Latest / How To Protect The Ocean / The Gerard Barron Pattern: Why a CEO Who Watched One Deep-Sea Mining Company Collapse Is Trying Again
Transcript
- 0:00Why would someone who watched one company collapse after destroying the
- 0:04sea floor go back and try it again?
- 0:07Like, this is not just a hypothetical.
- 0:09This actually happened with the same people, the same industry,
- 0:13and some of the same licenses.
- 0:15And the story that you're gonna hear on this episode of the How to Protect the
- 0:18Ocean podcast, it's not really, like, an accusation on this particular individual.
- 0:22It's really just a documented sequence of decisions.
- 0:25And by the end, you can decide for yourself whether
- 0:29what that motive looks like.
- 0:31Cause a lot of the times when we hear this type of story, the story of a CEO
- 0:37who is working in natural resources, where they're exploiting natural resources.
- 0:42There's one thing of having it as natural resource that we've exploited
- 0:45in the past, but when they go into a new domain, and we really don't understand
- 0:51the ramifications that are gonna happen in this domain from this activity,
- 0:56it really begs the question of, why the heck are we really doing this?
- 1:01Is it really just for the money?
- 1:03Is this just something, like, a business person kinda looked at?
- 1:06So, what I wanna do today is I wanna look at what I call the Gerard Barron pattern.
- 1:11And so essentially what this is, is you have this person
- 1:14who is a business guy, right?
- 1:15He's a business person, and he wants to have business and develop
- 1:19businesses, and maybe go into new frontiers and do something that would
- 1:22help his legacy or help their legacy.
- 1:24I'm not just saying it's a man, it could be a woman, too.
- 1:26And we see a lot of these people who wanna be CEOs, who wanna do something
- 1:30bold and something really cool.
- 1:33But at the end of the day, who is it really supporting?
- 1:37Who is it really helping?
- 1:39And so that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode of the How to Protect
- 1:42the Ocean podcast, your source for ocean news, updates on science and conservation
- 1:48from Monday to Fridays every weekday.
- 1:51So, if you like this kinda stuff that we're doing, I'm trying something, like,
- 1:53a new storytelling thing this week.
- 1:55So if you've been with me for a while and you haven't followed, you can
- 1:57follow right now if you like this stuff.
- 1:59And of course, you can let me know.
- 2:00Just hit me up on my socials.
- 2:01The links are in the show notes, 'cause I'd love to hear your thoughts
- 2:03on this new type of, storytelling, I guess, is what we're really doing.
- 2:07Anyway, let's get into it, right?
- 2:09'Cause wanna know just why this really matters.
- 2:11Let's talk about the person that we're gonna talk about.
- 2:13It's Gerard Barron, who is the CEO of The Metals Company.
- 2:16Probably one of the most prominent and best-funded companies pushing to start
- 2:21commercial deep-sea mining right now.
- 2:24Now, TMC, so The Metals Company also known as TMC, is the company that triggered the
- 2:28two-year rule at the International Seabed Authority through its partner nation,
- 2:32Nauru, forcing the pace on mining regulations before the science was ready.
- 2:37They did this a few years ago.
- 2:39It really accelerated and panicked a lot of people when they started
- 2:44to do this, because I remember covering, you know, talking to people
- 2:47who went to the ISA meetings, and these are done in Kingston, Jamaica.
- 2:50And it got to a point where they were putting scientists
- 2:53and NGOs in different rooms.
- 2:55So it made it a lot more difficult for them to discuss
- 2:58with member nations, especially if member nations had questions.
- 3:00So we had experts like Dr. Diva Amon, who were, like, in separate rooms.
- 3:05She's a deep-sea scientist, deep-sea ecologist.
- 3:07She's the one that you should be going to, being like, "Hey, if we decide to
- 3:09do this, what would be the consequences? Like, can we do this? Can we not do
- 3:12this?" And they were in different rooms, so it made it really difficult
- 3:15for them to have that kind of connection.
