“The U.S. Navy’s Economic and Strategic Impact from Florida around the Globe” Meredith Berger, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and Environment discusses the Navy's priorities in energy, climate resilience, and infrastructure, including hurricane impacts, before an October 10, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Assistant Navy Secretary Berger spoke to the Club by a live video stream as Hurricane Milton was just leaving Florida. She pointed out that hurricanes, storms, fires, other forms of bad weather and climate change are something the Department of the Navy has to prepare for all around the world.

“It's a threat that we see that's not bound necessarily by geography, season or time. It happens in other parts of the world, too,” she said. She referenced a typhoon that struck Joint Region Marianas (Guam and the Northern Marianas) last year.

“Ahead of the storm, we protected our critical infrastructure, secured systems, moved our platforms, everything from cars to ships to aircraft, and we sheltered our infrastructure the best we could so we could get the power back on to our community, both inside and outside the fence line. Because that's how a defense community works. We prepared fresh water, charged devices, aggregated supplies, and then you just sit and wait,” she said.

In her role as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and Environment, she supports what she called the three “C’s”.

• Community – “These are the ecosystems that allow us to survive and thrive, succeed and achieve the economies that support our way of life. It's where our values that we hold and defend reside. It's the institutions you're all a part of, regions, cities, towns. It's where we lead and serve, where our base is and the environment that surrounds them and supports them.”
• Critical Infrastructure – “These are ports, natural and man-made structures, roads and runways, barracks and depots, utilities, energy and water that connect us, sustain us, prepare us, and ultimately protect us.”
• Climate – “We consider this a war fighting advantage, a tactical and strategic enabler and significantly, a conflict deterrent.”

Ms. Berger also serves as the Navy’s Chief Sustainability Officer. “As we think about climate change and whatever term you want to assign to the impact that we're seeing, so extreme weather, heat, drought, floods, resource scarcity, this is a national security threat for us. It's a threat that we take seriously, and we are on the front lines of it.”

One way of being on the front lines is by investigating the need for buried power cables. She discussed last year’s fires in Maui where above-ground power cables were burned. (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“Conservation is Good for Business” Jessica Harvey, CEO of the Guy Harvey Foundation shares its mission and success in combining art and science for greater environmental conservation through ocean research and education before a September 24, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Ms. Harvey told the club that her father began his self-taught art career early. His teachers told him he’d never amount to anything if he didn’t pay attention in class and stop drawing Spitfires.

“Part of his success,” she said, “is that the art work is iconic. He started off with the inspiration from The Old Man and the Sea, and because he was a very visual person, he couldn't find an illustrated version of the story, and therefore set upon himself, at the age of 16, to do pen and ink drawings of the story. Took him a year to do, and he, at the time, did not explore the watercolors or the acrylic. That came later.”

Guy Harvey’s paintings of natural scenes now grace everything from museum walls to coffee cups, and part of the money made goes to fund the Guy Harvey Foundation.

“It's very hopeful. It's very uplifting, and because of that, more people want to be associated with the brand. It's branched out into people wanting Guy Harvey F-150s, so we had a licensing agreement with them. Norwegian Cruise Lines wanting to feature dad as the hull art, which they do on all of their ships. And it's not only become a feature of the art, but a billboard for conservation and support. You have things like Tervis, which is a well-regarded brand (of glasses and tumblers), you have TAG Heuer watches that wanted to feature his art on the face of the watch. It goes on to all sorts of different things.”

She said that her father’s art is so realistic because of the efforts he makes to understand the environment.

“He really makes an effort to study the animal and its natural habitat, but also learn more about it to support its conservation. He is not, as he says, he's not a tree hugger. He likes to fish. He likes to eat fish. But there are ways in which we need to move as a society to support sustainable use of our resources, and that's what he's about.”

She pointed out the importance of water to Florida’s economy.

• 52-million recreational anglers in Florida, $140-billion to the economy
• 100-million Americans boat annually, $230-billion
• Boating and fishing employ thousands of Floridians

The Guy Harvey Foundation began a relationship with Nova Southeastern University in 1999 to do research on pelagic fish – those that live in open waters – including sharks and billfish.

“Dr. Mahmoud Shivji is the director of the Nova Guy Harvey Research Institute based at Nova Southeastern University, and
he's an ecologist, but also geneticist, and he has helped with complicated studies on fish ID, because there's a lot of fish fraud that takes place in the States. Unfortunately, endangered species, his group was one of the first to find to account for the number of shark fins that are caught to support the shark fin trade, which is. Is upwards of 73 million at the time.”

