhance targeting operations on a battle space, or to leverage things like things that excite me as anything with lasers. I believe Center for, again, Center for New American Security says by 2027, 2028, 90 something percent of all self propelled munitions on a battlefield will be laser guided because we will not have GPS to be able to solve this problem.

And so when we look towards laser spectrums, when you start having like lasers work both ways, so you need a person or a robot there to provide that laser so that the weapon knows where it's going, the 1064 nanometer laser itself is very easy to be seen line. Like you can see that laser sign on a SWIR systems for wave infrared.

So you run infrared back in your day. When you start looking at the various wavelengths of infrared, You know, I get excited about mid wave infrared because it's ability to see through Marine obscurance. I get excited. I get so excited about the advent of shortwave infrared on more swap C size, way power and cost available systems to be able to see the lasers, various laser energy that's out there, whether it's an eight 50 nanometer laser that's being used on a rifle, whether it's a 10 64 nanometer laser that's being used off of a targeting platform.

There's just, because we knew GPS where there's going to be a ton of lasers on the battlefield. And so for me, I get. irrationally excited about technologies that employ long mid wave infrared and SWIR at a relatively size, weight, and power costs appropriate realm. And so that's why for me, that's why GPS was, that's why I say we're not going to have it.

It's just a relatively easy assumption to have.

[01:02:36] Brock Briggs: Are there specific companies that you think that are leading the forefront? You named dropped a couple of the companies that you have worked for Axon, shield AI, and you've worked for a couple other companies in this space as well. You can name drop them again, if you want to get into that, or this would be maybe a chance, anybody else that is building cool things that have great minds behind them that we could get into.

[01:03:03] Mark Holden: Yeah, sure. We talked about some of the companies that I've worked for. And yeah, like all the teams at Teledyne FLIR now are just doing incredible work with taking the next generation of infrared sensors and pairing them with just incredible robotic systems. And so I'm very excited about them in terms of like artificial intelligence from Maneuver, very much Shield AI just comes to mind.

I've just, so I'm proud of the work that we did over at Shield AI and the team's continuing to do just incredible work, the they're solving some really hard problems in the battle space, which require like a. Just a massive amount of gusto to be able to solve. And the team's got the right people in place to be able to solve those hard problems.

And they recognize that there's opportunity to bring to bear technology of consequence and to be able to ensure that those robots have the right artificial intelligence to fight and win for maneuver operations, AI for every pilot. It's awesome there. We're talking about the hybrid warfare piece, like providing options to those forces.

Axon for me is just, it's just like a dream to work there. The taser technology is just. It's a complete game changer for our department of defense. For our folks who are operating in those austere environments, who are in the thick of it, who are living and breathing hybrid warfare and operating in gray zone operations every single day, whether they're supporting our missions overseas, like the taser is just that technology that will give them options.

To be able to have an option, not to use the lethal fire, it's really cool. But with that, there are a number of just like really cool little pieces of technology that are out there that I certainly watched from afar and I know that they're going to do great things. Like very recently, Provironment Procure put a bid to procure Tomahawk Robotics for a hundred and maybe 120 million bucks, right?

Tomahawk Robotics was a, was an awesome team a bunch of years ago that. Put their heads down and say, there's a lot of robots and no one's really creating the common control system for them. This sounds like a hard problem. We should solve it. And so the team down in Tomahawk robotics. Not only solve the heart problems, but they did so with a, just a really good feeling product, right?

They recognize that there is power in the unboxing, unboxing experience. And one of the things I really appreciated about Tomahawk was outside of their, their partnership strategy, which was just. It's just a masterclass in how to get big OEMs pregnant with your product and eventually get acquired. But they realize that you can, like, when a warfighter picks up a product, they're, they don't want this like chunky plastic piece of garbage.

They want something that like feels good because they're taxpayers dollars, taxpayers too. And the team at Tomahawks did, did that really cool. I always look for folks who are trying to refresh something new. John Chapman, Liberty Dynamics come to mind. So they, they make a, they make a, uh, it's a software defined programmable flashbang.

Right. I'm all about, again, all about the reduction of reduction of organic tissue damage and what options can I have? And I like flashbangs because man, I threw hand grenades like a girl. Like one of my irrational fears when I was in service was hand grenades. Yes, I could qualify on them, but when it came time to chucking these things in combat, I was like, I'm not going to risk my, you know, you don't want me throwing hand grenades.

And so I would at the ready room, we're all doing these things. Like I would have my butt. I'd swap out his frag grenades or his, his flash bangs and smoke grenades for my flag frag grenades. And so like any piece of like ancillary soldier systems out there is something I'm interested in. And so the John Chapman Liberty Dynamics creates this programmable reusable flash bang for law enforcement and high risk defense operations to be able to give people time when they're conducting a very complex breach.

Thought that was pretty cool. Are those reusable too? The reusable too. Like essentially when I use a nine banger now or a flash bang, I chuck it out. It's gone. Like it's serialized. Piece of items blown. Yeah. This thing is great 'cause you can chuck it in and not only can you like detonate it with your, with a push of a button and it's not on this like janky timer or fuse, but yes, once you use it, it's reusable.

It's, you can use a whole bunch of 'em. It's, it's just this incredible form factor. You can slide it across. For a bunch of different reasons, it's just a really cool piece of technology. And then I look towards firearms, right? I look, we spend a like, we spend a lot of time as troops, whether we're engaged in combat or not, like hauling around firearms and to see what Sig Sauer has done with the firearm industry is awesome.

It's just awesome. But to see what the United States government has done with the requirements for our next generation of firearm, I think they're a step back. So SIG recently came around and just refreshed the entire handgun. All the handguns in the U S inventory are M9s or I deployed with M9s. I deployed with Glocks, Glock 19s.

I deployed with SIG 226s and like now to see, I had my thoughts about. Each of them, right? We even deployed 1911s on a couple of deployments, which is really cool. But really looking at what SIG has done from a product standpoint, with this modular handgun system, with the ability to put a bunch of relative accessories on it, to make sure it's ambidextrous, to make sure it fits in relatively small palms, like myself, really cool to see.

And so I love what the government's done with the adoption of. Gosh, damn near close to 500, 000 handguns across the U. S. inventory. But when we look at how, when we look at how we're going to fight and win against this next generation of conventional fighting force, we have to recognize that they're going to, they're, they're a conventional force that we're fighting.

So they're going to have armor. So we're going to have to defeat that armor in a certain range. What Sig did with answering the government's call with the new, what's called the Spear, and they've got this next generation squad assault weapon. So they've got a belt fed machine gun. They've got a larger caliber rifle for infantry assaults and things like that.

