00:03:22 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:03:22] S2: 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 ten years? [00:03:31] S1: 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. I met with brokerage firms that were opening a million accounts a month. Now, the average account was low, but that just shows the lack of friction that digitization has caused in India. And then the second thing is just taxation and, you know, lots of rules like they had labor laws that if you had them... 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 people or nine ninety nine. It 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 focus on the ten year stuff, very high conviction that that will play out over time based on history.
00:04:51 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:04:51] S2: 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 a 100,000 users. I was like, oh my god. These guys are all killing it. And then somebody pulled me aside and said, a 100,000 users in India is like a 100 in America. There's just so many people. Right? So there are a lot of people. Talk about the [00:05:14] S1: 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 trivial automation kind of tasks, but really product creation that's happening there. [00:05:29] S2: 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 the decade long themes that people should just tune out the noise and focus on?
00:05:45 · Jan Van Eck
[00:05:45] S1: Yeah. I mean, it's it's just 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 write software, and that's the first part. So, I think that the the trade is changing, Anthony. So, it used to be very simple. I'm the simple... 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 are merciless, right, 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 or other company, you can say, oh, they're gonna 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. What we've did is take our user base and said, what is our adoption by user? 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 push 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 gonna be the game going forward.
00:07:35 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:07:35] S2: 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 claudess, like, you know, either for coding or, like, a Google on steroids? [00:07:52] S1: There's nothing magical, I would say. To me, it's... I always say AI is just data, software, and people. And, you know, eighteen months ago, you... 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 this 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. So we're trying to promote that sharing, but it's a lot of just, education and communication. Yeah. [00:08:44] S2: 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?
00:08:44 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:08:44] S2: 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? [00:08:56] S1: I think the a... IT department has been completely repurposed from... No. Really, writing code, which they need, you know, like, maybe 20% of the people that for the code that we do, we rely on a lot of third party applications. So that repurpose to doing what I just said. I love I love this stat. I 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 wanna make this process better. So they normalized their data, and to do that, they spent $2,000,000,000 a year for ten years just to clean up the data. So I think that's where corporate America is now is... And that's why Accenture 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. [00:09:53] S2: And then have you limited people's usage or you want them to use this as much as possible? [00:09:59] S1: Not yet. [00:10:00] S2: Is that maybe coming?
00:10:00 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:10:00] S2: Is that maybe coming? [00:10:02] S1: My CFO is like, Jan, do you realize how much money people are spending? I'm like, I don't wanna throttle people. And our 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, it's... That's their first instinct is to make it harder. And I'm like, oh, yeah. You're gonna 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. That's my that's my philosophy. [00:10:28] S2: Have you publicly said how much you guys are spending on AI? [00:10:32] S1: We did a couple of quarters ago. I mean, that's sort of in the $2,000,000 range annualized. [00:10:38] S2: So it's but it's not like you're spending [00:10:40] S1: 20 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. Okay. A lot of need for management, Anthony, between the IT people and the business people and it's just 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. [00:11:10] S2: Makes, makes sense. Let's talk about the third theme. You and I were brothers in arms on this one. The government's never gonna stop printing money.