To date, the Foundation has had 176 peer-reviewed scientific papers published which aid conservation efforts. They are supporting... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“How Autonomous Trucking Will Deliver the Future” - Nationally-recognized expert Lee White reveals how trials of autonomous vehicle trucking on public highways are progressing and the impact driverless trucks are expected to have on the cost of goods, the labor market, and roadway safety before an August 27, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Mr. White told the Club that autonomous vehicles (AVs) are already on the road. Out west, Waymo operates driverless taxis with more than 100,000 paid rides a week. The company will be expanding to 20 more states.In Florida, trucking will be a huge user of these driverless vehicles. Currently in the state:

• 130,000 trucking companies operate in Florida
• 1 in 18 people are employed in the industry
• 95% of all manufactured tonnage is brought to you by truck
• Trucking is the harbinger of the economy

The U.S. trucking industry represents $900-billion worth of transactions in interstate commerce across 140,000 terminals. Plus, we already see autonomous vehicles and machines working in other areas, especially since the COVID pandemic changed the supply chain.

“One of the things that helped these e-commerce companies, the Amazons, the UPS, DHL, Walmart, Target get through that is a lot of automation in their warehouses,” White said. “We have more million square-foot warehouses in our supply chain now than we ever had, and there’s a lot of automation. Amazon has over 14 different robots that are doing things, picking and unloading. We've got automated forklifts that are loading and unloading trucks. There's a lot of automation that's taking place inside the four walls, inside these facilities.”

He also pointed to the ways agriculture uses AVs.

“With John Deere, I believe there's 12 locations that they're testing right now for farming where the tractor has 24-hour capability to be able to farm. All the farmer needs to do is transport their tractor to the field, get it set up, get out of the cab, use their mobile phone and swipe to farm.”

In New York there are autonomous airport shuttles to take you to the terminal and then back to your car. They use autonomous machines as baggage carts and to load and unload cargo.

The military is also interested.

“In the last 10 years, they've had some military vehicles in some of our areas and supply chains that are running without drivers,” White said. “It's going to keep our men and women, our soldiers out of harm's way. You know, if there's a convoy of 20 trucks, there may be truck number 15 that's got a driver in it, and everything else is being autonomously driven.”

The trucking industry is still suffering a recession. There was an additional 4-5% reduction in business last May and June. The industry is also dealing with cost increases.

“If you look at the past three years, the wage cost has gone up from 56 cents per mile for a driver to 78 cents, a 38% increase in wages,” said White, a truck delivery driver earlier in his career... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“Development Trajectory of the Internet and AI – Will History Repeat Itself, or Just Rhyme?” WebMD founding COO Michael Heekin draws comparisons to the early days of the Internet to discuss the rapid dynamics of Artificial Intelligence and how it may impact business operations in the next ten years before a July 23, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Michael Heekin first took the Club on a nostalgic trip through the history of the internet featuring names such as America Online, the first internet connection many people had, Alta Vista and Yahoo, early search engines, and Netscape, an early browser.

He discussed how electrical energy demands from Artificial Intelligence (AI), various data centers, electric vehicles, among others will be huge. Previous Club speakers have addressed the energy needs as well.

“AI does not think like the human brain,” Heekin said. “Data is the key. It does not have instincts, emotions or consciousness.”

He said that as far as we know, AI is not capable of innovative thinking. He acknowledged that while AI might replace humans in performing some tasks, it’s power will be helping humans work more efficiently.

“It can take the works of the Beatles, and it can compose a new song and have Paul McCartney sing it,” he said. “It sounds like the Beatles because it’s got the same meter and the same interplay of instruments. But, it’s not capable of, and I’m going to guess never will have original thought. It’s not going to recreate a masterpiece like the complete works of Shakespeare or the City of God by Augustine.”

Heekin, who specializes in the management and development of growth-stage health and technology companies, talked about how we saw internet companies succeed and fail, and through the booms and busts, we’ve seen what they needed to succeed. AI companies will be similar in that there will be successes as well as dashed dreams and lost investment money.

“Access to good data and good data curation is what’s going to be really key,” he said. “Getting good data, curating it, and then stuffing it into the algorithm.”

He said that regulatory good faith is necessary for AI to grow, and he praised President Bill Clinton and U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich for their light regulation of the Internet in the 1990s.

“The government needs to not kill this thing in the crib. It has great potential for good, and great, great potential for threats. But that’s the same with a lot of things, wi-fi, life in general. The genie’s out of the bottle. If it’s not AI, it will be something else.”

He also looked at social media and regulation as a model for AI.

“Social media is like giving kids a pack of cigarettes. It’s clear AI is going to need some regulation, but it should be ex-post, not in advance. People in Washington don’t have a monopoly on good sense.”

He said AI will be a commodity product.

“There will be some wrinkles to it, but it will be a commodity. We will have access to AI, but most AI companies will not own the AI algorithms. Thay may own developments of it. They may have prompt engineers that can tell the AI algorithm what to do, but they will not own the algorithm lock stock and barrel.”

