Why Do Nations Wage Wars When They Could Wage Wealth?

Why do nations mobilize armies when they could emancipate minds?

Sometimes they are forced to defend themselves, like Israel when blitzed on October 7, 2023, or the United States under air-strikes at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

But through the ages, the goal often has been to capture “scarce natural resources,” or in the current idiom of alarm, “rare earths” or “critical metals.” Japan’s attack was in part a response to British and American oil embargoes that threatened 90% of the Japanese petroleum supply. Bellicosity springs from seeing economics as a zero-sum game, where any gain for one party incurs a loss for another. People think they live on a limited planet and mobilize armies to amass wealth.

I call it the “materialist superstition,” the illusion that wealth is something material in the ground rather than emergent from our ideas, that it consists of molecules rather than minds, concrete rather than consciousness. Even in California, many cagey investors imagine that wealth inheres in the silica of beachfront property (real estate) rather than in new designs to be inscribed on silicon wafers.

In my book, The Israel Test, I address the paradox of a diminutive country in the desert nearly devoid of physical resources, lacking even water, that has become the richest country in the region and the world’s “startup nation” with the highest density of startups per capita. It is both a venture capital cynosure, with money flooding in from bountiful California, and a military powerhouse providing key technology to the United States, from strategic defense to F-35 upgrades.

Popstar physicist Carl Sagan used to shock us with the idea that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Material is superabundant, even if we do not consider physicist Jennifer Cano’s assurance that there are more electrons in a single grain of sand than stars in the universe.

So now, we are told to panic over a shortage of “rare earths” or “critical metals.” But the real shortage is in ideas and creativity.

One of our favorite investments over the last several years is our time with Rice University chemist and inventor James Tour. Tour and his student Duy Luong some six years ago debunked the “rarity” of rare earths by contriving a fast and simple method of extracting them from the mountainous abundance of electronic waste and other refuse.

Called “flash joule heating” (FJH), it imparts a short intense jolt of electrical current to ordinary garbage to yield pure graphene, a miraculous transparent two-dimensional layer of carbon 200 times stronger than steel that can intercept bullets, or strengthen concrete by 30%, and switches in the terahertz, a thousand times faster than silicon. We have invested in the resulting company, called Universal Matter, now producing graphene at a rate of a ton a day.

We thought that was the ultimate way to wage wealth—converting garbage into graphene. But then there arose the “rare earth” panic. “No problem,” said Dr. Tour. Using a two-step process, flash joule heating can extract so-called “rare earths” from electronic waste. Combined with infusions of chloride, the FJH method can separate out the desired metals in the form of metal chlorides identifiable through their critical temperatures.

This invention led to our more recent investment choice early this year called Metallium, which has already constructed a factory south of Houston to produce the metals by the ton. In my newsletter, the Gilder Technology Report, I describe my extended visits to the factory.

Tour says this method of waging wealth can also prevent the waging of wars. All it takes is human creativity in the image of our creator.