#231 Gerard Barron - CIA Project Azorian & Deep Sea Mining That Could Change the World

Gerard Barron, born in Queensland, Australia, is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Metals Company, a position he has held since 2017. A seasoned entrepreneur with a track record in battery technology, media, and future-oriented resource development, Barron leads the company's efforts to harvest polymetallic nodules from the deep ocean floor, providing sustainable sources of critical metals like nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese for electric vehicles and renewable energy. He previously co-founded DeepGreen in 2011 and assumed full control in 2017, guiding it through a public listing and partnerships to advance environmentally responsible deep-sea mining as an alternative to land-based extraction. Barron testified before the U. S. Congress in April 2025 on national security and critical minerals, emphasizing the strategic importance of ocean resources. He advocates for innovation in clean tech, reducing mining's ecological footprint, and securing supply chains for the global energy transition, often speaking at forums like the St. Gallen Symposium and GESDA. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: ⁠https://americanfinancing.net/srs⁠ NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 866-781-8900, for details about credit costs and terms. ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://bruntworkwear.com – USE CODE SRS⁠ ⁠https://bunkr.life – USE CODE SRS⁠ Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get your 25% off your family plan. ⁠https://calderalab.com/srs⁠ Use code SRS for 20% off your first order. ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://helixsleep.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://patriotmobile.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS⁠ ⁠https://shopify.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://simplisafe.com/srs⁠ Gerard Barron Links: The Metals Company - ⁠https://metals.co⁠ X - ⁠https://x.com/gtbgtb⁠ LinkedIn - ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardbarron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Jared Barron, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Such a privilege to be here.

• 1:12Shawn Ryan?

  It's a privilege for me. Thank you. Thank you for coming. You first popped up on my radar from a mutual friend, Cole Fackler from GBRS. And so we started looking at India. And I've been interviewing a couple of different guys that have been mining different areas of the universe, I guess. And so, haven't talked to anybody doing it under the sea. So I thought this would be... I'm just fascinated by innovators and what you guys are doing. So I really appreciate you coming.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Well, appreciate the chance to talk to, on your platform, to a new audience.

• 1:49Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Well, everybody starts with an introduction. Here we go. Jared Barron, entrepreneur hailing from a Queensland, Australia dairy farm. Built global companies across media, technology, battery manufacturing, and resource development. Chairman and CEO of The Metals Company, leading the charge in deep sea mining. A first principles thinker committed to resource extraction with minimal impact on people and nature. A global traveler, splitting time between London, California, and Tonga. Where the fuck is Tonga?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Well, I I should correct that a tiny bit. It's more, um, you know Tonga is a beautiful Pacific Island country, but I should mention Tonga and Nauru, which is also a even smaller country. Uh, little island in the Pacific and but look, it's a, it's a pretty. I'm a pretty frequent traveler, that's for sure. And I'm Australian, of course, as you said. But um, but over the last 14 years, I've been working with Pacific Island countries and I mean, they are amazing people. I mean, Tonga is beautiful. Nauru is really special. It's where the birds used to stop when they headed south.

• 3:07Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  And so it was discovered about, you know, 80 years ago that it was rich in phosphate. And so the Germans and the English and Australians and Kiwis came and took it all. And, you know, it was discovered back when good old James Cook was sailing the world after he discovered Australia and so he called it Pleasant Island. And then everyone came and took all of their beautiful phosphate, which was used to feed the world. And, and so now you have 80% of the island that's uninhabitable. Then they handed the country back to the people of Nauru. Said, how would you like independence? Now that we've taken everything that you've got?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  Right. I mean, what, where's the favorite place? Where is your favorite place that you've been?

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Oh, that's easy. Australia.

• 3:58Shawn Ryan?

  Australia?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm a, I'm a very proud Australian, very proud Australian. Although Erica, my partner, said, why don't we get our 23 and meet on, you know, our DNA? And um, it's like, yeah, I'd be interested in that. Came back 100% Irish.

• 4:17Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding? 100%?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:21Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. Right on.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  So my ancestors were well behaved, kept it in the family anyway.

• 4:26Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Many generations in Australia.

• 4:29Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Well, we got a couple of things to get through before we get into the interview. And uh, so one thing, first thing is I got a Patreon account and Patreon is a community we built. They've been here with us since the beginning. And um, when I started this damn thing in my attic, and now we're what? This is our third studio, hopefully our final, but they've been with us. Through the whole journey.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:54Shawn Ryan?

  And they're the reason I get to be here with you today. So, one of the things we do is we offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So, this is from Eric Alger.

• 5:07Shawn Ryan?

  Jared, most people see you today as the front man for deep sea mining. But before the metals company, you were behind Nautilus Minerals, which collapsed under controversy. What did that failure teach you about? How much of this battle is really technology and environment? And how much of it is winning the story? The world believes?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Hmm, well, I don't think it's about winning the story, but maybe. Great question, so I can set the record straight because in 2001, a friend of mine went to work for Nautilus. He was the, the second employee there. And he was telling me about it and I said, man, that sounds amazing. He said, yeah, and we've got no money. Can you put some money in? It's like, I mean, I was building my own company at the time, but I was like, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Well, because I thought it was such an obvious idea and they were focused on a different type of metals. They were focused on seafloor massive sulfides, which is where the chimneys pop up between the tectonic plates.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Anyway, so I, I agreed to fund the first one and a half million dollars. And it, um. Despite it almost sending me broke at the time because I was building another company as well at the same time, which needed money. Uh, it ended up being a great success and we floated the company in 2006 and I sold out in 2007, eight. Uh, pretty all the same time my friend left the company. And, uh, but I never worked for it. And I, but I was very helpful in attracting other capital. And then the big guys came in, we raised four or 500 million dollars. And then of course, uh, after I sold out Papua New Guinea, the, the country in 2012, maybe?

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Decided they wanted to invest as well because they were focused on a project up in Papua New Guinea. And by law, the, the government has the right to invest. They said, we want to invest. So they did. And then what happened, I'm winding the clock forward now, keep in mind I sold out in two thousand and seven. In two thousand and eighteen, the owners, there were two main people funding the company, even though it was public. And they said, look, we're the only two people that appear to be happy to keep funding it. Why don't we put the assets up for sale? So it was really called an administration, a reorganization. No one came forward, so they bought it and privatized it. And so, two thousand and eighteen, you know, I sold out in two thousand

• 7:40Speaker 03

  and seven, and I made some money, some good money out of it, to be honest. But it was a very different time. Firstly, it was operating in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea. It was a small resource by comparison, because they only ever found millions, single-digit millions of tons of this stuff, very high grade, rich in copper and gold. Whereas, we've got two billion tons of these rocks, like the one in my hands, defined resource of one point six billion, but we think about another four to five hundred million tons of these rocks on our resource. So, very different scale, and also a different time. You know, the geopolitics

• 8:22Speaker 03

  weren't as lively back then as they are now. But I think, you know, that project will get into production. The people that privatized it are continuing to push forward, and I think it will be a success. And, you know, but these projects are tough, you know, getting a new industry started is tough. You know, and I, we started this company in two thousand and eleven. So, so my biggest gift from Nautilus was, made some good money out of it, but it taught me about polymetallic nodules. And, so in two thousand and eleven, we started this one, and here we are, two thousand and twenty-five. And, you know, we're at what I

• 9:02Speaker 03

  believe to be the final stretch before the industry becomes big and commercial. So, that's a very long answer to Eric's question, but, yeah.

• 9:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's a good answer. One more thing, everybody gets a gift.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. I've seen people chewing away at these. How many packets did um did our friend Palmer Lucky eat of these? Cause he seemed to be chewing a lot that day.

• 9:29Shawn Ryan?

  He loves them. He loves them. Yeah. I can't remember how many bags, but it was a handful. Yeah, he was all hopped up on gummy berries, but.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. Well, I brought you a gift today as well.

• 9:41Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I love gifts.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, this is a very precious poly metallic nodule. And we had them made about five million years old, this one. We had them made by an artist in Detroit. And this one is particularly oxidized, turned into gold. And it's the same as the one that sits on the Resolute Desk. We prepared one for President Trump when he signed the executive order on April 24. And got the American flag and the coordinates of where we found it.

• 10:18Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, that is cool.

• 10:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's beautiful. Look at that.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  It's gonna look amazing on one of these shelves.

• 10:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's gonna go right over there.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, good, good.

• 10:31Shawn Ryan?

  Man, thank you. This is really cool. Thank you.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure no one else will give you one of those.

• 10:39Shawn Ryan?

  I'm pretty sure they won't either.