The public domain is... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“Florida’s ‘Booming’ Economy” Clark Mica, President of the Institute of Makers of Explosives highlights the critical role that commercial explosives play in building the Florida and U.S. economies before a June 25, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

“There are a couple things you need to have in a modern society, or successful society, and that's energy, water, and food,” Mr. Mica told the Club. All of those things require explosives to produce, what he refers to as “the ultimate power tool.”

The Institute of Makers of Explosives was begun in 1913 as an organization to provide safety instruction and guidelines. It’s been so successful in its mission that OSHA told the group it does not need to form a safety and health alliance with the government organization. To handle or possess explosives, a person has to pass an ATF background check and be thoroughly trained. Three universities in the country now offer degrees in mining or explosives.

“If you think about the millions of tons of explosives that are consumed each year, rarely do you hear about anything in the news,” he said.

The group includes manufacturers, distributors, and users of commercial explosives. The group does not deal with defense or fireworks.

Mr. Mica said that there is only one dynamite factory in the United States and no TNT plant. What is needed is imported, and that could be a national security issue. Most of the commercial explosives used today are made from ammonium nitrate emulsions.

The group just completed the first ever economic impact study of the commercial explosives industry in the United States and Florida.

Across the country the industry provides:

• 15,592 direct jobs
• 60,329 direct and induced jobs

The economic impact of the industry is large.

• $7.5-billion in direct economic impact
• $11.5-billion in supplier and induced economic impact
• $19.1-billion in total economic impact

Commercial explosives make other industries possible, including industries that will be very important in the future.

“We talk about all the new technology, the green economy. We don't care if it's fossil fuels or green, you need us for everything,” he said. “If you want to make lithium batteries for electric cars, you’ve got to mine the lithium, and you have to use explosives to do that. You want to build windmills, you use explosives, and not only to get the material out, but to build the windmill. You have to use it to prepare the site because those things go down twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty feet to build the foundations.”

The largest users of explosives are the oil and gas industry and the mining and quarry industry. There explosives provide:

• $121.7-billion in mining and critical materials
• $2.2-trillion in quarry and construction
• $81.2-billion for the energy industry

In Florida, the economic impact of commercial explosives is also huge.

• $132.4-million in direct economic impact
• $299.4-million in the supplier and induced impact
• $431.8-million in total economic impact

Explosives have played a critical... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“The Opportunity Capital in Florida's Rocket Ship Economy” Miami entrepreneur Saif Ishoof of the Miami business development firm Lab22c shares a glimpse of what Florida could become in the future before a May 16, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Mr. Ishoof told the Club that technological innovation and economic growth depend on human capital and developing that human capital. He quoted his late father, who said we honor the American Dream by helping others achieve it.

He pointed to the great changes in the state over the past 40-years by using the changing pronunciation of his city as a metaphor – Miam-uh, Meeahmi, and now Miami.

At 24, after graduating from law school, Mr. Ishoof decided to build his first software company in an office building near the University of Miami. Guy Kawasaki, Chief Marketing Officer for Steve Jobs and Apple, told him to move from Florida.

“And I disregarded what was the best worst piece of advice I ever had,” he said. “Because I believed that that Miam-uh, Meeahmi, Miami had something that was going to position us to win the second half of the 21st century. That very special element is human capital.”

Ishoof served as Executive Director for City Year Miami, an AmeriCorps national service program for young adults. As nothing was going on in downtown Miami in 2008, he decided to recruit young people to serve as tutors, mentors, and role models and to focus long-term on human capital. His ideas worked.

“We moved over 1.5 trillion of assets under management capital to Miami and Florida in the last 48 months. There's a global ranking called the GFCI which stands for Global Financial Center Index. It's a ranking of global financial centers. OECD and the World Bank put it out. Miami had never been on the list ever before. This year, we landed on the list for our first time at number 24. Dubai is 21.”

Ishoof said big companies are moving to Florida. “Blackstone, the largest institutional asset manager in the world, now has a massive strategic presence in Miami. Amazon is setting up 50,000 square feet of footprint in Miami, and Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world headquartered in Miami. That's all part of the increase of assets under management in our region. We have to look at those assets as opportunity for human capital.”

He said he wants to work supporting people, institutions, founders, and builders that are trying to solve problems, and that will require developed people.

“We have to develop human capital in our K 12 system,” he said. “We have to make sure that we're supporting early learning, we have to be focusing on creating an actual pathway. So, from when a young person graduates from college, they can see their way to a meaningful career. Are you setting up everybody's child for this form of success? Are you enabling and creating those types of ecosystems in those environments?”

