Bitcoin Is the Hedge Against a U.S. Default Nobody Sees Coming | Jan Van Eck

Jan Van Eck is the CEO of VanEck, a global asset manager with roughly $235 billion under management. In this conversation, we break down his 10-year macro framework, why India could rival Europe, and how AI is reshaping VanEck from the inside. We also discuss runaway government spending, why he says everyone should own gold and bitcoin, crypto ETFs, 24/7 trading, and AI agents managing money. ===================== Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ===================== Today's episode is sponsored by Abra. Hold bitcoin with a plan: explore bitcoin-backed borrowing for liquidity or a BTC-denominated yield strategy managed by Abra Capital Management. Learn about options, terms, and risks at https://www.abra.com/pomp. Borrowing may trigger liquidation; investment strategies may lose principal. Paid sponsorship. Not investment advice. ===================== Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp ===================== 0:00 - Intro0:20 - VanEck today & the 10-year macro framework2:54 - Why India will be as big as Europe4:59 - AI as a decade-long theme & projecting token demand7:05 - How VanEck uses AI internally10:42 - Government money printing & rising rates14:17 - Gold, bitcoin & the risk of a U. S. default16:50 - Can AI deflation bail out government spending?17:41 - Crypto ETFs & which altcoins survive18:48 - Tokenization & 24/7 trading 21:47 - AI agents trading & allocating money25:50 - The ETF industry 5 years from now

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:41Speaker 03

  And the way I put it is, for the entirety of US history, there's been financial crises that have come from the banking system or other industries, like agriculture, and then rolled up through the banking system. This is going to be started in DC. And it's, there's not, no one can bail us out. And I think the rest of the world sees this.

• 1:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. VanEck is very large. Can you give us some numbers in terms of the size of the firm today?

• 1:08Speaker 03

  About 235 billion under management. A bunch of that actually is outside the United States. We have half of our inflows over the last couple of years come from Europe and Asia. About 550 people. We mainly do ETFs, as everyone knows, but we also have our, I'll call it legacy mutual fund business. And we've been getting involved in private markets, so early-stage tech investing and some later-stage stuff with the SpaceX's of the world.

• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you think about the rise of some of these themes, you have ridden some, but you've also avoided some. What's the framework for deciding when you guys are going to play versus not? I know you have this kind of 10-year macro framework that you use to think about investing more generally?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, those are almost two separate questions, so I'll take them. So VanEck's overall investment philosophy, I guess I would say is, it's really impossible to know what's going to happen on a day-to-day basis. So what we tend to like to look for is big 10-year trends, as you said, 10-year macro. So, because asset allocation is really the most important thing to your portfolio. So what are those trends? What do we look for? We look for big changes in government spending, big changes in monetary policy, regulation as a third thing, and then technology. So let me explain regulation, because people don't understand that.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  When China pivoted to a price-based capitalist-based, you know, basically, economy, that was a big, the biggest deregulatory move of, you know, of our career, of my career. That's happening now in India, or it happened in India. So now it's just a matter of it playing out. So I have very high conviction that India is going to be the size of Europe in 10 years. So very simple three, 10-year trends, and we can get into detail. AI, India, and then government spending is the biggest risk to your portfolio. As far as what we do as an ETF issuer, it's all judgment. We haven't figured out the AI yet.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  How do you look at sort of trends or industry segments that will come in and out of favor? And some things that are just fads? So it's, it's, it's hard.

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's take each one of the trends. Let's first maybe start with India. What is driving your conviction that it will be as big as Europe over the next 10 years?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  I mean, Modi did, there are two basic things. One is the digitization of their economy. So everyone in India effectively can afford a mobile phone. It's so dirt cheap. It's like a couple of dollars a month. And the government put all identification online as well, so they've sort of digitized your government ID. So for example, during COVID, they said, we don't need you to fill out, to open a brokerage account, a paper-based thing, just do it online. There were, I met with brokerage firms that were opening a million accounts a month. Now, I mean, it wasn't with a million, you know, the average account was low, but that just shows the lack of friction that digitization has caused in India.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  And then the second thing is just taxation and, you know, lots of rules, like they had labor laws that if you had a company with 100 employees or more, you'd have different rules, or 1,000 employees or more. So all companies, Anthony, were either nine, you know, nine people or 999, right? It just, it just doesn't make any sense. So they've just done a lot of that, you know, sequentially, bankruptcy laws, all kinds of different things. And, you know, I think it's sort of very high conviction, that's why I focused on the 10-year stuff, very high conviction that that will play out over time, based on history.