We've just gone to bigger and heavier kit, man. Like there, it was not uncommon. Like I got a, I got a ton of back problems. I got a ton of neck problems and hip problems. And I go to chiropractors more than I'd like to admit. And a lot of it's because I was humping around. 123 pounds of gear rolling around the mountains in the desert.

You got guns and ammo and plates and all that stuff. It's crazy. And now when I look towards some of the soldier systems that are finding their way into the defense industrial base, like some of these SIG rifles, they're heavier, they're unnecessarily large. You can't keep this rifle at the ready for long.

And like, we're trending in the wrong direction in terms of soldier systems, meaning we're creating heavier. More cumbersome equipment for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Space Force Guardian. We see this with IVAS as well. I see so much promise in mixed reality, but I get really concerned about mixed reality and artificial reality and this big headset in front of your face to tell you where the bad guys are and where all your friends are for combat.

Cause yeah, like that would be really cool if I'm driving a convoy where I know I'm not going to get hit or I'm training or something like this. It seems pretty cool and gimmicky. But like I said, man, combat is. Beyond chaotic and tunnel vision is a thing. And when I've got these like ski goggles with all this information, like I will reach cognitive overload and it's going to, it's going to kill people.

Like we will have people that will die as a result of it. But I'm still very excited that the government is pushing the ball forward with some of this stuff with modern artificial intelligence being used for operations. I see folks who are like Microsoft who try to fit a square peg of a product in a round hole of the market with iVast or folks like Microsoft and SIG who listen to the government.

And just like they had, they have to build this really big, very power hungry, expensive thing that goes on a soldier's head in terms of Microsoft, or this big over encumbering rifle in the terms of SIG. Like they have to do what they have to do to win the business. However, it might not be the best thing for the users themselves.

See a lot of that going on. As well, and there's, I could speak all day, man's a number of technologies out there that I certainly can get irrationally excited about.

[01:10:23] Brock Briggs: There is so many things that again, I've never even thought of or heard of. So it's exciting to me to hear from somebody who is not connected with that world, that there are.

people that are pushing the boundaries of what we have currently and looking to maybe through more iterations than you would like to try to get to what that right product market fit is for the military soldier systems, like you said, and big companies like Microsoft that are wanting to help back that.

What are the, just your exposure to the industry and your deep expertise in it? You probably see. Things that are not being built, what is the big gaps that you see in this space when it comes to any of the systems that you just mentioned, whether it's the individual level, whether it's large DoD wide, what is not being built that maybe is a, an opportunity that you see.

[01:11:23] Mark Holden: You have two, two, two things come very clearly to mind. First is mobility tools, right? So we've cracked the nut on the next generation of tanks and we've cracked the nut on the next generation of Humvee replacements and things like that. But what we do not calculate is how can we make the individual fire team more mobile?

A lot of folks don't play down at this level because. It was not a massive landmark billion dollar franchise program aligned with it. However, like I've been riding two wheel motorcycles in and around the military for a lot of years, right? We used to run diesel powered KLR 650s in the mountains of Afghanistan.

We used to run dual drive Christinies throughout the jungles. We would run electric. You would kick, kick electric bikes out of the back of airplanes for infill and stuff like that. But there's no. One landmark brand company or whatever, that's really looking at the individual, the mobility of the individual soldier or individual like four person fire team.

I've got some really cool technologies with sky runner. That's starting to look towards how can I provide like a transitional aircraft and air, like something that will drive on the ground that I can deploy a parachute and fly up in the sky and. Do some really cool stuff with there. There's some companies out there that are trying to solve that, but no one's looking at the really solving mobility for the individual soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, or Space Force Guardian on the battlefield.

I think once we start seeing like jet packs start to become more of a thing, we got a long ways to go to get there. I'll be really excited to test those things out, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunity for mobility. The second thing that is just glaring is Arctic capabilities, right? We as a defense industrial base have a glaring lack of mobility.

capabilities to be able to provide our warfighters options to be able to fight and win in Arctic. This is Arctic communications. This is Arctic mobility. This is Arctic power sources. This is the ability for wide area surveillance and like unsupported or supportive reconnaissance operations in Arctic because we have so much global warming occurring.

The access to the global commons is another aspect of hyper warfare. We just can't overlook global commons could be space, could be moon, could be the Mars could be the bottom of the ocean, but it also could be the poles of the world and with the polar ice cap starting to melt with 80%, 90 percent of all of our critical communications going through undersea power or undersea communication lines with majority of our, of our fossil fuels and non renewable energies being mined in the ocean.

There in the Arctic, there's an incredible amount of opportunity, both strategically and economically to gain from power projection into the various poles. And so if you look at defense spending over the last like couple of fiscal years, as we've spent. A couple of million dollars on some new cold weather jackets.

But what we haven't spent money on is a lot of the training and sustainment. We've activated a new Arctic brigade, the Arctic angels, like it's coming back online out of New York and Alaska, certainly becoming a very critical part for us, but the technology to be able to equip our, our war fighters with the tools that they need to conduct sustained.

Protracted operations in the Arctic is just one of those things that's just missing. And I go and I go through all, I go to all the trade trips and I look around and there's one company who's got some nice Arctic uniforms, but that's about it. No one else is really solving the hard problems. And while they may have that in their portfolio, no one's leading with that because it's not an acute.

Clear and present problem right now. It will be very much so it will be, but those are two things that just come to mind as to just distinct opportunities in terms of the growth, man, it's like quantum, like everything, quantum navigation, quantum computing, quantum encryption, like how you weaponize quantum, like the mechanics of the quanta in a ground operation is like the next AI that I see.

And I'm just like, pite patiently waiting for companies to put themselves out there to start solving the hard complex quantum problems that are coming across the battlefield as well.

[01:15:08] Brock Briggs: Again, you're blowing my mind out a lot of things here. And a lot of stuff that I just, I'm glad that other people are thinking about because it's, I never really thought about our presence on the North and South pole, but obviously you're, and that's where my mind initially went, but as you highlighted, it's not just cold from a, Oh, wow.

It's like snowing perspective, but like in space or like it's a deep underwater, very cold and austere environments where things like don't exactly hold up the same way that they do. And maybe what we're used to more fighting heat problems than there is cold problems.

[01:15:46] Mark Holden: A hundred percent. You know, and even like the weapons based, how do you fight and win underwater?

