 And studying for the last six or seven years, the idea, the concept of the blue economy supported in my research by CMSI, the Ruger Chair and others, Fortrum Grateful. And I'm looking at China's science, technology, innovation strategies in this regard. And that's why I met Michael, Mr. Michael Jones. He's a leading figure in this area. He's the founder and president of TMA Blue Tech. TMA was the Maritime Alliance, now TMA Blue Tech. It is a nonprofit cluster founded in 2007. Its mission is promoting sustainable science-based ocean and water industries. It's focused or headquartered in San Diego. It is today the largest US Blue Tech ocean and water tech cluster. It has a growing number of members across the US and abroad. And Michael's going to tell us about the evolution of this cluster and, of course, its importance to not just the US economy, but also to our national security and military concerns. Michael's a businessman and investor, scholar, and pioneer in this area. So he has a lot to share with us. In fact, when we opened up our email listserv group, our Ocean Maritime Security Group, or OMSG, to our current work college students, we had a flood of inquiries about his 2018 lecture. So we've asked him to come back and update us, and he's graciously agreed. Before I turn it over, though, to Michael, just a few announcements. We are recording the talk portion of this lecture, and we may be sharing it beyond the war college community. So we'll let you know if you're interested in a video copy or you'll see it on the YouTube website if we choose to do that. We will be turning off the recording at the Q&A session. In the meantime, though, please follow our usual Chatham House rules, which is you can discuss what was said, but please don't attach any comments to any personalities. And because this might be on videotape, the required disclaimer is, of course, that nothing said during this lecture are the views of the US Navy, Navy War College, Department of Defense, or US government, but personal views of those who are making those comments. We will have muted everyone during the presentation part of the lecture, but what we're going to do at the end for the Q&A, we're going to moderate the Q&A via the chat function. So we're leaving the chat function open throughout the presentation, so please start asking your questions as they arise throughout Michael's presentation, but we'll ask them of him at the back end. And before I pass it over, let me just thank Laura Cavallaro for all of her assistance in making this possible, and we'll be our backup in case something else happens, with another power audit. And also to Captain Dr. Andrea Cameron for her advice as well. This is another in our Blue Economy lecture series. I hope to have more in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned for announcements in that regard. With that, Michael, I'm going to turn it over to you for your presentation. Now titled, Importance of Blue Tech Clusters for Growing Sustainable US Blue Economy and the Impact on the US Military. Thank you very much. OK, thank you. Thanks very much for the invitation. It's a really pleasure to be with you. Kate invited me, actually Kate called a couple of years ago and said that she wanted to come and visit, and we had a really great conversation, and it was wonderful to see her interest, both to see what China was doing in the Blue Economy, but also her interest from the Naval War College point of view in the importance of the Blue Economy and Blue Tech. And so I really appreciate the fact that she has taken the time to focus on something that I think is incredibly important to the country, to DOD, but in many different ways. And what I'd like to do is if they will allow me to share my screen, I will run you through kind of a little bit about why is it that we don't appreciate more the ocean. What are we doing about it? We Team Able to Tech. And then I'll end up with some comments about why I think it's really important for, I'll say, the government writ large, but also, of course, the US Navy and Marine Corps, those that have more wet applications and operations. So I'm going to run through this relatively quickly to make sure that we have time for Q&A. So if I can share my screen, let me see. OK. Does that popping up for everybody? Somebody give me a thumbs up, please. Yes, it is, sir. OK, thank you very much. OK, again, my name is Michael Jones. I'm the founder and president of Team Able to Tech. And what I'd like to talk to you about is the blue tech and blue tech clusters for a growing, sustainable US blue economy, world economy, for that matter. And then why is it important to the military? So first of all, just a note. I haven't updated this for a little while, but the OECD, which is, as many of you may know, is the think tank of democracy as a world. It's its first ever study in 2016. And they said that because they didn't have the ability to gather as much information from up blue tech, it was primarily traditional uses. They came up with $1.5 trillion in 2010 for the ocean economy and expected to be $3 trillion by 2030. Now, that's faster growth than the rest of the economy. And if you compare that to 2010 or 15, the global water industry or the space industry, both of which have a lot more people focused on them and a lot more funding that have gone into them, you can see that this ocean economy is very big. So why is it that the first ever study was 2016 for the ocean