- 3:17So TMC was responsible for doing this.
- 3:18They have been the one pushing for this stuff.
- 3:20And I should mention again, according to the, like, this is the idea of the story,
- 3:24that when TMC pushed that two-year rule, all of a sudden their stock went up.
- 3:28And the CEO, Gerard Barron, made millions off of it.
- 3:33So, like, all of this is all related to this story and to the
- 3:37sort of motive of what is really the motive of some of these CEOs.
- 3:41Now, TMC is also the company that has pursued the unilateral path
- 3:45through the Trump administration and NOAA to get a mining permit
- 3:49outside of the ISA process entirely.
- 3:51Now, the US is not part of the UNCLOS, which is the UN
- 3:55Convention of the Law of the Sea.
- 3:57They're not ratified, I guess.
- 3:58They're not signed onto it.
- 3:59They can't be a part of the International Seabed Authority, member committee
- 4:03meetings and things like that.
- 4:05But they can pursue their own deep sea mining path in
- 4:08their exclusive economic zone.
- 4:09So whatever happens with deep sea mining over the next few years
- 4:12in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone specifically, largely runs through
- 4:17this one company and this one CEO.
- 4:19And recently, like just as a couple of days ago as of recording this
- 4:23podcast, the US issued another leasing license, or the announcement
- 4:27that they're gonna be issuing another leasing license just outside the
- 4:31CNMI, so the, Northern Mariana Islands.
- 4:33And it's like a 69 million acre area.
- 4:36And this is all pushed on by this CEO, by Gerard Barron.
- 4:40This is where it all begins.
- 4:42Like, this is where we're at right now.
- 4:44We're at this precipice of going into a new frontier and doing
- 4:48something new, a frontier that we don't really know much about.
- 4:51We haven't surveyed, we haven't mapped a lot of the areas.
- 4:54We know specific areas, and we know that there has been damage done by deep sea
- 4:58mining through, like, this research thing.
- 5:00We know that there are studies that show that for three or four years after deep
- 5:04sea mining has occurred, the biodiversity that was affected did not recover.
- 5:10So we know there's not a quick recovery to deep sea mining
- 5:13when this damage has been done.
- 5:15The question is, really is, do people care?
- 5:18Because it seems like people like Gerard Barron are gonna continue to pursue
- 5:21this dream to be able to go there.
- 5:23But to understand sort of like the mind of a CEO such as Gerard Barron,
- 5:28we have to go back to his story.
- 5:30So he started off as an ad tech business CEO, Adstream, which
- 5:34was founded in Sydney in 2000 by three others, Brett Sullivan,
- 5:38Julian Chow, and James Carpenter.
- 5:40It was basically to solve the delivery of TV commercials and
- 5:43ad materials to broadcasters.
- 5:44So as the digital age was coming in, this was something that was really important.
- 5:48So Barron became the CEO once the company needed investment and formal leadership
- 5:53with a holding company formalized in 2001, which is the date of most of his official
- 5:57bios point and as to when he founded it.
- 6:00He was the CEO, but did he really found it?
- 6:02Apparently there's a bit of controversy around there.
- 6:04Now, under Barron, the Adstream grew from a single office in Sydney
- 6:07to more than 40 offices in 30 countries, eventually pulling in
- 6:11over $100 million a year in revenue.
- 6:13Now, he ran it as a CEO until December 2013.
- 6:17And so, like, he wasn't a mining person before this.
- 6:19He was a business person.
- 6:20He was going into ad revenue.
- 6:21That he was providing digital ads to TV shows and programs and things like that.
- 6:26Nothing this crazy, but he was definitely into technology,
- 6:29but in the advertising space.
- 6:30He was an advertising exec.
- 6:32So he was like the mad men of the '50s, but he was in the 2000s, right?
- 6:35So it's obviously a lucrative deal.