• 5:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Almost a decade ago, I went to India for the first time. I spent two weeks, and as I went around the country, I kept meeting all these founders, and they would come up to me and say, I built this mobile app, I have 100,000 users. I was like, oh my God, these guys are all killing it. And then somebody pulled me aside and said, 100,000 users in India is like 100 in America. There's just so many people, right? So there are a lot of people.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  But, but, you know, I don't know if you have staff or do operations in India, but almost every major tech company has very major, and not just, you know, trivial, you know, automation kind of tasks, but really product creation that's happening there.

• 5:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about the AI theme, and there's a lot of different ways to play this. The last two, three weeks, people have been concerned, there's been a little bit of a slowdown or sell-off. How do you see maybe the decade-long themes that people should just tune out the noise and focus on?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just a leapfrogging of better software, as I call it. I don't use the word intelligence, because I don't know what that is, but it's just better, faster, smarter software that can, that can write software, and that's the first part. So I think that the trade is changing, Anthony. So it used to be very simple. I'm the simple, think, demand's here, supply's here, right? And there will be a lot of dynamism within the ecosystem. Like I say, a year ago, fourth quarter of last year, CoreWeave and Oracle were down 50%. So the public markets are merciless, right?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  When they smell financing problems or tech changes or whatever. So there's a lot of change within the trade, but the overall was obviously huge amount of demand relative to supply. I think right now, we're getting to a stage, we were talking about this before, where you can project token demand going forward. So for every other segment, every other company, you can say, oh, they're going to sell X number of hamburgers, or X number of Netflix subscriptions. We're now, I think, going to be able, we have enough visibility that we can start projecting token demand. And what we've did is take our user base and said, what is our adoption by user?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  And basically, in the first year, your token usage goes up eight times, and then it grows about 25% after that, annualized. But a lot, there's a lot of VanEck, people that don't use it a lot. So that's a rolling process. And we kind of pushed that forward to the industry and came up with the same industry estimates of total token demand that, that other people did from a macro perspective. So I think that's going to be the game going forward.

• 7:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sure most of the people who work in the ETF industry would love to understand how VanEck is using AI internally. Have you figured out novel use cases that are like ETF-specific? Or is this still Claude is like, you know, either for coding or like a Google on steroids?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  There's nothing magical, I would say. To me, it's, I always say, AI is just data, software, and people. And, you know, 18 months ago, AI couldn't read a PDF, right? Six months, seven months ago now, I've been, kept yelling in my IT department, why can't these agents read my email and my calendar and make my life more efficient? Now that's table stakes, right? So it's just a sequence of accessing more and more databases within VanEck and making, enabling, giving the power to the user. And then what we're trying to do is make sure that someone builds an application, not five people build the same application or agent.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  So we're trying to promote that sharing, but it's a lot of just education and communication. Yeah.

• 8:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And have you hired people specifically to manage, like, the AI spend or the AI intelligence inside of the firm? Or is this just the people you had are now adopting the new technology?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  I think the IT department has been completely repurposed from, no, really, writing code, which they need, you know, like maybe 20% of the people that, you know, for the code that we do, we rely on a lot of third-party applications. So that repurposed to doing what I just said. I love, I love this stat. I've quoted it before, but the CEO of PNC Bank was quoted, interviewed about a year ago, and he was frustrated because they do a lot of tuck-in acquisitions. And he said, it's so expensive, I want to make this process better. So they normalized their data, and to do that, they spent $2 billion a year for 10 years, just to clean up the data.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  So I think that's where corporate America is now, is, and that's why Accenture's stock, I don't know if you saw it, completely bounced after a massive correction, is, oh yeah. You know, it's very expensive to organize data, so.

• 10:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And then have you limited people's usage, or you want them to use this as much as possible?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 10:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that a maybe coming?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  My CFO is like, John, do you realize how much money people are spending? I'm like, I don't want to throttle people. And our CTO is like, make them fill out a form. And I'm like, no, don't create friction for the adoption of this technology. Like, that's their first instinct, is to make it harder. And I'm like, oh yeah, you're going to build a little database app where they have to fill in five fields, they won't understand three of the fields, and that's that. This is my philosophy.

• 10:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you publicly said how much you guys are spending on AI?

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Um, we did a couple of quarters ago. I mean, it's sort of in the $2 million range annualized.

• 10:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's material, but it's not like you're spending 20.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  No, it's starting to like, I'm not saying that that's throwaway money, right? At all. But I'm just saying, if you need to encourage adoption, you have to be very careful about the signaling. So.

• 11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  There's a lot of need for management, Anthony, between the IT people and the business people. And it's just, you know, really promoting the champions and it's a lot of education. I would say the one big hire is like a COO type of person who's just floating around and connecting dots for people.

