The Pomp Podcast - Bitcoin Is The Only Asset That Survives What’s Coming | Jan van Eck

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Jan van Eck is the CEO of VanEck, a $200 billion asset manager and one of the leading ETF companies in the world. In this conversation, we discuss why bitcoin is still early in its institutional adoption cycle, the looming U.S. government spending crisis and what it means for your portfolio, VanEck's long-term bet on India, and how AI is beginning to reshape investment decisions.=========================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/ This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.=========================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.=========================0:00 - Intro1:14 - Private credit market & where the opportunity is4:26 - ETF industry growth & what most people miss6:09 - VanEck's history & gold as a core asset class9:42 - AI, commodities & the infrastructure buildout12:34 - Bitcoin vs. gold — why BTC hasn't kept up22:22 - VanEck's big bet on India28:49 - Navigating today's macro environment34:06 - U.S. government debt & the Social Security crisis38:12 - Balancing economic data & sentiment 44:31 - Corporate AI adoption & the token cost problem49:28 - When will AI make investment decisions?56:33 - Jan's father's legacy & what guides VanEck today

I think it's impossible to say Bitcoin should do X, Y, or Z, right? I mean, the reason I got interested in it in 2017 is it's its own thing, and it's going to evolve as adoption changes. Now, what has changed in the adoption story in the last two years? Nothing, right? Central banks haven't come on board. Corporations haven't come on board. It's basically been some financial investors through the ETFs,

but not many institutions. Slowly, asset allocators have started to include it, but not dramatic. So why would you expect some big change in the price of Bitcoin when nothing has happened? I mean, the way I look at it is still the old-fashioned way. Very simplistic. I like to oversimplify. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a conversation with Jan VanEck.

Jan is the CEO of VanEck. They're a $200 billion asset manager and one of the leading ETF companies. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, gold, the rise of ETFs, why Jan has so much conviction in the country of India, how he thinks about making long-term strategic bets. And then we get into what is in his personal portfolio, where his convictions are, how he's navigating the macro environment

and what he thinks you should know as an investor and how you should change your capital allocation strategy based on what he's seeing in the world. Here's my latest conversation with Jan Van Eck. All right, Jan, private credit has been a huge issue. People are very worried about it. Are you worried or what do you think is going on? You went right into my favorite topic.

Like, listen, first quarter, a lot of concern. Well, end of last year, Jamie Dimon says cockroaches. Remember, we had two frauds in the private lending markets. Cockroaches, meaning there's a sort of systemic problem is the risk. And J.P. Morgan should know they lend a lot into the private space, right? Whether it's private equity, private credit, BDCs, everything, they're all over it. So you'd think he'd be really informed. So there were a lot of fears about alternative credit.

As we said in the beginning of January, the sell-off is going to happen in the BDC space because they're liquid. So every day, every day the market's open, you can sell your BDC holdings. And BDCs as a whole went to a 20% discount to NAV. So NAV is only calculated once a quarter. So it's a stale as soon as they print it kind of statistic. But if these BDC is on average leveraged two times, a 20% haircut means that you've got a 10% default rate, right? High yield is defaulting at 2.5%. So the BDCs are pricing 10% default,

whereas the reality of the high yield market, now arguably that's high graded a little bit, is a 2.5%. That's just a disconnect. And I layer on top, listen, the world economy, sorry, the US economy, it's in good shape, right? So corporate America is in good shape. So there's no reason to think we're going to get this huge spike in defaults. So that's why I'm really excited. Now, even more exciting to me is some of the private credit issuers, like the stocks of Blue Owl in particular I like, way down. It's come down, I don't know, 20%, 30%, 40%. The stock itself, the dividend yield at whatever Tanisha share, which is where it sat this morning, is like 9%. So you get the upside of the business. They raised money in Q1. So despite all these

concerns, they're a growing business, slowed down, but still growing. Yes, some of their funds had redemptions. Anyway, so to me, that's a very exciting. So when you look at, let's take Blue Owl as just a hypothetical example here. So it has a very high yield on the stock itself. And then how do you underwrite the actual business prospects going forward? You just look at capital raised, and then you try to underwrite as best you can in terms of the solvency of the strategies? Yeah. I mean, look, asset management is generally a growing business. These companies, remember, a year or two ago had been trading at 30 to 40 times forward earnings. That's crazy, right? So of course, way overpriced against the market. Now they're underpriced. Where they started life,

before anyone heard of Blackstone, these stocks were 10 times earnings because no one thought their performance fees were going to be recurring. So they didn't give them any value. So yeah, I think, I'm not even betting, even if the business stays the same, I'm clipping the 9% dividend yield, and these are really bright guys. So much pain is in the stock already, and they're growing. I mean, the business is growing, but it's stable. I'd still maybe put it in your fixed income bucket. Now, when I look at the industry in general, you said asset management is going to continue

to grow. One of the stats that everyone has kind of held onto now and is yelling and screaming about is there's more ETFs than there are individual stocks. And I liked Eric Balchunas. He said, you know, yes, there are more words than there are letters. There's more songs than there are chords. But generally, do you see this as kind of a 10, 20 year run where you're going to continue to see all of these asset managers, whether it's FANUC in the private market or some of these public traded ones, just there's a massive tailwind that people doesn't understand? Yeah, the ETF business continues to explode, right? Not explode, but it's the growth area of financial services. And, you know, ETFs are like popcorn. You and I have talked about some of the, when the kernel, you know, goes off, I mean, suddenly you have a couple billion in AUM and an ETF. So, but the vast majority of ETFs are below 100 million, right? So, you know, that's kind of a misleading statistic as far as I'm concerned. Talking about the ETF industry earlier today, and I think where people don't appreciate is the accessibility to sort of underserved asset classes. I know Bitcoin is something we can talk about, but fixed income is a huge area, right?