- 6:37He did very well in growing the company, whether it's all of him or the people
- 6:41that were under him, who knows, right?
- 6:42But, you know, when you're a CEO, you're the one who gets the credit for all this
- 6:46that's happening and good on him for being able to grow that company to that amount.
- 6:50Now, his friend David Hayden, a geologist he knew through tennis,
- 6:54pitched him on a new venture.
- 6:56An underwater mining company called Nautilus Minerals around the same time
- 7:00Adstream was getting off the ground.
- 7:02So this is around 2001.
- 7:03He said it pretty plainly in his own words to NPR, that he knew very little about
- 7:08the ocean and very little about mining.
- 7:10But he was curious.
- 7:11It was a new frontier.
- 7:13In a separate interview, he described being fascinated to learn
- 7:15that the ocean is full of metal.
- 7:17Not the ocean is teeming with life, the ocean is full of metal.
- 7:20And that it seemed like an interesting project, despite knowing nothing
- 7:23about mining and never having invested in a mining company before.
- 7:27So this is completely new.
- 7:28It's a big challenge for him.
- 7:29Doesn't know much about the ocean, intrigued that there's metal.
- 7:32This is something that's really interesting.
- 7:33Now, years later, reflecting on that decision at a mining conference, he
- 7:36said he was fascinated by the new ideas and probably knew too little
- 7:40to be scared of the challenges.
- 7:42So if he had gone back again, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
- 7:45But he did put in his own money and helped round up other investors.
- 7:48So, you're looking at a guy from Adstream, gets presented with this deal to invest
- 7:52in this company called Nautilus Minerals.
- 7:54And so he has this area.
- 7:56And so it's not as if he's been intrigued by the ocean, intrigued
- 7:59by the metal all of his life.
- 8:00He comes from ad tech businesses, grows that really well and now into a new
- 8:04challenge and be like, "Hey, I don't know much about the ocean, so I'm probably not
- 8:07scared enough to really understand how difficult it is to do deep sea mining."
- 8:12So I think, he's someone who didn't really understand business risks.
- 8:14He put in a lot of his own money, and he got investors to do it as well.
- 8:17So, you know, he's very good at bringing in money.
- 8:20He's a very good CEO, he's a very good business person in
- 8:22convincing people to bring in.
- 8:24And he's consistently told the same story across, interviews
- 8:26at, like, spanning years.
- 8:28So it's not as if he switches his story.
- 8:29Like, he just knows what he went through and how he felt, and he's
- 8:32sticking to those type stories.
- 8:33Well, now whether that happened exactly, I have no idea.
- 8:36I don't wanna, like, put words into his mouth, but this is what
- 8:38he's been saying over the years.
- 8:40Now, Nautilus went after underwater mineral deposits
- 8:43called seafloor massive sulfides.
- 8:46So off the coast of Papua New Guinea, rich in copper, gold, silver, and zinc.
- 8:50And the company eventually raised hundreds of millions of dollars
- 8:53from investors, including the government of Papua New Guinea itself.
- 8:56And this is really important to understand.
- 8:59Now, Barron sold his shares and exited, walking away, a return
- 9:02reported as high as $30 million on his own original investment.
- 9:06So made money.
- 9:08As a business person, this guy made a boatload of money.
- 9:12He started early, left early, before anything could really be
- 9:15done, got the government of Papua New Guinea itself to invest in it.
- 9:19And a lot of times the CEO is that, is the mouthpiece, is the messenger.
- 9:23They're the person who you look to for the success.
- 9:25He's had a successful ad tech business.
- 9:27He's getting into this.
- 9:29He's got a lot of investors, including a government who probably doesn't have
- 9:32a lot of money, like in developing countries like Papua New Guinea, but
- 9:34they're invested in what he talked about.
- 9:36Sold his shares, made a reported 30 million.
- 9:39This is interesting 'cause it's like the first time, like he got into like deep
- 9:42sea mining, got out, made a ton of money.