• 11:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Let's talk about the third theme. You and I were brothers in arms on this one. The government's never going to stop printing money.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's really frustrating from an investor perspective because I don't think we ever know when it's going to hit the financial markets. It could be in three months, it could be in 30 years. So I say that upfront and I also, in our third quarter review, really believe that the rise in rates recently was not credit driven. I think it was, look, it's either inflation concerns, economic growth, or credit concerns. And again, I like to oversimplify. So which, which one is it? Which one is it? Inflation, economic growth, or credit concerns? I think it was economic growth.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Nominal GDP went up. I don't think people, for a while, the 10-year traded with the price of oil. But if you look over the bulk of this war or conflict with Iran, you know, the 10-year didn't go up. The 10-year rallied in the beginning of the war. So I don't think it's just strictly oil prices that are driving it. But it's pressuring the rest of people's portfolios.

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Bitcoin holders know the long game, but sometimes you want liquidity today or a way to pursue more Bitcoin over time. That's why Abra caught my attention. It offers two different ways to make your Bitcoin holdings work harder, depending on what your goals are. If you need dollars without selling your Bitcoin, then you can explore Bitcoin-backed loans with US dollars or USDC borrowing options. You can review the terms and compare rates at abra.com/pomp. Thinking longer term? Explore Abra's Bitcoin yield strategy, managed by SEC-registered investment advisor, Abra Capital Management. It aims to generate yield denominated in Bitcoin, which can have a strong compounding effect over time. I recently spoke with Abra CEO Bill Barheit on the show for a much deeper exploration on Abra, tokenization and more.

• 13:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Go and check it out. And if either approach interests you, visit abra.com/pomp to learn more. Abra's a paid sponsor. This is not investment advice. Loans and yield strategies carry risks, including liquidation and loss of principal. Returns aren't guaranteed. Go check them out at abra.com/pomp. Every person listening to this show, you probably own Bitcoin and you got it the same way. You paid full price on an exchange. But there's a smaller group of business owners, family offices and investors with sharp CPAs, and they're quietly getting theirs a very different way. They own the machines that make it, mining. Here's how it works. You buy the miners and Simple Mining hosts and runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates that you could never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet.

• 13:59Anthony Pompliano?

  There's two reasons I find this interesting right now. One, the economics. Cheap power lets you convert electricity into Bitcoin at a discount to spot. You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price that everyone else pays. But second, and listen closely, if you've got a big income year. Miners are classified as computer equipment. Equipment means depreciation. Qualifying buyers can write off the entire purchase in year one. It's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades, pointed at Bitcoin. Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year. And so with attractive financing available, you can deploy these assets without selling any of your assets to do it. This is not some garage operation. Simple Mining runs over 40,000 machines and was just ranked the fastest-growing company in Iowa on the INC 5000. They put together a valuable resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint.

• 14:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid them before deploying capital. You can access it for free at simplemining.io/pomp. That's simplemining.io/pomp. Go check it out today.

• 14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you guys doing to help investors insulate themselves from this?

• 15:04Speaker 03

  From the, from the government spending? I mean, every time I have an opportunity, I'm like, you have to have real assets, gold and Bitcoin in your portfolio. You don't know if it'll pay off, but there's times, you know, my dad started VanEck and he started the first gold fund in the United States in 1968. So I, he was a gold bug. I'm not a gold bug. Most of my career, gold's been going down. You know, it bottomed at $250 an ounce, which is when the Central Bank of England sold it, by the way. Good, good, good timing. So I am not a gold bug. It's hard to believe, but I do think this is just a structural risk. And the way I put it is, for the entirety of US history,

• 15:48Speaker 03

  there's been financial crises that have come from the banking system or other industries, like agriculture, and then rolled up through the banking system. This is going to be started in DC and it's, there's not, no one can bail us out. And I think the rest of the world sees this. China's holding of treasuries is down by half from its peak and they are buying almost half of all gold production this year. The private market, you hear about central banks ad nauseam. This is private Chinese investors. So the world kind of sees that we're doing this and they're like backing off.

• 16:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you're thinking about this in terms of gold or Bitcoin's price, you said maybe it will pay off. Do you have a probability that you would assign to either one of those?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Listen, I'm a long-term bull, so I definitely think it'll be higher in 10 years, significantly higher. I just, I just don't know. I just can't imagine, you know, I ask people, Anthony, when is the United States not going to honor its obligations? Some people call that a default. And then I say it's going to happen in the next 10 years and literally 99% of the people say no. And then I say, well, what about social security? What's going to happen? 2032, six years from now, they're going to cut payments to social security. You know, people would be very, very unhappy. And then people say, well, they'll make up the money from somewhere. I'm like, really? Are they going to do that without causing massive inflation? Or, or other kinds of risks? And you see how people have punishing politicians for inflation, right?