How do you fight and win in the Arctic? How do you fight and win in space? What I'm like patiently waiting for is the company who comes up with the Moonraker pistol to equip Space Force with the guns they need, because we're going to start seeing space Marines become a thing, right? We've already seen the Naval Academy have a space track.

It's only a matter of time until we got space Marines in the U S inventory. And those space Marines are going to have to fight and train. On how to take out other space stations. And so they're gonna need weapons to do, and I'm waiting for the companies that are creating the next generation of, it's almost like out of the expanse or insert your sci-fi novel here.

A next generation of like Space Marine equipment. It's gonna be exciting.

[01:16:25] Brock Briggs: I, I heard Space Marine and my mind just went to War Hammer 40 K. Yeah. There you go. Thinking of all of the nerds that just, I'm like, oh man, I'm, it's finally our time here. . I wanna take some of. The product experience that you have and download a little bit of that.

We've talked about all of these interesting technologies. You've had the several opportunities to work in very critical product based roles at very front lines, companies that are doing really innovative things, and I'd like to kind of get a little bit of a master class here on like product management.

And maybe the best place to probably start that would be. Maybe just asking what you think product management is. And it's a role that kind of gets a lot of shit from other. Departments within companies. And I think they point to that as being a, an overhead thing, maybe not something that's necessary. I don't have any strong opinions.

I'm sure that you do. I would, maybe let's just start there.

[01:17:30] Mark Holden: Yeah, I'm happy to. So you asked me the first question that I ask anybody that would interview with me for a product role, which is what is product management? And so I defined, you could ask a hundred different people. What is product management?

You'll get a hundred different answers and I agree with them all. However, mine. Is that product management is a corporate function that ensures the profitability and efficiency of other private people in products within that company's portfolio in works with the other corporate functions to ensure that happens.

Now, when you put a defense spin to it, the only things in my mind that drop efficiency and profitability of the products and the company itself is the product market fit and operational effectiveness. Is it relevant in combat? Is it effective in combat? Two things we need to put before profit above all things.

But make no mistake about it, product managers, they're geared towards profit and efficiency very much. So I've been fortunate enough to, I've had great product leaders in my time. I had a early on in my career, I had a product leader who like saw the opportunity for me to get into product in a relatively nontraditional sense.

I was very much that non, I was very much that accidental product manager that I got into place. I was very fortunate to one, have a great. Product leader that supported me throughout my living and learning that product journey. And then I had a muse, which is my product itself, which is Skyradar. And the RAD Skyradar just became that, that opportunity to take the sum total of my experience in the market and apply it towards a product.

Would I have done things differently with Skyradar? Like a hundred percent. Of course there's, there's stuff that would have changed. I think you need the right opportunities. You need the right leader to be able to give you the opportunity. And for me, I had that. And then you need the right muse, the right product to be able to like, just Gush and try new things in the market and to try to figure out this whole product thing.

And from there, I went into product leadership, running product strategy for executive teams, running product management organizations with multiple sites running, then in turn running some product teams with shield. And then certainly running a lot of the, a lot of the forward facing forward looking strategy with people like Axon.

Like for me, Product comes in a very, in a bunch of different realms. But again, for me, it's all about efficiency of the products, effectiveness of the products and mainly profitability of it. But again, I've seen a lot of misuse of product managers, and that's why I think you get a lot of executives that just are like, why do I have you on my P& L right now?

Like, why do I bill you to GNA? Why do I carry you in overhead? And you have to continually justify and fight for your seat at that table as any product individual, because you're right. Like. Your product organization is very expensive. And there's likely the reason that like likely reason you may feel imposter syndrome is because you may have a target on your back at any given time because your product people are very, I don't want to say replaceable, but it's, it's one of those things that easy to justify sales.

It's easy to justify BD in engineering, but. How do I justify product when the other two are doing very well? And I need to spend a lot of money on product to be able to make sure my BDN sales arms are equipped to sell the right thing. And my engineering arms equipped to run it or equipped to build it.

When I see product leaders and product managers or just product people being used as glorified engineering managers is a big red flag for me. And it happens in a lot of portfolios where they just, they realize that like the product individual can be an extension of that CTO. And that product individual can just like, Oh, just go run the engineers and solve for the sprints and do the things with the requirements and have fun.

But that's a gross misuse of your product individual. At the same time, I see product individuals get used as glorified sales engineers. There are sales engineers that just. Want to get, want to feel really good and part of the team get paid a little more so they could call product people, but it's the teams that really recognize the importance of product that when they leverage that product individual and they listen to that product individual, that they recognize that there's opportunity for great things to happen.

Selling into the department of defense is very complicated, but for folks who are looking to get into the department of defense and sell into it, there's two very simple steps you need. Identify evangelists, build social proof, period. And it's all about social and strategic selling. Another reason why I'm gearing up to focus on content and things like that is for me, I recognize that if you got a new piece of technology into the government, like you have to go through and go through the some, you can't just say, do I have product market fit and call and cross your fingers and hope, because hope is not a course of action.

Hope is not a strategy. It's a process. And so for us as product people, we have to go through what doctrine is in place to accept or reject this technology, what facilities, what logistics, what operations, what training needs to be in place. You look through the whole gamut, the whole life cycle of a product, whether it be a material or non material product, and you run the traps in the defense industry to say, okay, can I get this thing integrated in?

Does it, do I have the right facilities? The logistics place entail or the logistics tales in place. Do I have training in place or am I going to need that like that? When you start answering that question, you stop becoming a product company. You start becoming a solutions company. And therein lies the opportunity to sell.

And if you can sell a solution to the government, you have the opportunity for this great thing called an indivisible bundle that allows you to frame smaller losses with some of your larger gains. And for me, I like pricing just became one of those things that I really liked. I mean, really gravitated towards my, my father was a world class pricing guy in a bunch of years ago.

And when I came out of the military and I had a transitioning off to my time in industry, I had three books and they were all about this thing called value based pricing and they were all written by my dad. And so I just read them cover to cover a couple of different times before I hit corporate America.

And so I came into corporate America with a strong thirst for providing value and not in terms of the capabilities, recognizing that with value came opportunity for profitability. We talked a lot about some of the challenges of the larger companies earlier on in this podcast, the Lockheed Martin is in the big defense companies that like have a challenge because they have to perpetuate by their contracts as long as possible and cram as much as they can into a singular contract because they don't make as much on individual contracts.

Contracts as like some of these smaller, more value focused companies came into. And then I started realizing as a product individual, a lot of my role, and this is drawing from my operational time was understanding the value of product in the inventory and being able to conduct what's called price reasonableness discussions with the United States military to be able to justify the cost of a particular product.