- 9:44This was good.
- 9:45Didn't even mine anything at this point, like commercially.
- 9:49They may have done some little research here and there, but didn't
- 9:51even mine anything commercially.
- 9:52But he got out before anything could have gone wrong.
- 9:55That's where the key comes in.
- 9:56Now, Barron was never Nautilus' CEO or manager.
- 9:59He was an early investor and a promoter who helped raise the money, while
- 10:03David Hayden served as the company's actual CEO, his friend who originally
- 10:06presented the idea from 2002 to 2008.
- 10:09Now, by Barron's own account, he had largely sold out of his position
- 10:12by the time Papua New Guinea government invested in the project.
- 10:14So it's not as if he convinced it in there well over a decade
- 10:17before this company went bankrupt.
- 10:20Now, Barron himself has named three reasons for the collapse.
- 10:23So he talked about the wrong technology for the job, the difficulty in operating
- 10:27and developing in a nation like Papua New Guinea, and simply never finding as
- 10:31much of the target resource as expected.
- 10:34So really everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but it's a new company.
- 10:38It's something that's new.
- 10:39Deep sea mining hasn't really been done that much before.
- 10:42Now, independent reporting adds financial detail to this whole thing.
- 10:46Nautilus originally projected operating costs of about $70 per ton, but those
- 10:50costs spiraled into $192 per ton, which triggered its delisting from the Toronto
- 10:55Stock Exchange here in Canada, and its filing for creditor protection.
- 10:59So it couldn't really make the money that it really wanted.
- 11:02And then, of course, Papua New Guinea's own prime minister said the country
- 11:05burned through nearly 300 million kina, which is their money, which is
- 11:09equivalent to about $72 million US, calling the project a total failure.
- 11:14Now, on the operational side, a shipyard building the company's
- 11:17specialized support vessel canceled the contract after Nautilus failed
- 11:20to pay an $18 million installment.
- 11:23So that's another thing that went wrong.
- 11:24So not only did they leave the government hanging, they left the
- 11:26shipyard who was building the ship.
- 11:28And Nautilus filed for bankruptcy protection in a Canadian court in
- 11:31February 2019, failed to find a buyer during the restructuring, and
- 11:35was fully liquidated by that August.
- 11:37Now, along the way, the project destroyed sensitive seabed habitat
- 11:41in Papua New Guinea's waters.
- 11:43Now, the government's which had invested heavily in the project, was left
- 11:46facing not only a debt equivalent of roughly a third of the country's annual
- 11:49health budget, but also, part of the environment that was destroyed of what
- 11:52they were trying to bring together.
- 11:53So right now, if you really look at it, the business people have learned that if
- 11:57you create a company and you talk about mining in a new frontier, the deep sea,
- 12:01you can get a lot of interest from people.
- 12:03People who may not understand the ocean, business people who may not understand the
- 12:06ocean, but have the money to invest large sums of money, like, tens of millions
- 12:09of dollars to put things together.
- 12:11And as a business person, if you get out at the right time, or an investor,
- 12:15if you get out at the right time, you can make your money because of
- 12:17all, just the excitement of it all.
- 12:19Everybody's putting in money, putting in money, so your stock goes up.
- 12:22And I'm not an economist, I don't understand all that, but I know your
- 12:25stock goes up to the point where Barron's is like, "Hey, you know what?
- 12:27I'm gonna get out.
- 12:28I got $30 million now compared to my initial investment.
- 12:31Like, that's pretty cool." Right now, this entire company, everybody
- 12:34who was involved, not just Baron.
- 12:35Baron got out before really all the damages was done.
- 12:38But, you look at what this company did, caused damage and took out a lot of the
- 12:42money from Papua New Guinea's government, which probably didn't have the money to
- 12:44really burn through like that, just in general because it's a developing country
- 12:48and its people need other things, right?
- 12:50But they, took a chance and they lost.
