Saudi Arabia Has Oil, America Has This

This is the one critical material

the US has a monopoly on. Found in exactly one place

on the Earth's surface. Stop the ultra pure

form of this from flowing and the world would slip

backwards in time. 25 years. Which is why you don't

hear much about it. Why the secrecy around it How it's made,

how to use it, are guarded

like state secrets To make a million iPhones you need 250 pounds of it. Not a nice to have,

not we’ll figure something else out

if we can't find it. Like Saudi Arabia's oil. China's rare earths. This is America's

ace in the hole. Quartz. This video is sponsored

by Zapier. More on them later. This is sand. This is sand. This is also sand. This could be sand. Aside from white

tropical sand created by fish

eating coral or volcanic sand from worn down

lava, sand is quartz. Take this quartz crystal. Crush it up. What comes out

is what's in these piles. Zoom in

to one of the grains of sand in one of these piles. And you would see oxygen

atoms sticking themselves to silicon atoms

in a pyramid shape. Each pyramid tangled up

with its neighbor. The tangle becomes a crystal called silica. Silica

being the main ingredient. Concrete is quite literally the foundation of our world. Concrete is not overly picky

about the quality of its silica. A little bit of iron

or magnesium tangled up in the crystal. Mix it together with lime. Add some water poured

in a mold. Let it cure

and you have concrete. But if you find yourself

with pure silica, nothing else

along for the ride. You, my friend, have found something

exceptionally rare. Expect a knock on your door because humans discovered

long ago. If you apply enough heat to silica,

it'll turn into glass. The more pure the silica, the clearer the glass. Far more recently,

we discovered that if you want pure silicon, yes, that's silicon. If you want silicon, pure silica is the first thing you must find. The tank that fired first one two thirds of the time,

making the need to be able to see from inside the tank

critical with the field of view twice

as wide as British or U.S. tanks. The lens on German tank

sites often let German tank gunner see target

and fire at enemy tanks before any tanks,

even knew they were there. Made big enough

so a range finding system could be printed onto

an inner layer of the lens. Germans used just one site when attacking. Gunners

could sit in one station and look through a lens

mounted next to the barrel. The gun British and U.S. tanks

used two one whole periscope for looking around

and spotting enemies, another

for aiming the gun at them, forcing the commander to look through one

to gauge distance, then yelled to the gunner to aim and fire a one lens system

that helped Germany steamrolled through France

at the start of the war, and just six weeks

after crossing the border, found themselves

the captors of Paris and the world's

prized silica mine. Fontainebleau. Just 35 miles south, it was the purest silica the world had ever seen. Less pure silica and the larger, more high powered

the lens, the more distortion there is as you move

away from the center of it. Rifle scope. Submarine periscopes. Tank sights. Bomb sights. Radar tubes. Fontainebleau was the single mine the entire British glass industry relied on. Gone. So, working at breakneck pace, two inferior silicon deposits in the US and the now

famous Lochaline in Scotland, which would end up producing silica purer than Fontainebleau were developed to feed the Allied war machine. Better late than never. By the midpoint of the war,

the allies had managed to catch up to Germany

in glass production, but it wasn't

until two years after the war

that the hyper pure silica that powers the entire modern world was discovered. Despite 80 years

of scouring the planet, nowhere else on Earth has come close to rivaling what comes out of Spruce

Pine, North Carolina. Fontainebleau is 99.7% Lochaline 99.8%. Spruce Pine is a staggering 99.999% pure silica. It is impossible to make leading edge

semiconductors without the silica

pulled out of Spruce Pine. Inside your phone. Your laptop. Weapons. Every server

and every data center that powers AI,

air semiconductors formed on little sections of pure silicon, called chips, because the little square

they're all built on is chipped off

a much larger block. It is how that much larger block of silicon is made. That makes the quartz

at Spruce Pine irreplaceable, truly irreplaceable. And that is not hyperbole,

which I have to say, because it's extremely rare to have a hypercritical

global industry in the modern world

rely on one little piece of land. This irreplaceable land is the choke point that could be used

to determine which countries can make advanced chips and which can’t. This is why China can't suddenly overtake

the US chip industry. Why taking Taiwan does not guarantee China would suddenly be able

