The Gerard Barron Pattern: Why a CEO Who Watched One Deep-Sea Mining Company Collapse Is Trying Again

0:00 Why would someone who watched one company collapse after destroying the sea floor go back and try it again? Like, this is not just a hypothetical. This actually happened with the same people, the same industry, and some of the same licenses. And the story that you're gonna hear on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, it's not really, like, an accusation on this particular individual. It's really just a documented sequence of decisions. And by the end, you can decide for yourself whether what that motive looks like. Cause a lot of the times when we hear this type of story, the story of a CEO who is working in natural resources, where they're exploiting natural resources.

0:42 There's one thing of having it as natural resource that we've exploited in the past, but when they go into a new domain, and we really don't understand the ramifications that are gonna happen in this domain from this activity, it really begs the question of, why the heck are we really doing this? Is it really just for the money? Is this just something, like, a business person kinda looked at? So, what I wanna do today is I wanna look at what I call the Gerard Barron pattern. And so essentially what this is, is you have this person who is a business guy, right? He's a business person, and he wants to have business and develop businesses, and maybe go into new frontiers and do something that would help his legacy or help their legacy.

1:24 I'm not just saying it's a man, it could be a woman, too. And we see a lot of these people who wanna be CEOs, who wanna do something bold and something really cool. But at the end of the day, who is it really supporting? Who is it really helping? And so that's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, your source for ocean news, updates on science and conservation from Monday to Fridays every weekday. So, if you like this kinda stuff that we're doing, I'm trying something, like, a new storytelling thing this week. So if you've been with me for a while and you haven't followed, you can follow right now if you like this stuff. And of course, you can let me know. Just hit me up on my socials. The links are in the show notes, 'cause I'd love to hear your thoughts on this new type of, storytelling, I guess, is what we're really doing.

2:07 Anyway, let's get into it, right? 'Cause wanna know just why this really matters. Let's talk about the person that we're gonna talk about. It's Gerard Barron, who is the CEO of The Metals Company. Probably one of the most prominent and best-funded companies pushing to start commercial deep-sea mining right now. Now, TMC, so The Metals Company also known as TMC, is the company that triggered the two-year rule at the International Seabed Authority through its partner nation, Nauru, forcing the pace on mining regulations before the science was ready. They did this a few years ago. It really accelerated and panicked a lot of people when they started to do this, because I remember covering, you know, talking to people who went to the ISA meetings, and these are done in Kingston, Jamaica.

2:50 And it got to a point where they were putting scientists and NGOs in different rooms. So it made it a lot more difficult for them to discuss with member nations, especially if member nations had questions. So we had experts like Dr. Diva Amon, who were, like, in separate rooms. She's a deep-sea scientist, deep-sea ecologist. She's the one that you should be going to, being like, "Hey, if we decide to do this, what would be the consequences? Like, can we do this? Can we not do this?" And they were in different rooms, so it made it really difficult for them to have that kind of connection. So TMC was responsible for doing this. They have been the one pushing for this stuff. And I should mention again, according to the, like, this is the idea of the story, that when TMC pushed that two-year rule, all of a sudden their stock went up. And the CEO, Gerard Barron, made millions off of it.

3:33 So, like, all of this is all related to this story and to the sort of motive of what is really the motive of some of these CEOs. Now, TMC is also the company that has pursued the unilateral path through the Trump administration and NOAA to get a mining permit outside of the ISA process entirely. Now, the US is not part of the UNCLOS, which is the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. They're not ratified, I guess. They're not signed onto it. They can't be a part of the International Seabed Authority, member committee meetings and things like that. But they can pursue their own deep sea mining path in their exclusive economic zone. So whatever happens with deep sea mining over the next few years in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone specifically, largely runs through this one company and this one CEO.

4:19 And recently, like just as a couple of days ago as of recording this podcast, the US issued another leasing license, or the announcement that they're gonna be issuing another leasing license just outside the CNMI, so the, Northern Mariana Islands. And it's like a 69 million acre area. And this is all pushed on by this CEO, by Gerard Barron. This is where it all begins. Like, this is where we're at right now. We're at this precipice of going into a new frontier and doing something new, a frontier that we don't really know much about. We haven't surveyed, we haven't mapped a lot of the areas. We know specific areas, and we know that there has been damage done by deep sea mining through, like, this research thing.

5:00 We know that there are studies that show that for three or four years after deep sea mining has occurred, the biodiversity that was affected did not recover. So we know there's not a quick recovery to deep sea mining when this damage has been done. The question is, really is, do people care? Because it seems like people like Gerard Barron are gonna continue to pursue this dream to be able to go there. But to understand sort of like the mind of a CEO such as Gerard Barron, we have to go back to his story. So he started off as an ad tech business CEO, Adstream, which was founded in Sydney in 2000 by three others, Brett Sullivan, Julian Chow, and James Carpenter. It was basically to solve the delivery of TV commercials and ad materials to broadcasters.

5:44 So as the digital age was coming in, this was something that was really important. So Barron became the CEO once the company needed investment and formal leadership with a holding company formalized in 2001, which is the date of most of his official bios point and as to when he founded it. He was the CEO, but did he really found it? Apparently there's a bit of controversy around there. Now, under Barron, the Adstream grew from a single office in Sydney to more than 40 offices in 30 countries, eventually pulling in over $100 million a year in revenue. Now, he ran it as a CEO until December 2013. And so, like, he wasn't a mining person before this. He was a business person. He was going into ad revenue. That he was providing digital ads to TV shows and programs and things like that.

6:26 Nothing this crazy, but he was definitely into technology, but in the advertising space. He was an advertising exec. So he was like the mad men of the '50s, but he was in the 2000s, right? So it's obviously a lucrative deal. He did very well in growing the company, whether it's all of him or the people that were under him, who knows, right? But, you know, when you're a CEO, you're the one who gets the credit for all this that's happening and good on him for being able to grow that company to that amount. Now, his friend David Hayden, a geologist he knew through tennis, pitched him on a new venture. An underwater mining company called Nautilus Minerals around the same time Adstream was getting off the ground. So this is around 2001. He said it pretty plainly in his own words to NPR, that he knew very little about the ocean and very little about mining.

7:10 But he was curious. It was a new frontier. In a separate interview, he described being fascinated to learn that the ocean is full of metal. Not the ocean is teeming with life, the ocean is full of metal. And that it seemed like an interesting project, despite knowing nothing about mining and never having invested in a mining company before. So this is completely new. It's a big challenge for him. Doesn't know much about the ocean, intrigued that there's metal. This is something that's really interesting. Now, years later, reflecting on that decision at a mining conference, he said he was fascinated by the new ideas and probably knew too little to be scared of the challenges. So if he had gone back again, maybe he wouldn't have done it. But he did put in his own money and helped round up other investors. So, you're looking at a guy from Adstream, gets presented with this deal to invest in this company called Nautilus Minerals.

7:54 And so he has this area. And so it's not as if he's been intrigued by the ocean, intrigued by the metal all of his life. He comes from ad tech businesses, grows that really well and now into a new challenge and be like, "Hey, I don't know much about the ocean, so I'm probably not scared enough to really understand how difficult it is to do deep sea mining." So I think, he's someone who didn't really understand business risks. He put in a lot of his own money, and he got investors to do it as well. So, you know, he's very good at bringing in money. He's a very good CEO, he's a very good business person in convincing people to bring in. And he's consistently told the same story across, interviews at, like, spanning years. So it's not as if he switches his story. Like, he just knows what he went through and how he felt, and he's sticking to those type stories. Well, now whether that happened exactly, I have no idea.

8:36 I don't wanna, like, put words into his mouth, but this is what he's been saying over the years. Now, Nautilus went after underwater mineral deposits called seafloor massive sulfides. So off the coast of Papua New Guinea, rich in copper, gold, silver, and zinc. And the company eventually raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, including the government of Papua New Guinea itself. And this is really important to understand. Now, Barron sold his shares and exited, walking away, a return reported as high as $30 million on his own original investment. So made money. As a business person, this guy made a boatload of money. He started early, left early, before anything could really be done, got the government of Papua New Guinea itself to invest in it.

9:19 And a lot of times the CEO is that, is the mouthpiece, is the messenger. They're the person who you look to for the success. He's had a successful ad tech business. He's getting into this. He's got a lot of investors, including a government who probably doesn't have a lot of money, like in developing countries like Papua New Guinea, but they're invested in what he talked about. Sold his shares, made a reported 30 million. This is interesting 'cause it's like the first time, like he got into like deep sea mining, got out, made a ton of money. This was good. Didn't even mine anything at this point, like commercially. They may have done some little research here and there, but didn't even mine anything commercially. But he got out before anything could have gone wrong. That's where the key comes in. Now, Barron was never Nautilus' CEO or manager. He was an early investor and a promoter who helped raise the money, while David Hayden served as the company's actual CEO, his friend who originally presented the idea from 2002 to 2008.

10:09 Now, by Barron's own account, he had largely sold out of his position by the time Papua New Guinea government invested in the project. So it's not as if he convinced it in there well over a decade before this company went bankrupt. Now, Barron himself has named three reasons for the collapse. So he talked about the wrong technology for the job, the difficulty in operating and developing in a nation like Papua New Guinea, and simply never finding as much of the target resource as expected. So really everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but it's a new company. It's something that's new. Deep sea mining hasn't really been done that much before. Now, independent reporting adds financial detail to this whole thing. Nautilus originally projected operating costs of about $70 per ton, but those costs spiraled into $192 per ton, which triggered its delisting from the Toronto Stock Exchange here in Canada, and its filing for creditor protection.

10:59 So it couldn't really make the money that it really wanted. And then, of course, Papua New Guinea's own prime minister said the country burned through nearly 300 million kina, which is their money, which is equivalent to about $72 million US, calling the project a total failure. Now, on the operational side, a shipyard building the company's specialized support vessel canceled the contract after Nautilus failed to pay an $18 million installment. So that's another thing that went wrong. So not only did they leave the government hanging, they left the shipyard who was building the ship. And Nautilus filed for bankruptcy protection in a Canadian court in February 2019, failed to find a buyer during the restructuring, and was fully liquidated by that August. Now, along the way, the project destroyed sensitive seabed habitat in Papua New Guinea's waters.

11:43 Now, the government's which had invested heavily in the project, was left facing not only a debt equivalent of roughly a third of the country's annual health budget, but also, part of the environment that was destroyed of what they were trying to bring together. So right now, if you really look at it, the business people have learned that if you create a company and you talk about mining in a new frontier, the deep sea, you can get a lot of interest from people. People who may not understand the ocean, business people who may not understand the ocean, but have the money to invest large sums of money, like, tens of millions of dollars to put things together. And as a business person, if you get out at the right time, or an investor, if you get out at the right time, you can make your money because of all, just the excitement of it all. Everybody's putting in money, putting in money, so your stock goes up. And I'm not an economist, I don't understand all that, but I know your stock goes up to the point where Barron's is like, "Hey, you know what?

12:27 I'm gonna get out. I got $30 million now compared to my initial investment. Like, that's pretty cool." Right now, this entire company, everybody who was involved, not just Baron. Baron got out before really all the damages was done. But, you look at what this company did, caused damage and took out a lot of the money from Papua New Guinea's government, which probably didn't have the money to really burn through like that, just in general because it's a developing country and its people need other things, right? But they, took a chance and they lost. So Pacific Nation invested public money and got left holding both the financial and environmental damage. But some of the business people made money. This is what really happened. Now, in 2011, so people connected to Nautilus, including Hayden, started a new company called DeepGreen.

13:07 Now, Baron became involved early, then took over as chairman and CEO in 2018. So we advanced almost 10 years. Now, DeepGreen eventually became the Metals Company, which is also known as TMZ, which we know now is still active today. Now, TMC's exploring license in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone once belonged to Nautilus, so it got taken over by TMC. So this is look- looks like a deja vu. You get the both people who were initially involved in Nautilus. You got Hayden and Baron both involved together again. Baron made money. I don't know exactly how Hayden kinda left after Nautilus, but they made money. And now they're taking over the leases that Nautilus had into an area called the Clarion- Clipperton Zone, which is in the Pacific. It's a deep sea area that's known to have minerals, like these critical minerals for batteries.

13:51 Like, you gotta remember, this is all for, and especially now, EVs are really starting to catch on. The batteries need critical minerals. Not only do the EVs need it, but they also, like phones and everything like that, we need critical minerals. There are reports and videos of people in the Congo who are actively mining, open-pit mining for these minerals that are going through awful human rights crimes and they're being treated like crap. They're dying, and there are kids that are in there and all that. It's awful. So you have this, this area where it's like we're not harming anybody, like from a human rights perspective. Now we can see. We've already been through it, and then from a business perspective, we've made a lot of money from it, or at least Baron has. And so, hey, why don't we just try and take this again? We have a lease.

14:31 We can do it. Now going back on Nautilus, Barron said publicly that he and his colleagues are not ashamed of what happened with Nautilus, even though they left the government hanging and the environment damaged. He comparing themselves to pioneers who end up with arrows in the back, and arguing that without Nautilus, the wider deep sea mining industry would never have gotten started. And that's probably true. Like, they're probably pioneers in that area, but they haven't shown that it worked. They didn't have the right equipment. It wasn't the right materials that they were going after. And they eventually, they just couldn't do it with the equipment that they had, and they couldn't make it financially viable. The mistakes he names are technical and financial, not environmental. He never mentioned the environment, never mentioned the damage of the environment. He specifically criticizes equipment Nautilus used on the sea floor, like I mentioned before.

15:15 Calling those machines big, angry rock grabbers that filled him with horror, and contrast that with the nodule collection machine TMC uses now, which he calls gentle giants. Now, these are still machines. These are still things that are gonna be grabbing things, and they're gonna get into the sand, they're gonna get into the bottom, and they're gonna muck it all up. Now, he frames the location as part of the problem, too, in Papua New Guinea, noting that the challenge of operating in a developing nation like Papua New Guinea says that he had largely sold out of the project by the time the government invested, but didn't really tell the government that he was sold out, that I know of, Cause they bought in huge. To a third of what they could have. So again, no regret on his part from the environmental aspect. Made a ton of money from that project, and is ready to do it again because he thinks now they're in a different zone.

16:01 It's in the high seas, so it's not tied to a specific country, let alone a developing country, so don't have to deal with those. And he says he's got better vehicles now, and he can do it better. But again, not talking about the environment. More talking about the business and the sustainability economically. So the regret's more about the geography and equipment, not the environment. Now, across multiple interviews spanning years, Barron has not expressed uncertainty or worry about whether deep sea mining itself harms the ocean, which a lot of people are talking about. And his consistent argument is a comparison one. He said that mining the seabed is less environmentally damaged than mining on land, right? In the BBC interview, he described the Clarion-Clipperton Zone as having essentially zero plant life and only about 10 grams of biomass per square meter, compared to the far higher biomass equatorial rainforest, where land-based nickel mining happens.

16:49 So when Greenpeace published a report critical of the deep sea mining industry, TMC's response was that Greenpeace had fundamentally misunderstood the industry, not that the concerns had merit. And by the way, the 10 grams of biomass per square meter, it wasn't even close to that. It was a lot higher. Again, so looking at the character of the CEO, not just Barron, but a CEO looking at, " Hey, I have this industry. I made a ton of money last time. I'm gonna go into it again, even though it didn't survive, and 'cause I think I can do it better this time. We don't have to worry about the country, the geography, we don't have to worry about the equipment," according to him, according to the CEO, But he never is really concerned about this desert of a deep sea, and it's better than mining in a rainforest that it was done in the Congo.