If I, if I have a widget, it costs me 10 grand, but I sell it to the government for a hundred. The intent is to provide that solution, that 100, 000 solution to the government, and then be like, thank you, because the thing we were using was like a million bucks, right? That's the economics you need to be able to trade on.

That's the level of value you need to be able to provide to be able to make meaningful strides in this industry is you need to take that 10, 000 product, you need to be able to sell to the government for 100, 000, and it needs to be able to replace that thing that costs a million bucks. Because when you go into the government and you say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reduce the cost of this operation by 10 X, you still need to be able to profit on that thing.

And a lot of times people look at hardware as an opportunity to sell software. I think it's. Software in the government's really hard. There are a couple of companies like Axon that do it really well. However, a product person inside of the defense industrial base should be a Sherpa, not just for the company to make sure that they're fighting and women in the government contracts and they're continuing repeat business.

But there's almost like a fiduciary responsibility. It's almost a higher form of patriotism to be able to, for me to give back to that, that, that, that. Organization that I came from the folks who are there at the tippy end of the spear, who are going to have to take my technology forward. Yes. I owe it to the shareholders to craft something that's relatively sticky in the market and relatively profitable.

And maybe myself as a shareholder, like that's what I want to, but the thing that keeps me up at night is not about making sure the shareholders have an opportunity for a good, clean exit. It's making sure that the technology I'm bringing to bear in the first place really moves the needle for the soldier, sailor, airman, marine, space force, guardian, U.

1. federal government employer, international coalition partner that is employing that technology. When they use this technology and it's saving their lives and livelihoods. Or it's saving them time or it's 100, 000 solution to a million dollar problem. We really have the opportunity to create value. And if your product manager is doing the right thing, you'll have killer product market fit.

You've been leveraging strategic selling. So you're identifying your evangelist. You're building your social proof. You got, you got a hell of a beta launch. And then from there, as long as the company can do its part and getting past the valley of death, and you can ride with the challenges of defense procurement, your product manager is doing his job.

[01:25:39] Brock Briggs: Is that value metric that you keep referencing? Is that should, or should that be the North star for product managers? Is that how they should be determining their value that they bring? And then how do you, if that is true, how do you measure that?

[01:25:58] Mark Holden: Yep. Efficiency and profitability should be the North stars, right?

And through that effectiveness of the product, right? Effectiveness of the product governs the product pursuit in of itself, but I'm not going to sit here and issue a challenge to all defense industrial based product leaders that you need to TEDx your value and do all these things. That is an illustrative example, but the North star of a product manager is like.

Am I creating a more efficient organization? Are we able to get stuff done more effective and faster? Or am I creating a more profitable product? This could be by me informing pricing schema associated with the product. This could be me making a bold decision as the product owner to say, we're not selling this thing, individual quantity one.

We're selling this thing, minimum quantity 10. When you buy it, you have to buy all your spares. You have to buy all your training upfront. And so they're like your, your order bill of materials, quantity one, you just TEDx, right? Example. It is your up to your product manager to make the tough bets in the market right now.

And to ensure that one, that they're generating value for the company that they work for, but two, that they're doing the right things by the people in the company who have to steward that particular product and the end users who have to then deploy with that particular product.

[01:27:08] Brock Briggs: Are there any frameworks or guiding principles other than what you were just walking me through that?

You think would be helpful for maybe current product managers or aspiring ones to think about the relationship between the things that you just described, what they're bringing to their, the company and the end customer, and then how they can implement those in a way that is meaningful. And usually these types of questions are Helpful, maybe a past experience or a point in your history when that came to bear and like how you, you took that to be an implemented it yourself.

[01:27:53] Mark Holden: Yeah, fair. So there's no book that tells you how to be a defense industrial based product manager. I've tried to read them all and they just don't exist. Maybe I'll write one someday, but I was just about to

[01:28:03] Brock Briggs: say, it sounds like there's a book in the works here.

[01:28:06] Mark Holden: Yeah, for sure. Product management is relatively new for, for the commercial industry relative, like in and of itself, let alone inside the defense industrial base.

There are countless companies doing incredible things and like, they've been wildly successful and they don't, they've never had a product individual. But for the folks that are there. A lot of your challenges are try to, it's like the, it's like the emperor's new clothes. Like you have to tell people who potentially have product blindness about their product.

The founders of the companies you just got hired for, because your product individual is generally not your first hire. So you're coming into a founding team and you got to tell them what's broken. And you gotta be tactful about it. And it's, it's don't, do not bring the, do not bring the solution, the problem without a, at least a couple of solutions.

Cause that's how you get yourself to be just like a black sheep in an organization when you're a product individual that says, Hey boss, this product sucks. And you just leave it at that. Yeah, that's great. I'm not going to ask your opinion next time. He's like, Hey boss, this product sucks. But if you just did this and this like tons of market, tons of upside, you're good to go.

Like you, it's a delicate balance when you're a product individual. Cause like you have to have the hard conversations. You got to have the hard conversations with the business development and sales individuals who like your customer facing part of your organizations about the reality of what's going on behind the scenes with your engineers.

You have to talk to your engineers about and stand your ground on what the market really needs. Cause if you capitulate to engineer requirements, cause Oh, our engineers don't want to do it. And it's just, it's too hard. If you do that kind of stuff, you're not, you're like, you're not being a good fiduciary.

Like you're not living your fiduciary responsibilities of being like a product manager in this line of business. Like you have to create the right thing for the war fighter. And you've got to make sure that taxpayers are getting, getting a killer deal out of it. With that comes a paradigm shift of, Yeah.

Juggling the paradigm of fault and responsibility. One of the things that I see like hem new product managers up is they recognize that there's no difference between things that are your fault and things that are your responsibility, and I completely violently disagree with that. As a product and owner, it's like your job to have the hard conversation with the business development executives to say, Hey, I know you just pre sold a bunch of shit for like Q1, but.

We just had a slip and no way this thing's coming out to market until Q3, right? They're going to go ballistic, but it's not your fault. It's your responsibility to have that tough conversation, to mitigate the risks. We're able to ensure you've got the right second and third order and actions to make sure it doesn't happen again.

But in turn, your product manager, your product owner, product individual has to be armed with the, from by, with, and through the highest orders of that business to make sure that they have the ability to, Be the master and commander of their own individual product. And oftentimes it's hard. Let's sometimes you get a hard product to sell.