So if you look at our fixed income ETFs, only probably 5% or 10% of the bonds in any fixed income ETF, forgetting governments, trade on any given day. So it's really become a very liquid vehicle. Now, it's vulnerable when you have market dislocations. So if you look at the industry as a whole, I don't care about the growth. I think it's great. I don't care about the proliferation of ETFs. Competition is healthy.

But the thing to remember is fixed income ETFs are kind of a different cat. Now, when I look at your guys' business, I think these numbers are as of 331. You've got about $200 billion in assets. $100 billion are in U.S. and international equities. $45 billion is in gold and precious metals. $19 billion is in U.S. and international fixed income, and then $20 billion is in natural resources and commodities. My takeaway from that is you expect equities to be much bigger, but I think to your point,

having $20 billion in fixed income and $20 billion in natural resources, and then another $45 billion in gold and precious metals, you guys are pretty well-rounded here, right? You really do offer, I think, a full suite to an investor, and it's kind of the DNA of the firm of how you guys started with the big bet on gold in the early days, right? When I joined VanEck, we basically had one fund. It was a gold mining fund. It was a mutual fund. That was the fund that my dad became famous for in 1968. He started the first gold fund. Gold shares are so volatile. From 2011 to 2016, gold mining shares went, GDX was down 90%. Wow.

No one realizes what decimation happened in natural resource in the last decade. But to your point, I kind of historically have come to work. I describe it. What do I do in the morning? I try to get away from gold and diversify because if you're, you know, that's your revenue stream as a business, right? There's no fallback. Then you want to diversify. So luckily VanEck has been successful in a number of different asset classes. Now, when people think about gold, let's just start with that as one single asset class. I think that there's a couple of different ways that they can play this. They can obviously buy physical gold. They can allocate to an ETF and just get underlying gold exposure. There are the miners. There's these now gold streaming companies or

kind of royalty type businesses. How do you think about gold exposure in someone's portfolio? Is there a kind of a, hey, start here and then expand over time? Do they want a bucket of these in kind of a equal weighting? What do you, when you're talking to clients, how do you think about it? Our number one question when we talk to people about investing is, do you want the asset class, right? Your asset class decision is so important. And gold is a very, very powerful asset class in the right economic environment. I'm not like my dad. I'm not like an always gold guy. I am very bullish over the next 10 years because I think gold is re-emerging as a global currency. But the number one question is, do you want to own it or not? Why do you own

it? So I own it because I'm really worried about government spending. Our budget deficit has come down in the last couple of years from six and a half to maybe low fives in terms of a percent of GDP. If we're spending half a trillion more on this Iran war, which is what's been said, it's not showing through in the numbers at all right now. But if that happens, then absolutely, I think people need a hedge in their portfolios, because that will pull everything down. And actually, short term, it'll pull gold down as well, Anthony. So anyway, that's why thinking about that, and I'd love to get your views on, you know, if there were, I'll call it a freak out because of government spending, you could have the 10-year

jump 200 basis points, I don't think there's going to be anywhere to hide, even gold. But medium long-term, I think gold is something you want. Start with gold bullion. If you don't have someone helping you with the allocation, that would be the biggest thing in my portfolio because of its historical liquidity. Gold shares are kind of an add-on to that, maybe two-thirds bullion, one-third gold shares, if I was just to start somewhere. But more of our business is now doing model allocation. Yeah. What was so fascinating to me is if you go back to, I don't know, 10, 15, maybe 20 years ago, and you said to someone, I'm going to buy gold instead of buy equities. And I think gold may outperform. First of all, I don't think there's that many people

saying they were buying gold because they thought it was going to outperform as much as they were basically buying it as protection. So equities was for growth, gold is for protection. Now, the argument was always that, hey, the equities are productive. You're going to get cash flow, you're going to get yield, you're going to be able to do all this stuff. There have been certain times over the last two years, where if you look back 25 years, gold has actually outperformed equities. It's very fascinating to me because it suggests that maybe a lot of the equity growth has really just been the debasement of the dollar more so than the productivity of the underlying companies. Is that how you look at it? It's been a horrible time for the equities. And

that's why I was pointing out that big drawdown from 2011 to 2018, 2016. If you take a big step back, the first big commodity cycle in the US in recent history was the 1970s. And the beauty of that cycle for the companies, their cost of production didn't go up. So the price of gold went from 35 to over $800 an ounce. Cost of producing gold didn't really change. What's happened over the ensuing decades, including the 2000s, the China boom, is that the cost of producing commodities has started to increase the cost of inflation. And it's basically we're running out. So you have to dig more tons of dirt for every little ounce of gold. And that extends throughout the resources universe. So the equities, we're punished for

that. They're like, great, Anthony, Jan, gold's at 4,500 or whatever it is an ounce. But your costs keep going up. It's like the opposite of when you look at the tech companies like NVIDIA or all the hyperscale, their margins are beautiful. They just sit there in the high 70s, right? Why would you want to own a company where the margins are shrinking every year? So that's been the overhang. And you're right, over the recent past, it's been really bad. Now, in a bullish environment, you can overcome that. Yeah. What's fascinating about the commodities in particular is also most people don't think of AI and commodities being hyperlinked together. But obviously, we have seen that this commodity bull market is being heavily driven by, oh, wait a second, we need more power. We need to build data centers. We need to build out electrical infrastructure.

