Matthew Mežinskis: Bitcoin Is Cheap and Nobody Believes It
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/matthew-mezinski-bitcoin-cheap-power-law-percentile
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/matthew-mezinski-bitcoin-cheap-power-law-percentile-transcript
Published: 2026-10-27
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:36] Marty Bent: Matty, good afternoon.

[0:39] Matthew Mežinskis: Marty, good to be here, my friend. As your longest running guest, most anti-commie, anti-Nazi guest, I'm always glad to be back on.

[0:47] Marty Bent: It's always great to have you on, sir. Wild times we're living in. Wild times. You're just saying I need to get off Twitter.

[0:56] Matthew Mežinskis: I have been saying that, yeah, for a few years now myself. I find if I go to conferences and really need to link with people via Twitter DMs, then put it back on. But a few years now, I've had it off the phone. I don't know. How are you feeling? You in the doom spiral?

[1:16] Marty Bent: No. I mean, we got midterms here. next week. And so I think the, the algos are being turned up to stoke fear to get people to vote one way or another. Um, so it's just observing that. Then the AI stuff is pretty crazy, what's going on.

[1:36] Matthew Mežinskis: It is. But you guys are in the golden age, right? The golden age of America.

[1:42] Marty Bent: Oh yeah, baby. All systems go. All systems go.

[1:47] Matthew Mežinskis: There's nothing to complain about, my friend. We're good.

[1:49] Marty Bent: We got everyone and their mother building data centers, locking down power deals. They're handing out Starlinks like candy over here.

[1:59] Matthew Mežinskis: Mm-hmm. You're led by the doctor. You have a fearless leader in the doctor. And he's not a doctor. You remember the doctor, don't you? Which one? Don't you remember this tweet came out? It was a very, very controversial tweet with the Ivan evangelical, right, by your fearless leader. And he said, this is not a picture of Jesus. This is a picture of a doctor.

[2:27] Marty Bent: Oh, yes. Yes. So

[2:30] Matthew Mežinskis: you're led by the doctor. So I

[2:32] Marty Bent: forgot about that. This is the other crazy thing about, about Twitter. It's like 24-hour news cycle. That thing is— I had to— I had to—

[2:39] Matthew Mežinskis: 6 months. 6 months is already way deep in the recesses.

[2:43] Marty Bent: I had to go deep in In the mental random access memory of my brain to pull that one out.

[2:48] Matthew Mežinskis: Well, this is the beauty of like not getting on Twitter much is, you know, you just barely see this nonsense. So yeah. Yeah. But you know, to each their own. Ignorance is, ignorance is bliss, I guess.

[2:59] Marty Bent: I mean, over the weekend, I don't know if you saw it, but he was parading around Nicki Minaj saying, look at her ass.

[3:04] Matthew Mežinskis: I did not.

[3:07] Marty Bent: And this is true. This is a true thing that's happened here.

[3:12] Matthew Mežinskis: All right. Well, next time I'm on, I'll do a little search for that.

[3:16] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[3:17] Matthew Mežinskis: Can't wait.

[3:18] Marty Bent: Can't wait. The Bitcoin price sitting at a boob price right now, $80,080. Boobo. Yeah. It's all been quiet on the Western front of Bitcoin. I feel like we're in a consolidation period for the last couple months.

[3:33] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. But generally, I'd say still pretty positive from that August I was much more bearish in the summer and happy to be proven wrong on that bump that we got in August. And so far holding. And, you know, I would be highly, highly doubtful if we go back to, you know, $60,000, even $70,000 levels, maybe for a quick, quick minute, but Yeah.

[4:06] Marty Bent: Flirting with

[4:07] Matthew Mežinskis: it. I chart this stuff out and we're looking at it most days.

[4:11] Marty Bent: I mean, we do this every 3 months.

[4:15] Matthew Mežinskis: Yes, we do.

[4:16] Marty Bent: And we've been doing this for 7, 8 years now almost?

[4:23] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, it's going to be 8. It's going to be about to be 9 years actually. next year.

[4:33] Marty Bent: I know we've both been hanging around the rim of the corn for quite some time now, 13 going on 14 years, which is hard to believe. But I tweeted this out like a month ago, the dislocation between market structure, I guess the price of Bitcoin. And I know looking at your charts, power law trend, it's or power trend line, it was near historic lows, but it felt like the bear market wasn't as severe as bear markets past from a price perspective. But the dislocation between what I would call market structure, pretty shallow bear market and short bear market, and the sentiment is larger than I've ever seen it. The sentiment is very reminiscent to the summer of 2015 to me these days, and the price is hovering around $80,000, which is— I don't know, there's a disconnect between price and sentiment right now, I think.