• 10:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome. Yeah, thank you.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  I've got to give a shout out to my buddy Andre. Who's my, you know, one of my partners on this project. He would love this room. He would love this room, everything about it.

• 10:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'll show them one day. I gotta give a shout out to Eric Bethel too.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 11:03Shawn Ryan?

  He told me when I first met him, we had dinner at a place here and he was telling me about some of the investments that his VC had made. And the first one that he had brought up is your company. Actually, he told me about that before we ever even met.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:18Shawn Ryan?

  And told me about what you guys are doing and it sounds awesome. I can't wait to dive into it. But, you know, and like I said, it's interesting. I've had, you know. Had people come on, talk about mining the moon, talk about mining asteroids, enriching uranium, and now you're here, we're doing it under the sea. So, um, it's gonna be fascinating. And, but what, what got you interested in, in, in metals, in nodules?

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I'm a, grew up in a dairy farm, went to university, had four jobs in my first year, realized there was no time for a fifth, started a company. And the company worked out pretty well. And, and I'd been building companies my entire life. So I'm, I'm kind of naturally drawn to things that are, you know, a little bit unique. And, you know, I've been lucky to build some great companies and grow them globally. And then, as I mentioned, I invested in 2001 in another project, Nautilus. And then we started this company in 2011. And originally, I was just

• 12:34Speaker 03

  gonna be a financial backer. I only decided to step into the ring, you know, and formerly, I took over in 2017 and became chairman and CEO. Before that, we'd hired someone out of one of the big mining companies and it wasn't working out so well. And I thought, what do I know about running a mining company, a resource company? You know, you'd go to BHP or Freeport to go and find one of them. But actually, when I started to dive into, you know, the data behind this resource and how big it was and how impactful it could be, and to global supply, you know,

• 13:15Speaker 03

  and, and of course, a number of things then came along to help as well, like geopolitics has now made this a really hot topic. You know, critical minerals are on everyone's mind. And, you know, if, if we take a step back and apply some of that first principle thinking, 70% of our planet is ocean. Yet we don't get metals out of the ocean. You know, we get a few diamonds, but you know, they're slowly being replaced by lab-grown diamonds. But we don't get our nickel or copper or cobalt or manganese out of the oceans. Yet in this one little deposit where we are focused,

• 13:57Speaker 03

  seventy percent of the known reserves of nickel and cobalt and manganese sit in the form of these polymetallic nodules. And they literally just sit on the seafloor like the one in my hand. And so it's only a matter of time that we got around to it. And there was a false start back in the seventies. When, and that's, that's another story, right? Because the CIA were very involved in getting this whole industry started.

• 14:28Shawn Ryan?

  Really? Why so?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Well.

• 14:32Shawn Ryan?

  I've got some ideas. I got a feeling it doesn't have anything to do with mining.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  It has nothing to do with mining. But it was a great cover story. Yeah. And the Russian submarine, which had nuclear warheads on it, the K-129, sank in the Pacific. It had set sail from a Russian port. And the Americans were, this is dating back to nineteen sixty-eight. The Americans had already implanted listening devices on the seafloor around the Pacific. So they could detect nuclear explosion and other activities. And so when the,

• 15:16Speaker 03

  they were tracking this submarine, and all of a sudden they heard an explosion. And the Russians didn't have the same technology installed in the oceans. And so the Americans quickly clocked onto it and the CIA got involved. And, but they had to have a reason to be out there because the Russians were looking for their lost submarine. And they'd had no idea where it was. They could just say, well, it left this port this time, and we last heard at this date in this location. So.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  The CIA went ahead and started to plan how they could recover this. First, they needed to establish were the warheads in place, were they worth recovering? And when they decided, yes, they were, they said, well, actually, we can't just go and pick them up because the Russians, it'll become an international incident. We might have World War Three on our hands. And so they said, we need to, there's a lot of polymetallic nodules around them. And so we need to use the recovery of these polymetallic nodules as the cover story to go and recover these, the sunken Russian submarine. So they thought, well, they're not going to believe that we, the government, are going to be involved. So who can we get to front it?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Howard Hughes. Because everyone thought, he's a bit crazy, he'll be up for this. And so they reached out to Howard Hughes and he said, yeah, of course, no problem. And so the CIA funded it all. And there were other companies involved and the Glomar Explorer was, you know, became the first deep sea exploration vessel and mining vessel. And it's, you know, that attracted other people into the industry because of course, no one else knew about this. And so then you had other consortia forms, Shell and BP and Mitsubishi from Japan and many other corporations became involved in this whole industry was moving forward.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  But then the United Nations decided they wanted to get involved as well. Because they were like, well, who owns the ocean? Like, we should all agree this set of rules. Like, we should share these resources in a more equitable manner. And so 169 countries now signed on to this treaty called UNCLAS. But what it meant was America had this leading position when it comes to polymetallic nodules and ocean metals. But then they decided to step back and see where this international consortia went. And so the mining companies involved then got busy looking for more minerals on land.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  But when you see this deposit, like they estimate there are more than twenty billion tons of these.

• 18:12Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  More than twenty billion tons. As I said, we we have an estimated two billion tons on our license areas. So it's generally regarded, we've got the best ground out there. But so you had all of these countries form this treaty and of course, um, well, not not form it, agree a treaty, but Ronald Reagan was the president then and he's like, no way in the world, we're not going to join another international treaty. So America stood aside and said, well, because no one has sovereignty over the oceans, right? Every nation can traverse the oceans, every nation has the rights to the seabed minerals on the floor, um, to lay cables.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  But all of these other countries said, well, when it comes to the seafloor minerals, how about we agree a set of rules? And so they signed the treaty, but America did not. And so, you know, it's been a pretty exciting year for us, last twelve months at least, because, you know, we've pivoted our business away from this international organization to now focus entirely on permitting this resource through the US administration. And that really became possible with the election of President Trump.

• 19:27Shawn Ryan?

  That's good to hear. That's good to hear. What, I mean, what percentage of that rock has precious metals in it?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Well, it's amazing, right? They, this forms through precipitation. So it grows a little bit like a pearl grows. And so we turn one hundred percent of this into salable material. And it's got about thirty-three percent pure metal. But the rest of the material is, there's some silica in there, there's a lot of crystallized water in there, so about twenty-four percent of it is, is moisture. And but the rest of it, we all turn into salable product. And that in itself is a, is almost.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Well, very unique to this resource because on land, you know, you go looking for a copper deposit and last year, the average greater copper mine was about point six of one percent. So it means that you go digging up a ton of material, a thousand kilograms of material and you have to treat it and process and cart it and take it places, looking for six kilograms of copper. So it's, so it's very inefficient and it's very expensive and it creates a lot of impacts. Whereas we lift these up, take them to shore, process them and we turn it all into salable material. So it's kind of unique.

• 21:05Shawn Ryan?

  You do the processing as well?

• 21:07Speaker 03

  That's our plan.

• 21:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  That's our plan.

• 21:10Shawn Ryan?

  Mine and process.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and the reason why we're so excited about the US is because President Trump and his administration made re-industrialization a priority. Because for decades, America has been outsourcing mining and processing and refining to other parts of the world, particularly China. And then of course, you wake up one day and you realize that your adversaries have control out of all of the critical minerals that you need. And it was

• 21:51Speaker 03

  a foolish playbook in hindsight, but it was hard and heavy industry. You know, the world wanted to be involved in cool, new industries. But when it comes down to it, if you, if it ain't grown its mind. And so you can't just dream up a land-based mine. You know, they don't just appear out of nowhere. And all of the obvious ones were found and developed. So that's why if you look at about half of our revenue comes from nickel. And 100% of the growth in nickel supply over the last seven years has come from what we call rainforest

• 22:35Speaker 03

  nickel. And to get to it, you've got to remove the rainforest to dig up this material called nickel laterite. And of course you, um, and we're not talking about, you know,

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Anything other than pristine, beautiful rainforest, which are filled with indigenous people in some cases, certainly filled with enormous amount of biodiversity and biomass, filled with cute cuddly animals. And, you know, led by China, it's just, you know, bulldozing it out of the way. Uh huh. And that's the beginning of the impacts, you know, because you, you, to process that material comes with a host of impacts. The waste material gets spilled into rivers and oceans and kills off the local industry, the fishing industries and, you know, I mean, for your listeners, just punch into your favorite search engine, rainforest nickel.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, I've, I've, I've had the first had experience of witnessing, you know, in one particular region. It was in Indonesia, actually, where 10 years ago, there were no people focused on nickel mining. We visited there, my team and I, maybe three years ago. This town of 70,000 people had been built, all focused on nickel mining. Like, 70,000 people. Seventy thousand. That's a lot of people. Yeah, it is. And all of a sudden, and it was all 100% done by China. I mean, that, when China

• 24:12Speaker 03

  sets its mind on things, you know, they become very, very impactful and, um, and successful. And in this case, that's what they've done. And, and, and, you know, I know we're going to talk about it today, but this industry almost went that way as well. Man. And it was only the election of President Trump that provided a pathway to us rescuing it. And America reasserting its dominant role when it comes to ocean metals.