economy? To show you how little we really know about how big the blue economy is, the global economy is about $80 trillion, at least when I looked this up about six months ago. I was giving a talk at the National Academy of Sciences. They'd never really done an event on the blue economy. They'd done some very specific things, but they wanted me to come and talk to them about why the blue economy was important. Then earlier this year, they did an event that kind of followed on my presentation to their advisory committee. But if you look at this, this is now UNCTAD, the party of the United Nations. They say that the global ocean-based economy is between $3 trillion and $6 trillion, and more than 3 billion people rely on the ocean. Well, 3 to 6 trillion, that means 3 trillion already versus the 3 trillion, it might be in 2030. So we really don't know, but these are very big numbers. And then in the lower left-hand corner, that big box, you see something that NOAA looked at. And the global, the water, the ocean economy is growing about twice as fast as the US economy in general. So if you look to the lower right-hand corner, and you begin to say even at $3 trillion, which is the lower end of the estimated range, that would make it the equivalent of the fifth largest country in the world. And yet we don't really know, because we don't gather the information really on the ocean economy the way we have done on many economies on land. And again, just to underline this, in 2012, we did our first study in San Diego. And San Diego is a city that was found by ocean when the Spanish came knocking on the door through the San Salvador. They came offshore in San Diego, claimed it for the Spanish crown. And most people didn't come by wagon train or train to San Diego, they came by ocean. And we're a city built around the Navy. And yet nobody had ever studied the value of the blue economy in San Diego. So we did that in 2012. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to get the funding to update our study. I'll give you a little more detail in a few minutes. But when you look at this kind of step function, I told you about the OECD study, the first ever global ocean economy study, 2016. We were the co-authors of NOAA's first ever study on the value of ocean observation, 2016. The United Nations did its first ever ocean conference in 2017. The EU did its first blue invest day in 2017. Kenya, with United Nations, did a African Stainable Blue Economy Conference first time. EU did its first blue economy study, 2018. Second blue economy study, 2019. They did their second blue invest day in the Mediterranean, 2019. National Academy of Sciences, I mentioned before. The White House did its first ever, the Trump White House did its first ever event in the White House or in the Executive Office, next to the White House. In November of 2019, I was one of I think about 115 or 16 people that were invited. And then in 2020, the second blue invest day in Brussels, I was invited to represent the whole US capital market, which was kind of a hoot. But there were hundreds of people there because the EU is really focused on the blue economy, blue tech, what they call blue growth. And they've done a wonderful job really promoting blue invest. And then there was supposed to be the second UN ocean conference in June of 2020. That was obviously postponed because of COVID. But I want you to see what a compressed timeframe is that around the world, people are saying, oh my God, there's this big blue thing out there. And it's really important. And I think that speaks volumes of out of sight out of mind, but it also I think is a harbinger of the importance of the work that Kate is doing and where college is doing. And hopefully all of you will help her do in the future. I think this is a very important slide because this shows everything that's blue shows the exclusive economic zone that's owned by a country. And so you look off to the left and you see lots of islands, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, even Portugal, New Zealand, they have far more blue than they have brown, which is their land mass. And you come toward the middle and you see United States and Australia, we have more ocean as part of our EECs than we do land mass. You start moving for the right. And now you understand Iran and China from a geopolitical point of view. You say it's no wonder that South China Sea is so incredibly important. It's no wonder that they have long range fishing fleets because they frankly don't have access the way we do in the United States, the enormous amounts of area that are under our economic control. I think this slide is incredibly important because I think it helps one understand graphically very quickly, viscerally, why the ocean is important. And as we have the economic, sorry, as we have the technical prowess to go exploit the ocean, we've always done fishing, we know that, but there's so much more, whether it's mining or it's aquaculture, it is understanding the ocean in new ways, it's new biomedicines, the whole area of biomerine, which will be trillions of trillions of dollars. All these people over in the far right are really poor in the sense they don't have as much ocean to play with. So in the 60s, NOAA and NASA's budgets were about the same. NASA has done a wonderful job of storytelling. NOAA isn't allowed to do the same. Many of you will have heard of Bob Ballard, the guy who found the Titanic, he and his team, world-class