That is made up of commodities. We have to go find this stuff. And so there's almost this like global treasure hunt, if you will, trying to find enough supply to meet the demand. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. What about you? No, I don't see it. Right. The new world needs the old world and you've got the reshoring dynamic, right? All of the supply chains need to be independent of China. So that's rare earths. That's not directly for AI compute, but indirectly it is. But yeah, copper and all the commodities, all the processing. So you've got the double kick of we need more and we need it home. Mm-hmm. Now, when you look at gold and silver in particular, those two had exploded over the last two years or so. In a weird way, Bitcoin has not kept up. And so some people say, hey, well, that means that Bitcoin's got to catch up. Other people would argue, actually, that means gold is going to kind of correct and gold and Bitcoin will meet again. How do you look at the relationship between these two assets? I think it's impossible to say Bitcoin should do X, Y, or Z. The reason I got interested in it in 2017 is it's its own thing, and it's going to evolve as adoption changes. Now, what has changed in the adoption story in the last two years? Nothing. Central banks haven't come on board. Corporations haven't come on board. It's basically been some financial investors through the ETFs, but not many institutions. slowly asset allocators have started to include it, but not dramatic. So why would you expect some big change in the price of Bitcoin when nothing has happened? I mean, the way I look at it is still the old fashioned way. Very simplistic. I like to oversimplify. Limited supply like gold

for your halvening cycle, where your halvening cycle has driven because that's the amount of Bitcoin that miners get to run the network. That has caused a decline in their profitability and the decline every four years of Bitcoin. Guess what? 2026 is the year of decline in Bitcoin. Why would it break the cycle this year, given that nothing has changed on the adoption side? So I'm still long-term bullish. And I just don't get the narrative of it should link. Actually, it's been a negative to me that Bitcoin has had this higher correlation to the NASDAQ since COVID. right? It used to have literally zero correlation, and now it's had a 0.6 correlation, which was really high, right? A correlation of one is the identical performance. So that's kind

of where I'm at. I don't like... And even... Wait a minute. It's a long-term story, yeah. Do you see sophisticated institutional investors actually walking away from or not investing in Bitcoin because the correlations have risen? I think allocators, right? So if you think about a lot of America's wealth through financial advisors is in these big model portfolios, right? They follow the chief investment officers of a Morgan Stanley or a Merrill Lynch or something like that. And so your average advisor is doing less and less of the fund picking or the Bitcoin allocation. Those allocators are open to Bitcoin, especially with the ETF kind of approval, implicit approval of the US government, but they absolutely do not like the correlation.

It will rightly, they'll just say, well, I'll have 1% as opposed to 2% or 2% as opposed to 4%. Absolutely. I think it's hurt adoption. I hope it changes. I don't know if you have a view on that. I think that it just takes time. I mean, I've been saying for years, people always ask, what has to happen for Bitcoin to go higher? And I would just say the expiration of time. I know people don't like that answer, but there is an element of you need young people to become a little bit older. They need to make more money. They already are sympathetic to Bitcoin. And so they're going to continue to put more money in. You need these young people who are analysts or, you know, kind of associates at the financial firms to become the managing directors or the

CIOs and get into positions of power and influence and control. You need to have the kind of Lindy effect of, okay, this thing has not only been around for 10 years, 12 years, 15 years. Now it's been around for 50 years, right? And so people just continue to allocate to it because they realize it's not going away. And so it's in a world of Bitcoin where people as like a population have been so instrumental in making it successful. The most important thing to happen to Bitcoin is the thing that none of us control. It's just time. You can't speed it up. And so you just got to kind of let it happen. And if you go back, you know, two and a half years ago, what, there's no ETF, right? A lot of these institutions aren't participating.

Larry Fink is not on television acting as the, you know, CMO of Bitcoin, right? Like all this stuff. And so in a weird way, just the passage of time, the normalization, I think you get more capital, more interest that the media actually now treats it much more like an asset that is not going away. They will still claim it's dead or, you know, you guys are idiots for putting in your portfolio or you're too bullish or, you know, whatever their critique is. But people forget, I mean, five years ago, if you said that you thought Bitcoin was going to a hundred grand, these people were, they'd crucify you, right? I mean, they literally were like, you guys are stupid this thing is complete zero yeah and so what i think is interesting is bitcoin has passed

into you know kind of the the major leagues is the way i think about it i think stable coins have as well but that long tail of crypto i mean it's not like you guys ran out and filed for you know 50 crypto altcoin etfs right and so i just don't see interest in that stuff in what i consider like the major leagues of finance. Yeah. I think there's an aspect of that level of patience, which really rings loudly in my ears. And the first time this kind of concept was driven home to me, I was listening to the All In pod, and they were talking about internet stocks like Amazon, like the winners. What was happening to their stocks after the blow off in 2000, right? As and NASDAQ took 15 years to break even.

And it's just the rotation in the ownership of those stocks, right? Where people who had lost money were selling for tax reasons and then new buyers would come in, but then the price would go up and the people were like, oh, I'm even, I'm out.

And there's just, it was a multi-year process. I don't know if there's a good word for it. If there is, I don't know what it is, but I find that's very similar to like what's happened to NVIDIA over the last nine months, right? Fabulous stock over the last five years, right? But over the last nine months, despite this huge compute shortage, it's been grinding, you know? And I just think it's just the replacement of ownership. And I think that's happening in Bitcoin. And it's almost

foreseeable, right? We were talking, if you remember, at the end of last year, and we were basically saying this was going to happen. It was going to be quiet. We're both big Bitcoin owners, I believe, right? But we're like, it's just going to be boring. And I think part of it is that churn is a negative word, but you know what I mean? It's like replacement. Maybe it's a re-energizing or something of the ownership base. Jordy Visser calls it like a silent IPO, right? As you basically have like in a normal IPO, you have all the private investors and they basically are handing it to the institutions of the public market and it's like changing of the guard, right? And his point is basically that is what Bitcoin has been going through over the last

year or so is this replacement or the changing of hands from what are really the hardcore retail individual Bitcoiners. Some portion of them, not all of them, but some portion of them have been selling and you can see where the buying is coming from. And the question is just how long will it take for that changeover to happen? Now, the nice thing I believe is that when the institutions hold Bitcoin, they don't really sell that much, right? And so you're actually almost taking it from people who did have really strong kind of diamond hands, and you're handing it to professional diamond hands. And so that should lay the groundwork. But I also think the volatility compressing, a lot of Bitcoiners like Bitcoin because it was super volatile. The thing that

scared away the institutions attracted the individuals. Now, I think that we've reached a volatility point where the institutions are interested, which means that the cowboys of finance, they're like, eh, is it going to go up 30% a year? Where's the thing that's going to go up 200%. Memory stocks, let's go. Right? Yeah. So I do think that there's this very interesting dynamic of you have people who are early to a lot of these trends. What they're actually seeking is the asymmetry and the volatility. If Bitcoin's asymmetry is gone and now you basically have something that compounds at 30% a year for the next decade, any traditional investor would be ecstatic. But the hardcore Bitcoiners that were there for the volatility and the quote unquote

fun. They're like, the stock market does that. They'd be ecstatic, but they'd be thrilled if that correlation came down. Correct. Because that's the, who needs more cues, right? That's kind of the thing. I like the silent IPO concept. I've been watching NVIDIA, obviously it's the biggest holding in SMA, so I watch it very closely. But SoftBank last year announced they were selling, their early investor in NVIDIA, they were selling all their NVIDIA. And that's kind of what your point is, right? It's like an IPO process, like they were getting out, they probably have other things that they can make 10 trillion times their money at, right? But yeah, interesting. It's also like, what is your game, right? If I think of you and VanEck,

I think that you have a very specific game that you guys play, right? Both in terms of, as you and I have talked over the years about your personal portfolio or the firm's, you know, kind of allocation of capital, but also the products that you offer, right? I think it's a very unique approach and mentality compared to take the exact opposite extreme. The 25-year-old who's just started to make money and is basically saying, my W-2 is not going to get me any sort of financial security. I got to go and take max risk right now. Their allocation is going to look very different than what VanEck is doing, right? I think that that is part of this of Bitcoin was super attractive because there's also people buying it. They knew the world was betting against

them and you were kind of get going to get paid if you were right if you think of prediction markets today like that's kind of what people are doing right like people are looking for what's the thing that is mispriced and maybe bitcoin is getting better priced like the world understands it more and so if it's better priced you're just not going to have as much asymmetry to it yeah could be all right um let's talk about uh international equities in general you guys have been i think very big proponents to this early in the van eck days that was a big focus but i know that you're pretty excited about India and some of the stuff that's going on there. Talk us through what you're seeing. Yeah. I mean, nothing really new. So if you take my 10-year kind of investment philosophy

in 2036, looking back, what's going to be one of the obvious things that's happening today? Don't just focus on what's happening in the headlines in the newspapers, but a very powerful trend. And looking back, if you look back at capitalism, like 400 years, you want to invest in the countries that are just pro-business, right? That the government has a clear set of rules and stays out of the way. India has really implemented a very strong set of pro-business kind of enablers over the last five years under Modi. One important thing as well is a technological basis, right? So effectively, the cost of cell phones in India went down to something that 900 million Indians can afford. And now they have digital IDs and can move all kinds of paperwork

and taxes and everything. It's more transparent, but that is a very important part. And then they've restructured labor laws, bankruptcy laws, everything to make it easier, taxes between provinces to make it easier to do business in India. Anyway, the result is you have the highest GDP growth, and it's supposed to be as big as continental Europe in 10 years. Of course, I started talking about this a year and a half ago, and India has underperformed, I think, every market. But I don't care. I'm just saying in 10 years, do you want 1% of your portfolio in India, or do you want 5% or something, given, I think, what I just said is a very high conviction in my mind. Now, there's a lot of negatives about the Indian market or the large cap companies.

They're being attacked by AI, you know, just like the consulting firms here, like the emphasis is. So, I mean, we could spend an hour talking about the pros and cons of India, but that's kind of my general thesis there. What do you do? So you do the work, you come up with this thesis that, hey, India is going to be a growth sector or a growth geography. I want to go and get both myself and also our clients access to the Indian market, right? You guys create some products there. It doesn't perform for the first year and a half. Do you get more excited? Do you start to question the thesis? Do you go and redo the work? Like, like just walk us through just using this as one example. There's, I don't know, over the years you've been running VanEck, I don't know

how many thesis you've had, right? Some of them will work. Some of them won't. At what point do you say to yourself, Hey, maybe I got it wrong versus no, I'm right. And it's just early. And And so that patience, that long-term thinking is really what will pay off here. That's a great question. So I started doing these like quarterly outlooks and they're on the internet. So you can look at my track record and I wanted to start keeping score. And one of the most important things I realized is to be clear about the timeframe of what you're talking about.

So if I say India, usually I'm saying 10 years, right? But sometimes like the opportunities in BDCs, I think that's short term. So I think that's this quarter. Like, I'm a strong buyer of BDC's Blue Owl this quarter. I'm a buyer of Bitcoin this quarter. I was a seller in January. So that's short term. To answer your question, we run client portfolios and been doing it for about five years now.

And the models, the quant screens will slap me down if I have a 10-year view and I'm wrong, right? And I think over that time period, I've gotten better at at least communicating what I have in mind. 10 years for me as a personal investor, which I think a lot of people have some of their portfolio they run themselves, who cares? Who cares if India underperforms by 5% in a quarter against China? Like, you know, if you're right over the 10-year period, that's like worrying about NVIDIA, you know, when it had its 80% drawdown. You just buy more if you're convicted in the trade. But you're right. Our clients do care more about monthly and quarterly performance, and our risk screens will affect that. And we don't really even try to go after the quarterly things in most of our models. They're longer term than that. So it's more the medium and longer term, but under quant controls.

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people would have argued that we were entering into a low inflation, high growth economy and people were very bullish. And I think that they were saying, look, we're going into a midterm year. We have a president sitting in Washington, D.C. who is going to juice the stock market and everyone was kind of really going risk on from that perspective. At the same time, we then get into the war with Iran. Oil prices spike. Energy goes up, right? Inflationary pressures start to come. CPI starts to creep back up after it had been falling. And so then people say, well, hold on a second here. If we're getting inflation, then we should be getting higher interest rates. If higher interest rates are coming, then maybe this is going to be a headwind for stocks.

And then you go and you look at the private market and you see that there are at least three, if not more trillion dollars or larger companies that are supposed to be coming to market in the next 12 months or so. And so people start getting worried about supply coming in. Then you go and you look at the economic data, which maybe is telling a somewhat rosy picture, but then you hear people and they're like, I am underwater. This sucks, right? Gas is too high. Groceries are too high, et cetera. My point is, depending on where you look, there's a different story. So it's very complex and it's very dynamic because, I don't know, 100 days ago versus now, the story looks very different. How do you navigate that as an investor? Like what you've been doing this long time, like what do you do to make sure that you capitalize on opportunities, but also not panic, sell by, you know, and kind of have unforced errors? Well, you identified the big questions I ask myself when I think about the 10-year trends,

right? What is fiscal policy, government spending? What is monetary policy? What's the Fed going to do? What are interest rates going to do? My thesis coming into this year is we are not going to learn anything. We're in a stable environment in 2026. And literally, we could just go to sleep and wake up on January 1st, 2027, nothing will have happened on fiscal or monetary. And I'm sticking with that. Generally speaking, the tax bill went through last year. And even if the Democrats win the midterm, they're not going to be able to change much on that because the president will just veto it. So fiscal is kind of set. Warsh, like Besson did, I think, a fabulous job at kind of articulating a less activist Fed stance. And they stuck the landing. I mean, like, that's

what I call it, like wars getting in there. You know, everyone was worried about all this kind of stuff. And what does Trump do the day he's, you know, he's put in office, he says, go do what you want. Remember how much time we wasted talking about anyway, sorry. So there was visibility on monetary policy i i don't think this i just fundamentally look at this iran conflict as temporary i just i mean yes it'll be bad for government spending inflation's up i don't think the fed's going to react to that like i think that's their whole point is that the fed doesn't like you think the central bank can affect gas prices like not not one person in a hundred in america thinks that well you know right except for the a couple of people on cnbc but here's

Here's what's crazy to me is the Fed, I think they're smart enough to know that they can't. But what I actually think is a little nerve wracking is that I do think there are some politicians that think they can affect gas prices. And so if you go down to, you know, take New York City, we both live in New York and World Cup tickets are expensive. The new mayor is like, well, I'm going to go and I'm going to figure out how to get $50 World Cup tickets. And when you realize what they did, you're like, I mean, this is crazy town, right?

By the way, the people who get the $50 World Cup tickets are ecstatic. They're incredibly happy, but it's just not a sustainable thing that you can go and you can do, right? And so if all of a sudden the mayor of New York or a couple of other politicians around the country, if you said to them, hey, we're going to give you any tool you want, get gas prices down, they would come up with insane ideas on how to do that. So in a weird way, like I actually believe, and I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the Fed usually, right?

But I do believe that they are intelligent and they understand kind of what levers they can pull and can't pull. It's the politicians that seem to not be that smart and say like, oh, I just need to claim victory in the headlines. Well, Trump waived the gas tax, right? That's $3.5 billion a month. That's more government spending to your point. But I mean, big picture, if you just focus on these macro trends, I think it's easier. And I think it's more transparent this year that there's no big monetary shocks, no big government spending shocks. And I think probably it'll extend into next year as well. Sure, it does mean short-term rates aren't going to fall a lot because I never really thought that was going

to happen anyway. They could even rise a little bit. Does that really change the world? I don't really think so. My biggest concern by far is government spending, to your point. Don't trust politicians. But people don't... When will that get priced into markets, Anthony? I do all these client meetings and surveys. And I'm saying, I ask, do you think the government will meet its obligations in the next 10 years? Will it default? What do you think? They all, 80, 90%, absolutely. And then I'm saying, okay, social security, unless they change the tax regime, will not have enough money in 2033 or 2034, right? So that's within my 10 year. Do you think the government's going to somehow fix that problem? No one thinks

are going to fix the problem, but they don't believe. Even afterwards, they still say the government's going to meet all its obligations. I'm like, that is dissonance. In your mind, you're saying something, but you're not conscious of that. And so it's all about the timing. I absolutely think it's going to be a problem. Every financial crisis in US history has always come out of the banking system because banks are unstable, right? Government has always marched up and, you know, bailed out, let's call it an industry or Wall Street. Who's going to bail out the Fed? When our 10-year rates go up to, you know, if and when that happens, who's, like, it'll be a new thing for everybody. And I don't know about our portfolios.

Do you think that- When, I don't know. Do you think that the government's going to default in the next 10 years? They're not going to pay their social security. I want to write an op-ed saying, I'm sorry. You're not going to get your money. You're only going to get 80 cents on the dollar, and I'm sorry for the people that really need it.

And then they're going to whack up the rest of society to try to make for a shortfall. But David Friedberg on The All In Pod talks about this a lot. The states have a lot of obligations that they can't meet. I mean, if New York and California continue to drive business out of their states, their pension obligations are going to eat the economy alive. So they're not going to meet those obligations either. I call that a default. I mean, it's, they will probably pay the interest in principle on their debt because otherwise they couldn't access the financial markets, but they're going to stop paying people what they owe. And then what are the courts going to do?

Force them. I've always wondered, should they just, sorry for that rant. No, no, but I always wonder, should they stop promising things to young people? Right. So like what always strikes me as a little crazy is, okay, so let's all objectively agree that there is a timeline as to when they're going to run out of money. Some people may think it's a little earlier, a little bit later, but they're going to run out of the money. Why would you keep making promises today, knowing you're not going to have the money, right? Now they may argue because we need those people to pay in, right? It's kind of like a Ponzi scheme. So like we need someone to give us fresh money so we can go and we can use it to pay out our obligations. But it does feel like

uh politicians are really good just like keep kicking the can down the road and so what i always go to is like what does the quote-unquote reset look like is it just hey you get 80 cents on the dollar again those people would be very upset i understand why i would be very empathetic towards them and and and feel like they would have a great argument but for people outside of that cohort it would not be as destructive if that was the only thing that was happening i don't think that's the only thing that's going to happen they are going to have to debase the dollar they're going to have to do a bunch of these things all

at once to be able to address this problem. And I think that's the part that people don't kind of see past is, again, this is like pretty complex stuff that they're going to have to do to be able to address this issue. I think the sad thing is that day arrives and who do you point the finger at? Do you point it at the Republicans? Do you point it at the Democrats? Because they're both responsible. And so then what are you going to do, blame prior politicians? That doesn't really help the recipients. So I wonder if there's a role, you know, for us, like people in the markets being a little bit louder on this topic. Anyway, that's the separate. Because the trustees are very clear. They'll write the annual report saying 80 cents on the dollar in 2033. So they'll have a

clear conscience or whatever. I mean, they've done what they're supposed to be doing. It's the politicians that are really shortchanging the average person. One of the aspects of investing today that I think has really changed over the last five or six years and a lot of it i think is because of covid and the spending etc is um if i go and i look at a lot of the economic data everything looks pretty good right i mean there's some risk areas but for the most part it looks like the u.s economy is growing stock market is up inflation is not at nine percent or you know whatever if you go and you talk to people it is a whole different story and a lot of people point to like the michigan consumer sentiment survey i think that it's

complete trash and there's a lot of sampling issues, et cetera. But let's use it as a directional, like the stock market is going up and sentiment is going down. People are saying, I'm in financial pain. The data is not necessarily showing that as much. How do you balance these two? Do you look at the data? Do you listen to people? Do you have to kind of take them both together? I think it's a great question. There's been a collapse in the kind of accuracy of sentiment and trust in polling. And it's not just financial markets. I can't recall it off the top of my head, but it's consistent. And if you look at trust in institutions, for example, trust in Congress, trust in, I think, I don't know what's retained it. I think small business and religion is about

it. But academia, large businesses, everything. And sentiment, you're right, is just wacky out touch. It doesn't even match, like their own behavior doesn't match what they're saying about themselves, right? So they're saying, yeah, sentiment is horrible, yet they're spending, right? And that's, so I don't know. I think there's been a politicization, a little bit of sentiment data, but that's- Well, we 100% know that to be true, right? And again, I kind of look at this as, and over the years I've gotten very jaded where I'm just like, both political parties than most are like full of shit. Right. And so like, okay, let's use it as a starting point. But if you go and you look at the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey in particular,

they do a great job of publishing a lot of the source data. And so people smarter than me, aka Tom Lee, has gone and actually done the analysis. And what he shows is it used to be they would survey 50% Republicans, 50% Democrats. And the reason why that was important is because you know, Democrats will tell you inflation is going to like 6% and Republicans will say it's going to one and a half percent. Right. And so they're just wildly political. You know, their brains are broken by politics. They're talking their books. Yeah, of course. Well, the sentiment was kind of middle of the road. And so you kind of had this healthy tension. Some people thought it was good. Some people thought it was bad. And, you know, here we go.

In the last three years or so, they have shifted to a lot more online polling. When they did that, the construction of the survey sample has changed. So now they are actually surveying two thirds Democrats, one thirds Republican. Now I'm not going to claim because I actually don't think that they're doing it intentionally. I think it's probably where they advertise in the survey, where they get the people, you know, there's all these like components that go into it. Yeah. But immediately by now having two times more Democrats than Republicans and the Democrats tend to be more pessimistic on the economy going forward, et cetera, sentiment starts to pull down. And so I look at that. I'm like, okay, there are probably a lot of issues with the stuff. If I tweet though, and I say the American economy is rocking. Oh my God. I mean, you just read the comments and you're like, by the way, there's a lot of people who disagree with that.

And so again, that's anecdotal. But I do wonder sometimes, is that actually a better signal for sentiment than the survey? Because there's a bunch of people who are like, look, man, gas is X dollars a gallon. Grocery bill, it's up 20%, 30%. and so i think that in finance we look at inflation and that's the thing we worry about but really uh average american family is just looking at i don't care if the inflation happened in 21 22 or if it happened in 26 all i know is it used to cost me 60 bucks to go to the grocery store now it cost me 90 somebody did this to me right right you know and they're and i don't even know if sometimes they even blame it on one political party the other they just care about the aggregate increase in price, and they don't understand inflation, when it happened, who did it. It's just, it's too expensive. And that's driving a lot of the sentiment, right?

It is too expensive. I mean, honestly, they're right, right? We just had a huge increase cumulatively, and that makes more sense, right? To your point, right? Economic statistics can, short-term economic statistics can be very misleading. I throw out all sentiment data, really in the way I think about markets. And so in the spending example, you put more weight on the spending data than you would on what people are saying. Yeah. And why do you think people are still spending? And I also don't try... Look, I'm looking for these big trends. I don't really care that much about wiggles and data. I think... Look, the biggest question I've asked myself statistically for this year, by far, by far, employment, right? Because the big concern

is AI takes people's jobs. And is that happening? And you can see some of these hyperscalers cutting back on their employment. Is this the beginning of something? I published like some 20-year survey data from Morgan Stanley in January, or borrowed it. And you can see huge changes like secretaries, right? 75% fall in secretarial jobs over a 20-year period, but it's over 20 years. You just don't see employment. This was my conclusion, but you never know. We'll see at year end, but you just don't see big moves in employment because our economy is so vibrant, Anthony. That's what's so cool about it. And I was really persuaded by a futurist who said, listen, we threw 40 million new people into the workforce and you could barely

see the blip in the employment trends. And that 40 million was women entering the workforce after World War II. You just can't see it. And once I saw that, I'm like, this is nothing happening from AI that's going to dramatically throw half the workforce out of... What is AI doing to your guys' business. Like where are you guys seeing disruption and obstacles versus where are you seeing efficiency gains or advantages in using it? I mean, it's empowering researchers, right? Just generally. And what I laugh about a little bit is the knowledge flow within VanEck from department to department has changed. It used to be, you always went to legal for your first questions. And now legal is kind of like only if they need to produce the document, right? Because

you can do the research yourself that's true for you know like we were checking some stuff on our website which you think would be marketing but it wasn't marketing someone another department like built a tool to kind of like check for stuff on our website um and in hours right so uh what we're seeing is a lot of productivity we spend about 750 000 a year right now on on claude we're moving more from chat to Claude. And, you know, you think of we have 550 people, that's not a lot of expense. I could see that going up. I did that partially because I call 2026 the year of corporate AI, right? Because Anthropic on the LLM side, and then, you know, NVIDIA last week with its earnings broke out the hyperscaler demand for their hardware from kind of the rest of the world,

including uh you know companies and so i really think we are providing this extra compute um demand so um what i find interesting i went a little back to the markets there but it was that helpful we we published our use of tokens on our on our website i know you guys did i find it pretty cool and one of the things i'm seeing across the internet we are seeing inside of our companies like you've take the cfo sylvia product right um it was like roll this out to everyone get everyone using as many tokens as possible. Companies had token leaderboards and all this kind of crazy stuff.

And then all of a sudden everyone realized, wait a minute. Publish it for Sylvia? We do not, no. But- You should. No, it's- A lot of radical transparency.

The token usage exploded and then we have been very successful in cutting it. And I think that this is- That's the dynamic, right? Something costs money, you jigger how you use it. Yeah, and industry-wide. I talked to friends who run private companies, friends who run public companies,

investment firms, et cetera. everyone 12 months ago, 18 months ago told their teams, go use AI. You have to start using this stuff, become, you know, AI native, go, go and figure out how to use these tools. Sometimes they did trainings internally. They built tools, like whatever they could do to enhance the productivity of their teams. They did. Then they started to get the bill and they said, wait a minute. I like the productivity. I don't like the bill. And so over the last six months or so, what I see a lot of teams doing is they're saying, how do we keep as much productivity gain as we can but i want this bill to come down and so what people started to realize just like all new

technologies is like hey every time we refresh this page it was hitting the model right we don't need to do that right let's stop doing that and you start to see these bills come down and so it'd be fascinating inside of uh like an anthropic yeah the per query token usage yeah my guess is probably coming down some of it's because things they're doing some of it's because of the way the users are using their tools. But the adoption of AI is exploding higher. So you get this net gain for a company like Anthropic, but actually the individual companies are trying to figure out, okay, how do I get this bill down, but still get the efficiency gain? And so that I think is maybe one of the most bullish components of AI is it's not just a way of existing customers and they're

using AI more. What they're doing is they're actually trying to cut back their bills, yet your business is adding $10 billion of revenue a month, right? I mean, there may not be a more bullish sign than that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we shared the data, an investment colleague said, well, what's VanEck's usage? And I said, let's share it. I was surprised, right? So a couple of things. OpenAI is less transparent about their token usage for some reason than Claude. And Claude is supposed to have the compute problem, right? But we could only get estimated token usage from OpenAI, whereas Claude would actually publish, it was like order magnitude higher. It was like millions and millions of tokens a day, like, you know, anyway, that we had to guess with OpenAI.

But our overall token usage on Claude had only sort of doubled in a four-month period, which didn't feel right, but it's to your point. People are using it more efficiently. And the IT department, that nine months was completely, like literally, I heard that people worried about their jobs. These people are providing, they're like enhancing. They're all in. Well, they're enhancing. Having the IT background makes you so much more productive, right? I mean, vibe coding is fun, but having access to the underlying data and being able to optimize use of AI is way better. Now, what will it take for the AI to make the investment decisions? Right now, everyone is using it for research. They're using it for things around. When will you feel comfortable

giving your money to an AI or when will VanEck offer some sort of product where the AI makes a hundred percent of the investment decisions? So, I mean, we use AI already, right? If you think that all our actively managed funds and all the analysts are AI empowered, right? So that's already happening. We have an ETF that sorts huge amounts of data using AI. And I guess that's fully AI in a sense. It's processing social media data, like likes and dislikes and comments on your tweets and that kind of stuff, if you talk about stocks. But I'll tell you what the difficulty is. maybe AI is really good. It presumes a lot of trading that's better sitting within a Citadel or a Jane Street than within an ETF. Because the cost of transacting, if you're not really

good at it, is exorbitant. And then the last component, Anthony, that I think really delays it is, do you really trust an AI not to go off the rails? And we might be okay, but to persuade a customer, like this is a really smart AI as opposed to all the other ones, that's a tough sales proposition. One of your big bets is India. One of my big thesis over the next 10 years is that the people actually trust the AI more than the humans. And there will be some tipping point. I don't know when it will happen or what the thing will be, but, um, we have people who reach out to us from the CFO Sylvia user base and they ask us all the time, can I just give Sylvia my money?

Now we don't do that, right. For a whole bunch of different reasons. Um, but what they're essentially saying is she's superhuman intelligence. She's smart. I already trust her to give me insights or information. What really is happening is I query, she gives me information. I'm then the bottleneck and I have to go into the portfolio and make a decision, but she's already telling me the thing that she thinks is a good idea, a bad idea, or the pros, cons,

whatever. Why don't I just remove the human from the loop? Why don't I just let her do it? It's fascinating because when I've always thought of AI, I've thought of high-frequency trading and those types of things where it's almost like humans can't do it. What these people seem to be saying is, I actually just want to outsource the decision-making. And that to me, that's not rules-based. That is, you know, kind of this almost black box to a degree. I don't know if I'd be ready to do that yet right now. I'd love to ask you more questions. Like if I put my data into Sylvia, right. And I had two brokerage accounts, but 80% of my net worth was in apartments. I rent apartments, like whatever that was like, but culturally my parents said,

put your money in real estate. I like to walk around and collect the rent from people and kick them out. I don't know who likes to do that. But anyway, is Sylvia going to tell them that you have too much risk in New York real estate? Let's say you're doing it here. And then what, move? Or I mean, reduce that part of your portfolio. And you're saying people are like, yeah, that's right. I actually don't really care if I own any apartments. I don't really believe that. Yeah. So I think that there's two components. One is it will definitely say, hey, you've got heavy concentration here. You're very exposed to interest rates or whatever the thing is. You can explain, I'm not going to change it, disregard this, right? So there's a back and

forth, no different than a financial advisor, right? Or maybe a CFO or an accountant. That's my point. They're not going to totally give or take. Correct. I don't think it's just like, here's all of my money, all of my assets, like do whatever you want. What I think is more interesting is somebody may say, you know, actually what I want is I want to give a hundred grand to this and no different than an actively managed ETF. I want maybe exposure to the AI trade, go find, you know, certain types of stocks that are very asymmetric that could double every year in the AI space or whatever. Yeah. That to me, it's almost like a self-contained, you know, AI driven type

strategy it's a blending right it's kind of rules based it's kind of not it's got the llm i call that mainly human because the human is saying i've made the decision you go execute i'm totally with you like just get the agent to execute it rebalance it whatever or remind you that maybe you want to rebalance but that the gate of the kill switch is still with the human is how yeah i do think the i do think the kill switch and the ability to shut it off obviously will always human the other thing i think it's really interesting is um uh you've probably seen these apps or these tools where people scroll a lot on the internet right you know and so yeah yeah and they track it and so you basically though you can say like hey only let me do it for one

hour and then once you hit the one hour you literally can't log into the services until the next day or you know maybe pay five bucks or something right uh i do think that there's something about investing where like uh stanley drachman always tells the famous story of like he knew in 2000, but he like couldn't sit on the sidelines and he bought at the top and lost like $2 billion in, you know, six weeks or something. And he's like, you know, somebody asked him what he learned. He goes, I didn't learn anything. I knew I shouldn't have done that. But I did it anyways. Right. He's like, I'm not an idiot. I knew not to do that. And I still did it. And so I do think that's where AI becomes really interesting of like, you know, you go to do

something and it says like, are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you 100% positive you want to do this? Are you not panicking and chasing momentum? It's almost like a co-pilot is probably overused, but a coach or some sort of sounding board that I could see being valuable. One of the coolest things I've learned is behavioral economics, right? Or just how we are built as humans. Our decision-making processes are biased to kind of make the same kinds of mistakes. And what you're talking about is, I actually talked about this with my summer interns is you need rules or tricks to combat some of your biases. The bias that I care about the most is recency bias, where everyone just thinks, oh, this is the trend and that's

going to continue. I'm like, no. History and markets can be very discontinuous. But when you think about it, the whole retirement savings system has been driven by the ability of people just to say, I'm putting my money in a 401k and the default, right, is the target date fund. That is so good for people because they used to always put their money in cash. The amount of wealth that that trick or tool has generated is probably enormous, you know? So anyway, so I think you're right. AI can maybe be your buddy or your trick or tool and apply that in more places. But that's also the role that financial advisors play. Yeah. I think that that makes sense. We've known each other now for a while. I've never asked you this question, so I'm very interested

in your answer, but there's a quote on your website. It says, my father built this firm on the idea that the world is constantly changing and that by understanding those shifts early, you could create real opportunity for clients. That belief still guides us today. And when you first started at VanEck, he had pretty much made two major bets from my understanding. There was kind of the international equities, and then there was gold. And I think that he, probably a lot of people did not agree on the gold thing at first, but it obviously was a very smart thing for them to do. What do you think your father would say now to you, or how would he look at the firm? I mean, you know, this thing's grown to 200 billion in assets. You've completely diversified away from

gold, although you still got to have a, still a big gold business. And this quote about, you know, just constantly staying on top of the shifts, you guys have done a pretty good job. Yeah. I mean, look, these 10-year shifts are, I think, very profound. And you look how they can distort the US equity market, the AI trade. But it's not magic. And we leaned into emerging markets as well. A lot of people did, right? They saw the rise of China. We're not alone in seeing the rise of India. Don't mean to be alone. We're not looking to be the only people out there, right? So to answer your question, my dad, I think he'd totally be all in on India. He was, well, no, I mean, he was a globalist, right? His parents were European. So he always

thought of the world as a globe. And commodities bias too, Anthony, I realize has affected me too, because all those markets are always global, right? So I think India, definitely. AI, I don't know, we never really talked technology a lot. And the way I look at the world now, technology really is an important trend for industries. And he would definitely be worried about government spending. He would definitely be worried about that. I feel like that is like seared into the family lineage, just the government spending is a problem. Well, but it isn't all the time, right? It's not all the time. But we went nuts relative to other countries during COVID. We went berserk. And I think there were no consequences to our markets. And that's why we have continued

to be really irresponsible. And we'll see if we get there. All right. Working with some people to find out more about VanEck. VanEck.com, Jan VanEck, number three on Twitter, and then LinkedIn, you know, try to share my favorite pod. You've been amping up the social media a little bit. A little bit. Yeah, you're doing a pretty good job. Tell the story. All right, we'll do it again in the future. Thanks.