Like you, sometimes you just do when you have the opportunity to have that hard conversation with a founder and be like, Hey, I'm like, I'm here for you. And your product's really cool, but tell me again about it because I'm just not getting it and to have, to get it explained to you, like the 10th, 11th time.

And to just, it's, it's sometimes a really tough position to be in because you want, you're there for the company, you're there for the mission. For instance, you have a, you have an opportunity as a product owner to like, have a hard conversation with the founder. And sometimes that falls on deaf ears and that can be tough.

I'll draw on, I'll draw on like a product we had at Shield AI. There was a product called Nova developed by this great idea of this concept of how do I take. A small backpackable drone. How do I enter it inside of a building? And how do I find the people inside of this building? Huge life saving concept, right?

If I, as a close quarters combat operator, knew where everybody is. In that building, I'd love to know where everybody is in that building. I just had a little quarterback cheat sheet and I was like, all right, send in the dog or let me just start getting to work. Easy day. It breathes really well, but I have this drone that saves lives and livelihoods.

So for me, it was like, I got to find out more. Cause I couldn't figure out why they built this thing. Even though I had challenged, I had questions with product market fit. But I went in and it was like, it was a tough conversation with the teams who created it. It was like, all right, so let me, this is me speaking.

Like, let me break this down for you. So we've got this aircraft goes in called a thousand square feet. It'll map thousand square feet and 60 seconds. And it'll tell me where the people are. Okay, cool. Let's break down the operation itself, right? The market that this thing plays in, right? Close quarters combat, you balance three things at all time.

Speed, surprise, violence of action, right? If my, the rules of engagement dictate that I cannot employ a heightened level of violence of action, I can overcome this tactical disadvantage with speed and surprise. If I, on an operation, lose the element of surprise, I can overcome this with speed and violence of action.

And so when I was trying to get information on Nova, the thing that I was trying to figure out is how this thing plays in the stack, right? So the stack, a bunch of dudes outside of a door, right? Let's say I use this thing. It's loud. I've lost the element of surprise because now like everybody, the thousand square foot building that this thing's flying in, everybody knows that this is a.

That there's a drone inside of this, a giant loud quadcopter running around. So I've lost the element of surprise. Now this thing takes a thousand, takes 60 seconds, thousand square feet comes back, maps it. Now I have to go clear it. And now I clear it about a thousand square feet. Me and about three of them, three of my best friends can clear a thousand square feet in about 60 seconds.

And so now I've doubled my time on target. So I've lost the element of supreme. I've certainly lost the element of surprise. What do I have on this drone to overcome violence of action? And it's like nothing. But what is violence of action have on the target? Now, everybody knows you're there. So they've closed all their doors.

They put belt fed machine guns at the fatal funnel. They've armed their suicide vest and now they're ready to roll. So tell me again why this product's there. And it was really hard to like to come into this company, which I like, I adored the leadership. I adored the product, but I just couldn't figure out why this product made it there.

And. And I had that tough conversation with them, but then come to realize once the founders of the company peeled back the onion and they were like, yes, but we created this as a way to develop artificial intelligence as a way for it to be a, like a real world demonstrator for our product. Oh, it became, it was like, Oh, of course this thing makes that's no shit.

You should definitely have this thing in your portfolio. But for me going in. Right. Trying to understand how this thing fit in the market, how this thing fit in the stack. It was just like, it was a tough conversation as a new person with like a high performing team, I mean, chilling out, this was a varsity.

Right. And here I was a relative wet behind the years guy in industry trying to understand product market fit in this thing. I had to have that adult conversation with the founders of the company to understand, okay, like here are my challenges with this thing. Why did you create it? And then understanding why they created it was so powerful.

And you've got to have those conversations and you've got to be able to see past the maybe potential lack of product market fit for an initial product in a portfolio and understand that there's gold in the second and third order effects of that product being in there. And so product managers need to have curiosity to be able to ask those questions.

They need to be able to have really deep understanding of the product in the market itself and the capabilities to be able to ask those questions. They need to know how government procures and how like this crazy chess game of government acquisitions works. And they need to be able to certainly understand the technical side of the house.

They need to understand from a technical standpoint, whether it be software, whether it be electromechanics, hardware, optics, whatever, they need That they, they, they have to juxtapose the size, weight, power, and cost constraints against the operational need. And they got to figure out how to make the right product at the right time in a relatively profitable manner.

And so for that, for me, there's no shortage of opportunity for product managers in the defense industrial base. And hell man, I think veterans. Make great product managers because they're passionate and they're like, they're tactful, they're able to learn. And I never went to college, still haven't gone to college and I've been able to do some great things because I've been able to take my tactical experience and the tactical knowledge that I've gained throughout my time in industry and in time in the military and just use that for this perfect thing and product.

And when I really boil it down. Office space comes to mind. What do you do here? I talk to the engineers, like a hundred percent is exactly what you do. You talk to the engineers and it's, you're, you're that translation layer between the market and your business development and your tech arm and everything in between.

[01:35:54] Brock Briggs: As you're sitting here talking to me and explaining all of these nuances. All I hear is this perfect infusion of your service and a technical role in industry, just like marrying together so nicely. And all I can think about is how well suited you are for the roles that you've had so far. When people talk and you hear things about how Marines, infantrymen, people who are carrying weapons, they lack the Maybe hard skills when it comes back to getting out of the military, the transition, the dreaded transition, maybe missing skills.

That is 100 percent not clear here just based on this conversation. Like there is direct application. From Battlefield to here and you might have just laid out the entire case for frontlines folks going into defense tech because this is I'm sure and I know that you brought another level of understanding to that conversation at shield that I know didn't happen before.

Nobody was like, Oh, how does this actually work when we are entering a building? That probably was not a conversation. It sounds like it was a different intent, but it's still a good question to be asking. And man, that's the case for it right there.

[01:37:30] Mark Holden: It's a great way to continue serving as a product manager, as a product leader, like passion, you need passion.

And there's no higher form of patriotism than continuing to find a way to continue to serve after your service, then dealing with being a functioning contributing member of the defense industrial base. Like it is a very big challenge in a variety of different reasons to raise your hand and say, I want to create this, but.

Being able. I was broken, man. Like I, my hips, my back, I had too much time jumping out of airplanes with heavy gear and falling off a shed and knocking my head and concussions industry. I got lead poisoning from all the indoor gun. There's no shortage of injuries for me. And when it was, there was no. Time for me to answer the question.