explorer, and his comment. Now, if you show this to somebody from NASA, they'll say yes, but we find a lot of stuff for NOAA, which is really true, but it's still a very interesting the exploration budget at NOAA is quite small compared to NASA. Again, I'm not trying to make any qualitative or quantitative judgments here. I just think it's important that we have a tendency to take the ocean for granted. And I think it's very important that we understand the value of this economy and the importance to the country as well. So just a word about our study, 2012. Normally, for those of you that are economic, kind of industry people, you would understand the next codes, which is the North American duster classification system, which of course will change now that we have the new agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. But normally you would go to a next code and it would lead you to companies. In our case, we had to find the companies and then say what next code have you been assigned or what was assigned to you? This is unheard of to have 200 next codes to look at an industry. Again, we could not have gone to a next code and found the industry, we found the companies. Now of those 1431 companies, 700 plus self reported that they had a maritime focus and 350 reported over 75%. Nobody had ever done this study and we found 46,000 direct jobs, not indirect as well and 14 plus billion dollars of annual direct sales. Again, as an economist, you would say, okay, what's the overall economic impact? You'd look at direct, indirect, and induced to really understand the overall impact. And I'll show you something about that in a minute. This was done on 2011 numbers. Again, we've not had the funding to go forward to do an upgraded study. We are hopefully getting close to doing that. If you look at what NOAA came up with, and again, this is in absolutely no way a slight because the only six sectors that are covered by the next codes, which I just talked about, are marine construction, living resources, offshore minerals, ship and boat building, tourism, recreation, marine transportation. And so they looked at the city of San Diego or the county of San Diego and said 5.8 billion. But if you take out tourism and recreation which we do not include in our study, it was only 2.1 billion. So our 14 billion was 6.7 times what NOAA says. Again, NOAA has done an amazing job. I have nothing for admiration. They're taking US government economic data which is essentially systematically undercounting the value of the blue economy in the United States. We did a little study. One of our member companies gave us some funding and we then did a study on what's the overall multiplier which is this issue of direct indirect and induced jobs. And what they found, again, we didn't do this study. We got the funding for it. It was an MBA capstone project at San Diego State University, our largest university. And so it was a very small sample size of two companies but the owners basically gave us access to their whole supplier list and a team of companies under the tutelage of two really good professors that done a lot of work in the supply chain and multiplier did this study. And they came out and said of the $40 million generated just in the city of San Diego is a 1.74 multiplier. The state of the county was 2.15 and the state was 2.59. Now a closed loop system is about three because essentially you're saying 100% of the dollars are direct or then they show up as indirect and they show up as induced. And so it is the higher that number the better it is. And then they looked at it vis-a-vis other industries they had studied. And so total you can see your output multiplier and then pharma, biotech, healthcare tourism. Again, these were not our numbers. These were the numbers that San Diego State team came up with whether that's the right number or not isn't the point. The point is that there was an amazing multiplier in blue tech because when I go out and buy a wire to create a wet madeable connection or because I'm doing a ROV and I need 1,000 meters of tether that you buy the copper from somewhere you buy the plastic from somewhere you mold that it then goes into another product. So you basically create subsystems. So it's a very high multiplier which means blue tech is one of those industries that you should love if you understood it in more detail. I think this is the, and I was, I said this really the National Academy of Sciences because this is the time for us in the United States to be bold. There are so many industry sectors and within the military you've got many, many sectors as well. You may not have aquaculture sitting over here but you know that food security is incredibly important. It's a fast growth industry. I hope I showed you that by one of the earlier slides. It's huge potential for the United States. You know that because 71% of the world's surface is ocean but 98 to 99% of habitable earth is underwater. 