[5:39] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. Yeah. I think that you're right. If you back it up though and take a look at the numbers, we're definitely in cheap territory. In fact, the same thing as those 2015 lows or 2018 lows or 2022 lows. But I still remain pretty confident. I mean, it's— we do this every time, it rebounds every time. And I say it often in my streams, especially when we get to these levels and, you know, when we're around $16,000, $17,000 at the end of 2022, all the FTX debacle was in full swing, and Peter Zeihan, the geopolitical genius, was on Joe Rogan saying Bitcoin was $17,000 overvalued at $16,000. Those are moments to remember because often people spout off about Bitcoin without knowing anything about it, even if they may be somewhat learned in other spheres. I'm not saying he's not learned in certain things. It's important to remember because cycles do repeat and we are in the exact same scenario percentage-wise, percentile-wise now as we were in those periods. Yeah.

[7:05] Marty Bent: You tweeted out on Friday, Bitcoin sits at the 8.4th percentile on 17-year power trend. Gold At the 93.5. So we've got this gold still hovering up there.

[7:20] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. Yeah. So we can look at these. I don't know if you want.

[7:26] Marty Bent: Yeah, let's do it live.

[7:27] Matthew Mežinskis: Usually, dear listener, when we do these, it's a little bit better on the YouTube streams. Or when you launch on Spotify, do you have the live videos going as well? I think you do, right?

[7:41] Marty Bent: We do on Apple now. Spotify's been a little finicky with Fountain. Fountain is trying to communicate with the Spotify team like, hey, we have video all over the place. But you can watch the video on Apple or Fountain if you're listening on Spotify right now.

[7:55] Matthew Mežinskis: Okay. So again, just brass tacks, being in the— trying to get the macro trend and not get too worked up. The nice rainbow-looking log-linear trend of Bitcoin with a power trend, 96% R-squared. You go log-log, get a nice straight line, beautiful trend. Uh, here's, here's the Peter Zion moment, right? It's here, end of 2022, 16 and change. And you see here, we actually went lower Uh, and set really like an all-time low here in, uh, in June, uh, when that was $60,000 Bitcoin for the time, for the, you know, for the relative time of Bitcoin relative to the power trend. And so now, yeah, we're even lower than that, uh, tweet that I did last week.

[9:56] Marty Bent: Yeah. What's been going on with gold and the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio?

[10:04] Matthew Mežinskis: Right. So let's look at gold first. Let me just pull it up here, just a quick second. So with gold, I called this one pretty accurately. Gold's trend is much less explosive, in fact, than Bitcoin's. It's been on a hell of a tear last 3, 4 years, no doubt. But if you look at the gold price here, just straight up gold price, and you go over a long, long macro trend, all right, this is linear scale, all right, linear. And then if we go log linear, get that straight line, and that's an expo trend. So gold, just like stocks, bonds, you know, I've said it 1,000 times, exponential trends.

[13:29] Marty Bent: I think that's, I think that's where the signal is too.

[13:32] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah.

[13:33] Marty Bent: Bitcoin price and other commodities.

[13:35] Matthew Mežinskis: Right. So here we got Bitcoin dollar, we got gold dollar. Now we'll go Bitcoin gold. All right. So this is interesting. First thing to notice is its power curve. Okay. We go log-log, a straight line. All right. So the Bitcoin price in terms of gold, that the power regression dominates here. Like it's not an exponential trend, which again shows us that something's going on more in Bitcoin land than it is in, you know, the world of gold. But what is interesting here is because of gold's massive success, relative to its history in the last 3, 4 years, you see this, like, you know, Bitcoin had a major low, right, in the winter and the summer.

[17:31] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, I think Bitcoiners need to do better. I'm sure you saw the headlines of the fusion reactor turning mercury into gold and every Bitcoiner and their mother running out and saying, oh, Peter Schiff, we can use alchemy to turn mercury into gold now.

[17:48] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. It's not the first time that such news has broken, but yeah.

[17:55] Marty Bent: Almost like that. If you look at it, I think mercury is something like $14,000 a gram to do something like that at scale. And then if you do successfully use a fusion reactor to turn mercury into gold, you have to bury it underground for 20 years to let all the nuclear waste dissipate from the asset. But the point being is you just look at the— you don't need to discover alchemy to shit on the gold bugs. Just look at this trend.

[18:28] Matthew Mežinskis: Correct. Correct. And it's still not the first instance, I think, in history where someone has demonstrated in a lab where it's possible to create gold. It's been demonstrated years before, as far as I know. So that's it.

[18:49] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean, let's go into base money now because I am interested with everything going on.

[18:53] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. Well, one more here on the— I had these quarterly candles now, just a simple one. I think these are actually helpful. If you look at the downtrends, right, in prior cycles, 2015, as you mentioned, was a real long one. 2018, 2019, relatively shorter, although we did have that fall in 2019 again, 2022. But bottom line is, I think if you just gloss over these trends, right? Of all the cycles down, it's at least 4 red candles and we've had 3 full red, right? From 2025. So 2025, 4th quarter was red. First 2 quarters this year were red and green, and now we're actually currently in a red.

