The Pomp Podcast - #862 The Bitcoin ETF Is Being Held Hostage w/ Jan Van Eck

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

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What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jan Van Eck is the chief executive officer of Van Eck. They're an $80 plus billion asset management firm, and they've been into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for some time now. In this conversation, we talk about everything from regulation, the spot Bitcoin ETF, and of course, stable coins. I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation as I did as well. But before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products

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site. You can read the white paper at CryptoToday.com. Again, go to CryptoToday.com to learn more. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. is for informational purposes only. All right. I think we've got a Yon here with us now. Yon, how are you? Sorry. You know, listen, when you hang out with your brother, sometimes you just got to make sure they're paying attention at all times, right? It's like head on a swivel and, uh, and keep going. A hundred percent. I got three boys. So, uh, it's all the time. How old are they? Uh, 25 and 22 year old twins. All right. So the 25 year olds definitely beaten up the 22 year olds when they were younger right all the time i'm the oldest so i could say that

and while my two younger brothers are sit here and just like shut up the tables have turned though as you can tell but the problem the problem was when you have twin brothers then you're outnumbered right so you've got like you've got two people that adds a dynamic so that that was a really bad day for my oldest son that is a great point all right we have we have one uh very serious question before we get into all the bitcoin and crypto stuff is so i told everyone earlier that you were coming on and my genius brother over here immediately goes oh the 14th century painter is he named after him do you know anything about jan van eck who spells it differently he's got a y in it is there any relationship any uh uh connection here definitely not um it's it's

jan van eick you're right um and uh my my grandfather was who was a dutch lawyer decided to spend a lot of his retirement on figuring out the family tree and we are he went back that far and we are not not related but since you're into dutch trivia um i don't know if you know what my name means uh but it's jan is john van is from and ek is corner so there was a river in the southern netherlands that had to bend and i'm from that little town or my relatives are i'm start hitting people with yo you know john from corner awesome all right so here's uh we got a whole bunch of stuff to talk to and i feel like i could literally talk to you for hours so i'm gonna do my best to kind of uh focus on what i think is the most important stuff uh for folks

to hear from you the first thing i think is important for people to understand is you don't run like a brand new crypto uh type investment uh organization you guys have been around for a long time. You've got a lot of assets, but you've also been paying attention to and participating in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industries for a while. So help people just understand how big is the organization and then what eventually got you to get comfortable with and start to allocate assets towards this industry? Sure. VanEck was founded in 1955 by my father. So it's been around for a long time, as you said. And I think there's some good things to talk about there. But just to answer your question. We manage about $82 billion. About 90% of that is in exchange traded funds.

I launched that business in 2006. And we're sort of the top 15 ETF sponsors in the world. We have operations, meaning local funds in Europe, Australia, and the US. Got it. And so when you think about a business that was started in the 50s, I always joke that there's financial organizations there's two types there's ones that are brand new and they're going to survive or thrive in the current environment and then they'll get disrupted and then there'll be a new crop of new ones but then there's these organizations and you know usually i point to like a goldman sachs or jp morgan but i think you guys fit this bill as well which have navigated you know in some cases literally the creation of electricity the telephone the internet the mobile device like all these

different pieces of technology. And so if you start in the 50s till today, like you all have navigated a number of those. Why do you think it is that the organization's been so kind of durable and able to kind of move through these transitions with success? I think that's very flattering. So thank you. I think that it's two things. Number one, it's mindset. And the second is the ability to execute. So the DNA of the firm really came from my father, who was a historian, but the way I describe it, a functional historian, kind of like I am, which is trying to have mental models for the future. All that matters is the future in a way, right? But his big bet pump, it's crazy, it's almost as big as yours, is in 1968, he converted the only fund that the firm ran

effectively into a gold fund. Gold was pegged at $35 an ounce, and gold had been pegged for the entire 200 years or so of US history. So he basically said the world is going to massively be disrupted, and inflation is going to appear, and you want to own gold as leverage into that trade. So it was very forward looking. And so that's just part of the firm's DNA. I think the The second thing is having what I call like a founder's mentality, because I've thought about this because people have said, wow, you were so early to ETFs in 2006. I'm like, early? I mean, this was so many years into ETFs growing at astronomical rates. And I think it's, look, sure, it's helpful if the enthusiast is running the firm. But I do think it takes that founder's mentality, almost what Zuckerberg is doing with Facebook, to really bet on your vision of the future. So those two things.

So taking that mentality and looking at this new industry, when you all started to kind of dip your toes in at first into Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, etc., what did you guys do early on to actually get started? The first thing was hit the books, right? In early 2017, of course, I've been following crypto for several years through my oldest son and other forms of conversation was say, oh, my God, is this going to disrupt gold, which is a huge, even two years ago, gold funds for 40% of our revenue. And so just listen to the podcast, went on the internet, did the white papers, did all that kind of research because no one would answer that question. I'd ask my colleagues, is Bitcoin going to disrupt gold?

And no one gives you that answer. So just research it. And then, you know, look, what we did is kind of trivial in a way is get organized and we're in the ETF business and file for a Bitcoin ETF. I mean, we've done a lot more since then, but in some sense,

what asset managers are doing is not the most exciting part of the ecosystem. Yeah. Why do you think the spot ETF, like what's the issues there? And obviously, given the fact that you guys have put forward applications and gone back and forth regulators,

I don't know what you can say, what you can't say, but just kind of, there's a futures ETF in the United States, there's spot ETFs and futures ETFs for Bitcoin internationally. What's your read on kind of regulatory environment and what it'll take to get a spot ETF for Bitcoin in the United States?

I mean, look, I could talk about this for a super long time. I think what I've said is the SEC is holding a Bitcoin ETF hostage until they get jurisdiction over the underlying crypto markets, which they don't have right now. And so that's that narrow issue. I mean, the broader issue, and I wrote a piece on stable coins a couple of weeks ago, is that I think the whole regulatory dialogue is not very healthy right now, because I think there's dialogue on shows like yours where there's actually a back and forth, a pro and con. But when you get to D.C., it's one congressman doing their view, another senator doing their view. You listen to the hearings, you know, and the banking regulators

want stable coins to be banking products and the future, you know, CFTC wants them to be maybe derivatives or their cash commodities. I mean, it's everyone's talking their own book and there's not a lot of thinking through of really what these things are. If you could just wave a magic wand and you were SEC chairman for a day or president for a day or pick your kind of role, what do you think would be the ideal scenario for the industry? Is it just approve a Bitcoin spot ETF and let the market kind of take it from there?

Or are there other things that you think would be worth having a conversation around? I think we need, actually, I don't know if I really care about that so much anymore because so many people can buy Bitcoin, you know, kind of retail. I mean, it would be nice. But I think, you know, in Europe, we have eight different exchange traded products. So seven single tokens and a multi token. So just Bitcoin. OK, but it really would be nice for retail investors through their brokerage accounts to have access to many more things in the ecosystem. That's just not happening. Right. Right. So I'm a little I'm really of two minds.

I think it would be nice to try some safe harbors, like I said, trade stable coins like ETFs and see how that goes. If you're really concerned about a regulator, a custodian and an auditor looking at the assets behind, I'll call them the traditional style stable coins because there's so many types. Let's just start there. But at this rate, nothing's happening. So I'm almost the other mind says, just forget it. Let all the disruption happen because DC is never going to get organized. If they do anything, they're more likely to mess it up and create big regulatory barriers, which is really bad. Yeah. You mentioned this idea of treating stable coins like ETFs. And I know you had this piece in Barron's, which I found fascinating. And your argument, if I can kind of summarize it in a very elementary, simplistic way, is that a stable coin is actually more like a fund than anything else. And the idea is that somebody puts cash into a custody account. The stablecoin issuer is then essentially issuing the equivalent of shares. And those shares contract or expand with the inflows and outflows of the cash.

And so it is acting as if a fund would act. Is that kind of your general framework or argument as to why these are more like ETFs than any other type of asset? Exactly. I don't know if I'm allowed to say the Tether word on this program, but Tether operates like an ETF. I mean, that's it. They have creation units. They have authorized participants who can add or detract shares. It trades on an exchange like ETFs trade on an exchange.

It's just in digitized, tokenized form. So it's immediate settlement, which is brilliant. It's a great step forward. So now, listen, there are algorithmic stable coins and all this other kind of stuff. But I'm just saying it's so close to an ETF. Just take existing ETF regulation and do a trial. If your policy concern is the concern that there's no assets behind the 100 billion plus in stable coins, well, take a peek at half of them. Yeah. And what would change? So let's say that we go down this path, right? And all of a sudden it comes down from high on the mountain. Yes, these are going to get treated with ETF-like regulation.

what would change in the crypto market or in the stable coin market? I don't know if anything would change, right? I mean, I think we have this other problem, which is, you know, come and talk to us, right? This attitude of the regulators, well, come and talk to us, but no one in DC approves anything, right? People aren't getting banking licenses, you know, funds aren't generally, you know, Bitcoin ETS aren't getting approved. So that's the other, we need some regulatory fortitude, which you had at the end of the Trump administration, not to politicize it, but I just, I don't see it for the next four years. Okay. And then you've got in this article, I want to read this because I think it's a really

interesting nuance. You say in a slight difference from mutual funds and ETFs, most stable coin issuers keep the income generated from the assets in the stable coin. Thus, even though interest rates are low, stable coins are accumulating assets that are growing above the one dollar price they promised to maintain in response some stable coins now assign a part of their investment gains to holders i believe these income distributing stable coins will likely proliferate this is fascinating because in the etf world usually any of the interest or financial gain would automatically go to the holders of those assets and the kind of fund wrapper essentially is just there to serve as a as a kind of organizational

structure and there's some fees extracted for that, but pretty much it's an organizational and kind of legal compliance thing here. The stable coin issuers are actually, I don't think people understand, like there's a lot of money to be made by having the stable coin. Cause you're generating the yield off of what almost kind of acts like a money market fund or something like that. And so why is that important to distinguish between is that revenue being returned to the stable coin holders or is it being kept by the for-profit company? Well, right, right now it's held by the stable coin, which is, you know, God bless them. You know, if you let's say interest rates go to 3%, even at the short term, right, they're earning all that all that income. The

positive thing for the ecosystem is presumably, I mean, I think most of these people are straightforward that run these things, you would have more assets, you know, standing behind the stable coin, then then actually, stable coin outstanding, right? Because as the income accrues over time that compounds, which is a wonderful thing, as we all know, in a way that can enable them to take more risk, meaning going further out if they if they have more if they have one hundred and three cents right behind every one dollar stable coin, then they actually can use some of that three cents to generate even more income. But, you know, or you can consider it a form of insurance.

My point, the second point that I make in the article, the consequence of that is, you Listen, it's a free market and there's competition in the world and someone will come up with another stable coin. Like who's getting that income? Circle is getting the USDC income right now. Right. Or the shareholders of that. So over time, I would expect someone to say, hey, listen, I'll pay some of that out. I'll keep one and a half percent, but, you know, I'll distribute one and a half percent. The distribution part is really interesting, I think, just from an ecosystem perspective, because then you have to have like a transfer agency mechanism where people can get that income paid to. So anyway, just that's thanks for picking up on that point. Joe, John, what questions you

guys have? So my question would just be about what you're hearing from clients. You've obviously been looking at digital assets and crypto in general for a few years now, but like how has that narrative for those conversations changed? Is there more demand? I'm assuming there has been other conversations around that as you guys look at other products, but just walk me through kind of what you're hearing? Well, I mean, the world has changed a lot since 2017, when it was a it was really a retail phenomenon, but still meaning institutions and CEOs that I would talk with that really no idea. And, you know, you know, all the dismissive comments that they would have about crypto. The I would say the institutions are way up the learning curve, but they're not up the

doing curve. So so like 90% of the volume in our ETNs in Europe is really retail. The institutions have been participating through VC funds, right, that are investing in early stage like the Andreessen Horowitz funds. But very few, I mean, they make headlines, but very few are actually buying crypto directly. And they can't, most investors do not know how to deal with the volatility. That is the biggest sticking point. I mean, they see something go up and down. They can't really explain it because the correlation of Bitcoin to NASDAQ and gold and everything else is so low. Uh, so there it's still early days. I look at that as a really, really positive thing. Gotcha. John, what do you got? Nice to meet you. I will call you a John VanEck as my name is John

as well. So my question is, is thinking around the SEC and, uh, the spot ETF in particular, like what are your thoughts around that without getting too deep? As I know you guys, um, are continuously applying for that spot ETF. But why has the SEC not approved a spot ETF yet in the United States? Because I think they want jurisdiction over... Look, it's super complicated. This really is a weakness in securities laws because to define a security, it can really cover a whole lot of different things, right? In law school, you learn, well, can a membership in a golf club be a security? And the answer is yes. And so you have a range. So that's hard enough. But then in crypto, there's this range of assets between decentralized and centralized. And that

changes over time. Like I was listening to a colleague this morning talk about Terra Luna saying, yeah, some of the steps they're taking are to decentralize. So they're less vulnerable to being sued for being a security when they come to the United States. So anyway, that's a long, complicated answer. But I just think it's what I said before, the SEC wants jurisdiction over the whole universe, and they want it from Congress, I guess, is ultimately it. Listen, we have a major, I like to point out, we have a major part of the financial services system that's just regulated at the state level, right? Crypto right now, you need a money transmitter license.

You're regulated at the state level. Insurance company, our insurance industry is entirely regulated at the state level. Yeah, when you start to think about, like, let's take the executive order that came out today, right? It seems to be very much like go get information, bring it back with reports,

and then we'll decide what we want to do. But is there an element of maybe bifurcation where the regulators already understand, know, and have been doing work on this industry. They realize it's not going away. And so, you know, they're working. But now politicians and kind of the current administration and like the political machine has realized and woken up

and said, oh, wow, this is not going to go away. And so like, they're almost like saying back and forth to each other, you know, hey, get us information, get us information, and then we'll make decisions together. But like, do you think it's important that the politicians now recognize the size and kind of durability of the industry? Or do you think that it never really mattered and this is more just kind of bureaucracy that's getting in the way of the true innovations? I think politicians realize, and we saw this right

through the legislative fights over the last couple of years, that the crypto community can organize and they're very participatory, meaning they will write letters to the house. And so I think that's gotten people's attention. I don't know where we're at with that. I just don't. I don't. I'm hoping that doesn't become like a partisan thing where, you know, Republicans are more libertarian and more pro crypto and Democrats aren't. But the House block blockchain caucus is bipartisan, which is a really positive sign. I'm trying to have some conversations here in New York around the BitLicense, that hopefully it would just be bipartisan and reviewing that. So that's kind of it. I think, Pomp, look, the big macro, macro, macro issue is will Bitcoin be

legal to hold in the United States? Do you worry about that? Do you think that could be an issue? I worry about that big time. I'd love to go back to, sorry to repeat this story, but in 1968, why did the fund that you know vanek offered why was the gold fund invested in gold mining shares why didn't it just buy gold bullion do you know the answer well because it was illegal to hold individual gold yeah it was illegal it was illegal for decades right from fdr to the early 70s illegal so you could own coins and people bought crew grand so you think that we can't make bitcoin illegal i mean you know i i think we're one or two headlines away from something nasty coming out of Treasury? Like what what if Putin evaded sanctions somehow using

Bitcoin? So I think, you know, there's this whole discussion of, you know, this using the financial system to regulate life. And, you know, Bitcoin is permissionless. And so the you know, I don't mean to repeat your pro Bitcoin arguments, but is let let the money move. And then eventually we can track bad behavior, right? You don't have to stop everything ahead of time because people will always find ways around it. So I think there's a good answer from a policy perspective, but it's the big macro issue. And I think it does drive the price too. I mean, I think that concern that I just talked about hurt Bitcoin over the last couple of weeks, but I can't prove it. Yeah. So I want to throw out something I've been thinking about. I want to caveat it with like,

I don't know the answer here. This is me just kind of thinking out loud. But as we think about the geopolitical stuff that's been playing out. One of the things that I think more and more people are talking about is the potential, not guarantee, but potential for kind of bifurcated financial systems. And if you ask somebody like Balaji, he would tell you that, you know, hey, you basically are moving towards like a Western based system, an Eastern based system where you have kind of China, Russia, maybe in India, and then like a decentralized system. There's other people who maybe won't give the credit to bitcoin or cryptocurrencies and they'll just say hey it's east versus west and then other people who say uh the east will never be able to actually you know

kind of get a financial system off the ground and and the west will continue to dominate regardless of which one of those scenarios kind of plays out one of the pieces that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of conversation uh coverage is obviously there's the sanctions with russia going on right now and everyone has run kind of to the extreme and said oh bitcoin the the the thing that resists censorship and seizure and all that like that will be used but i keep saying like man the chinese digital currency this central bank digital currency is on different rails than what the u.s could uh effectively go ahead and implement sanctions on it feels like you know these governments would be much more excited about like well why don't we just have our currency that we

control. And let's just use this one. And it's got some kind of insulation from sanctions, but also we can produce and expand and contract the money supply and do all this. How do you think about just central bank digital currencies in general? We talk about stable coins. I think people usually think of those as like US dollar backed coins. But what about these other countries that want to create central bank digital currencies? Have you guys thought about that or done any work there? I wouldn't say we've done any original research. I mean, I've certainly thought about it. I think that's one of the positive signs, really, is that policymakers in the U.S. really understand, I think, the two risks of central bank currency, which is the complete lack of privacy,

which is maybe, I think, a minor concern relative to the fact that the Fed offering a central bank currency is basically the Fed offering retail access and retail competition to the commercial banks. And in time, you know, they don't want to compete with the commercial banks. I think there's a lot of vested interests that support the commercial banking system in the United States. So I think because right in the time of risk on or sorry, risk off, everyone's going to move their money to the Fed, the Fed stable coin or the, you know, whatever it is.

So, you know, the government stable coin. And so that it's that aspect where they're competing against commercial banks directly for retail, for whether it's payments or just deposits. I think that is the thing that's stopping a central bank currency in the U.S., which is great because I definitely am against it for privacy reasons. And I think Americans are as well. Yeah. One of the things that I keep coming back to is like the benefits that are being presented. It's very obvious why there could be positive benefits. The hard part is the tradeoff, right, of all the financial surveillance, the ability to censor transactions, all this. and what i do wonder is um maybe in 2019 uh i went on television and they asked me you know hey what do you think about this and i said look if i was the united states and i wanted to ensure the global accessibility and drive adoption of the u.s dollar i would digitize it immediately so that anyone with

an internet connection could have access to dollars and regardless of why they wanted those dollars that would drive adoption now the other part of the conversation is when those people opt into the central bank digital currency, it increases the bad stuff as well. And so what I do wonder also is if you have digital currencies, so every central bank has one, let's say at some point in the future, it means that everyone will have digital wallets. That's the only way that you can actually support this technology, et cetera. I keep coming back to this idea of the friction of switching costs. So right now, if I have dollars and I want to go to Mexico and use pesos, I either go to the bank and ask them for pesos. So there's some friction there.

I either go to a currency exchange at the airport and get ripped off or I basically get into the economy in Mexico and then go to an ATM and pull out the money. Those are really kind of the three most basic ways for me to get my hands on the currency of that economy. But if all of a sudden everything's digital and it's on a device, I can just with the press of a button switch back and forth between these currencies with relatively low friction. does that somehow change in a world where like the liquidity gets sucked into the best store of value and then you come back out of the store of value when you need a medium of exchange whether it's dollars pesos or something else and i don't know right this is all me kind of just like thinking about these potential things but it does feel like there's this important technology advancement of the switching cost drops and when switching cost drops usually you see behaviors change

It's just, what is that behavior maybe? Yeah, I guess I'm not sure. For those who have money, we're indirectly invested in a Latin American fintech with a very weak local currency. And I was very intrigued, like, what do they own on this crypto platform? And basically, I'm oversimplifying, they own a third of the local currency was Argentinian pesos, a third dollars, and a third crypto. And so I think, OK, right. I think then it's just a question of which is kind of what I would do if I were Venezuelan or Chintanian. I wouldn't own a lot of my local currency. And but I'd adjust that Mexican peso. I'd have more. So I think your point is, hey, listen, are these are these transaction costs coming down? And I think they will come down

dramatically. I'm a big fan of crypto for that reason, is that, you know, like Bitso, the mexican payments company i mean they you know it's it's outrageous what people pay for western union you know money transmissions and so uh that that is the really pro-social benefits i'm very excited about um in in in lat you know emerging markets in latin america are there other pieces of the industry that you're really excited about that maybe people wouldn't expect or or you haven't talked about dude i think the whole financial services sector except for ets and mutual funds of course, is going to get disrupted or is being disrupted in front of our eyes. So I think payments. And I don't have the simple view that everyone's going to like just use Bitcoin or

something like that. But it's the ability to go to this permissionless payment system is putting going to put long term price competition, I think, on Visa and MasterCard because they had such a stranglehold. Right. Even with your iPhone, you need to use one of those stupid payment rails to move money around. So payments, brokerage, cryptocurrency exchanges, bang, instant settlement, who needs T plus two, all that garbage. And they've picked up Coinbase has more retail accounts than most of the online broker dealers. So brokerage is being disrupted. And then DeFi, lending and borrowing, why not move that to a more efficient, more transparent, transparent better risk control platform and i think it's i think defy is at the most risk because

i think it threatens the commercial banks and i think the the regulators the commercial banks are just using the regulators to slow that down um you know process a lot of price competition in that area of the market but oh yeah it's all around us i'm just waiting for the first uh you know kind of defy etf company i know some people think they're out there doing it but yeah it is um uh it's fascinating when you start understanding regulatory, uh, capture and like the arbitrage and, and there, there's definitely stuff going on that, uh, even myself, I don't understand, right. In terms of what's happening in some of these conversations and all of it. Uh, but, but I do think that, um, it's very similar to Uber coming to New York, right. Uh, one of the

things I've talked to, uh, Bradley Tusk, who was, uh, kind of instrumental in that whole thing was they just one day said, you know what, the best way we have to make sure that this gets, uh, kind of pushed in the direction we want is allow the users to make their voice heard and they just took all the cars off of the app one day and they said this is what it would be like if the regulators get their way and there's a lot of people who said i don't want that world and you know they went and they started to become much more vocal and i i uh always laugh in these situations because um i think you i many other people who have thought about this who have talked to whether it's regulators or market participants we say man this is you know going so slow it's so bureaucratic

whatever. But then we do see scenarios where people voice their opinions and there is change or there is the stopping of something that could have been, uh, you know, somewhat harmful. And it reminds me like the democratic process works. It's not always perfect. It doesn't always end up, you know, obviously in the way that you want it to, uh, but it's the best system that we have. Right. And so it's a reminder to people that in these situations where folks are saying, hey, this is important, make your voice heard, make your voice heard, right? Like go and write your letter, go and send the email, send the tweet, do those things, because the politicians do listen to some degree. Look, yeah, the positive is, I mean, the crypto world is innovating like

crazy. It's going a thousand miles an hour. It's impossible, I would say, for almost anyone to keep up. Look in 2021, the whole NFT phenomenon just went mainstream, right? And who would have anticipated that in January. I don't think a lot of people. The negative pump to your scenario of, hey, you know, it's a benign, slow, but benign regulatory system is that enforcement is being used. And the enforcement mechanism, I don't think is particularly fair, right? So you don't necessarily get a rule ahead of time. And then, you know, they decide to pick on one firm and make an example of them. And, you know, and then they get, you know, they get fined, punished or jailed. Okay. Crypto companies may have a lot of money. I just, I don't think that that doesn't

feel very American to me. Not, not very fair. Yeah. I completely agree. You guys got any other questions? No. Thanks for coming on. All right. Jan, I have one last thing for you, which is 25 years from now, the 80 plus billion dollars you guys have today, which is almost exclusively not crypto related. 50% is crypto related, 10%, 100%. How do you think about the evolution of your business in the coming years? And how much of it becomes crypto, either because you guys are interested in it or just the financial system changes? So I think of crypto in two pieces. I really think Bitcoin is like digital gold. And I think that a lot of the other ecosystems are kind of classed in the growth category, like growth tech. So I would say, you know, you should

have 10%, 5-10% in Bitcoin and gold, and, you know, certainly maybe the same amount in crypto, so 20%. So I hope, you know, our firm's assets, and I hope they go up. But I hope our firm's assets reflect just what would be in a normal portfolio so that people are having access to it at that point in time. Yeah. I mean, that would be, that'd be pretty good. And I think, you know, if, if 20% of all financial assets, you know, essentially, right. Ended up somehow in crypto would be multitudes bigger than it is today, which is. We'll be living in a metaverse pump. We don't, we won't, we won't recognize that world. Yeah. I, I, I joke, I say, look, I get a lot of the reasons for some of this stuff and, and I'm excited about it, but then there's

also just a reminder of like, you know, if you and I are in the same city and we'll go to dinner, we're not going to slap a headset on, we're going to go to dinner in person. Right. So like there's a balance between it all, but, uh, I appreciate you, uh, you coming on, where can we send people to either find out more about VanEck or, uh, or find you on the internet? Yeah, I'm on, I'm on social. So Jan VanEck number three, and, uh, and I'm on LinkedIn as well. I kind of occasionally post content uh and then our website is vanek.com so so pretty easy but please uh please reach out we love talking to people getting ideas and learning i've got a lot of learning to do i love that in your bio it says history as a guide for the future which is uh which is uh pretty true

all right my friend thank you so much for coming on i think uh i learned a lot i hope everyone else did uh if you're not following on please go do that and we'll definitely do this again in the future. Appreciate it. Nice to meet y'all. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more

and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.