What do I, what do I do when I can't carry the gun anymore? What do I do when I can't jump out of airplanes and do all the fun shit anymore? For me, I looked at industry initially as an opportunity to make a living for myself. But really what I very quickly found is it's an opportunity for me to continue my mission.

Like my end users, right? People who work with my technology or work on the technology that the companies I work with work on, like they, they are the folks that I. You know, I, I make sure are my happy customers. They're the folks that I'll burn the extra hour for to make sure that they've got the right thing.

And like, you generally surrounded by other people who feel the same. A lot of folks in the defense industrial base, very geared towards how can I continue to help the individual solar sailor, airman, marine space force, guardian, government, civilian, and international coalition partners and products a great way because product continues to continue serving like you don't need an MBA for it.

And. I think a lot of folks, like I get asked that a lot as Mark, I want to do what you do. And once I get my MBA, once I do this, this, uh, this accelerator program, when I go study under, under this venture capitalist, like maybe I'll be ready. It's okay. Yeah, maybe, but I will tell you, man, like any good skill combat is a tradable.

It's like either your knowledge of what's going on in, in and around the military is very tradable. And so I spend a lot of my time in and around them, like around the military to try to learn what's going on. But. Man, like, I don't speak active duty like I used to speak active duty. I certainly don't speak.

Like special operator, like I used to speak to a special operator. I don't speak that as much anymore because I spend a lot of my time around industry, solving for industry problems. And like when the years go by, man, more every new trade show, I've got another person on the other side of the booth, meaning somebody I used to know who wasn't like, who was in the mix, getting after it, now they're in industry.

And now my ability to call on people who are like actively engaged in combat, smaller and smaller. And so. Get in there fast. Cause your operational time is very much has an expiration date on it. It's very attributable.

[01:40:05] Brock Briggs: One of the things that you said to me in our very first conversation, you talked about how, what you're doing now, you likely are able to have a larger.

Impact on the people that you are serving with. Do you think that you still think that's true? A

[01:40:24] Mark Holden: hundred percent, right? A hundred percent. I, I like to think of myself as a relatively high, effective, Part of the United States inventory when I was doing my work. But in the end, very, it can come up off like my wife.

So my wife's a Navy veteran. We talk, what happens if the draft hits off? You think you're going to be drafted? What do you think? You think you're going to be drafted? She was a service warfare officer turned public affairs officer in like I did the Navy corpsman thing and they came up through counterterrorism, all that kind of stuff, and then did the tech thing.

And so it was like, it was a question. I was like, you think he'd be activated? So I'm like, VA says I'm pretty fucking broken right now. So probably not going to call me out. But if I had to make that case, like I'm very much. Way more effective in my current role, maybe in my other roles, working defense portfolios, or even my current role now supporting the defense and pedestrial base to make sure that the companies I work for have highly effective, highly profitable products.

I'm much more, much more of an impact I can make on the battlefield by creating technology that can be adopted to fight and win against the next generation of asymmetric threats than I ever would be a single gun, a single bino, a single bare radio, a single ATAC end user device on the battlefield.

[01:41:28] Brock Briggs: You just said something you were talking about your what the VA looks at you as, and I think that there is for people who have served in ways similar to how you have, that is a very, that's common.

And it's easy for that to become part of the identity that then influences negatively, typically. What the vet reenters industry or the world with again, how did you think about it? And maybe it wasn't even an active thought, but in hindsight, how did you think about looking at, Hey, this is what the VA is telling me that, and your back is probably, it's also telling you, and then not letting that get in the way of continuing to serve and, um, maybe even a more meaningful way than before.

[01:42:19] Mark Holden: Yeah, the narrative, like our narrative, internal narrative is huge. Very quickly. Can we adopt external narratives as this internal narrative? And if you ask the VA, no, I I'm like this college uneducated individual that's had, I've spent like a year at the last couple of jobs I've been in. I've, I've a failure to adjust.

Right. Like, I am a veteran that's had a hard time trying to find his way after service. And yeah, there's, yeah, there's all sorts of musculoskeletal problems. The VA has got me listed that they like to remind me with. I've got no shortage of like post traumatic stress that I've tried to turn into post traumatic growth.

Right. And I think some of the, like my initial challenge to be real was like following the way of the VA. Right. So like my back, great example, right. Jacked up back, bunch of different reasons. Carrying a bunch of gear and falling out of airplanes and stuff like that. I get out and the VA is like, I'm like, what do I do about my back?

And they're like, Oh, there's a bunch of painkillers. Just take all these. You'll be good. And that is his own challenge and danger. And I never recommended it, but. What, like what I needed, I did not need all these shots in my back and I would go in twice a week for injections and physical therapy and they would just load me up with highly irresponsible amounts of opiates and painkillers as they did a lot of people back in the day.

And. That's the way the VA wanted me to heal. And I just stopped going, I eventually just stopped. I was like, I can't do this. This is not the way for me. And I found like what I really needed was meditation and a chiropractor. And if I can solve for the chiropractor, I can solve through meditation. And for me, mind, like mindfulness is a huge part of my practice.

Yoga is a huge part of my practice. Being able to rationalize all like the horrific things that happened. And I've got my fair share of survivor's guilt from the times that I did make it out and the injuries I didn't sustain when a bunch of people did, and there's no shortage of just awful scars that live in our veterans, both those who deployed and those who didn't, there, there are folks who supported the war effort that just have like awful things that happened to them in the name of military, right?

Whether it was in training or there was something that happened remotely or just something horrific. That happened to them at a time that, that is something that shouldn't happen to anybody, but just happened to them in the military. For me, it was like almost like having a soft divorce from the VA saying, I can't go through your care anymore because you just, you remind me every day I'm broken.

You remind me every day I need help and you, the only things you're going to do for me is just shove a bunch of narcotics down my throat and call it good. And so for me, it was taken a couple of years off from the VA and like really digging down the root of my problems. Like my back is great now because I've been able to manage it internally.

And no, I don't take any of that garbage anymore. For me, it's my mindfulness is awesome. Right. Cause a lot of the challenge I had with the VA was like, Oh, PTSD. Okay. You got to go talk to a bunch of therapists. And so you go talk to a bunch of therapists and they're like, tell me about combat. Oh man, yeah, like little kids and like fire and brimstone and all this terrible thing.

So I know exactly how that is. And you're like, no, you don't. That's the, that's my problem with the VA is they're like, oh yes, I know exactly what that is. And you're like, no, you don't. Don't tell me what it's like, what the smell of burning children smells like, or what the sound of like gunfire echoing off the halls of a small building as you're like firing.

