When I ask Barron if he is planning on triggering the rule, he demurs. “Well, it’s not for us to trigger, it would be for the member state to trigger,” he says. “Do I think a drop dead date would be useful for the development of this industry? Yes, I do.” We talked about why Nauru had been chosen as a sponsor state to begin with. I wanted to know if it was because of the island nation’s general disarray—a 2018 report from the Lowry Institute for International Policy stated that “Nauru has recently lurched towards authoritarianism”—or if he was looking to avoid the kind of pushback that DeepGreen’s predecessor, Nautilus Minerals, got from the indigenous people of their sponsoring state, Papua New Guinea. Barron becomes uncomfortable. Everything with Nauru was completely transparent and aboveboard, he insists. “I just thought it would be an interesting story to have one of the smallest economies sponsoring one of the most ambitious ideas,” he says. “Because these small nations, you know, have a voice, but it doesn’t get heard.”