to make high end chips, Because if the US stopped

providing the quartz from Spruce Pine, Taiwan ceases to operate full stop. But where is this connection between quartz and silicon? This ultrapure quartz

ultrapure silica

is turned into silicon. Not quite actually. That is exactly what those who make silicon

try to avoid. Pull apart

your phone and inside you'll see where the brain

that powers your phone is. Inside of this casing, right here is an advanced

semiconductor that, in a pristine state

would look like this. Just three millimeters tall. A perfectly polished piece of pure silicon etched into it using a process

that could be mistaken for magic are billions of tiny

pathways. The width of each

measured in atoms. We're talking 40,

maybe 50 atoms wide for each path. If a random

iron or oxygen atom is baked into the silicon,

when an attempt to create one of these

pathways is made, the pathway

will not be made. Fail to create

just one of the paths and the whole

thing must be thrown out. All right, so you know that tedious thing

you do every day? Copying data between apps,

sending the same follow up emails, updating

spreadsheets manually? There's a way to make all of

that happen automatically. I have been using Zapier

for over five years. It lets all of my apps

talk to one another. When the editor at one of my companies updates

one of our books, he uploads it to Google

Drive. Zapier sees that happen, goes through the files,

compresses them, changes the file name to what

the publisher needs, and sends a message to slack

when it's done. It took about 30 minutes

to build that and saves us 24 hours

per year. You can just type

into Zapier what you're trying to build, and it will lay it

all out for you. And just recently, I realized I could hook

Zapier to my brokerage. So now every Sunday, it pulls all my positions

and I send them to AI and ask you to highlight any upcoming events

that might impact them, and then summarize

any events that did impact them

the week before. Format

that to be a pretty email. Send it to myself.

That took an hour. The possibilities are

endless, and I actually find it fun

to come up new ways to use it. You can start automating your most tedious

tasks for free using my Zapier link. Bitly forward slash 4J7KR2. Also in the description. Free up your head space. Get the boring

stuff to handle itself. To make a piece of silicon pure enough to power

an iPhone. You must make sure that when silicon is melted

down from its natural blocks and formed into a cylinder,

chips can be sliced from the thing

that's holding the melted silicon doesn't

contaminate it. Silicon melts at 1300 degrees Celsius. 2400°F. It’s very hot. Just about anything

that comes into contact with the pool of molten

silicon will, at minimum, shed off little pieces of itself

that mix with the melt. Each rod of pure silicon comes out of one of these, a crucible made entirely out of quartz that comes from Spruce Pine, the quartz that comes

from Spruce Pine, and only the quartz

from Spruce Pine must be used for every single

one of these crucibles, because some of it will inevitably end up

in the molten silicon. Boeing planes, iPhones, PlayStations, MRI machines they all require at least one advanced chip that's been cut

out of a silicon rod formed in a crucible made with quartz from Spruce Pine. This crucible is just 99.9% pure quartz, but just three inches

wide were melting tin. I don't have the equipment,

skills, or insurance,

so attempt Silicon. Crucibles used to make

silicon stand 3 to 5ft tall. They're 2 to 3ft across and can only be used

one time. For every 1 million iPhones Apple sells, a crucible will be built,

filled up with molten silicon and destroyed

by the process. Each chip in them starts out as silicon blocks that are melted inside

the crucible, created using a process so difficult to perfect, it's not considered science,

but black art, because you can't just let the molten silicon cool

and pull it out, can't pour it

into something else for fear of contamination. A Polish engineer named

Czochralski discovered using melted tin

just like this, that discovered using melted tin

just like this, that if you dipped an object

into the metal, pulled it out in

just the right way, you could grow

a metal cylinder, an atomically perfect metal cylinder that, in the case of silicon,

can be sliced into circular disks

half a millimeter thick. A tiny, perfectly structured

seed crystals melted

on the tip of a metal rod and then dipped down

until it just touches the surface of the molten

silicon. Pulled up at

an excruciatingly slow pace. The rod rotates, the molten

silicon clings to the seed, and as it cools, because it's touching the perfect seed

crystal arranges its atoms in that exact same perfect pattern performed by people known as master growers. How fast to spin and pull, how to manage