17:33 We're still looking at, is it really equitable? I don't know. But obviously there's the extra added like human rights offenses that happened in a lot of these mines in Africa and the Congo where this happens. Again, you're looking at a business person who wants business, who wants this to survive so he can make a boat ton of money. Now, the Wall Street Journal summarized the arc, this way when the TMZ went public. The company Baron backed for the first time lost half a billion dollars, got crosswise with the South Pacific government, destroyed sensitive seabed habitat, and went broke, and now he's trying it again because he made $30 million. The company lost half a billion, but he made $30 million. Again, it's just like this came like a mainstream financial publication.

18:17 It's not just like an environmentalist here. it's something like a publication that looks at like finances. That's what they look at. And I think when we look at how this is pursued, , if you take the Gerard Baron pattern and you kind of blow it up a little bit and you look around to other natural resource companies or even other companies, the people involved a lot of the time see the process. You know, they see the operations. They don't necessarily see ahead of the damage that they could cause. We're looking at a new frontier in the deep sea that we don't know anything about. We're looking at doing something that could damage something that could really mess up our planet if we knew what we were messing up.

18:59 We saw damage done off the coast of Papua New Guinea. We saw studies saying that the recovery is not four years. It's longer than that. We don't know how much. But we've also seen studies in the deep sea that I covered yesterday where we look at seamount trawling and, you know, you're looking at destroying habitat that took centuries to create because they're such slow-growing species that create this habitat. What if that happens down there? We will never be able to know the loss of any kind of endemic species that could be beneficial to the human species later on in life as we start to discover more about the ocean. You see, Scripps, Oceanog- Institute of Oceanography. You see Nautilus Live. They go deep. They take their ROVs, and they do public education.

19:40 So does Ocean Networks Canada. They do public education of the deep sea. So we're starting to be able to have the technology to go in and see what's there, but we're just… We haven't even scratched the bottom of the ocean, not even the surface, the bottom of the ocean, and we're ready to go in blind and just destroy what's there. And you know, again, this is not something against Gerard Barron. He is doing what a business person does. Unfortunately, this is what business people do. They see what they can get, they can make a lot of money on it. And when people bring up things like, "Hey, you could damage the environment. We have no idea what the damage you can do to the environment." And they'd just be like, "Well, actually, we're not doing any damage." It's not as bad, which we don't know it's not as bad, as doing it on a rainforest, 'cause we can see the rainforest.

20:22 We can see the damage we're doing to the rainforest, we can see the damage and the human rights offenses that are happening. Like, we can see that. Those are bad. Those shouldn't happen. But it doesn't mean that we have to go with the place that is less bad, even though it could still be bad. He never said it would be bad, he just said it wouldn't be as bad as doing it on land. So why are we doing it anyway? And it's gonna be really interesting because in my interview on Friday with Matthew Gianni, he talks about some of the conclusions of the International Seabed Authority, which TMC is not even a part of anymore because they're going with the Trump administration. They want to mine. They want to deep sea mine. That's their goal. They have investors. They wanna go do this thing. Whether they can do it sustainably is gonna be another thing.

21:03 At the beginning of the episode, I talked about how they really pushed for a two-year ramp-up to deep sea mine. It never went through, but I'll tell you what did. The stock price went up. It went through the roof, and then it's slowly been going down. And so Barron has been losing money because of the stock price, and he hasn't sold yet. Now, we're ramping up very quickly again with the Trump administration and issuing leases or will be issuing leases in the next coming weeks. That's gonna bring up the stock again, and whether it's actually gonna be economic or not, Barron's gonna make money. He may or may not stay with the company after he makes this money, I don't know. That'll be interesting to see and to see if this actually will go through. Stay tuned for that episode in a couple days where I talk to Matthew Gianni, who is the co-founder and the political and policy advisor for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, which I covered his story on Monday.

21:53 And tomorrow, stay tuned because we're gonna be talking about some of Barron's indications or allegations that the deep sea is just a desert, and there's really nothing to worry about in terms of damage. So we're gonna talk about that tomorrow, whether it's true or not. Follow if you want it, if you don't wanna miss tomorrow's episode or come back, whatever you want. Trying something new. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Hit me up in the socials in the show notes. But other than that, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.