[21:51] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean, just looking, eye testing, caveman TA, this chart looks like my favorite. Yeah. yen, euro, pound going opposite of the yuan, the dollar, and Bitcoin, it looks like.

[22:08] Matthew Mežinskis: Yep. Yep. And I'm not sure how much the yuan will continue there. That's interesting. I mean, sometimes the news cycle might be overhyped on some of these technical things, but you read the tea leaves, the Chinese seem to be worried. about their debt. You know, they're the largest— of course, the US always, it's a debt story, right? But the Chinese, even though they have a huge manufacturing base, they have the fastest growing debt. They have the largest debt of all, you know, developing countries and the second largest debt holding country in the world, basically. So it comes with economic growth. It's true. I'm not defending any of it, but that might face some headwinds as well. And again, all this stuff about the BRICS currencies or the yuan being like some sort of a new safe haven. I just don't see that at all. I think we agree it's going to be Bitcoin before it's going to be Chinese yuan.

[23:05] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I think that's, I mean, bringing the debt into focus here, big point of contention here in the United States, especially where considering where yields have drifted to. Obviously they've come off their highs and the last couple of weeks, but big point of contention here, which is how high can we let these yields go as we're rolling over all this debt? And then you have the Genius Act rules being set last week and this over-indexing on the front end of the yield curve by the Treasury with Scott Bessent at the helm. And that's been a very consistent topic of conversation on this show over the last 6 to 8 months is what's going on with yields and what's going on with the Treasury.

[24:42] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. Well, it's a longer-term thing. First of all, I would say I think it's much larger sort of, I don't know, what's the word, like sort of clickbait sort of a topic, right? Because the stablecoin market cap still, is it even $200 billion? I have it somewhere, but $100 and some billion. So you're checking me right now?

[25:13] Marty Bent: Yeah, I'm checking. We got Tether at $182 billion. Oh,

[25:19] Matthew Mežinskis: okay. So it's rising faster than I—

[25:22] Marty Bent: USDC. So it's like, yeah, $250 billion between USDC and Tether.

[25:27] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. So $250 billion. But then if you look at What M3 money represents, which is basically money that is most analogous to a stablecoin. Okay? So M3 money is repurchase agreements, Eurodollars, which I don't have, but I do have everything else part of the M3 stack, which is the broadest money. It's the most liquid, non-bank, non-insured deposits. All right? So money market funds, repurchase agreements, those types of assets, we're getting your $8 to $10 trillion in size, just dollars. And that doesn't even count eurodollars, which are offshore dollars, which are also analogous in some way to stablecoins, right? Because stablecoins are basically an offshore money market fund.

[28:07] Marty Bent: Yep.

[28:08] Matthew Mežinskis: Right? Which is a short-term seizing of the market that happened in September of 2019. The result of that was they had to raise asset purchases. They're doing that again, and they have been here from the end of last year, right? As Powell did what he said he was going to do, but usually they always overshoot it. So this is, I would say, eerily similar to 2019. It's just like, are we going to get that shot or shock of a a black swan, which would give them the excuse to monetize, give them an excuse to lower interest rates. That might even be preferable to them. But if they do not have that, then that seems like it's going to be pretty difficult for debtors to pay the creditors.

[29:26] Marty Bent: Yeah. It's interesting here. I guess the one difference between now and Q4, end of Q3, Q4 2019 is we're raising rates and it's still going up.

[29:39] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, correct. Correct. That is a difference. It's almost like it's actually the opposite situation because here they were just the standard targeting lower rates, rates were going down and they were purchasing more, printing money. And here they're actually able to do the opposite. and how long that can go. People think, what, there's a Fed meeting coming up this week? No. And people think that that might stay the same, might be a hike at the next meeting in December. So it is diverging from the 2019 story. But yeah, overall, that sort of trying to normalize the balance sheet, which happened from 2014 to 2019. And then even pre-crisis or pre-pandemic, we had this exploding of the balance sheet again, which showed that not all was well.

[30:54] Marty Bent: Well, we're doing a lot all at once right now, trying to reindustrialize, obviously tariffs we talked about. The AI trade, whatever you want to call it, build-out seems to be somewhat existential to the quality of economic growth moving forward. And as we're talking, Anthropic has released their S-1 to go public next week and Just reading the tea leaves here, doesn't seem too confident. The market doesn't seem too confident in what they released this morning.

[31:34] Matthew Mežinskis: Right.

[31:35] Marty Bent: That's been the big question is, can any of these companies get public? And if not, what message does that send the market? There's obviously hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars even locked up in this trade, for lack of a better term.

[31:56] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah.

