Forrest Gauthier and a New Ocean Perspective

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Inventivity. What does it mean? The state of being inventive, creating or designing new things or thought. Hello, I'm, um, Richard Miles. Welcome to the inventivity pod. Join us as we speak to inventors, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who are using inventivity to change the world. They will bring us alongside their journey as they share their personal stories from start to finish, including the. [00:00:33] Speaker B: Hi, I'm James de Virgilio. Welcome to our series on exploring the blue economy, a look at what it is, who's involved, and what the future could look like. For this limited series, we're able to talk to inventors and subject matter experts who are excited to give you a look into the growing and impressive blue economy. Today's guest is Flores Gotier, the CEO of Blue 71. He earned his undergraduate degree in aerospace technology from Northrop University, and then his bio is illustrious. There are all sorts of things I can tell you about Forrest, but don't worry, he'll have plenty of things to share with us on this show. Right off the top, he has over 600 patent claims and more than 800 patent citations. And he has done a wide variety of things, which, of course, is not surprising to most of our listeners. Forrest, as many of our guests are involved in all sorts of industries and hobbies, uh, as you are as well. Welcome to the program. We're really excited about talking about Blue 71 and the blue economy with you today. [00:01:32] Speaker C: Well, thank you for the opportunity. It's my pleasure, indeed. [00:01:35] Speaker B: So let's talk a little bit right away about how your varied experiences, and feel free to mention some of them, led you to starting blue 71, and then we'll describe what blue 71 is. [00:01:46] Speaker C: Well, there's no question that people have different ideas and how to direct their life. I truly admire people that developed a dream and followed that dream. Living in the keys, I see those people every day, and I have a great admiration for them. I was not one of them. My parents were both professional. My grandparents were professional. And fairly early on, I had a dream, but I didn't follow it. I went for the education, I went for the money. I said, what do I do to get into that pinnacle of what my skill set might be? Um, I had great mentors, including my parents. And I was always taught, if there's a pyramid or a triangle, find that apex where you are uniquely qualified and have a unique skill set. And that's what I did, that's what I pursued. And my dreams had to go on hold to some extent. Now, don't get me wrong. I loved working I loved my career. I loved the jobs that I have, not every day, not every single piece of it, but later on, after I had built several companies, taken a few of them public, found myself with a, uh, financial flexibility. I then was able to resurrect passion and say, what is it that I really, really want to do? Yes, maybe there's some interesting plaques on the wall, but those may not really be me. And again, it's easy to say, gee, what do you want on your tombstone? And whatever I wanted on my tombstone, I hadn't accomplished yet. And so when my friends started calling me a hypocrite, and I realized that I was expressing a passion and I was expressing a concern and I was expressing a change, I wasn't doing anything about it. And I had to look in the mirror and say, either shut up or get active. Either do it or stop talking about it. And that's when I created Blue 71. [00:03:59] Speaker B: And let's talk about Blue 71. What is blue 71? [00:04:03] Speaker C: Blue 71 within a category is a blue economy business. So what in the world does that mean? Blue economy businesses can be defined in a variety of ways. But if you look at a traditional company that is really, really focused on shareholder value, generating the greatest return for the shareholder, there's nothing wrong with that. That's what makes corporations work, not just in America, but globally. But we have a different model today. We have a slightly different objective. And yes, we must generate shareholder value, we must generate revenue and profits, but we can do that in a way that benefits the planet. We can do that in a way that doesn't take, but gives. And those are not mutually exclusive. When we're careful and we think about it, we can generate profits and take care of the planet that has been put in our charge. [00:05:01] Speaker B: That's a good description of blue economy. Uh, the stewardship model there. Trying to steward the resources you are utilizing or using or existing in, of course. So you can get the best of both worlds. So blue 71 itself, let's get a little more granular. What is happening with Blue 71? What is it and how is it involved in the blue economy? [00:05:20] Speaker C: So Blue 71 was created to launch whatever products we thought were going to be necessary to get more people to experience the ocean, and not just to experience the ocean, but to have an emotional, immersive connection with it. Google put out a document a while back that I thought was really instrumental in part of our thinking. And Google, within their Sea view product, said that the problem with ocean conservation is that 99% of the people on the planet never experience the ocean. So how do you get people to take care of something when they have no actual connection with it? Right? You can't criticize somebody for throwing trash in the ocean if they don't know what the ocean is. You can't criticize them for possibly dumping chemicals into the ocean when they just have no idea what they're doing. Yeah, we can criticize them this way or that way, but if they don't realize it, what