98 to 99% of habitable earth is underwater. I was participating in a NATO Portuguese Navy event yesterday part of a big exercise got canceled this year called RETMUS 2020. And one of the admirals was saying that 98% of all of the world's voice traffic and communications goes underwater via cables which of course with the technology moving as rapidly as possible is very vulnerable today. So while it is fast growth and it has huge potential for the world it also has creates vulnerabilities which is where of course navies and DOD come in. So all these things underwater communications, unmanned systems, marine and survey vessels, hydra all of these are of great importance. Again, forget aquaculture, think food security. High economic multiplier which I just talked about the US is still a global leader but as Kate can tell you the Chinese for example have been pouring money into promoting blue tech centers in China. Europe has identified 15 years ago plus more I would say about this. We started working in kind of some of the blue tech areas about the same time as the EU but when I say the EU we're tiny the EU has put a lot of funding into a lot of research to do some really great work but the United States is a traditional leader here and should continue to be a leader. There's global impact with partner clusters around the world I'm gonna talk about clusters in a few minutes. Big problems or big opportunities which I'll talk about in a minute. And of course I think if any of us have children or grandchildren and nephews it's the right thing to do. We need to take care of the ocean somewhere between every one of every two and two out of every three breaths comes from bacteria in the ocean essentially. We need to unleash innovation to address important issues. First of all, we should be talking about the circular economy and then we need to think about cleanup of the ocean. For decades we threw nuclear waste in the ocean and today you can go down and pick that up if you want to. There's phantom netting many places. There's plastics we know because that's the issue that we have probably heard the most about. There's sunken vessels from the Second World War with oil on board. And some day we're gonna have a catastrophic rupture that's going to ruin the economy of some South Pacific country. And if we decided that politically, socially, economically, morally we should go out and find some of those vessels and in clean them up we would create jobs and it would be doing the right thing and also avoiding much more expensive cleanup. There's unexploded ordnance in many places not least to which the Baltic Sea where there's estimates of hundreds of thousands of mines still floating around and an untold number of shells that were dumped because nobody thought we would get to them before and we of course can easily today. We believe in floating infrastructure. There'll be airports, diesel plants, energy plants, ports to spend money on building a billion dollar diesel plant which in 20, 30, 40 years will be under attack from the ocean. Doesn't matter who did it, God or man, we know that oceans are rising. So we need to be thinking about floating infrastructure. We think incredibly important. Some years ago I went to the Department of Transportation and told them what we were doing and they said, oh, you're the second person that's been here to talk to us. And I said, oh, it was the first. They said this guy from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and at the time we had been under non-disclosure agreement as we had worked with Lawrence Livermore looking at large floating ports which frankly the private sector would pay for but it would be a little bit like at what happened after 9-11, I'd rather, God forbid, there was a dirty bomb. If it went off in the ports of Long Beach, Los Angeles we would be at a standstill. If it was a floating port 20 miles offshore it would be a terrible, terrible, terrible thing but it would be something that we could deal with. And all these things around this this was actually a foot, this was something put together by Lawrence Livermore. These are wind energy and in here are ICBP related activities to make sure that you come in, you delouse the, not delouse, you, what do you call it? Demagnetize the vessels that they come in. You then bring the ocean going vessels on one side and you bring in the ones that are gonna go to your small ports. You revitalize the ports, you work on short sea shipping. So again, lots of political, economic ramifications of things like this and it's where we need to go to add insult to injury. A few years ago, the Chinese offered to build an offshore port for us on the East Coast which really didn't go very far, fortunately. There's a lot of ocean noise. We have the ability today to understand ocean noise. It's not just military, it's all those vessels, bigger and bigger vessels. If we don't understand it, how do we, you know, if you can't understand a problem it's hard to come up with a solution for a problem. Salt intrusion, you know, this whole area of saline farming and what's happening in the Mekong Delta in countries in Jordan, in Bangladesh, these are moving people because they can no longer farm because of salt intrusion. And there are other countries that are spending a lot more time and focus on things like saline farming. So these are big problems that we can turn into opportunities where we can deal with them. And I always like to draw the analogy with the Netherlands which Naderland, as you may know, means low country. And so the Dutch have lived with probably half of their country underwater, under sea level for a long time. And so they are a world leader in working on dredging and trying to figure out how to protect what they have. They also build their cities. So when there's water, it then is captured and the runoff, if it's fresh water can be utilized and the rest is funneled back into the ocean. They've done things because they've had to live with it. So again, these are definitely problems. Nobody likes to deal with problems and they're costly problems. But if we look at them as opportunities where we can create industries and we can sell that around the world and do good then I think we'd be much further along. Amazing photo as far as I'm concerned that is both cute and frightening at the same moment. Okay, what's a cluster? Where are they important? A business cluster is a regional concentration of related industries. For us an organized cluster is when you really understand regional recognition, funding and leadership intersect effective leadership is critical. We believe that effective blue tech clusters should focus on the triple bottom line. People planet profit and they balance economic environmental social equity factors. And we are both tech and service companies. And if we don't use blue tech we cannot understand the magnitude of the problems. Let's just say plastics is an example and then figure out how to solve it. The plastic isn't just gonna go away. So we have to figure out what's the extent of the problem and how do we deal with it? This is us, we were founded in 2017 we're in our 14th year. We are a strategic partner with the US Department of Commerce. We were a recipient of the first ever ocean technology funding from the US government. It's got the terrible name of Market Development Cooperator Program. Approximately a hundred members as Kate said our mission statement is to promote sustainable science-based ocean and water industries. Our tagline is promoting blue tech and blue jobs. And so we're at our core and industry association. We care about sustainability. We care about science-based which means replicable ocean and water industries. We care about doing what's right for the ocean and water. We care about doing what's right for the world. To us, blue tech is all things wet and I'm just gonna highlight a couple of these. These are important things for us. We're very broad. I'll show you that in a minute. From an open ocean observation point of view we believe we have to change the math. And by the way, in a resource constrained world the Navy needs to think about this. Marine Corps has to think about changing the math for whatever they wanna do. We just can't do things the way we used to do them but it's just as important in science, government, industry as well. Blue economy, space economy, interface is very important. It provides real-time comms. And then ocean observation and blue tech are essential for humans to address what we call the big five, food, water, medicine, energy and real estate. And then you've got what I would like to think of as very important but I hope transitory problems like abandon netting, plastic, sunken vessels. Again, these are not trivial issues but we have the technology to go find and remove these but we have to have the will and the funding to do so. International collaboration is critical. These problems and these markets are way too big for any country to deal with alone. We're very broad. As I said, if it's wet, it's blue. You can see here 16 sectors. We are a mile wide and in about two inches deep. There's no way that we are specialists in all these fields but we try and bring people together. One of the biggest problems for us has been getting people in disparate sectors within Blue Tech to understand why they should help each other. And I'm in biomedicine. Why should I help somebody in robotics? Well, frankly, because those robotics are gonna help you find the medicines or harvest whatever it is in a sustainable way. And by the way, the end of the day, a chorus is always better than a single voice because it's louder. There are more people with more connections and think about us as bringing disparate voices together to try and create what we call a blue voice, region by region. This was a study, we didn't do this 2016, the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation but you can see in the lower right-hand corner, course in blue, our study. And then you can look at these other industries. Again, this was not us doing the work but where we talked only direct jobs, not indirect and induced. When they say direct economic impact, total economic impact, it's really, it's hard to imagine that that isn't a full economic impact whereas what we were talking about was just direct jobs, direct industry. So it's a big industry, nobody had any clue about the size of Blue Economy and Blue Tech in San Diego until we did that study. This is an older slide. You even see our old logo there. Kate alluded to that, that was our former name, same logo but here are just around the world, French, Mexican, this is Ireland, Spain, Inter-American Committee on Ports, part of the American, oh God, part of the Inter-American Committee on Ports and the IS in Washington DC. So we deal with lots of companies around the world, organizations around the world. Some areas of particular TMA focus we think for the future, K through 12 education is critical, promoting Blue Tech clusters and chapters around the world, capacity building we think is very important. All of these things are important. You know, attracting more capital is very important. The end of the day to study the ocean, to understand the ocean, we have to drive down the price of platforms and sensors. And one of the disadvantages the DOD deals with is the very cumbersome acquisition system, it's very hard to be nimble. And I think we note that