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• 25:46Speaker 01

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• 26:16Shawn Ryan?

  So is this a US-based company?

• 26:19Speaker 03

  We started the company in Canada, but we set up a US subsidiary in 2013, and it's our US subsidiary that is applying for the permit.

• 26:28Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. And you said 50% of our revenue comes from nickel?

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:34Shawn Ryan?

  Is that US revenue?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Well, at the moment, we haven't generated our first revenue. 2027 is when we're aiming for first production. Yeah, but if you look at the metals in here, we've got nickel and copper and cobalt and manganese. And America imports about 50% of its copper, but it pretty well imports almost 100% of its nickel, cobalt, and manganese.

• 27:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What do we use those metals for?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Well, let's think about, well, copper's used everywhere, right?

• 27:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wires.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Wires and many other things. But nickel is mainly used to make, it's a hardening substance to make stainless steel. So you add it to steel to make stainless steel. It's also used in super alloys. You need it for making military equipment. And... And then cobalt is of course used in your iPhone battery. But it's also a very efficient thing. They're all used in batteries for cars as well. So if you have a, you know, Tesla EV, it's full of nickel and used to be full of cobalt. They kind of managed to get cobalt out of it.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  But mainly because they weren't able to get a affordable um supply that hadn't touched the hands of child miners in the Congo. Which is where the cobalt market is characterized. And then steel, manganese is used to make steel. You can't make a ton of steel without manganese. And now more manganese is going into batteries as well. So these are all what we call base metals. They're the foundation building blocks for industry. And, you know, if you wanna, if you wanna look at, you know, over the last, since two thousand and two. About twenty thousand companies have evaporated who were involved in heavy industry, twenty thousand.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Twenty thousand. Thousand. Wow. Twenty thousand. Millions of jobs have disappeared. And it's all because of outsourcing to

• 28:44Speaker 03

  developing countries. You know, China saying, we can do it. And of course, you know what? I I know that the current administration are very focused on, um, you know, looking at

• 28:59Speaker 03

  dumping and have these materials been coming back into the country at cheaper prices and, you know, two thirty two reviews are underway, I understand. Because it's another way where you can go and buy, um, where you can go and buy market share and end up controlling an entire industry. Because the the incentive price for local production.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Is too low to attract investment into those industries because you know there are there are some nickel deposits in America, they're small, but they need nickel prices to be, you know, fifty percent higher than where they are to even break even.

• 29:45Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  We don't have that problem because we're so high grade, you know, I mentioned before, last year, the average grade of copper was point six of one percent. Um, so this is full of filled with nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese, but if you were to put all of those other metals into copper equivalent, just for value perspective, we're like more than seven percent copper equivalent. So an order of magnitude richer material. And that obviously has a big impact on the economics. And so, you know, we, we can withstand dumping from, you know, certain markets like China.

• 30:23Shawn Ryan?

  So we're not mining any nickel here in, here in the U S?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  No, there are some that are.

• 30:30Shawn Ryan?

  They've shut down because the, the, what they, they, they're not making, the company's not making enough money.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  No, that's right. If you, um, yeah, over the last five years, you've seen, you know, some of the biggest nickel miners, you know, B H P, Vale, you know, slow down or shut their operations, put them on, um, care and maintenance, hoping for a recovery in the price. But, but, um, there doesn't seem to be any recovery in the price available in the next few years. And, you know, and at the moment, you know, if you've got seventy percent market share, which is probably what China has when it comes to nickel.

• 31:10Shawn Ryan?

  Seventy percent?

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Seven zero, yeah. Yeah. Why not go for a hundred? Keep the price down there?

• 31:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Go for a hundred and then you can put the price to whatever you want.

• 31:22Shawn Ryan?

  That's true. That's true. Man, China's just got us at so many different angles. The whole world, it seems like.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  That's because they're really smart. You know, and I, you mentioned Eric before, Bethel, he's one of the guys that gets it, you know, because he's lived there, he's lived the experience.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  I've lived the experience as well. I I've I've admired their approach. I was, um, you know, one of the companies I um I I grew was making batteries in China back when they started to attract invite foreign investment, you know, in the early nineties. They were starter batteries, not so much. They weren't EV batteries. You know, I watched Padong come out of the out of the ground. You know, there were hundreds of cranes building at the same time. It was like, I remember I used to take people with me on trips to say, you've got to come and see this, like, you will not believe it, you know. You'd pull up at a train crossing and there'd be 2,000

• 32:24Speaker 03

  bikes there. Now you pull up and there's no bikes there, you know, it's it's a it's it's it's just it's impressive. It's impressive. But I think the West has fallen into the trap of letting them do that, thinking it'll all work out in the end. But that's a trap.

• 32:50Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think you're right. I know you're right with that. I know you're right. I mean, they they own practically our whole damn supply chain. I mean, is Australia, are they are they concerned about all the stuff that China's involved in and doing and innovating?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think the, you know, the the Scott Morrison, uh, you know, recent president, former um Prime Minister, we call them, had a bit of a blow up with the Chinese because he ordered an inquiry into where COVID came from. They didn't like that, so they banned our coal and live fresh livestock. Didn't impact it. They just bought it somewhere else. And so we supplied them. I think the the current Prime Minister is um laying out a red carpet.

• 33:44Shawn Ryan?

  He is.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:46Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Sees them as a great trade partner. Sees them as a great trade partner. Not spending enough money on defense, just thinking everything's going to work out beautifully. It's a trap to fall into.

• 34:02Shawn Ryan?

  What is the sentiment in Australia about that?

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Australia's lost its way a little bit, in my personal opinion.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  I think that

• 34:21Speaker 03

  people want to follow

• 34:26Speaker 03

  voters want to follow someone, a leader, and

• 34:35Speaker 03

  there is not a good viable alternative in Australia at the moment, so it's a left-leaning government.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  The net result of that is, you know, you've got

• 34:48Speaker 03

  eight out of every 10 new jobs created in the last four years are in the government. Are you serious?

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Eight out of 10? Holy shit. Yeah. Wow. And you can see a theme repeating, you know? And I think that

• 35:09Speaker 03

  one of the challenges is,

• 35:13Speaker 03

  you know, these economies go on until they bust, right? You know, I see it in the UK now as well. I I mean, eventually, whether it's immigration or whether it's government spending, eventually the books don't balance, you know? And eventually, you know, we the press coming out of the UK at the moment is horrible, you know? Free speech, you can't say things, you end up being locked up for saying stuff compared to some of the other crimes that some of the not-so-welcome visitors are committing, but the world went a little bit crazy. And I, I, I think it's kind of coming back a little bit.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  At least, people feel safer, partly because of platforms like your own. You know, being cancelled by the media now, it doesn't matter, you know, it's like, whatever. There are better avenues to express views safely, you know.

• 36:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think mainstream media is going to the wayside like we were talking earlier. The average viewer of mainstream media right now is about sixty nine years old.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:28Shawn Ryan?

  It will die with the baby boomer generation unless they make some miraculous change, which I don't see that happening at all, just as divisive as they've ever been.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:39Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe more now, but.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, I think not before time. I mean, and I've I've lived that firsthand. I've lived it with China where I've seen what people like Eric talk about. I've had firsthand experience of them intimidating me and what we're doing and now aligning with the USA. They don't like it because they thought they had it all going to plan. And we broke the plan.

• 37:10Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:12Shawn Ryan?

  That's honorable.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:14Shawn Ryan?

  So where does the metals company operate? Is it strictly off the coast of North America?

• 37:20Speaker 03

  There's only one deposit that we're focused on at the moment. It's this area known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone. And it was discovered way back in the eighteen seventies by the British, who sailed around the world on HMS Challenger with a basket off the back. And thankfully, the steam piston had been invented so they could haul up this basket. It was at sea for four years and they came across this big field of nodules about a thousand miles southwest of San Diego.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  And I mentioned before, they precipitate, right? They grow a little bit like pearls grow in the in the ocean. And so there are nodules found in other oceans, but they're just not as interesting as these because these contain a very high grade of nickel and copper. And the reason for that is if you look to our east, you've got the Rockies and the Andes. And over millennia, they eroded into the Pacific Ocean. And so you had these currents that came from the north and south, met headed west. And that's where you have this belt of nodules. It's amazing. It's about a thousand miles high, about 4,000 miles wide, where it's like a carpet of nodules. I mean,

• 38:41Speaker 03

  it's, it's the most beautiful mother nature gift, you know, far away from human settlement,

• 38:51Speaker 03

  no alternative use for this part of the ocean floor, just sat there looking proud, saying, come and get me.