they're doing, if they don't experience what they're doing, it's not going to affect the very core of their being. They're not going to make the correct micro decisions or possibly even macro decisions. So I've been involved in oceans for most of my life. I've been a, uh, scuba diver since 1971. I've been a, uh, scuba instructor trainer for over 20 years. The team that I put together for blue 71, we have taken over a million people underwater, personal experience, and we learned from that. And we saw that when you put people in the ocean, when you gave them that emotional, tangible, immersive experience, the vast majority of times it changed how they felt, it changed how they saw, it changed how they thought, and it changed how they act towards the ocean. So if we want to sit back and think that governments are going to step in and save the ocean, fine, you can believe that if you want to, but that's not reality. People are the ones that make change. And if we cannot change the way people think and feel about the oceans, then we're going to lose our oceans. Blue 71 is all about finding ways, using our ability to innovate, using the experience we have with taking over a million people underwater and saying, how do we get 10 million more to have that same experience? [00:07:56] Speaker B: And how do you, you mentioned, obviously, with scuba diving, you can take me and you can strap a tank, and we can head out into the ocean, and we can dive the Great Barrier Reef, and I can see all the wonders that are there. But how do we do this? For all of these other people you're mentioning, what exactly is happening? [00:08:12] Speaker C: It really has to be bigger than a sport or a hobby. Scuba diving is a great sport, right? I am a big fan of scuba diving. I love to teach people how to scuba dive. I love to scuba dive myself. But it's a sport, it's a hobby, it requires a discipline, it requires training, it requires expensive equipment, constant maintenance of that equipment, and constant development of those skill sets. Well, that's delightful. There's nothing wrong with that, right? But in 70 years of scuba diving. The United States has about 2.3 million active scuba divers. Globally, we have about 6 million scuba divers. Well, that's a drop in the bucket. Unfortunately, that is a very, very exclusive, esoteric sport. So to get people in the ocean, we can't take that approach. We use an analogy. Analogies are always poor, and I understand that this one is just as poor as any other. Okay? But I became a pilot right before I could drive a car. I love the perspective of altitude, and it gave me a different view of the world, seeing things right from a higher perspective. And anybody that wanted that perspective could do that. You just had to become a pilot. Well, what did drones do? Right. Drones are amazing pieces of technology. They fundamentally gave people the opportunity to see the world in a different perspective. Right. Drones themselves were not popular until they had cameras, because it was fundamentally the new perspective that a drone enabled anybody to have. You didn't have to discipline yourself to become a pilot. You didn't have to discipline yourself to learn how to fly an RC airplane or an RC helicopter. You could buy a drone, take it out of the box, right? Hit the go button, and suddenly get this brand new perspective. That's an analogy of what we're doing at blue 71 with our oceans. Step off the cruise ship, walk to the beach at sandals, and 20 minutes later, we have you immersed in the ocean, looking at fish, seeing coral reefs, feeling the water on your body, feeling a weightless experience, and going on an exploration with no prior training, with no skill sets. We're not teaching you a new sport. We're not trying to entice you to take on a new sport. We're trying to get you to fall in love with the ocean. [00:10:59] Speaker B: So what is happening when I'm like you said, I'm in the water. Um, I'm there. What's happening then? Do I have an underwater drone? Am I going under the water? Do I have a snorkel? What exactly is going on? [00:11:09] Speaker C: So, blue 71, again, taking the experience we learned from over a million people underwater. We learned a lot, right? You not only ask questions, but you observe. And again, scuba diving is a possibility for anybody that wants to learn the disciplines, learn the skill sets, but that wasn't the tens of millions that we really need to get in the water to really make a difference for oceans. So what we did is we developed a product that we call pneuma. And pneuma uses miniaturized submarine technology, some drone technology, and the technology that we developed in house so that you do not have to have a prior skill set. You do not have to have prior training. You download the app. There's some very fundamental questions that we ask you in the app. We show you a few things, but the pneuma unit, it weighs twelve pounds. It uses air recycle technology. There's no big tank on your back. You're not breathing out of a compressed air tank. You're recycling your breath, just like a submarine does. But it's a twelve pound pack. It's about the size of a laptop computer. It's a little bit thicker. And then from there, it goes up to a full face mask. So you're breathing out of your mouth and nose, and it has a full face retina projector, right? A full view retina projector that is giving you the instructions. So prior to immersion on your mobile app, you select a mission. And that mission can be just a fun mission. That's what most people really enjoy. One of the more popular missions we have is geocaching of pirate treasure, gold coins. And the Retina projector in the mask guides you underwater, telling you what to do, telling you to go up, telling you to go down, telling