And I suppose just as a starting point, tell us when you really started to look at the sector and go, wow, there's really something interesting going on here.

Absolutely.

Maybe a definition first, because it's a bit of a term of art.

What is alternative yield? So at Wilshire, we call alternative yield the range of either less correlated or entirely uncorrelated yield generative strategies.

And typically, these may look like private credit in terms of their return profile and the yield that they generate, but are outside, specifically outside of traditional private credit.

So we see this falling into a few different buckets.

Maybe this is more specialized asset-based finance, think transportation finance or leasing.

And I've got, I've How do you go about doing that in today's environment and what role do primary funds, secondaries and co-investments play in a, in a really sophisticated kind of private markets program?

So why is it your church is doing this coming up on August the 7th?

Well, we did have Ironworks.

And for about seven to eight years, we ran the men's ministry there in Andalusia with the state dinner once a month.

And I think we had five men's conferences during that time.

But again, it was a season of life.

And we believe that God blessed that time.

God used that time.

Very

And I think that's a great opportunity today.

Yeah, man.

You said so many things, again, that there's so many tidbits I could take from everything you say.

And again, you know, being in the industry for a long time and supporting Everbridge, everything you're saying is like spot on.

That's probably why you were the first CIO of the Army.

But when I think about it in the conversations and how they've shifted from everything you mentioned earlier, like commercial off the shelf, to now you have teams, and I saw it with even this hackathon this week, you have service members now embracing open source and cloud native type of applications.

And you see more and more people within our industry creating solutions based on those.

And when you do that now, operating the software, maintaining the software, centralized control, but then yet decentralized execution and processing is all possible in that new architecture.

Right.

If we build to that, I feel like that's easier than to move to that connected world, right? Um, and then again, making it easy, secure, not something that, you know, old Soldier Perry could break, and then not have it come back up again, you know? And lastly, we talked, you know, kinda the pace of things and how fast things are happening.

You know, when I think about Spectral Cloud, and I think about how flexible we need to be, you know? What, Spectral Cloud's about six years old, right? You know, we've had what we call our vertex, um, you know, uh, I guess you could say our pallet vertex, our software edition that's for regulated environments.

Mm-hmm

... right? That I could go to any of them and still be able to get on target the best I could.

And I think about what we're doing and how important it is to tactical edge to find that commonality, that predictability, that, you know, not only that, but the sustainability, um, that as I moveFrom environments to missions to, um, you know, even next generation things.

I need something that can support me five years down the road as I add in things, or I decide now that it is an air gap.

You know? Hey, a lot of this data that we've collected and everything else is no longer, you know, classified information.

Why do you think mindset plays such a big role in entrepreneurship and investing?

Uh, because it's the inner world.

You know, the inner world must reflect the outer world.

Um, you know, if you, if you go to Amazon right now, I wrote a small e-book, you know, probably about five, six years ago.

It's Shifting Your Mind From Poverty to Prosperity.

And then the other one is Give Yourself a Second Chance.

Uh, and they're both on Amazon.

Mark, one habit that helped you succeed as an entrepreneur?

Can you just give our audience a little overview of what this trend looks like and how long it's been going on?

Yeah, well, you know, this has actually been going on for a long time.

It's actually, you know, women have outnumbered men in higher education in terms of enrollment degrees since the early 1980s, so it's really been going on for more than 40 years, and it just, the gap between men and women in higher education keeps getting bigger and bigger.

But if you're just looking at, you know, let's say for bachelor's degrees now, it's about 60% female graduates and 40%, uh, male, and then for master's degrees, it's even a bigger gap, so it's, uh, 63%.

It's almost two to one, uh, women versus men for master's degrees.

Women get, um, about two-thirds of associate's degrees, and they get now about 60% of doctoral degrees.

So at every level of higher education from community college to graduate school, women are, uh, outnumbering men, and that's been going on for a long time, as I mentioned, but it just seems like the gap keep, keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger every year, where women, um, continue to outnumber men, but by bigger margins as time goes on.

Now, what about the downstream social effects of women succeeding and men retreating from academia? Is this something we should be concerned about?