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Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Today, we're getting smarter about deep sea mining, because a lot of change is happening in this fledgling industry. And many, including President Trump, say that it has a lot of change is happening in this fledgling industry.

And many, including President Trump, say that it has a lot of potential to boost not only the U.S. economy, but also national security.

My colleague Daniel Ackerman is our resident deep sea mining expert. He's reported a bunch of stories for Marketplace on the ocean mining industry, and he writes a

newsletter on this topic called Seabed Spotlight. He's here to help us out with Deep Sea Mining 101.

Dan, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Kimberly. So to get us started, what is exactly deep sea mining,

and why are people so interested in this?

Well, most of the mined materials that we use in our cars and smartphones, you know,

come from land. It comes from the rocks and the dirt beneath our feet. And mining all that

stuff can often mean bad things, like displacing communities to make an open pit mine, or cutting down a rainforest to get at the materials underneath it.

So deep sea mining is this idea that, you know, maybe we can avoid some of these problems by getting these metals from the bottom of the ocean in a remote area that's far from where

anyone lives, that doesn't touch anyone's drinking water, not near a rainforest.

And, you know, there really is a lot of metal down there at the bottom of the ocean that the U.S.

...