Fighting your way room to room. Don't tell me how you think, how it feels. I just want to be heard and receptive received as a veteran, but it just became so prescriptive for me in the VA healthcare system that I just had to find my own way. And so eventually like we moved out of Washington, DC, which is part of the problem.

I lived in Northern Virginia, Washington, DC for the better part of my operational time. And my wife and I just girlfriend at the time made a very conscious decision that we were getting out of DC, moving to Colorado. We found mountains. I found the ability to like walk among nature. And I found the ability to be in solitude.

It really crushed the limiting beliefs that the VA had put on to me. Just, it took, it took a lot of like self righteous behavior and a lot of self talk to be able to realize I'm not the broken fucked up veteran that they think they, they think I am. I am somebody who's highly capable. I am somebody who's limiting belief does not reside on the whatever rating I get from the VA that week.

And for me, I think that a lot of folks doubt the narrative. narrative of the Veterans Administration and they say, Oh man, yeah, I am messed up because the VA told me to or they, or maybe they didn't get validated because they do come out with the VA misdiagnosis, all this shit all the time. And so people come out with all these injuries and like, they didn't have the right paperwork or they didn't have the right narrative correctly.

And so they shut down. They're particular, like they shut down their investigation and they're like, maybe it's all in my head. When then they started talking their head and their brain and they go deeper down the rabbit hole and it gets ugly. And at the same time, man, there's no shortage of veterans that need help.

And so the VA has got like a really tough road ahead of this. But you know, what I'm happy to say is like very recently started like seeing like now that I'm a solopreneur and I pay for my own healthcare, now I don't have somebody else managing my healthcare is I've had to readapt the V readapt my healthcare to the VA.

And I went out to the, I'm hearing, you know, Karen calling you from Colorado, the VA here in Colorado at the, like at us, at a clinic was one of the best healthcare experiences I've ever had. It was, and it totally broke the stigma for me. I had spent the last bunch of years. I have like tons of health stuff coming along with autoimmune problems, stress, and like all the stuff that Western medicine just has a hard time diagnosing.

And the VA has been like, I don't know what to do with you. You know, I've been finding a lot of support in the East and finding a lot of support with like functional medicine to get my gut, get my health right, and to get my mindset right. And now that I've started to see the VA again, like, I look towards some of the care that I got with healthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield over the years.

And like, I would, I was just unimpressed, functionally unimpressed with what Western medicine was providing me. And again, another reason why I would never consider the VA because of all the horror stories that I hear and all the horror stories I had while at the VA, because I needed to, out of necessity, created a appointment here in, in Golden, Colorado, and it was, I, I never felt Like I had a more attentive medical staff.

I never felt like I was in a cleaner facility than I had in that moment. And was just very excited that now the VA was back in again. And they, they had a good talk with me. They're like, Hey, I see you haven't seen us in a few years. Is this because we did all this terrible things and we shoved all these pills down your throat?

I'm like, exactly why I'm not here anymore because you did all these terrible things to me. And like, I decided not to do that. And I made the conscious decision. I took the healthcare into my own hands. And so yes, very quickly, veterans can adopt that psyche of like the VA told me I'm broken, so I'm broken, but.

[01:48:37] Brock Briggs: There's a quote that I have here that I want to ask you about. It says, Who am I when I am no longer myself? What does that mean?

[01:48:45] Mark Holden: Yeah, buddy, Chad Conley, Colorado Springs runs a great organization called 50 for the Fallen. It pledges a lot of veterans to ask themselves this question of who I am when I'm no longer me, right?

And transitioning from active service, like whether your general purpose inventory, whether you're administrative personnel, a culinary specialist, or a tier one special operator, like you still had this persona of yourself. That you, you, you define a lot of these people are fucking superheroes, man. When they're in wait, you need guns.

We got guns. You need airplanes. We got airplanes, like whatever you need, plus or minus 30 seconds, anywhere, any place, anytime, like we're here for you doing the things that you would read about in books and see in the movies and things like that. But essentially like, again, no matter what you did in the military, whether you're an admin or you're frontline worker or not.

When you come out, you have to answer that question because you're no longer yourself anymore. And you've defined yourself as master culinary specialist extraordinaire or parachute rigger for the golden Knights or the insert sexy tier one special operator thing here. There's a lot of folks who define themselves as that.

They run around with their fellow superheroes. They put on the uniform every day. Like. They are them. They have been told who they are. You are Navy corpsman, Mark Holden. You are aviation electronics technician to do like you are a thing. But then when you're no longer you, like, there's nobody to tell you who you are.

It's up to you to define that. And going back to the VA, like sometimes the VA is the first person to tell you who you are. Hello, you are a fucked up, broken veteran. Welcome to society. And you're like, Oh my God, what have I done? I want to go back in. And very quickly we can romanticize who, like who we are and who we were.

And I'm super guilty of it. And as, as most veterans, like you romanticize the smallest shit you did to make yourself feel good. But like, you think you're going, no shit. I used to do X, Y, and Z. And that was so cool. But like, I don't care about that stuff anymore. Cause I have had to redefine who I am now and who I was in back in the early days as a GWOD, who I was when I was transitioning out, like at the height of my operational career, very different people, but still had my own definition.

And you have to answer that question. Who am I? Cause I'm no longer me anymore. Who am I, and it's up to you to determine that. But it's also, it's a choice. Who am I going to be, not who am I right now? Cause man, maybe you're like the struggle and fucked up veteran that's failing to transition. Right. But it's up to you to define what that is.

And for me, like I had options, right? So my options were find my way and like bumble around trying to make my way in this product thing and industry, or go deeper down the rabbit hole. Get another fancier gun and just go get after it as, like, recontinuing on as an operational contractor, going back into government service, or potentially joining the National Guard to get my kicks off, something like that.

Like, I had options to continue to be that, that, like, gunfighter or that technological evangelist in the military, whatever I decided to pay myself in for that particular operation. But for me, It was about making that conscious decision. It took me, it's, I'm still doing it, right. It takes years to continually redefine yourself, but like, I am a veteran.

I'm very proud of my time in the service. I am equally as like relatively proud of my time in industry, supporting that mission and the technologies that I've been able to work with the great teams to bring to bear, but you as a veteran, and we as all veterans have to answer that question, who am I?

Because I am no longer by myself.

[01:52:06] Brock Briggs: What is the most important thing? That a veteran should learn from you, and maybe you only.

[01:52:16] Mark Holden: It's not your fault. I think that's it. That's it. It goes back to the things that they did in service. Like a lot of people, like a lot of GWAT veterans I talked to, and this is just top of mind.