the temperature, the gases surrounding it, everything that allows

a perfect silicon ingot to be grown is not

considered a true science. There is no manual,

just a feel. Learn through decades

of apprenticeship to masters of the craft. Can't patent it because you'd have to reveal

how to do it. The operators rely on sound, smell, or color. Even the masters fail 20 to 30% of the time despite perfect settings. These are the traits

of a black art, like how to make the blades inside every jet engine grown

from a single nickle crystal into one

giant crystal molecule by molecule, using

what's called the pigtail selector

is known to a select few at GE, Pratt and Whitney and Rolls-Royce, or the handful of people

at Cannon And Leica

who know how to polish the highest end lenses used in cinematic cameras or semiconductor equipment. The Takumi technique. Nobody has cracked the alchemy of 1623. That's

let Zildjian for 400 years make the world's best symbols, using ingredients

that every metallurgist will tell

you should produce metal so brittle it shatters when struck by a drumstick. 80% copper, 20% tin

with traces of silver. The process is only known

by the CEO, delegating it out in parts to prevent anyone from

knowing the whole secret. The mountains that run down

the east coast of the US used to be taller

than the Himalayas, violently pushed to the sky when Africa smashed

into North America, forming one giant

supercontinent, Pangea. Friction

along the line impact created

incredible temperatures that melted rock 15 miles beneath the surface. Molten rock

that would become the courts pulled from the corridors

of Spruce Pine. Call it a freak accident like the asteroid that

smashed into South Africa, creating a small area that's produced a quarter

of the world's gold. But the freak in this

accident wasn't the impact. It was the complete

and total absence of water carrying things with it

like a bus. Water drops molecules here and there that pollute

the purity of quartz. Zero water, zero impurities with zero impurities. The molten silicon dioxide

was left to cook at high temperature

for 100 million years. Very, very, very slowly being pushed towards

the surface as the African continent pulled away

from North America, letting the mountains shrink to where they are today. A fifth of their

original height. Cool the molten rock quickly

and would have turned into tiny, messy crystals. But the 100 million year

timer attached

to this science experiment formed them into massive, organized crystals mined out of the ground by two

very secretive companies who no doubt would prefer this video to not be made visible

in satellite imagery. You can see bright white

veins of quartz trucks mingling about behind

a 25ft high wall, patrolled as though an enemy is bound

to arrive any moment, surrounded by nothing

but a very small town, trees and hills 500 miles away, the semiconductor

was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey. 30 years later, across the country,

Intel perfected it, crowning themselves

King of technology. Japan

sliced off the memory chip part of Intel's business

in the 90s. Two decades

later, Taiwan Semiconductor sliced off the cutting edge

CPU chips after passing Intel

on who could make the most complex chips Apple, Nvidia, Google, Tesla anyone on the cutting edge of technology that needs

the frontier of capability no longer look to Intel

for elite chips. They looked to Taiwan. Taiwan now, with the crown

firmly on, looks across the Taiwan Strait with a new and profound

understanding of the famous words

Intel's CEO, used to describe the chip

business. Only the paranoid survive. This is the difference

between the purity needed for solar panels

and silicon wafers. Nine nines versus 11 nines. Those two nines are a major part of the moat between the US, Japan,

South Korea, Taiwan on one side, China on the other. There is no black art in nine nine silicon. It is a science limited only by how much electricity

you're willing to spend to turn

silicon gas into crystals. China won

the solar panel wars by deciding it would spend as much electricity

as needed, feeding its solar industry free

or nearly free electricity so they could make the tiles

of nine nine silicon that cover every solar panel cheap enough

to undercut rival companies, push the price down

low enough, and everyone else

will go out of business. It worked

and loathed to be beholden to the current

kings of silicon. It is a play. China is without question intent on running again

for semiconductors. Once it's figured out The black heart of 11 nine

silicon stated by officials outlined in plans. This is no secret. But in a twist of fate from 380 million years ago, regardless of who or what country wears

the semiconductor crown, the most advanced

piece of engineering humans have ever pulled off

will, unless a miracle happens, always be tied to sand

pulled out of the mountains around a small

town in the United States.