Helium can definitely be used up if we keep putting it in balloons and allowing it to escape into space. Radioisotopes are also used up. Sure, we could transmute radioactive waste back into usable uranium or thorium but that would be a big energy sink, negating the primary use for those minerals. Fossil fuels have the same problem.
Once a gas escapes into the atmosphere any gas (apart from O2, N2 and CO2) is irretrievable economocally. Helium happens to leave the planet, but so what?
Helium is continuously produced inside Earth, it is the alpha radiation produced by the decay of Radon. There are natural gas wells that yield up to 10% Helium. If the market demand were there (eg airships), the Helium production could probably go up by a factor of 10 or 100.
this wealth is built on top of a foundation of mineral wealth. Merely ideas isn't useful if not implemented, and to implement an idea requires said mineral wealth.
The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree. This has documented by other economists / historians as "bullshit jobs" / "useless jobs". People sending emails all day or influencers obviously depend on mineral extraction to exist, but the direct inputs to their wealth creation are not minerals. You can "implement ideas" with a relatively small footprint.
> The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree.
Have we really though, or is the coupling just obscured to the point of near invisibility?
Take software development. In a bounded context, a solo developer’s continued output of software looks quite clearly decoupled from material inputs. They may work essentially indefinitely, producing new wealth, powered only by renewable energy.
Step out of the bubble of the thought experiment, though, to look at the software development industry more broadly, and what do we see? A vast churn of new computing equipment in pockets, offices, unseen data centers, and embedded at every possible scale in between, with layer upon layer of software abstraction that chews up most of the increases in computing power anyhow.
Also, minerals are not "used up". They are transformed into different compounds. With energy, they can be transformed into more useful forms.
Besides, he misses the third source of wealth - ideas and information. Anyone who writes software is creating wealth.