“Driving economic development and driving innovation is not about tech bros at coffee shops. It's about PhDs and postdocs sitting at labs that are actually creating bench science that can actually go to the market.”

His company, Lab22c, works with founders who are creating technologies that are the stuff of... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“Towards Precision Medicine Therapies and Biomarkers for Neurodegenerative Diseases”Dr. Nilüfer Ertekin-Taner, Professor and Enterprise Chair of Mayo Clinic’s Department of Neuroscience, explains the very latest research and treatments for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases before an April 2, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Dr. Ertekin-Taner gave the club some shocking figures on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease:

• $305 billion spent on the diseases
• 600,000 cases in Florida alone
• 12.5% of Florida residents over 65 suffer, the second highest in the country
• 18 billion hours of caretaker time

At Mayo Florida, she has more than 200 investigators working in her lab and supervises more than 250-scientists and trainees at the Florida campus.

“Our collective mission is to find cures and diagnostics for currently incurable and undiagnosable neurologic illnesses, like dementias, like Alzheimer's disease,” she said. “Dementia is the umbrella term, it means a person is having problems in their thinking, and it's interfering with their day-to-day life.”

She pointed out that while Alzheimer’s was first identified more than 100-years ago, it has only recently become recognized clinically. It was thought to be a normal part of aging, but now we know it is not.

Dr. Ertekin-Taner and her lab are looking for cures not only for Alzheimer’s but also Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a disease that progresses faster and at a younger age than Alzheimer’s.

The investigators use genetics to get information about possible risk factors, but it does not give specific information.

“Basically, think of it like the general address. There is a fire so the firefighters are called, and we say there's a fire in this general region. That's the kind of information that these kinds of studies give us. But they don't tell us exactly which house is on fire. And they don’t tell us what caused the fire.”

While diagnosis has gotten better, there are still few cures.

“The answer again, lies in in the economy. The cost of putting a single drug on the market is on average over a billion dollars. So pharmaceutical companies cannot commit unless those drug targets are de-risked for them. And the groups that are going to really identify those drug targets and de-risk it for big pharmaceutical companies are academic groups. Places like Mayo Clinic and other places.”

Dr. Ertekin-Taner said Alzheimer’s, PSP, and the other forms of dementia differ from person to person. While Alzheimer’s is now treated as a single disease, she says it should be treated similarly to cancer with specific therapies for specific patients. Doctors need to apply precision medicine, which is diagnosing and treating the right patient with the right treatment at the right time.

Genes are not all researchers look to.

“There's also a big emphasis now on environment, the exposed zone. Where you were born, what you eat, what are your other risk factors, and education? What are the things that enrich your brain, and what are those that take away from your brain? Their relationship with genes matters. And this combination either puts you at risk for diseases... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast

“The Radical Consequences of a Digital Economy” Bob Rice, Managing Partner of New Jersey-based Tangent Capital Partners, shares the revolutionary implications of Artificial Intelligence on global production, wages, competition, investments, and education before a March 21, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

Bob Rice told the Club that the current digital revolution is making radical changes in the economy which will have radical societal consequences. The changes are occurring at a rate of speed that is hard, even for him, to comprehend.

He pointed out that the first digital camera was invented less than 50-years ago. With the popularity of the Internet and the Personal Computer, anyone can now transmit a photograph to half the world’s population instantly. “The latest iteration is Artificial Intelligence or AI, created by machine, and it’s just getting started. The advances and the consequences are mind-blowing and we have to be ready,” Rice said.

He then showed three brief videos that were created by computers solely with human text commands.

“They literally started with a blank screen with no pixels at all on the screen,” Rice said of the AI process. “Tyler Perry, the big movie guy in Atlanta, was shown this a month ago. He walked out and told The Hollywood Reporter ‘I'm putting my $800 million studio expansion on hold. Jobs are going to be lost.’”

He calls both the advances and the consequences “shocking.” Mr. Rice said we are seeing a “revolutionary revolution,” and he calls it that because it’s not happening in just one domain of human existence. It’s affected things such as the war in Ukraine, entertainment, and also medicine.

“Some of the medical advances that are coming out of this are absolutely mind blowing. The ability to create brand new antibodies that are proteins, specifically for your body, is happening right now.”

It’s a revolution that everyone will have access to.

“You don't need to be a specialist with 20-years of training to use this tool. You need to be able to speak or write something, and it will take care of it and do what you want it to do.”

He said that the Meta (formerly Facebook) open-source AI has been downloaded about 150-million times.

Mr. Rice also discussed human productivity and said the invention that most improved the world was the washing machine.

“Suddenly, electric washing machines freed up essentially half of humanity from six hours of drudgery every single day. And half of humanity was unleashed into things that were more economically productive,” he said, alluding that AI holds the same potential. (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast