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.
00:11:10 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[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. [00:11:19] S1: Yeah. It's really a frustrating, from an investor perspective because I don't think we ever know when it's gonna hit the financial markets. It could be in three months. It could be in thirty 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. Nominal GDP went up. I I don't think people... For a while, the ten year traded with, the price of oil. But if you look over the bulk of this war or conflict with Iran, you know, the ten year didn't go up. The ten 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.
00:12:21 · Anthony Pompliano
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00:14:16 · Anthony Pompliano
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. 5,000. They They put together a valuable resource called the $20.26 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. 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.iopomp. That's simplemining.io/pump. Go check it out today. What are you guys doing to help investors insulate themselves from this?
00:14:53 · Jan Van Eck, Anthony Pompliano
[00:14:53] S1: 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 those 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. You know, 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, 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 gonna be started in DC and it's... There's no... 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 kinda sees that we're doing this and they're like backing off. [00:16:12] S2: 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?