when we went to a place like Iraq and Afghanistan and the people we were fighting were using off-the-shelf GPS and things like that and we were struggling to stay up with the change. So there are lots of companies that are not in the DOD orbit just because it takes long and it's hard to be seen. They often don't have the right admirals and generals on their boards. But our goal as an organization and our companies is drive down the price of platforms and sensors. I'll come back to that. Well, I think it's important for military. Here is a representation of a cluster. I mean, we bring together academia, industry, policy and in the middle, we said each of those we have to talk to differently because their interests which is what you see here, here and here, they're different. But where they overlap is the needs and the solutions, economic growth and jobs. So we talk about a regional voice and we promote a blue opportunity and to do that we have to align stakeholder interests. I'm gonna spend a minute talking a couple of minutes talking about education because we think it's critically important. We spend probably 25% of our time on workforce development and educational development. There's a lot of things that we have done but I'll focus on this one. When COVID hit, we had, we trademarked, we were the first people I think to really use Blutex in certainly United States. We talk about Bluestem. We didn't trademark a lot of these things because we wanted people to use them but we use wanted to trademark aqua optimism because we are both ocean and water. While we're primarily I think talking about ocean today again, we are feed in both areas and there's a finite amount of water in the world and it's either in a cloud or it's underground or it's out in that great big ocean where 97% of the world's water sits. So we're interested in all that. So we decided that we were going to put a curriculum together and so we are just finishing a phase one which is a TK through 12, so 13 grades curriculum and a resource matrix. We've talked to UNESCO, part of the United Nations. It's possible that we're gonna get some funding to translate that into some other languages. Our goal is to roll this out. It's pretty exciting to see teachers and curriculum writers look at this and just one example, I'm part of a leadership team from the San Diego Unified School District and that SDUSD is 105,000 students, K through 12 students. So it's the second largest school district in the state of California and we are their essentially Blue Tech partner to bring Blue STEM in. And one of the middle school teachers stood up and said, I know every teacher in the middle school and the high school but when they finished, I don't remember her grade, let's just say up to seventh grade, sorry, fifth grade, sixth grade, whatever she was, sixth grade, let's say. And then I say goodbye and they go off to the next teacher. By having a light motif, a theme, they can work together and so things build on each other. And if you think about the ocean, whether it's math or it's reading or it's science or whatever it is, writing, it's drawing, it's healthcare, the ocean has impacted it and is impacting it. So we are finishing a curriculum that we hopefully will be adopted and we're now beginning to put together phase two funding. Why does that impact the military? Because it's hard to get people to understand the value of the ocean. And if you see this as a place, my gosh, you too could see the world and then come back out and there's a whole industry that's looking for people like you. I think it's of great value to the Navy. Some posters were put together, your future is in the ocean technology industry. We're just releasing these posters along with the curriculum, we've had them for years but there was no place to send young people to learn about careers in Blue Tech and that's one of the things that we've done. I invite you to, if you wanna learn more, go to our 160 page TMA Blue Tech website. There's lots to see and do and learn and we will be eventually making the curriculum available. We need funding to give it to underserved communities but for those that can afford it, they'll be able to utilize and pay for matrices and various other things that hopefully will help them. We have a physical incubator but we think we really act as if we were already an accelerator, that's what we do. And our biggest strength is our global network of Blue Tech clusters, companies and contacts. We helped put together the world's first kind of alliance of Blue Tech clusters. So this is the Blue Tech cluster alliance. You can tell we like the word Blue Tech. We're branding every time we can. So hopefully you'll all walk away and use the word Blue Tech many times in the course of the day. We pulled together 10 leading Blue Tech clusters from eight countries. You can see our mission there and you can see our goals. We typically have bi-monthly calls. This has allowed us to work together in very unique ways and to promote Blue Tech internationally. So if I go to Norway like I did last October to the our ocean conference, which was hosted there, I was there with my partner cluster and the two of us worked the room. So my Norwegian cluster partner who knows the people in Norwegian government and I knew some of the US government people that were there, including Craig McClain, the acting chief scientist to know was there will be a Blue Tech week as well. So we worked together in that, as we all know, there's strength in numbers and the ability to do things together. That also led to something that we are recently unveiled, I think this may be new for Cata as well. But on June 30, we signed an MOU, We Team Able to Tech with three other partners to create essentially will be the world's first publicly available long distance testing facilities for robotics and sensors. And so our goal is to create presence in the ocean. We've talked to the European Space Agency and NASA and NOAA and the National Oceanography Center and the UK and many others, the Navy of course and everybody's expressed interest. We're just now kind of moving into our second phase which is getting partners together for this. The thing that's so interesting is, let's just say as Kate knows, I'm involved also with a very innovative small unmanned surface vassal company and we're in San Diego. And so we can go out to the Cadillian Islands and maybe in a week out and back but after that, it's Hawaii or bust. That's a hell of a long ways. And if halfway across it breaks down or gets caught in netting or seaweed, it's really prohibitive to go out and pick something up. But if you look here from Puerto in the north to the Azores and then between the Azores and islands these are all manageable distances and no place is more than 500 miles, 475 miles actually, from where if you broke down right in the middle that somebody could come and help you and pick you up. So we think it's pretty cool. And right now there are robotic centers in Porto and in Ploca, our partner. And we are partnered with Porto Mociano, the national cluster in Portugal, Ploca, a cluster in Spain and of course we're the largest cluster in the United States. So the four of us went together, we've got our logo and we're gonna be building or they will be building robotic centers in the Azores in Lisbon. The Portuguese Navy is gonna be sponsoring a new robotic center and then there'll be one in Mededa and then there is a 24 seven center but we'll be grafting on to that kind of a one for company. So now if you're an NGO or you're a military that for example, you can't see it here but this is, call this a big loop around the mouth to the Mediterranean. If you care about, for argument's sake, submarines going in, it'd be nice to have people gathering information for METOC purposes, potentially for just knowing who's going through and transiting an area. So we see lots of advantages in this. This would not have been possible without our relationship with our partners around the world. This is our blue tech week coming up. Kate and I were just talking about that. She's tried to come for the last couple of years but since we're virtual, there's no reason she can't come for part of it this year. One day will be a California and US blue economy initiatives and policy. So Kate, I hope you can at least join us for part of that one. 2019, we had 686 people from 18 countries including 16 clusters and 150 companies. Those were clusters and clusters and formation. Those were both ocean and water tech clusters and you can see 2020. Okay, I'm getting to the end because I wanted to only talk for about 45 minutes and then leave time open because I understand by about 115 some people will be running to classes. I said before and I'll just come back again, blue tech is critical to identify and solve problems. The Navy through UNR and other organizations, the UTIC in Newport and others, I think have done really great work but after the Second World War, probably, I don't know the numbers so I think we've all seen a little bit of research and how over time the private sector continues to invest in often doing things that are faster to market than a government funding program. And so both are very important. We think UNR and DARPA and all those guys play an incredibly important role but there's a lot of work being done in the private sector as well. And so these are all issues that are important for DOD, autonomy, autonomous vessels, big data, cybersecurity, food security, ocean energy, ocean observation, pollution mitigation, port maritime shipping efficiency and making sure we have enough water wastewater. You know, those poor people in Guatemala and Honduras that are in decade long droughts and are moving north, it's not because they wanna leave, it's because they would starve to death if they stayed where they are. Those problems are proliferating as climate change happens, whether it's in the middle of Italy, which is having problems or the Middle East where we're seeing the temperature soaring to levels they've never been before. But these are big problems and Blue Tech, again for us means both ocean and water. So on the water side, we're interested in recycling conservation and of course the creation of new water, whether it's just taking it out of the air through evaporation or it is desalination of some kind. Upper left again, ocean represents 71% of the world's surface 98 to 99% of habitable earth. People, we live on a two-dimensional world even if you're in the Andes Mountains, you're still two-dimensional, whereas the ocean is essentially three-dimensional and then you throw time in and everything's moving. The border between Mexico and the United States is very static unless there's a earthquake that makes a difference. But you throw something in the water in Alaska and it's down in Costa Rica in a week. If we didn't know that before, we knew it from Fukushima. So why is this