Now We Shall Mine The Oceans - EP 39 Gerard Barron

**Gerard Barron** (0:00)
The future looks like more recycling. It looks like more circularity. And so the problem that we're trying to solve for today is the fact that there are not enough metals in the system in circulation to allow recycling to be a viable alternative. But in the future, they will be. The most crucial number of decades are the ones in front of us right now. We need to stop the deforestation of our most pristine ecosystems and apply some common sense and go to the parts of the planet that we can cause the least impact to both the environment and to humans.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:48)
Gerard Barron, thank you for coming.

**Gerard Barron** (0:51)
Great to be here.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:53)
You are the CEO of The Metals Company. Bit controversial.

**Gerard Barron** (1:01)
Really?

**Ashlee Vance** (1:03)
As you might have noticed, I think you're my second guest in the last couple of weeks. We got the John Oliver adventure on what is it, last week, tonight. Yeah.

**Gerard Barron** (1:15)
Used to be funny, that guy.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:19)
I was wondering how it feels. I mean, it must be a strange experience to-

**Gerard Barron** (1:24)
Not really. No. Yeah. I mean, it was a poor effort, I thought. And a lot of people said to me, should be happy John wants to cover it. It's like, I would have been happy if he'd made a little bit more effort to get the facts right.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:40)
Yeah. Well, so we could get into some of that. He doesn't, his people on the other end, they don't get much of a right of reply on the show. So we can get into some of that. But just to give people context, The Metals Company, you guys are doing deep sea mining. I mean, it's this thing that people have been talking about for a number of years. And it's this idea of fairly straightforward, I guess, from the name going down to the ocean floor and picking up a lot of elements and metals and things that we need, especially to make all these electric batteries that the world is running on more and more. I say it's controversial because obviously you've got one camp of people who want to do this. And they say it's actually going to make less pollution because these things are sitting on the ocean floor. You don't have to go through all the mess of digging through mountains and everything. And then you obviously, clearly, you have a camp of people who don't want to touch this pristine environment and say we don't have enough data and information yet to begin this. You're here at a, it's been a journey for this concept and for the company, but you're here at a pretty important time because since Trump has come in, he's identified this as one of the areas that he wants the US to be moving forward on, sees it as a way to help us compete against China and its stranglehold on many of these very important elements and metals. And so, is that fair so far for the context?
Okay, like I said, you've been at this for a while in a couple forms of companies. And yeah, well, so tell me, I mean, this really, we're gonna get, I want to get into the science and the engineering and how all this works, but just going off what I said, I mean, this is, this must be a, it's a big moment for you guys. You guys have been waiting years to get something approaching a green light, right?

**Gerard Barron** (3:45)
Yeah, no, we've been at this particular venture since 2011 And of course, before President Trump was elected, we were heading down this permitting pathway with this international body called the International Seabed Authority. And we had a couple of sponsor countries, a couple of developing nations from the Pacific. But it took a while to realize, but it was going nowhere. It was being entirely overtaken by the NGO movement. And not directly, but by infiltrating member countries. And one of the characteristics of the last decade is you've seen powerful economies become less powerful economically. You've seen countries like Germany de-industrialize, same with France, and make a lot of compromises, if you like, by having to form coalition governments with in some cases around Europe, 15 different parties needing to get together to form a government. And what that means is you can have very small minority parties who have something they care a lot about, and it might be a radical Green Party. And they're like, well, we'll give you our votes, we'll come and support your government, but there are some things that we really want to move on. And unfortunately, that was being taken to an extreme case.