you to breathe deeper, telling you to breathe more shallow, telling you to slow down, right. Relax. And it guides you on a mission underwater. And hopefully you find your gold coins, have a victory experience, and then we guide you back to the beach and safely get you back out of the water. And that is a typical numa experience. [00:13:36] Speaker B: And now, how does that. Let's say that you're an average swimmer somewhere, you've never been under the water, aside from just holding your breath for some things. You grab, as you mentioned, you grab the tech to take yourself underwater, and then you're sort of on your own. Uh, what is being done to alleviate perhaps the fear that people would have of going underwater kind of by themselves with just this tech with them? [00:13:59] Speaker C: Of course, that's a progressive process. And one of the first things that we found right away is that fear is always an unknown. That's what generates fear. And so the more we can make something known, the more we can alleviate that fear. So when you put on a full face mask and you're breathing through your nose, right, that instantly alleviates a great amount of anxiety. And then when that display is telling you what to do, it's giving you step by step. And again, it may not be immersive immediately. You may just be swimming on the surface at the beginning. And with our AI software, we're looking at your respiration rates, right. We're looking at your oxygen to CO2 conversion rates, we're measuring your level of anxiety, and we're calming you down. We're guiding you. We're showing you where to go. And we have found, through our own experience, again, over a million people that we've taken underwater that this dramatically reduces anxiety. [00:15:00] Speaker B: And then how do you get this into the hands? You had m mentioned, 99% of the people, of course, haven't really experienced the ocean, and you're trying to get tens of millions more there. What does this look like right now? How does someone access this device? And what does it look like maybe five years from now for someone to get access this experience? [00:15:20] Speaker C: Well, we've been six years in developing the product. We have working prototypes, but we don't have the product fully commercialized. Um, we're in the process right now of funding to get the product to the fully commercial state. The prototypes right now that we're diving are good. They have all the technology involved in it. But as soon as we finish with the product, the way that you will see this, and there's two different mechanisms that we launch. All of it comes through the phone. So we actually, uh, have this experience. It's not a SaaS per se, but it is a service that we're providing. So if you want to consider it as a hybrid SaaS, there's a lot of reality to that. So you download the app on your phone, there's a bioidentification that comes in. There's a health questionnaire that you answer, and we give you just some basic information about the ocean. Ocean, aquatic life. Right. Pressures and breathing underwater. And all of that is done, gamified in our app. And then you decide, where do you want to have your first experience? So maybe you're going to sandals, maybe you're at beaches resort, maybe you're coming down to the keys and want to have this experience. You choose that in the app. You show up at the destination, either on the beach, at sandals, or on a cruise ship. And the unit is a rental unit. And your phone then connects to that rental unit. And with Bluetooth, we completely configure that unit to you. So it's completely bespoke to you based upon the information that we have collected from the phone. And at that point, we already know a lot about you. The unit is trained. The mission has now been preloaded into the unit. There's a cartridge that you tear open and drop into the unit, and that cartridge powers it for 45 minutes. [00:17:23] Speaker B: Yeah. How deep can we go with this? I mean scuba diving, obviously, like you mentioned, there's training required to get the bends. You go down the right way, come up the right way, but with just this, can you go down 20 meters, 30 meters, 10 meters? How far can we go down? [00:17:38] Speaker C: It's progressive. So in order to get people to have an experience first, right, we can't put a lot of skill demands on people right away. And so skill is a progressive learning. So you start with your first experience with a very minimum amount of skill, but that also means there's a minimum amount of capabilities. So on your first dive, right, we're not going to let you go deep, but we're going to let you immerse and we're going to let you see the reef and we're going to let you see fish and you're going to see garden eels. Okay? And then as you demonstrate skill, we store all of that in your profile. And the next time you go and do a pneuma dive, the machine is going to allow you to go deeper. I teach deep scuba. Right. I actually teach what's called heliox diving, which is the deepest form of diving that you can do. And I commonly tell people that come and say, hey, I want to dive deeper. I go, well, that's interesting. What's the purpose of diving deeper? Why do you want to go deeper? Because the reality is that deep is everything scuba is, and less. When you go deep, you have less light, you have less color, you have less time. So there has to be a real reason to go deep. We run about 500 dives a day out of key Largo, and the average depths of those dives is about 40ft. And so with Numa, we feel very comfortable that at its version, one at its first stage, that 45ft gives people exactly what they want. At 45ft, you still have light, you still have color, and of course, we can do a much better job of keeping you safe. Yeah. [00:19:33] Speaker