• 38:59Shawn Ryan?

  Man, so how does it, I mean, well, actually, let me, how much of the ocean floor have you explored for other deposits of nodules?

• 39:11Speaker 03

  We haven't, to be honest, but, but, you know, there are other people exploring, including NOAA, the US agency, they, they go out and, and Bowen, who explore their own territorial waters. And of course, other explorers that the Chinese, I think, have explored a lot of the ocean floor, a lot more than they probably admit. And, but this is so big, like it's multi-generational deposit. You know, as I said, 70% of the known reserves of nickel, cobalt and manganese are in this one deposit. And so that's where we've had our focus since 2011, purely there.

• 39:51Shawn Ryan?

  So you don't even, you don't even have a need to explore anymore?

• 39:54Speaker 03

  No.

• 39:54Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, do you think that there are other metals under there that we don't know about yet?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. I mean, you know, before I mentioned where these tectonic plates meet, you know, if you get a map out of the world, you can see how the globe, how planet Earth all sticks together. So you get a lot of pressure coming up from the core of the earth and you know, that's where a lot of these deposits have formed and the systems die, so they're very hard. Some of the systems are still active, they're still emitting gases, so they're easier to find. They like chimneys underwater, they're fascinating. And, um, but some of them have, have, um, been dead for, you know, I don't know, a million years or a hundred thousand years. And so they're covered. And so you've got to go really exploring. And

• 40:45Speaker 03

  so, yeah, there, there are other deposits out there for sure. And Tonga is an interesting example there because they have a lot of volcanogenic, volcanogenic activity around where they are. You saw that massive underwater volcano exploded some years ago. Um, so, look, some of these Pacific island countries in particular have a lot of metals in their, potential metals in their economic zones. So there will be opportunities there as well. And I, I think what the world is waiting to see is, you know, us to get started and

• 41:25Speaker 03

  then, you know, I think there'll be a massive rush, you know. Now, we, we, we know we have the best ground in the best area. But once people see firsthand the low impact of what we're doing, the fact that the area recovers fast, I mean, in the last, since 2011, we've spent, I don't know, now approaching three quarters of a billion dollars, a lot of it on environmental research. Even though, you know, I, I, I always use this first principle analogy to say, we should be carrying out extractive industries in parts of the planet with the least life, not the most life. At the moment, we're pushing into our rainforests,

• 42:10Speaker 03

  which is the area with the most biodiversity, the most cute and cuddly animals.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  When down here on the other end of that table is the abyssal zone and the abyssal plains and the abyssal hills cover fifty percent of the planet, okay? Fifty percent of the planet, almost approaching seventy percent of the oceans are considered abyssal, characterized by deep, low, low amount of biomass there because all the food gets eaten on the way down the water column. And, you know, if you look on our website at metals.co, you'll see lots of video of us doing trials down there and, you know, there are no plants down there, of course, because we're talking, you know, more than four thousand meters deep.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  And the amount of life living down there is grams per square meter. Most of it bacteria, single cell organisms, living in the sediment. So if you ever had to have a big resource somewhere, this would be the perfect place. You can't go and grow crops there or live there or, you know, it's the perfect thing. Yet we also have people who wish we wouldn't do it, you know?

• 43:28Shawn Ryan?

  There's pushback. I mean, first of all, I love what you're doing. I mean, you're doing it cheaper and you're, you are, I mean, it's, it's, it's net positive for the earth, right? Because the mining is, is hopefully going into the ocean where there's not much life. But, you know, when it comes to the rainforest and, you know, some of the stuff that we see, I mean, I've seen documentary, documentary after documentary about what we're doing there and it goes through my head when I see those things. Are we destroying more resources than we're even gaining?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 43:59Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, I mean, all the undiscovered life organisms, microorganisms, I mean, timber, trees clean the air. I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it did, it didn't bother me early on in life because I didn't realize, you know, but now when I see it, I'm like, man, if you look at all the landfills and shit, I just watched one about. Amazon.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:24Shawn Ryan?

  And all the destruction that that company is doing to the earth and they, you know, they try to put this facade on that, that, that.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, oh, we're saving the earth. And it's like, no, you're not, Ben. You've created more waste.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 44:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, through Amazon than, than arguably anything that, that's ever existed. And, and so I love, I love that about your company. Was that, was that?

• 44:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is that a, a early on ethos or is that a byproduct?

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 44:52Shawn Ryan?

  Came out of it.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I've, I've always deemed myself an environmentalist and, you know, and I, I often get criticized for the fact that by the NGO community or, you know, activists who don't want to see any progress saying, ah, you've just, you know, switched from talking about environment to now talking about geopolitics and critical supply chains. It's like, well, if you go back to my presentation decks a decade ago, you'll find security of supply was always highlighted as one of the critical issues. But, you know, at the end of the day, geopolitics are pretty important, you know, because

• 45:37Speaker 03

  we've got trading partners who've said they'll turn off supply.

• 45:40Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  If they choose to. And that tells you, you've got to make some changes in that supply chain. And, and so, but if we just maybe take a, a journey down that path, because

• 45:56Speaker 03

  circularity

• 46:00Speaker 03

  is something we should aspire to. And at the metals company, we do aspire to it. And if you go, uh, we just had a big strategy day on August 4, actually, where we, you know, talked about, step one is where can we find the lowest impact supply of these critical minerals? And when I say lowest impact, I mean, um, you know, less destruction of biomass ecosystem, less impact on biodiversity, less CO2 emissions, less impact on freshwater ecosystems, and the list goes on. And we've, we've, we've spent so much money, like hundreds of millions of dollars on, on that whole basket of studies.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  And they all point to one thing, and that is that we can massively reduce the impact when we create metals from these rocks compared to land-based alternatives, no matter where they come from. Ocean metals from these rocks is the way to go.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  But eventually, the world has to get more focused on recycling, and they will.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  And when I say we need to aspire to circularity, in the future, I hope we won't be picking up these rocks. In a hundred years' time, we should be making sure that we're using recycling every single atom we put out there. In fact, we talk a lot about as metals as a service. I built a software as a service company in a previous company, and metals as a service is a similar idea. It's like, hey, we'll give you these metals, you can use them, but we want them back. Because they have to do something with them, right? At the end of life, you've got a responsibility, so you can't just put them in the waste pile, you've got to hand them back somewhere. So instead of us just treating fresh nodules, we'll

• 47:49Speaker 03

  treat recycled material, black mass as well. And eventually, you know, recycled material will have a growing share. But at the moment, there are not enough metals in the system to meet the needs. So we need to find a fresh input of billions of tons until we build that reserve. Because there are just not enough metals coming back in to be recycled, you know? It's easy to see how an electric vehicle battery gets recycled, but a lot of the other metals in the system don't get recycled, or they have a much longer life.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  So I can see in decades to come that we will not be in the business of picking up rocks.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  We'll be in the business of purely recycling the metals that we previously sold. And that's a good day because that's that's going to be a great thing for planet Earth. An amazing thing.

• 48:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's very forward thinking on your part. Do you have any idea how much metal would need to be in circulation for that to actually take place?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  We've done the calculations and it's a big number. It's a big number like um. I think the if we if we use a uh. A trusted source, say the International Energy Agency. Or the World Bank, they pretty well align. They say we need to increase extractive industries by between four and five hundred percent per annum. By twenty forty.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Four to five times more mining.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  By twenty forty to meet the needs.

• 49:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's a lot.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  It's a lot and you know, and I think that.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  That's where people don't give enough attention to where the materials are coming from.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  You know, for the electric car battery that you're using or your iPhone battery or. Just generally stuff, you know, if it ain't grown, it's mined, it's that simple. And of course, we've been talking in the recent years all about AI and you know, bits. You know, it's the bit economy. But actually, it's time for atoms, you know, because. Reindustrialization is going to depend on the atoms that are contained in here. The real world infrastructure and so. You know, and I think that's where. You know, I'm. I get criticism from some people in the environmental group who are very anti anything.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  They're anti-growth. They're anti the fact that, you know, despite the fact that we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on scientific research, they criticize the fact, yeah, but you spent it, so you can influence the outcome. It's like, it doesn't work that way. We went and hired, you know, the best universities and organizations to carry out this research. The Natural History Museum, um, Texas A.M., you know, Florida University. Like, there's twenty of the world's leading institutions who have subject matter experts, expertise, when it comes to ocean research. So we went, said, this is our goal, this is the work program, we'll pay for it, you get to do it, you get to publish your results, but it all filters back into this one integrated

• 51:19Speaker 03

  environmental impact study. And, um, and, you know, we've, we've had the green pieces of the world, um, come and board our boat in the middle of the Pacific to try and stop us doing this research, because they don't want to see the results, you know? The results are very inconvenient to their argument.

• 51:38Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we, we've seen time and time again that these groups, that they don't want to see growth. And, I mean, I think the, the first one that comes to mind is U.S. energy sector. I mean, we've really kneecapped ourselves, especially when it comes to, uh, comparison to China. You know, they're building a new coal plant every other damn day.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:58Shawn Ryan?

  And they're way ahead on nuclear, it seems to be, and, and, you know, we, we, we don't mine our own gas, you know, not nearly enough, and can't go nuclear. The cleanest form of energy in the world, according to the people that are, the folks that I've interviewed on the subject.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 52:19Shawn Ryan?

  And we use, we want to, you know, there was this big push, which seems to have died down a little bit now with this administration, but this big green push with renewables. You know, and, and the groups behind that claim energy independence for America, but it's not energy independence, because all of the, we don't mine our own lithium, we don't produce our own solar, we don't produce our own wind turbines, we, that's all imported from China. And, and so I don't, I don't, I don't understand how anybody can think that that is energy independence when you're, you, you. You are beholden to another country for the materials and the tech and

• 53:03Shawn Ryan?

  in in in in actual production of all of the, you know, the panels and stuff that come from China. That's not independence. And you talk about independence from China when it comes to the metals. And so I do have a question. I mean,

• 53:21Shawn Ryan?

  in regards to the US, I mean, we've had the ability to gain independence in a variety of ways from our oil and gas reserves, which we have not tapped into very much. And we are relying on, you know, the Middle East for that. We just talked about renewables. We talked about nuclear. I mean, does the US have the stomach to become independent, you know, in the metals industry or any other industry for that matter? Do we have the appetite for that? Do we have the stomach? Can we actually? Do you think we'll actually do it? Because we've had the opportunity several times. And it's really, you know, when you think about it in that aspect and how far we are behind on

• 54:06Shawn Ryan?

  energy or supply chain, all these things, and beholden to China. I mean, do you see? Do you see the change?

• 54:15Speaker 00

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• 54:45Shawn Ryan?

  Is it going to happen?

• 54:46Speaker 03

  But I, but I think no matter what your political view.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  People should be grateful for the Trump administration getting into government because I swear to you, Ocean Metals was about to go China's way.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  And this is a bipartisan issue. Critical mineral supply chain is a bipartisan issue. But not many people have the stomach or the kahunas to be able to see it through. And, you know, we saw President Trump issue an executive order on April 24 to say, "We have a right to these minerals. I want, I'm instructing my government agencies to fast track the permitting because we need the critical minerals. China dominates the supply chain now. They're going to dominate this as well if we don't get busy."

• 55:45Speaker 03

  And so I think that a lot of the moves that this administration are moving, making are starting to

• 55:56Speaker 03

  work.

• 55:57Shawn Ryan?

  Every innovator that I've had in here that is doing some type of, you know, good for the country is, is, is saying the same thing. They're all beaten to the same drum, saying that this administration is, is getting rid of a lot of the red tape for innovators to be able to, to do what they do and make the world a better place. So.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  And the thing I see, Sean, is, is the, the political appointees,

• 56:21Speaker 03

  they're really top shelf people. Like, they are people that have come out of, they're either amazingly successful or they're people that have come and put their careers on hold so they can come and help out. You know, the, there's one guy, he's, uh, the Critical Minerals are, you know, he, he, like, he is, he just said, "The administration needs me. I'm going to stop what I'm doing for this major mining company and come and help the administration sort out critical minerals." And, um, like.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Like he's at the top of his game, you know, like, and that's what I noticed with the political appointees that we're dealing with, the same with Noah. You know, the people we're dealing with have conviction and they they are super talented. And I think that that is going to create that momentum. And, you know, we're confident that we'll be in production during the forty seventh administration. And and we're also confident that we will make it a bipartisan issue because, you know, reindustrialization is so critical. I don't think anyone would argue that it's not going to be good for the long term benefit of America to bring back some of those jobs to America.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  And you would think the other side of politics wanted even more, right? But I think this administration will get that ball rolling and I think it won't matter.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Please God, who's in power? Because once you get the ball rolling, people will get a taste of it. They'll get a taste of jobs being created because it's true, right? AI is going to cost jobs. It's hard to, I see the optimist talking about how that's going to work out fine.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  You know, I'm not sure about that.

• 58:15Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of people are worried about AI taking their jobs.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:19Shawn Ryan?

  And it's already, it's started, it's already started and in, in, in, in just about every sector other than manual labor. But so let's talk about how this actually works. What does it take to mine minerals at the bottom of the ocean floor, four thousand meters below?

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's,

• 58:44Speaker 03

  it's a big advantage that they just sit on the ocean floor like this. So we don't have to drill or dig or tunnel to find them. It's a two dimensional resource, which is quite amazing. You go down there looking, exploration is pretty easy.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  So we send a robot down. So we build this beautiful robot. In fact, our partner, Allsees, had built it for us. Allsees are one of our biggest investors and for the last forty years, they've been laying pipes for the, in the deep ocean to connect oil and gas to transport it around the world, owned by an amazing engineer, Edward Herrimer. And so we build the robot. We have a production vessel floating up top. In fact, our first production vessel, called the Hidden Gem, was a former oil and gas drawship, which we bought for, well, Allsees bought it, but with some help from us, very cheaply. It

• 59:45Speaker 03

  was a $700 million boat, new in 2011, and bought it for less than $50 million. And we then connect it with a big riser, it's called, think of it as a big straw, which is the vertical transport system. And so basically, the robot crawls along and fires a jet of water at these nodules, so kind of a curved head, fires a jet of water. It creates an inverse pressure and lifts the nodule, goes into the hopper. We separate the sediment, which we spit out the back. And we then move the nodule into the vertical transport system and pump it up to the boat, 4,200 meters.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  How big are these robots? Well, the first one we built was six meters wide, weighed about 90 tons. The biggest challenge was keeping it on the floor. 90 tons? Because when you put it in water, it gets a lot of buoyancy. Then you add more buoyancy. 90 tons buoyant? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, funny story, another contractor.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Was out there doing some trials. They too had a collector, but they weren't doing, you know, in two thousand and twenty-two, we ran a full collector, full end-to-end production system, but they were just testing their robot. They put it, they put it over the ship and dropped it, literally. And they thought, oh my goodness. Four thousand two hundred meters. And there was big panic. Including from us, because it wouldn't have been helpful to me either. And um, I mean, um. Shit happens, right? I mean, it shouldn't, you know. But they were able to retrieve it and it was fine. Because it, you know, just floats down and landed. It's like, okay, I'm here now. And uh, they checked it over and put it back down and it went working.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  And so um, so anyway, back to my story. So we put a robot down there. Um, our production one will be wider. More like fifteen meters wide. Maybe even wider. And it crawls along like snow track tires.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  And, you know, back in the nineteen seventies, when they ran these collector trials. So, so it's all pretty cool. But then nineteen seventy-nine, they, they actually launched a machine and they, to pick up these very same rocks, back when America was driving the innovation.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  That was really pioneering engineering. But back then, they used a Archimedes screw drive system to propel it forward. And they made a big imprint in the ocean floor, about eighty centimeters and um. But whereas ours makes about a two-centimeter imprint. Just literally glides on the ocean floor. So we fire it to water, separate it out, pump it up. And um, and eventually, you know, I, I anticipate we'll have a lot of production vessels out there. We then offload them. You know, the analogy, uh, two analogies I use. One is they're like golf balls on a driving range. We've got to pick them up at the greatest efficiency and the lightest, lowest impact.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  And then it's a little bit like harvesting a paddock of wheat. You know, you just keep harvesting. And then the, the bin pulls up alongside, in our case, it'll be a, a bulk carrier. We offload the nodules, it goes off to port. Another one comes, it goes off to port, but you're always in production.

• 1:03:21Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. You know, what's interesting, what's interesting is this thing weighs like, looks like it would be heavy.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:03:28Shawn Ryan?

  It weighs almost nothing.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:30Shawn Ryan?

  And so,

• 1:03:33Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how much of this is metals?

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  About thirty-three percent of it is metal. It's got a specific gravity of about one point nine.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  So no, it's very light. It's because of how they form, right? Because of them precipitating. It starts around a kernel of something, could be a grain of sand or a broken shell.

• 1:03:54Shawn Ryan?

  And how, how?

• 1:04:00Shawn Ryan?

  And so these are just on the ocean floor like, like sand. They're just right there on the top. You don't have to do anything, you know, digging wise to get to them. They just go on the hopper. They get sucked up to the,

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Shawn Ryan?

  to the mothership and bring it over.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Shawn Ryan?

  For processing.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:04:21Shawn Ryan?

  How many of those? Can you give me a, a snapshot of how much of those you're, you're gaining an hour a day? I mean, how many of those are you picking up?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Well, our production vessel will do about, um, three million tons a year.

• 1:04:41Shawn Ryan?

  Three million tons a year?

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  And we'll be in production about two hundred and seventy days a year.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:04:52Shawn Ryan?

  And so with this international treaty?

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Shawn Ryan?

  And everybody has access to the ocean. I mean, what would? And you found, you found the motherload of these things or back in, I think you said eighteen seventy?

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, the British found them in eighteen seventy.

• 1:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  The British found them in eighteen seventy. I mean, will we start to see, you know, is this gains traction? When it sounds like it will. I think you said twenty twenty seven would be the first production vehicle?

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Shawn Ryan?

  How are the competitors, if there are any, I mean, will they, will everybody be vacuuming these things up off the ocean floor in the exact same spot? Will it become crowded? I mean, how do you, is there any possibility that you will secure, you know, any specific rights to, to an area?

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's highly regulated now. Very highly regulated. So since 2011, we've been working through the International Seabed Authority. And if you recall when I said the United Nations stepped in and took over the process,

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  they created this framework called UNCLAS, the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  And it basically said,

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  you know, every country owns 12 miles from your coastline, has an economic right to everything within 200, but beyond that, it will be considered the area. And, and this UNCLAS called for the establishment of the International Seabed Authority to be established, which it was in 1994. Now, remember, the United States never agreed to it. In fact, they've been a consistent objector to it. So they're not part of it. But for 169 other countries, including China and Russia,

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  they signed this treaty that said, when it comes to minerals, these are the rules we'll play by.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  And America went, nah, we're not going to do that. They were like, we don't even like multilateral organizations, you know, one vote, one country doesn't seem to work for the big, for the biggest economy in the world. And

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  oh my goodness, how insightful they were, how insightful they were, because this international organization has been entirely overrun by NGOs. And it's played right into China's hand. So China have five licenses through this body, the International Seabed Authority. But what started to happen was

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  And this is more a representation of politics around the world, how the world went a bit crazy. You saw governments in Europe be very heavily influenced by smaller governments who had to form coalitions to govern. So you don't have two parties, like in some countries, like UK is still that, Australia is still that, US is pretty well still that. But in other countries like Germany and France, you had, um,

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  or Belgium or the Netherlands, you have like a dozen different parties to form a coalition to get the votes to be able to govern. So you had green voters who might only hold two or three seats, so a very tiny, tiny, tiny majority, but but they might have the balance of power. Without their two votes, they could, you might not have majority. And so what the Green Party started to do is to say, we really care about this ocean metal. And there's no better example than France. So France have a pretty good nuclear industry, right? And if you go back, um, four years ago now, Macron, the president,

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  came out with a very public statement, which I was very excited about, said, here's our 2030 plan. France needs to re-industrialize. We need to bring back jobs. For that, we need metals. We have these ocean deposits. We can get these ocean metals far more effectively than we can possibly find metals on land. It was a pretty good speech.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  Eighteen months later, at COP, I think it was COP 23, Total Switch.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  We should ban deep sea mining was Macron's new pitch and the reason why he changed his position was because, once again, he was losing influence, losing power, so he had to do a deal with the Greens and they wanted him to pull back his nuclear ambition. He said, I can't touch that, we need it. And it was like, how about I give you ocean metals? It's literally like that. Man. And, you know, and I've seen firsthand how they've worked with corporations. You know, WWF did the same to Maersk, you know, Maersk were one of our shareholders, they were one of our early supporters, great company, one of the great shipping companies of the

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  world. And that Maersk, WWF went in there and said, we don't like you being part of the metals company, we'd like you to sell your ownership, or we're going to come after you for your green shipping ambitions. And it's like, I had a friend sat in the room with them, like, they are bullies, these NGOs. They are absolute bullies. And so, so that was, that's how they overtook some of these countries. So these countries, like Germany's another great example, right? Germany used to be an industrial behemoth. Now they're deindustrialization because of energy policy and other things. And there is an industry body there that represents every industry association who has pleaded

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  with the government to support ocean metals, like they used to, because America can't get reliable supply, sorry, Germany can't get reliable supply. Yet their government were appeasing the green side of things, saying, oh, we should slow down and just wait. Now this all played into China's hands because we, we are the most ambitious player in the industry, right? We were driving the industry forward. China.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Despite the fact that they want to dominate this because, you know, President Xi made a public statement saying we want to dominate deep ocean, deep earth and deep space, part of their plan. But they're running a little bit behind us, five to seven years. That's good to hear. It's good to hear. And it was going pretty well for them because the NGOs were in there influencing the countries who were influencing the International Seabed Authority adopting the final rules. And without those final rules, it's very hard for me to get started. And so this is playing into, this is when I mentioned it was playing into China's playbook. This is how they were doing it. China sat back going, oh, it's going to take a bit longer, is it?

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  No problem, just let it happen, you know? But for me, I depend on shareholder support. And unfortunately, shareholders were not, would not have been willing to give me another five years to sit around and see what happens. I would have had to pivot the business into something else, which I was preparing to do. Because I did not like what I was seeing. What would you have pivoted into? Well, we were running the ruler over a number of other assets, land-based opportunities. My board didn't like it particularly, but we would have done what we had to survive. Because we would have just kept the licenses and kept them rolling on.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  I would have had to streak the business, you know? The team that we've had together over the last many years would have had to go. And, but, you know, when things get so bad, they've got to self-correct. It's like the rubber band, it was just pulling and pulling and pulling and we just knew it would break, question of when. And luckily, it broke in the form of President Trump being elected and it had gone so far crazy. So we, we knew there was a pathway because America put the rules and regulations in place in 1980 that, that the International Seabed Authority still can't agree.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  And you can understand why they can't agree, there's 169 countries trying to agree something, even though they have a smaller council, 36-member council.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  So getting agreement when the NGOs are there

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  chipping away, trying to slow progress or stop the industry, that's their plan. And, and you know, we knew we knew what the strategy of the NGO, the activists was, their strategy was to bleed the metals company dry, you know, to just slow things down to let us run out of money. And we were lucky to have amazingly supportive shareholders. I mentioned Andre before and Allsees and myself agreed to keep funding the business and we lent the company money and because we, we believed we didn't want to keep printing equity. We wanted to, you know, just keep the business moving, waiting for

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  a moment in time when the value could be restored to something more equitable. And so we knew there was a legal pathway to lodge the application through the United States because they had the rules in place. So this is a very long windy answer to your question about who's going to dominate it because, because now of course, that international body, including China, have been very critical of us and of the United States of America for operating outside of the system. It's like, but America's like, they came out with very forceful statements saying we've never been part of that system. We've been a consistent object to that system. We have a legal right to be able to go and collect these metals.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  You 169 countries all agreed to be bound by those set of rules that you can't even agree on. So why don't you just keep doing whatever it is you're doing and we'll see you out there.

• 1:15:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's good to hear. Yeah, it's good to hear that we're doing that.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  It is, it is. And, and the administration have been amazing, ranging from the regulator, Noah,

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Secretary Latnik. We were lucky to have a lot of people that the president chose in his cabinet who we knew well when they're in opposition. They'd been big supporters of ours and they'd written letters on our behalf and lobbied.

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Congress to make funding available to do studies on processing here in the United States. And so, you know, it's all of our stars aligned all of a sudden.

• 1:16:12Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to get into how this concerns national defense.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

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• 1:16:57Speaker 00

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• 1:18:04Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Jared, we're back from the break, and we want to get into some national security stuff and the implications of this, and what it would do for national security. And I know we covered some of it, but I just wanted to revisit that. I'm big on national defense, and something I talk about a lot here, so I'd like to just go into more detail on that. So how is this going to help our US's national defense?

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Well, as I mentioned, in 2000 and since 2002, we've lost so much of the manufacturing industry. We've lost millions of jobs. We've lost hundreds of billions of dollars of annual GDP. And, you know, I think, all of a sudden, when you realize the reason we've lost them is because we've exported those industries, because it was very convenient to outsource to the developing world, heavy industry, because it was a little bit dirty, and, you

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  know, this was before some of the greener pollution controlling, you know, controls became statutory. And, but it also makes you really vulnerable, you know? The fact that you can't build a ton of steel without manganese means that, and the fact that we import 100% of our manganese, puts you very vulnerable, you know? And I think it was a great initiative that the president wants to bring back shipbuilding. And if you think about, you know, what turned the Second World War, it was America's navy, right? At the end of the day, and they were able to build ships efficiently, and now ships

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  don't get built in America, you know, they're built in other parts of the world. And so, so I think national defense and national security is a, it's a very complex, intertwined, you know, network of, you've got to have desire, you've got to have really strong partners, and it so happens that...

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Because China dominates the, if they don't dominate mining, they certainly dominate all of the processing and refining. So it means that, you know, I gave you that example of one town we visited where, you know, China went from zero to seventy thousand people in less than a decade.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  You know, they control seventy percent of the nickel market.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  And they are doing, they play the long game, you know, they, they, they're playing with the classification standards, they're playing with the IMO standards, trying to put in place initiatives that would become very expensive for the shipping industry, but only they can supply the equipment, you know? We saw Secretary Rubio come out and stamp on that the other day. I was very pleased to see that.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  So it's very complex and they're very smart and tactical, the Chinese. And, and you asked before, does America have the, the will and endeavor to, to fix this? And, and I think

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  the trend of this administration does. They see the problem and they've got people in power who see the problem and they're putting in long-term strategic fixes, you know? I know in our case, we've had many meetings,

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  become a frequent visitor to the White House because, you know, they are making it very clear that they want to support us to come and build processing capacity in, on USA soil. But they also recognize that capital needs to be available to do that. And when you're competing against a country like China where capital is freely available from the state,

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  then you've got to have something equally enticing from US government to encourage it as well.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  So I think that

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  building

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  A reliable supply of all of these critical minerals and including rare earths. We saw them do a deal with MP the other day.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  You know, it was a smart deal. I think we've heard from the administration that they're going to do more deals like that. Because they want to see investment on the ground. They want to see jobs created. There are so many good knock on benefits like we talked about before. Bring jobs back, you know, and I think

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  giving people purpose and is another benefit that's going to come out of this, you know?

• 1:23:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you know, it was interesting. Couple of things are jobs I want to talk about, but you know, you you had mentioned the the shipbuilding, you know, that that used to take place in this country and that a lot of things seem to be coming back with this administration. In fact, I are you familiar with the company Sironic?

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, Dino Mavrukas, he's doing the autonomous surface worker, surface warfare vehicles. And I mean, that guy is, you know,

• 1:23:36Shawn Ryan?

  it's awesome what he's doing. And, you know, I remember, I don't remember the exact stats, but, you know, I remember him telling me that China had over 50% of the ship of the of the global shipbuilding capacity. And that the US had less than 1% of shipbuilding capacity in the world. And, you know, and he's trying to change that and he's making these boats that, you know, they're they're they, I mean, he's he's going to pump them out at record pace. And so I'm sure your metals company is going to be able to, you know, enable them to make them even cheaper than what they already are doing.

• 1:24:17Shawn Ryan?

  And hopefully we we can get back to being, you know, some type of naval superpower with with.

• 1:24:25Shawn Ryan?

  Many boats, not not just, you know,

• 1:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  point one percent or whatever it is, point zero, point five percent. I can't, it was less than one percent of the of the US shipbuilding capacity. Another question that I have for you though is, are any of the metals that you are mining in the ocean are getting ready to mine in 2027? Do those, will those play any type of a role in the computer chip business?

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, we do. We do have a lot of rare earths in here as well. We don't recover them in our first plant. We we um, but there is a plan to recover them. And of course, um, there are

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  a lot of the cobalt and um, and of course copper is used in that entire AI space extensively. Um, will be used a lot. And so so yes, is yes, is the answer. Just, I just want to go back to that shipbuilding because, you know, one of the exciting things about some of these industries is that, you know,

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  when when China started taking these industries away from the US and other countries,

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  they had a big workforce, you know, farmers were becoming non-farmers or peasants were looking for other industry jobs to move into. And so they were happy to to use a very available, cheap, abundant

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  labor force.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  But of course, a lot of things have happened since then in the automation space. And if, and the shipbuilding industry is a really good one to look at, you know, if you look at what um, Hanwar and Hyundai and, you know, the the other Korean shipbuilders have done is they bought a lot of automation into those industries where and the same is going to be on metal processing, you know, that that now with automation, you can take some of the dangerous jobs away and

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  What you end up doing is just generating a lot of GDP for local economies. So there's a lot of direct jobs, but there's an enormous amount of indirect jobs that come as a result as well. But it also, it it's, it means that you can compete. Because you're not having to compete with, you know, a hundred thousand, almost free labor force. You know, you're actually competing for um that on a technology basis. And and once again, China have been amazing at building and deploying technology at a rapid rate. But the West and America are starting to recognize the need to do that.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  And in when it comes to certainly critical minerals, they've made it very clear that they're going to make the capital available to encourage and entice. We we took a big investment from a um company called Korea Zinc recently. And they're in many metals other than zinc, but they have a rich, long history. And outside of China, they're one of the only companies that can produce the P C A M materials using their own technology. And so it's a really important partnership for us. And in fact, their chairman and I uh attended um some White House meetings

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, they have moved their position. And they've moved it primarily because of the Trump trade strategy. Their view was, we've already got a recycling business here. It's not working because China is underbidding us or outbidding us for all the recycled material, which is another strategy China is very smart at. They're like, you know, we'll overpay to get it, to get them out of the country and send them back to China. Wow. Yeah, it's very clever. It's very clever. But. If I I know that a year ago, you know, Korea zinc would not have contemplated building

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  here in the USA, but now, along with us, they are very keen to bring their expertise and turn it into jobs on the ground and local supply chain. And, you know, that, of course, is the beginning because it spawns many, many other industries. When you have available supply of these metals, then you can look at all of the ancillary industries and, you know, my standard presentation is like a thousand other industries that can be built off that other industry. But I but if you don't have the material, and then, of course, if the government truly

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  have, um, you know, the these dumping reviews that are underway at the moment, if they truly do impose um some sort of penalty over importers, and it's not just China, there'll be other players as well, uh, dumping material into the US, then if that can all be sorted out, then you're going to see a very, very vibrant industrial reindustrialization go on here and um and, you know, and I think everyone wants to trade with the USA, right? And um, so America will go from import replacement to becoming, under our plan, the

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  the biggest supplier of nickel and cobalt and manganese and a big exporter of it as well. And so it it's a massive turnaround, and that's going to lead to tremendous GDP growth. It's going to lead to, you know, new companies being formed, new jobs being formed, new industries to support those industries. It's a massive knock on impact and, you know, and it's but it's only possible if you've got the kahunas to to say, you know, this is how we've got to turn this around, you know, we've got to get things back on a on a level playing ground. And, um, yeah, I got to tell you, when President Trump started talking tariffs.

• 1:30:52Speaker 03

  You know, it was like, it's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. But I gotta say, it's working out pretty well. It's working out pretty well.

• 1:31:01Shawn Ryan?

  When you say that new companies will be formed from, from the, from the new industry that you're creating right now, what, what kind of companies do you envision popping up around this?