- 12:52So Pacific Nation invested public money and got left holding both the
- 12:56financial and environmental damage.
- 12:57But some of the business people made money.
- 12:59This is what really happened.
- 13:01Now, in 2011, so people connected to Nautilus, including Hayden, started
- 13:05a new company called DeepGreen.
- 13:07Now, Baron became involved early, then took over as chairman and CEO in 2018.
- 13:11So we advanced almost 10 years.
- 13:13Now, DeepGreen eventually became the Metals Company, which is
- 13:16also known as TMZ, which we know now is still active today.
- 13:20Now, TMC's exploring license in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone once belonged to
- 13:24Nautilus, so it got taken over by TMC.
- 13:27So this is look- looks like a deja vu.
- 13:29You get the both people who were initially involved in Nautilus.
- 13:31You got Hayden and Baron both involved together again.
- 13:35Baron made money.
- 13:36I don't know exactly how Hayden kinda left after Nautilus, but they made money.
- 13:40And now they're taking over the leases that Nautilus had into an
- 13:44area called the Clarion- Clipperton Zone, which is in the Pacific.
- 13:46It's a deep sea area that's known to have minerals, like these
- 13:49critical minerals for batteries.
- 13:51Like, you gotta remember, this is all for, and especially now, EVs
- 13:54are really starting to catch on.
- 13:55The batteries need critical minerals.
- 13:57Not only do the EVs need it, but they also, like phones and everything
- 14:00like that, we need critical minerals.
- 14:01There are reports and videos of people in the Congo who are actively
- 14:06mining, open-pit mining for these minerals that are going through
- 14:10awful human rights crimes and they're being treated like crap.
- 14:13They're dying, and there are kids that are in there and all that.
- 14:15It's awful.
- 14:16So you have this, this area where it's like we're not harming anybody,
- 14:19like from a human rights perspective.
- 14:21Now we can see.
- 14:22We've already been through it, and then from a business perspective,
- 14:24we've made a lot of money from it, or at least Baron has.
- 14:27And so, hey, why don't we just try and take this again?
- 14:30We have a lease.
- 14:31We can do it.
- 14:32Now going back on Nautilus, Barron said publicly that he and his
- 14:35colleagues are not ashamed of what happened with Nautilus, even
- 14:38though they left the government hanging and the environment damaged.
- 14:41He comparing themselves to pioneers who end up with arrows in the back,
- 14:44and arguing that without Nautilus, the wider deep sea mining industry
- 14:48would never have gotten started.
- 14:49And that's probably true.
- 14:50Like, they're probably pioneers in that area, but they
- 14:52haven't shown that it worked.
- 14:55They didn't have the right equipment.
- 14:56It wasn't the right materials that they were going after.
- 14:59And they eventually, they just couldn't do it with the equipment that they had, and
- 15:02they couldn't make it financially viable.
- 15:04The mistakes he names are technical and financial, not environmental.
- 15:07He never mentioned the environment, never mentioned the damage of the environment.
- 15:10He specifically criticizes equipment Nautilus used on the sea
- 15:13floor, like I mentioned before.
- 15:15Calling those machines big, angry rock grabbers that filled him with
- 15:18horror, and contrast that with the nodule collection machine TMC uses
- 15:23now, which he calls gentle giants.
- 15:25Now, these are still machines.
- 15:26These are still things that are gonna be grabbing things, and they're gonna get
- 15:29into the sand, they're gonna get into the bottom, and they're gonna muck it all up.
- 15:33Now, he frames the location as part of the problem, too, in Papua New
- 15:36Guinea, noting that the challenge of operating in a developing nation
- 15:39like Papua New Guinea says that he had largely sold out of the project
- 15:42by the time the government invested, but didn't really tell the government
- 15:44that he was sold out, that I know of,
- 15:47Cause they bought in huge.
- 15:48To a third of what they could have.
- 15:51So again, no regret on his part from the environmental aspect.