relevant? I mean, every topic I just talked about is relevant, but in a larger kind of geopolitical sense, every great power throughout history has been a naval innovator. You know, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Venetians, the Greeks, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the UK, the United States, without naval innovation and power, it has been hard to be a world power. We believe that, you know, I think we hope us all believe that we need global partners and one way to develop that relationship is cluster to cluster, company to company. We think that's a way to build bridges and build relationships that promote collaboration, innovation, respect and trust. So I think, you know, you put into a port somewhere and if somebody says, oh, I've been working with somebody in your country, that's obviously wonderful. It only helps the sailors, it helps our vessels, it helps in the trust factor. Great technologies are being developed globally and we can help source them. We started something in April called Blue Tech Global Connect and every month we bring three companies from three countries and we're always trying to find very innovative technologies and we find them in Iceland and Switzerland and Norway and anywhere around the world and we are trying to help bring them forward. Support for the creation of blue economy clusters and developing countries can promote smart sustainable development. We can't be good stewards just in the United States and Europe and Japan and Korea, you know, a few developed countries, Australia, New Zealand. We've got to be developing this around the world. I mean, that ocean touches 100 and I think it's 61 countries of the 186 or whatever it is in the world. You know, there aren't that many countries, you know, the poor Bolivians, for example, there aren't that many countries that don't have ocean access. Sometimes it slivers, you know, but you know, and the Bolivians and the Chileans fought a war and the Chileans won and they took away ocean access to Bolivia and Bolivia has been wanting to try and get back ever since. So we need to help them and I don't mean the Navy has to be doing this but to me the Department of State, USAID and people like that because it's the right thing to do and it pays dividends. Dual use technologies drive down the price. Clusters can help identify them. As I said before, it's increasingly important in a resource constrained world. I spent a couple of slides looking at blue stem and aqua optimism. We think that's an amazing way to excite our youth for the future. You know, you so show a child an angler fish with its, you know, the light hanging out in front with these great big teeth trying to attract somebody and you go, oh my God, you know, but they'll remember that. And when you talk about how much of the ocean is still unexplored and you say, you can be part of creating a sustainable ocean economy, we'll be doing this a hundred years from now. I mean, this is such a big opportunity. I believe, and I hope most of us would believe that we're probably gonna cure breast cancer or ovarian cancer from something from the ocean as opposed to something from Mars. And so we have an ability, if we can excite our youth, whether they go into telecom or healthcare later, it's not important. It's exciting them early on. And we believe that hopefully what we're doing will add to that opportunity. Promoting BlueTac promotes awareness of the importance of the ocean. At the beginning, I talked about how little research has been done, how people are waking up. And that means if people say, my God, of course the ocean's important. And of course, funding is important for the US Navy and US Marine Corps as our wet services. It may not be a direct line, but holy mackerel, it is important in direct line. And of course, it's the right thing to do. If we care about our future, if we care about the ocean and water and climate change, then dealing with it and BlueTac, and from my point of view, clusters are critically important. So I always like to, somebody once said this from Esri, Don Wright, Dr. Don Wright, the chief scientist used this quote, if you wanna go quickly, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. And I've always used it, and I always credit her for it. We need each other, we need to collaborate. And so I will say thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. Kate, it's always a pleasure to work with you in any way we can. And then contact details for us. Obviously, Kate knows how to get ahold of me and we are happy to take any questions via Kate. And then I offered, if this goes on beyond the, I guess, 130 year time, we would change it over from chat feature, assuming people have questions for me. We're happy to talk more live, but you also can get ahold of me if anybody wants to talk one-on-one. So with that, I'm gonna say thank you for your attention. I know it was enforced if you were here. You couldn't raise your hand, you couldn't talk or anything else, but thank you very much for listening. And I look forward to answering any questions. I'm gonna stop sharing at this point, Kate, unless somebody wants me to go back. Yeah, hold on to that. Oh, well, that's right. Easy to go back to. We're gonna ask in a moment about the EEZ slide, but while you go back to that, I'm going to use moderated privilege. We have several questions lined up, but one practical question, one substantive. The practical question is,