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  It's just, it's not just what companies, but it's the efficiencies of redesigning new industrial process. And, and if we think about

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  manganese, for example, you know, there, there are two ways of treating our nodules. You either dissolve them in acid or you use heat. Now, actually, because of parts of America's abundant supply of affordable energy, which is ironic, right? I mean, energy is the cornerstone of a healthy industrializing economy. You need energy. And of course, that's why parts of Europe are deindustrializing because they, they can't compete. But America has it, so it's a great, great starting point. And that's why America will be able to compete with countries like China as well. Capex is higher, but the government recognized that, so they'll make it easier.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  But operationally, actually, you can compete largely because energy is abundant and affordable. But when we use heat, we generate really hot. I mean, the, the furnaces go up to 1200, 1300 degrees Celsius. And as that material comes out, it cools down again. And, but then when you go and use it, you've got to heat it back up again. So one of the immediate opportunities is to be able to use it when it's still hot. And you save all the energy of it cooling down and you avoid having to spend

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  energy heating it back up again. So there are opportunities to build adjacent industries near where we are, to be able to use those materials in their current form. But if we then look at manganese, what else is it being used for? Well, it's used in water purification, it's used in fertilizer, it's used in, batteries are now moving to a manganese-rich battery cathode. So it used to be very high in nickel, still is, but it's now starting to use more manganese and less nickel because manganese is cheaper. So all of a sudden, America could be very competitive, and we've already produced our first, it's called manganese sulfate, which goes into

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  a battery. We, we, so we've been working on that for some time. There's no real magic to doing it. Um, you've just got to do it. But at, but at the moment, there is zero industry. And to make manganese silicon, we import a hundred percent of that in from China at the moment. But to be able to build that right next door to a reliable supply of manganese is more jobs. Um, we don't make much stainless steel here in America because we don't have the, we import the iron ore, we import the nickel, and we import the manganese. So all

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  of a sudden, there is a pathway to be able to generate that. You know, the, the material that goes into the stainless steel and the steelmaking industry, it's like, all of these things are very interconnected. And then when it comes to nickel, I mean, firstly, it's used, it's a super alloy. So you need it for, you know, in these beautiful planes that we see the US Air Force flying around. Um, there's, nickel is a vital ingredient, as is cobalt in those structures. But there's a lot of simpler industries as well, you know, whether it's, um, energy-related businesses, solar. Um, in fact, I, I have a page on one

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  of my presentations, there's literally a thousand industries that A thousand industries? A thousand that depend on nickel, cobalt, manganese, or copper as an important input, import. And I think, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, one of the great things we've learned from people like Elon Musk is how to get in and drive cost out of processes. You know, he'll, he'll look at things and go, well, the bill of materials says a hundred dollars, why am I paying five thousand dollars for this, you know? And of course, that's what's enabled him to build rockets and cars and everything else much more economically. And then, of course, he's a, he's a great manufacturing genius.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  And so, so I think, you know, we seek, we, we receive inspiration out of that as well. And I think, you know, there are many, many efficiencies that when you start focusing on re-industrialization, the fact that we exported it all. And as I, as I mentioned before, more than 20,000 companies have disappeared, more than two and a half million jobs have disappeared in the last 20 years.

• 1:36:14Shawn Ryan?

  Two and a half million?

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Two and a half million jobs have disappeared from the manufacturing sector in the last 20 years.

• 1:36:24Shawn Ryan?

  Geez.

• 1:36:26Shawn Ryan?

  So the amount of jobs this could create is really unfathomable with all the new industry that could this.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  I think, I think the opportunity is a lot more new industries. Those two and a half million jobs might come back at a lower number, right? Because of automation and other things. But it's about GDP growth as well. And that GDP growth will lead to more industries around it. It's about direct jobs and indirect jobs. And so I think that's the exciting part for the American economy. And, you know, a reliable, affordable supply of these critical minerals is the beginning of a great era, I believe, for the United States.

• 1:37:13Shawn Ryan?

  I think you're right. I think you're right. When it comes to the, the refining of these things, how fast will you be able to turn that into a usable product?

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  Well, the good news is, um, the approach that I have taken. Is to bring partners in who can help speed that up. So for example, I mentioned a company, Allseas, who have worked with us on the offshore and Allseas employ many thousands of people. For forty years, they've been laying pipe for the oil and gas industry in the deep ocean. So they're used to three hundred and sixty five day, twenty four hour day operations laying pipe. It's it's magic to see. They built the world's biggest production vessel. They build a boat that can lift thirty thousand tons at a time. So instead of decommissioning an oil platform at sea, which they used to take apart piece by piece, they build a boat

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  that allows you to cut the legs off, lift it, bring it back to shore, and then do all of that, you know, deassembling there. Much safer and much faster. Takes risk out of it and danger out of it for everyone. So they bring all of that expertise to help us on the offshore. And the same is the case with the onshore. We've been working with a group in Japan called Pacific Metals, but more recently, we took this big investment from careers Inc. And careers Inc. want to come to America. They want to put infrastructure on the ground. They also are the world's biggest antimony producer and a very large gallium producer as well,

• 1:38:51Speaker 03

  which are two critical minerals needed here in the United States. So they bring a lot of strategic importance as well, but they can help us build much, much faster. And, you know, the Trump administration are very committed to taking away the permitting challenges. And I think for construction and approval. And I think that's where the red tape has really slowed things down. So, you know, there's been desire, but there's been so many people who need to stamp the page. And I think there are tremendous efficiency. Palantir, of course, have really helped perfect that as well. You know, we were talking to those

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  guys about how they could help us streamline that whole permitting process. And, you know, they've been very successful in other industries and they can help us in our industry. And,

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  and so much quicker than we could do it by ourselves. Production, I mentioned twenty twenty seven. We've already got our first boat.

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  So that's good. And I think it's probably a four-year window to put processing and refining infrastructure on the ground here in the United States.

• 1:40:06Shawn Ryan?

  So 2031, you think?

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  I hope sooner than that. I hope sooner than that.

• 1:40:12Shawn Ryan?

  When you, when you say 2027 would be the first actual mining, uh, successful mining operation, I mean, how fast do you see that scaling? Does it start with one vehicle?

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  It does, yeah, it does unfortunately, but already, um, this morning I'd been on the phone with all Cs, you know, we're mapping out, you know, how do they build more scale? And, um, I, I held a, a strategy day in New York on August 4, and we had the owner of all Cs, Edward Herrimer there. And, and, um, you know, we asked the question like, what's the appetite? Do you want to have a fleet of these boats out there? And he's like, yes, we want to flee to these boats. And that's what we want as well.

• 1:40:59Shawn Ryan?

  Love to hear that.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:01Shawn Ryan?

  Love to hear that.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and you know, you get the first one done. You know, and the, the strategy we've adopted at the metals company is we don't want to be the boat owner. There are people who are really good at owning boats, you know, and they make a business out of it. Whereas what I want to be is focused on the permitting, owning the resource, um, letting contracts out to companies who can come and collect our nodules for us in return for long-term contracts. And, um, owning part of the processing onshore. And then very much in the marketing of those materials

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  into, you know, the marketplace, because I, I, I'm absolutely certain that when people see the lower environmental and human benefits of ocean metals, they're going to want to buy products that are made with these metals. And, um, you know, remember that great campaign Intel Inside? That they used to run, you, you, you should buy a computer with an Intel chip. I think it'll be the same when it comes to our ocean metals, because we can measure every single thing. We can guarantee whose hands have touched it. We can tell you how much CO2 was. Generated, we can tell you how many trees we felled, zero. We can tell you how much child labor we used, zero.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  We can tell you how much contamination was caused in the water tables, zero. And once we start measuring and making these commitments, other people are going to be forced to do the same.

• 1:42:42Shawn Ryan?

  Or they'll go out of business.

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  Or they'll be limited to where they can sell their product. They'll sell their products into markets where people turn a blind eye. But that won't be in the United States of America.

• 1:42:52Shawn Ryan?

  Well, they likely won't be able to compete either because you'll drive the price of these metals down.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  I think that's a realistic

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  expectation that that prices can go lower. You know, if you can, if you can deliver efficiencies in the way you handle these materials, because in, in, in years to come, there won't be many people on these boats.

• 1:43:18Shawn Ryan?

  Now, Jared, we're wrapping up the interview. And so my final question is, you know, I bring a lot of innovators in here. And there's some amazing companies that, that, that are coming to fruition right now in the U. S. And almost all of them have been private companies. And so is this a company that people can invest in?

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  So in, um, so we're a public company and our ticker is T M C. We're listed on the NASDAQ and

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  uh, it's fun being a public company.

• 1:43:55Shawn Ryan?

  Is it?

• 1:43:58Speaker 03

  Some days, some days. I mean, it is, um, there's been some dark days and, uh, but the days have been a whole lot brighter since November 6th, put it that way. And, um, but look, we, you know, we, um,

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  look, it's, it's, I think it's.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  It's an amazing place to invest your money. It's an amazing company at the beginning of a new industry. You know, we've got a really loyal group of shareholders. You know, the key shareholders own just under half of the company. Our retail brigade of shareholders are an absolute army of loyalists. We've got a growing list of institutional shareholders. And we're going to perform a very important part in reindustrialization. You know, and we're going to be wearing that badge very, very proudly.

• 1:44:59Shawn Ryan?

  So. Well, Jared, I love what you're doing. It's good for the planet. It's good for the country. It's bringing jobs back. And it's not good for China. And I love that. So thank you for coming and I wish you the best of luck. And I can't wait to see what happens in 2027.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks, Sean.

• 1:45:18Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Cheers.