B: It's truly a life changing experience. I've done scuba diving in my time at various places across the world and it is a completely different world. And of course, you know that far better than I do. And this idea that someone doesn't have to put on scuba gear, which is often anxiety inducing, fear inducing, that seems difficult for a lot, but they can just basically go to the beach, as you mentioned, get their cell phone, use an app like they would for something else, connect to a device that knows their capabilities, is walking them through things, is flashing up on a heads of a display. What's happening is definitely a remarkable idea. And so if this. And when this gets to the marketplace, then I know you probably don't have pricing worked out yet. But I'm imagining, because the goal here is for ocean stewardship, that you're trying to make this an affordable experience for just about everyone as soon as possible, I imagine. [00:20:24] Speaker C: Again, my background is varied, but you also may recognize that I have a lot of inkjet patents, and so a number of my other companies are inkjet. Right. I own inkjet marine, and I own inkjet aviation. And those are all because I generate a nice revenue, patent royalty revenue from inkjet cartridges. So I'm very familiar with the model of give away the printer and sell the ink, and that's a very successful model. And one of the barriers in the sport of scuba diving is equipment costs, and we really needed to deal with that. So, with Numa, we have two different branches that you can take. The first branch is you just rent the unit, and it's a very low cost rental. It's not painful whatsoever. And there's a cartridge that recharges the unit. So we're trying to keep the cost as low as we possibly can to get the maximum exposure. But we also sell the unit, and the entire unit fits in an airline approved overhead compartment case. It's a rollerboard. So you can have your entire dive kit in your rollerboard, take it on board the airplane, shove it in the overhead compartment, and off you go to the Caymans or Mexico or anywhere else you want to go. And you don't need a scuba shop. You don't need an air compressor. You just drop in a cartridge, and you get 45 minutes. But what that's allowed us to do is to keep the cost of the unit at an impulse level. Again, we're not ready to price anything yet, but the goal is impulse pricing, right? If you have to think about it, then it's too expensive. And so if you say, gee, is this entire kit under a $1,000? Absolutely. [00:22:12] Speaker B: That's pretty remarkable. I imagine. I live here in Florida. I could just get this, and I can go to the beach, and any beach I'm at, I can begin to dive with my own personal apparatus. And then I essentially am replacing these cartridges, as you mentioned, that becomes the fuel for my gear, correct? [00:22:26] Speaker C: That's exactly right. So everything is based upon a subscription to the service, right? Because all of the surrounding equipment is a service, so there's a monthly subscription fee to be part of the community. And then, of course, we charge for the recharge kit and the recharge kit is priced, uh, about two thirds of what a traditional dive would cost. [00:22:49] Speaker B: I don't want to take this too far, but let me ask the question that I think is on a lot of our listeners minds. Is this going to be disruptive to scuba diving itself, since most people's first dives are 30ft or less? Is this something that eventually replaces scuba for those that don't want to be? It's a much bigger time commitment. Is this a significant potential disruptor to scuba dive? [00:23:13] Speaker C: Um, it's really a very different market. I don't think that anybody believes that a drone is impacting flight schools. It's really a very different market. Pneuma is all about getting people in the water that don't otherwise want to take the time or want to develop the skill sets to become scuba divers. Interestingly, in the United States, about a million people a year take what's called a discover scuba dive. Less than 1% of those actually complete certification. So if Numa is replacing those million people that want an experience. Right. Are 1% of them going to go on and become scuba divers? It's very possible. But scuba diving is a sport, and it's a great sport. I'm a fan of it as a sport. But pneuma is not about diving as a sport. Pneuma is about a service that enables anybody to have an immersive underwater emotional experience. [00:24:21] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really something. So essentially, you view this as a companion where somebody's first experience might be with pneuma, and then they decide, I love this. And then scuba diving offers perhaps more. Let's, uh, call that like the PhD level of what you're going to be doing, where Puma offers a lot, and if you really, really love it, uh, you go out and you pick up scuba. So perhaps you're furthering the scuba community while also furthering those who are experiencing the ocean, which, of course, is accomplishing your goal of increasing the experience that humans have with the ocean around them. [00:24:51] Speaker C: Well, and we haven't done a big analysis. We really see them as two separate markets. Clearly, it's very likely there's going to be some overlap. Right. Pneuma has missions. So every pneuma dive has a mission. It has a goal that you are attempting to accomplish. It has underwater navigation to guide you throughout that goal. And then because it has full time video, it comes back and has content ready for sharing. Where scuba diving. Right. You can go deeper with scuba diving. You might be able to go longer with scuba diving, but you're going to lose the community. You're going to lose the