- 15:55Made a ton of money from that project, and is ready to do it again because he
- 15:59thinks now they're in a different zone.
- 16:01It's in the high seas, so it's not tied to a specific country, let alone a developing
- 16:05country, so don't have to deal with those.
- 16:07And he says he's got better vehicles now, and he can do it better.
- 16:11But again, not talking about the environment.
- 16:13More talking about the business and the sustainability economically.
- 16:17So the regret's more about the geography and equipment, not the environment.
- 16:20Now, across multiple interviews spanning years, Barron has not expressed
- 16:23uncertainty or worry about whether deep sea mining itself harms the ocean,
- 16:27which a lot of people are talking about.
- 16:29And his consistent argument is a comparison one.
- 16:31He said that mining the seabed is less environmentally damaged
- 16:34than mining on land, right?
- 16:36In the BBC interview, he described the Clarion-Clipperton Zone as having
- 16:39essentially zero plant life and only about 10 grams of biomass per square
- 16:43meter, compared to the far higher biomass equatorial rainforest, where
- 16:47land-based nickel mining happens.
- 16:49So when Greenpeace published a report critical of the deep sea mining industry,
- 16:52TMC's response was that Greenpeace had fundamentally misunderstood the
- 16:55industry, not that the concerns had merit.
- 16:58And by the way, the 10 grams of biomass per square meter,
- 17:01it wasn't even close to that.
- 17:02It was a lot higher.
- 17:04Again, so looking at the character of the CEO, not just Barron, but a CEO
- 17:09looking at, " Hey, I have this industry.
- 17:11I made a ton of money last time.
- 17:13I'm gonna go into it again, even though it didn't survive, and 'cause
- 17:17I think I can do it better this time.
- 17:18We don't have to worry about the country, the geography, we don't
- 17:20have to worry about the equipment," according to him, according to the
- 17:23CEO, But he never is really concerned about this desert of a deep sea, and
- 17:28it's better than mining in a rainforest that it was done in the Congo.
- 17:33We're still looking at, is it really equitable?
- 17:35I don't know.
- 17:36But obviously there's the extra added like human rights offenses that happened
- 17:40in a lot of these mines in Africa and the Congo where this happens.
- 17:44Again, you're looking at a business person who wants business, who
- 17:47wants this to survive so he can make a boat ton of money.
- 17:51Now, the Wall Street Journal summarized the arc, this way
- 17:54when the TMZ went public.
- 17:55The company Baron backed for the first time lost half a billion
- 17:58dollars, got crosswise with the South Pacific government, destroyed
- 18:02sensitive seabed habitat, and went broke, and now he's trying it
- 18:06again because he made $30 million.
- 18:07The company lost half a billion, but he made $30 million.
- 18:12Again, it's just like this came like a mainstream financial publication.
- 18:17It's not just like an environmentalist here.
- 18:19it's something like a publication that looks at like finances.
- 18:22That's what they look at.
- 18:24And I think when we look at how this is pursued, , if you take the Gerard
- 18:29Baron pattern and you kind of blow it up a little bit and you look around to
- 18:33other natural resource companies or even other companies, the people involved
- 18:38a lot of the time see the process.
- 18:40You know, they see the operations.
- 18:42They don't necessarily see ahead of the damage that they could cause.
- 18:47We're looking at a new frontier in the deep sea that
- 18:50we don't know anything about.
- 18:52We're looking at doing something that could damage something that
- 18:55could really mess up our planet if we knew what we were messing up.
- 18:59We saw damage done off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
- 19:02We saw studies saying that the recovery is not four years.
- 19:05It's longer than that.
- 19:07We don't know how much.
- 19:07But we've also seen studies in the deep sea that I covered yesterday where
- 19:11we look at seamount trawling and, you know, you're looking at destroying
- 19:14habitat that took centuries to create because they're such slow-growing
- 19:17species that create this habitat.