There's other stuff you can learn. So stay tuned for more, but for me, like stuff, top of mind coming from some recent conversations. There's a lot of people. Look back and they're like, shit, I could have done more, or I should have stayed in, or I shouldn't have done that op, or, oh, I should still, I should still be at, I lost all those people that one time.

And whether you've transitioned too early and you think you did, whether you've get out, got out of the military, you think you got out too early, whether you're trying to find your way. I think a lot of people, so one, it's not like the things that happened, like there were terrible things that happened to you in service and that's not your fault, but you are capable of everything and anything.

Right? Like you're still like, so maybe the one thing I want veterans to take in this is that you're still a superhuman. You can still have those superpowers. You just have to use them in different ways. And you do not need permission to use the superpowers that you've worked hard in your life to gain.

Right? The folks have the, you have the opportunity to do anything you were. Fucking military veteran, right? Some of these folks entrusted with gajillion dollar aircraft. They were driving ships. As you look at the kids out of like high school with a really basic associate's degree or the runs who like are our nuclear engineers, right?

There are people as in the military that are capable of incredible things. And I think too often veterans ask for permission to do something that I need my MBA. To be able to be a product manager. Oh, I was in special forces. So I can't do that really cool job in corporate America. They won't like my story.

You've got a story. Everybody, everybody wants to hear about it. You are capable of incredible things. It's a conscious decision to be capable of those things. And you're still a superhuman, still capable of those superhuman things. And it is a conscious decision for you to go out into industry, to find the companies you want to find, to work on the technologies you want to work on and to find an excuse to get in there and work on it.

Everything's available to you. Everything is available. The sum total of the, of the world is at your disposal, not your fingertips. And you do not repeat, do not need permission to go after any of that stuff.

[01:54:19] Brock Briggs: That's super powerful. That permission thing gets in so many people's way and myself too. It's difficult and you're used to rules and regulations and on the outside, you don't have those.

The only person that's really getting in the way is yourself. Beliefs. about the world or what you think about yourself or anywhere in between. Mark, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. This has been a ton of fun for me. I know it'll be a lot of fun for the audience as well. What can myself and or anybody listening do to be useful to you?

[01:55:01] Mark Holden: I appreciate that. Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on LinkedIn every day. So come find me Mark Holden on LinkedIn at Holden actual on YouTube. I'll start putting on some YouTube content here in a little bit. If you're interested in my hybrid warfare discussions, you can find all that, all the shorts on YouTube right now, but I want to start talking to you on LinkedIn.

I have great conversations in the comment section. I'm talking very daily, almost daily about Veterans growth and new defense technologies and stuff that I'm seeing as I'm coming through trade shows. And so what you can do for me is hop on LinkedIn, come at me. LinkedIn is not dead. LinkedIn is cool. It's a great place for people to go.

If you look at the folks on Instagram and they've got great dreams and conjecture, but the people on LinkedIn have jobs. And so that's really where business to business is getting done. So I welcome you. Come on over to LinkedIn. I'm there every day, popping up my DMS, uh, let's chat. And I, man, uh, Just echoing this, I appreciated this, this is a good message that certainly a lot need to hear and I appreciated the opportunity to be able to connect with you today.

[01:55:53] Brock Briggs: One last thing, I, we should have gotten to this earlier, but maybe take a couple minutes and just talk about Holden, talk about what you do now and maybe what you could offer. In your consultancy services and how you might be useful to somebody in the business context. You're not going to plug yourself.

So I'm going to, I'm going to plug you for it. Yeah,

[01:56:11] Mark Holden: for sure. I'm not here to plug myself, man. I'm here to talk about the real stuff. I'll just be real with the audience here. So I'm at this awkward teenager stage in Holden where I'm just trying to figure out what it is. I'm doing a lot of work today with companies that are looking for assistance with product launch planning.

With marketing and product strategy. How do I take my commercial technology or my idea and how do I get it adopted from the department of defense? So I work by, with, and through the companies. I am not a proposal shop. Do not come to me to edit your white papers for zippers. I'm come here, I come here to work by, with, and through organizations to ensure product market fit inside of that.

To be real, Holden is not a solo endeavor. While the sum total of my experience is up available for you to be able to hire for your team and stuff like that. For me, the intent is to start growing people and to teach them what I've learned to make sure that the companies that I work with have a more scalable way to access this type of knowledge.

Big into public speaking. So if anybody in the audience is keen to bring me in as a public speaker, that's something I'm really interested in, whether it's virtual, whether it's at a trade show, or whether it's to talk about some of this stuff we talked about here with your audience, and then for me, as we talked about earlier, my growth engine is content.

And so what I'm really looking forward to is working with companies who are looking to refresh their content, just to create some good content about their products. What I found. Is that there's a number of companies that are out there that like, I would work for free. And so a great way for me to work with them is to have an opportunity to work with their products to work alongside the company and it just do a deep dive.

Here's what I love about this product. And let's talk about it. And then I can show through video through a series of shores. And then certainly through my follow up interactions about those technologies itself. So Holden service disabled veteran owned small business hub zone company here to team with you.

But really based in Laramie, Wyoming, we'd also do a lot of product testing. So I've got, uh, We've got a pretty big facility in Wyoming. I've got about 40 acres on a lake up in the high Alpines where I have the opportunity to test some of the most rugged conditions for some of these products, and so I have had companies that are relatively interested in employing me in the facility for product testing.

So again, man, we're kind of a shotgun blast again, I just, full disclosure at that awkward teenager stage, we're trying to figure out our niche. Make no mistake about it. The riches do lie in niches. And so eventually all the things that I'm doing will get married down into maybe one or two. And so right now I'm just trying to find the things that matter to the most with the audience that I work with.

Something that I really take enjoyment in and that's where the content marketing and all that stuff gets into play. But for me, that's, that's holding again. We're relatively new in the scene and coming soon to a trade show near you.

[01:58:35] Brock Briggs: Fantastic. Mark, this has been so great. I really appreciate your time.

[01:58:39] Mark Holden: Appreciate you, man. Good podcast. Great to be here.

[01:58:41] Brock Briggs: Thanks so much for tuning in today. Your listenership helps me better educate people like you and the rest of our nation's military, both past and present, on building a successful life outside of military service. If you're looking for more ways the top vets are leading more effective lifestyles, building businesses, and using the resources designed specifically for you, press here for a selection of some of the best clips.

Be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel to stay up to date, and I will be talking with you soon.