ability to have content creation without doing something extra. And is there a companion? Certainly, um, we certainly expect that. But the dive shops that we have engaged with with regards to pneuma, they believe that their boats are likely going to be more full of pneuma divers than scuba divers. [00:25:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That's kind of what I was thinking along those lines, is so much more accessible. It alleviates a lot of the, perhaps fear and, uh, in general, a guided sort of experience. If you've never done scuba diving, right, you hop down with your instructor, and you're on a line together, perhaps, and you're still by yourself and you're getting hand signals, but this is something actually interacting with you, directly to you, personalized to you in your own mass, directing your own individual breathing. They're constantly paying attention to you. So, yeah, there's a level, I think, of comfort that you're bringing with pneuma, which, of course, comes from your vast experience with scuba diving. All right, one final question. This has been a very fascinating discussion. I'm sure a lot of our listeners are looking forward to seeing this out in the real world. So what does the next five years for blue 71 and Pneuma look like? What are the hopes and goals to get this into the real world, and when may this become something people can utilize? [00:26:47] Speaker C: So we're doing a fundraising right now to commercialize the product. Again, I have a great respect for entrepreneurs that carry technical ability, know how to develop the app, know how to build the device that they're trying to launch. That's wonderful. Right. But we're dealing with a, uh, relatively complex artificial intelligence device that includes life support. And so we are the experts. The team that we have put together is absolutely phenomenal. There is nobody that you could look at, or it's unlikely that you would find better experts in the field than what we've been able to assemble in the blue 71 team. But we are not product designers. That's left up to experts. And so our next stage is we're going to proven product companies. I can tell you we're using Nottingham Spurk. Um, it's a company that I've worked with for a long time. The vast majority of the consumer products from Procter Gamble and a number of other companies are developed by Nottingham Spurk. Uh, we're using vectorform for the software development. So these are world class professional product designers, and they're the ones that are taking our working, proven engineering prototypes and turning them into these amazing, low cost, hyper reliable products. So that's the next stage. And that is twelve months out, post funding, to get that finished off. Then we start our launch program. We have a, uh, well defined launch program. It starts at our resort in key Largo, and then it expands out to our affiliates in the Virgin Islands. And those are our rental facilities. Those are where you can get the unit at a resort, where you can get the unit off a cruise ship. And then shortly after that, we start individual sales where you can, in app purchase a unit for yourself. Within five years, we expect to start making a significant impact in ocean conservation. We expect to have well over three and a half million regular NUmA users that are not only in the water, generating revenue for us and substantial revenue. But as important, they're now becoming ambassadors to the ocean. They're now making decisions that are better decisions. Maybe they're major decisions, maybe they're micro decisions, but they're starting to think a little bit better about how they treat the ocean. And again, if we believe that governments are going to save the ocean, there's no need for pneuma. There's no need for us to pay any attention whatsoever. But I think most of us understand that real change comes when people decide to change, and that's what we're all about. That's our core, that's our passion. [00:29:48] Speaker B: Uh, well described for sure. I think everyone listening to this pod today is going to come away with a good visual of what is happening, what's going on, and perhaps if you have not had an experience with the ocean like this, you are now looking forward to it, which is definitely the goal. All right, Forrest, last piece of information for our listeners. Where can they maybe see a demo of this or see a prototype, or learn more about blue 71. [00:30:13] Speaker C: Enuma, come on down to the keys. That's where we're developing it. That's where we're running all the tests. That's where we have our prototypes. Get on blue 71 IO, fill in the information, make a request. Again, we're looking for money right now, but, uh, if you want to put the unit on, if you want to get in the water with it, come on down. [00:30:34] Speaker B: That's awesome. There it is. I might just take you up on that forest. Well, our guest today was Forrest Gautier. Thank you so much. Been a very insightful and interesting episode. We certainly wish you the best of success with pneuma N, Blue 71, and thank you for enlightening all of us today. [00:30:50] Speaker C: Well, thank you for the opportunity and, uh, let's hope we can gain the momentum and actually make material sustainable. [00:30:57] Speaker B: Change the inventivity pod is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention, located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles and me, James de Virgilio, are your podcast hosts. Podcasts are recorded at the Heartwood Soundstage in Gainesville and edited and mixed by Rob Rothschild. Up. Be sure to subscribe to the inventivity pod wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a comment or review to let us know how we're doing. Until next time, be inventive.