• 17:19Speaker 03

  I think that's partially got Trump elected, I think, in the midterms. So what, we're going to have massive, we're going to inflate our way out of our debt? It's, it's, there's no easy answer and it's not going to be pretty.

• 17:31Anthony Pompliano?

  How does AI and maybe the deflationary, you know, impact of AI affect the government's spending? Is there a world where they can keep spending, but AI bails them out?

• 17:41Speaker 03

  No. I mean, they're writing checks to people, right? For healthcare or other, I mean, unless healthcare, well, retirement by definition can't. And then healthcare, I can't see healthcare costs coming down so much because there will be new technologies like GLP-1s that people want to spend money on. So, no, I mean, and people say, oh, AI is a new kind of technology. It'll, it's deflationary. I'm like, what do you think the PC was? What do you think the internet was? Right? Amazon has cut the cost of getting goods to your home. So all technology is deflationary. There were, there was great technology in the seventies, but we had runaway inflation. So I think they're not, not the same.

• 18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about the crypto ETFs. You guys have the Bitcoin ETF, but you also have really pushed to kind of pioneer a number of the other altcoin ETFs.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What's kind of your analysis of that right now?

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Um, it's, we have, and we have 13 crypto ETFs in Europe. So before the US government allowed it, we got pretty aggressive. I think the days of sort of more crypto ETFs are basically over. What we, what we have pushed, pushing is active management. We have an actively managed, I know you interviewed Matt Siegel. Most advisors can't pick Avalanche versus Ethereum or these kinds of things. So we did some layer one blockchains, right? The foundational ones will survive, I think. And then the exchanges, I think will survive. Now, I don't know if Hyperliquid survives or, you know,

• 19:13Speaker 03

  I know the BNB token isn't a direct play or a perfect play on Binance, but the Binance ecosystem maybe. But those are the two categories, Anthony, that stick in my mind. Otherwise, go with an index or go with an actively managed fund.

• 19:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, a lot of the promise of crypto is they're coming for you. You know, they come for Wall Street. They're going to tokenize things. Hyperliquid is going to use perps. There's all these kind of new variations. Do you see this stuff as a headwind for the ETF industry? Or do you actually think the ETF industry can just embrace the new technology and figure out how to, how to kind of stand on its shoulders?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  I think there are a couple of leading firms right now, like I'll say Franklin, Fidelity, and others that are really in this move towards changing the back end of Wall Street towards a 24/7 environment. So Franklin just announced that they offered a money market fund that Uber can, Uber users can use to put savings in. Well, to do the plumbing, to offer a fund that's accurately priced over the weekend is, you know, that's, that's pushed by blockchain. That's really enabled by the people that understand blockchain. So I think it's happening. It's just happening behind the scenes.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  You know, I think the dream actually of most blockchain enthusiasts is you don't know that you're using it. It's just in the background, making your life easier, making it 24/7. I think what's interesting, the most interesting thing for the ETF industry that you asked about is sports, these sports ETFs that are coming. I don't know how you don't do that on a 24/7 basis. Because the sports games are at night and on the weekend. You want to trade this thing at 10 AM? No, of course not. You want to trade it when, you know, USC beats Ohio State.

• 21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  No comment.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Don't mention the name.

• 21:07Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at the 24/7 trading, will that just lead to record inflows, record volumes? And this is like a very good thing for ETFs? Or do you look at potential issues by now moving and expanding the market hours because there's still humans involved?

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Listen.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Couple of different answers. First of all, our VanEck's core business is not to do stuff like that. And that's more fun than it is investing, I would call it. Not that it's wrong. It's just that we don't typically get involved directly with that stuff. So I think there, I mean, hyper liquid has basically proven that there is a demand for individual investors to trade hot things over the weekend. And that's the debate in the ecosystem right now. So whether it's the price of anthropic, like, is it going public or what's it worth? The same thing with SpaceX. So the prices of private companies or commodities. Gold was traded very heavily in Q1. So people wanted, you know, put their money and allocate

• 22:10Speaker 03

  risk. The big debate is the entrenched players like the CME are suing the CFTC. They're really fighting because they own the institutional customer, not that kind of retail and global customer. And so that's, that's, that's what we're going to watch for the next year or two.

• 22:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Another aspect that I find interesting is the AI agents, people want to start letting them trade for them or make allocation decisions. The number one request we have at Sylvia is people saying, let the agent loose. I just want to give it some money, not my whole portfolio, but maybe 10% and let it go trade for me. How does that change flows into these funds? Because let me give you the counter example. There's now talk of like an agentic bank run. If all the agents start moving from, you know, low yielding, kind of deposit accounts into high yield savings, all of a sudden, you could really have some pressure on some of these financial institutions. Is there an equivalent concern in the ETF or fund management business?

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Not in the ETF business, I would say. Yeah, I saw that. I mean, we couldn't figure that risk out. I think, you know, my view is that banks actually provide services, you know, for the checking and all that kind of stuff. They provide a lot of fraud protection, right? Which people still will want. So I'm not so sure that, that, that I'm a skeptic of that bank run kind of situation.

• 23:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I am as well. But if you look at the maybe positive impact, if agents are going to be making decisions, and especially allocation decisions, do you all have a big effort internally to go and become more agent friendly, either, you know, optimizing AEO, or trying to figure out how to get the agents to pick you over some of the lovely people in this room?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  It's so funny, you know, Q3 ended, and we do these Q3 business reviews, and our web track traffic around the world is stagnant or falling. And then people just want to flip the page on like, don't you see what's happening? Right? It's AI, right? And so you just have to maximize the feeding of information to agents. We just tried something with one of our RIA clients is we gave them an MPC connection to all the data in our webs on our website and all our documents. So that's our first experiment. And our salespeople are a little nervous. But that's, that would be the one example. But I also believe, I want to just put on the record, I think that people are going to want to give their agents access

• 24:36Speaker 03

  to accounts with money in it. I mean, when you get, when I have the auto renew for my cable bill, that's the same thing, right? It's effectively an agent. It's just the, that company's software that's, you know, triggering that payment. They, they basically own access to my bank account. It's not a big step, I think, to give agents that kind of.

• 24:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain this pilot that you're running with the RIA. So you create an MCP connection. They can now get access to VanEck information, data, etc.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And the idea is that they can talk internally at the RIA to their agent, and the agent can more easily access VanEck information to give them better answers.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Instead of calling a salesperson.

• 25:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And the salespeople.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Or using Google.

• 25:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the salespeople are worried because they're saying, hey, is that the first step of automating away my job?

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think so. I'm just saying people, it's a change. You asked about how we're doing it. I guess I've heard BlackRock is doing that as well. So it's just changing. That's why Google's earnings were interesting, right? With their, their potential decline in, in ad based search revenue. I think that, that makes sense. That's going to be a different way. For those of you don't really know what I'm talking about, right? Just very simply, AI itself doesn't have access to data. So we, you have to add connections and related skills, but connections to the different databases at VanEck. So at VanEck, we have a connection to our custodian at State Street. So our PMs can write all kinds of crazy reports

• 26:14Speaker 03

  because they see everything that's held through that database at State Street. And that kill, it just really kills a huge part of the IT department.

• 26:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's have a little bit of fun. Have you vibe coded anything?

• 26:25Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 26:26Anthony Pompliano?

  No? Are you sure?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. If we come and do this again, five years from now, what are the biggest changes to the ETF industry?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  To the ETF industry? So I think the biggest change is going to be, and you're playing right into it, which is more of the business will come from individual investors. So right now, we get the, you know, our biggest clients are financial advisors. And I just think that more individuals, but also individuals with a greater percentage of their wallet will just be buying directly through low cost broker dealers. So I think that will go, I don't know, I don't know. People don't publish those numbers. But I'm going to say from a quarter to a half of our business.

• 27:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. So 25.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  I don't even know. Yeah.

• 27:19Anthony Pompliano?

  But like a material increase in direct to consumer, essentially, distribution.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. What are you doing to accelerate that or be better positioned to be the recipient of those funds?

• 27:33Speaker 03

  We just do a lot of content. I mean, me being out there, you know, webinars, you know, a lot of individuals participate in the content that we provide. I think the content game, I mean, if you look at yourself, right? You're a content creator, the Ritholtz company. No, no, but, but it's a, you know, Andreessen Horowitz started, you know, pioneered it for the venture capital business. It's how you communicate with people. People want to hear sincere opinions, right? They don't want to just hear product pitches. And you have to earn their trust, right? And that's, that's hard. But that's the, that's the playing field that we're on, I think.

• 28:10Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Last question. Are you the one tweeting from the intern account?

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I can't tell you that.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  You'd have to torture me.

• 28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Jan VanEck, everybody.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Thank you.