Hey, everybody. It's Kai Rizal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as always.

Indeed, I'm Nova Safo, and for Kimberly Adams. It's Tuesday, March 25th. As part of negotiations over a ceasefire in Ukraine, the White House and the Ukrainian government have been weighing a deal that will give the U.S. a cut of revenues from Ukraine's mineral resources.

In particular, President Trump is interested in Ukraine's rare earth metals.

Not just Ukraine, of course. The president has said he wants to cut deals for rare earths all over the planet.

So we, not knowing a lot about rare earth, made a phone call.

And we got Graceland Baskarin on the line.

She's a mining economist and also founding director of the project on critical mineral

security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Grayson, welcome to the pod.

Thanks so much for having me.

Okay.

So first of all, what does a mining economist do?

So minerals are part of every part of our lives.

They are in our phones, our TVs, our computers, our defense technologies, our cars.

But there's this idea that, you know, we have minerals, we mine

them. But it's a little bit more complicated than that. Because ultimately, minerals have to be

economically attractive to mine, which is a product of a couple of things. One is how deep is it?

Two is what else is found? So minerals are often rarely found alone. People don't necessarily

realize that rare earths, for example, are not actually rare. They're all over the world,

but they're often not economic. You just stole my actual first question. Sorry, go ahead.

But it's interesting is minerals are only, I mean, they're only attractive to mine sometimes.

So our job as a mining economist to go, what is the long-term outlook for this mineral?

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