- 19:20What if that happens down there?
- 19:21We will never be able to know the loss of any kind of endemic species
- 19:25that could be beneficial to the human species later on in life as we start
- 19:30to discover more about the ocean.
- 19:33You see, Scripps, Oceanog- Institute of Oceanography.
- 19:36You see Nautilus Live.
- 19:37They go deep.
- 19:38They take their ROVs, and they do public education.
- 19:40So does Ocean Networks Canada.
- 19:42They do public education of the deep sea.
- 19:44So we're starting to be able to have the technology to go in and see what's
- 19:46there, but we're just… We haven't even scratched the bottom of the ocean,
- 19:50not even the surface, the bottom of the ocean, and we're ready to go in
- 19:54blind and just destroy what's there.
- 19:58And you know, again, this is not something against Gerard Barron.
- 20:00He is doing what a business person does.
- 20:03Unfortunately, this is what business people do.
- 20:05They see what they can get, they can make a lot of money on it.
- 20:08And when people bring up things like, "Hey, you could damage the environment.
- 20:12We have no idea what the damage you can do to the environment."
- 20:15And they'd just be like, "Well, actually, we're not doing any damage."
- 20:17It's not as bad, which we don't know it's not as bad, as doing it on a rainforest,
- 20:21'cause we can see the rainforest.
- 20:22We can see the damage we're doing to the rainforest, we can see the damage and the
- 20:25human rights offenses that are happening.
- 20:27Like, we can see that.
- 20:28Those are bad.
- 20:28Those shouldn't happen.
- 20:30But it doesn't mean that we have to go with the place that is less bad,
- 20:33even though it could still be bad.
- 20:34He never said it would be bad, he just said it wouldn't
- 20:37be as bad as doing it on land.
- 20:39So why are we doing it anyway?
- 20:41And it's gonna be really interesting because in my interview on Friday with
- 20:45Matthew Gianni, he talks about some of the conclusions of the International
- 20:48Seabed Authority, which TMC is not even a part of anymore because they're
- 20:52going with the Trump administration.
- 20:53They want to mine.
- 20:55They want to deep sea mine.
- 20:56That's their goal.
- 20:57They have investors.
- 20:58They wanna go do this thing.
- 21:00Whether they can do it sustainably is gonna be another thing.
- 21:03At the beginning of the episode, I talked about how they really pushed for
- 21:06a two-year ramp-up to deep sea mine.
- 21:08It never went through, but I'll tell you what did.
- 21:11The stock price went up.
- 21:13It went through the roof, and then it's slowly been going down.
- 21:16And so Barron has been losing money because of the stock
- 21:18price, and he hasn't sold yet.
- 21:20Now, we're ramping up very quickly again with the Trump administration
- 21:24and issuing leases or will be issuing leases in the next coming weeks.
- 21:29That's gonna bring up the stock again, and whether it's actually gonna be economic
- 21:33or not, Barron's gonna make money.
- 21:35He may or may not stay with the company after he makes this money, I don't know.
- 21:38That'll be interesting to see and to see if this actually will go through.
- 21:42Stay tuned for that episode in a couple days where I talk to Matthew
- 21:45Gianni, who is the co-founder and the political and policy advisor for
- 21:49the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, which I covered his story on Monday.
- 21:53And tomorrow, stay tuned because we're gonna be talking about some of Barron's
- 21:57indications or allegations that the deep sea is just a desert, and there's really
- 22:03nothing to worry about in terms of damage.
- 22:05So we're gonna talk about that tomorrow, whether it's true or not.
- 22:07Follow if you want it, if you don't wanna miss tomorrow's episode or
- 22:10come back, whatever you want.
- 22:12Trying something new.
- 22:13I'd love to hear your thoughts.
- 22:14Hit me up in the socials in the show notes.
- 22:16But other than that, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode
- 22:19of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
- 22:20Have a great day.
- 22:21We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.