[31:57] Marty Bent: Is that, to your point, is the 2019, 2020 equivalent of the COVID scare this time around? Is it like a bailout of this infrastructure build-out if it begins to puke?

[32:13] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. And 2019, well, in 2019 at least, I know people tried to read the tea leaves on, I think the yield curve inverted even in August of 2019. And there were rumors, I guess, if you really look back about what was happening in China in 2019, but really the market didn't even know at that time. So like, I don't think that was really a story until, you know, January 2020. Just point is, Yes, I agree with you. Yes, it's very incestuous the way the capital markets are treating AI right now. io/topmoney. 7 trillion, whatever it might be, is still a top 10 stock, even though Anthropic will probably push us down a peg.

[33:32] Marty Bent: But quantum and AI breaking ECDSA, it's here. We're screwed. It's going to zero.

[33:39] Matthew Mežinskis: Yes. Yes. If I had a nickel, if I had a sat for every time I heard quantum over all the years that I've been in Bitcoin.

[33:46] Marty Bent: But this time it's real. AI's here. This time it's different. It's really smart.

[33:52] Matthew Mežinskis: Well, we've seen how AI has been able to penetrate certain people's stash. For sure, there's a hardening going on, but, uh,

[34:08] Marty Bent: I mean, yeah, I mean, we haven't spoken. I don't think you've been on the show since ColdCard.

[34:13] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah.

[34:14] Marty Bent: And all this, um, all these vulnerabilities have been, uh, identified and exploited by, by people leveraging these AI tools. Do you think it's a hardening that's been going on the last 3 months? Do you think we're out of the woods? Do you think— I

[34:30] Matthew Mežinskis: think it's definitely hardening. Yeah. I don't know if we're out of the woods, but, you know, like what Kali and those guys have been doing, trying to track these white hat, you know, actors in space, it's fantastic. I think there can only be— there can be no other way, right? Like, it's not government regulation that's going to save us here. So if AI is exploiting people's stash, and very sadly so, first of all, there are ways, there were plenty of ways to mitigate that. And again, I'm not, definitely not happy for that situation, but the fact that I think new software releases can be so much clearer now in the way that they're implemented as far as checking for bugs, and the bugs are out there, and the potential attack surfaces are out there. It's going to be this cat and mouse game, but I absolutely think that we're attacking this all in the right way as far as trying to protect people.

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[37:41] Marty Bent: It's scary. It's unnerving. And that's the other thing. That's why I love talking to you. And I say this every time you're on, but just looking at the charts to detach yourself from the narratives of the day is extremely important. And not going to lie, it was very discombobulating end of July, August, September. what the hell's going on? Felt like every other day something was happening. And I think one thing I've been telling people behind the scenes is it was never ever going to be easy. You're going to have these trials and tribulations on the road towards the Bitcoin standard. These are just par for the course. You got to go through these hardening experiences and I mean, I was definitely guilty of this in the past, but I think in recent years have become more sober about Bitcoin's path to ultimate success

[38:37] Marty Bent: and it's arduous, not a straight line. And I think we're still learning how to interact with Bitcoin correctly. We're still discovering what this alien technology is, how to interact with it, and what we can do with it, and how to secure it. And I think the conversations that have been had over the last 3 months about how we secure Bitcoin, how we audit the code, and what products are actually needed right now, it's been a lot of hard conversations, but I think very important, and in the long run will be a massive net positive, but you just have to realize we're in the middle of the storm and you can't let the storm sort of dictate your view of Bitcoin in the long term.

[39:31] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. And I mean, like anything, there's a wall of worry, right? None of us know the future. We could do these charts with these probabilities to try to chart out the relative range of where we think the future could go, the more uncertainty that is posted or the more volatility that is posted on these charts, it's true, the range of probabilities widens, right? But at the same time, you gain more confidence that those bands, you know, are relatively accurate. And that's why I was pretty confident in the in the winter where I said that gold was reaching a top. It just doesn't matter what Peter Schiff or James Rickards says.

[41:52] Marty Bent: Fed doesn't monetize the debt. They don't monetize the debt.

[41:56] Matthew Mežinskis: Who said— who says that?

[41:57] Marty Bent: That was Bernanke's thing. We're not monetizing the

[42:02] Matthew Mežinskis: debt. I mean, yeah, cue any sort of no-coiner there, but the reason this goes down and actually looks better, it goes down from, you know, 16, 17% of owning the federal debt in the '70s is not because the Fed is printing any less money. It's actually because the US has taken on more debt. So it shows sort of how this thing can go on for a long time. But anyway, if you zoom in here and then we look at the QE 1, 2, 3, and then again the pandemic, you can see at the height in 2021, we're at 20% of federal debt. And this does not include agency securities, which are separate numerator, separate denominator, but It's basically, it's just gross federal debt and how much the Fed owns of it, Treasury securities.

[43:31] Marty Bent: How do you think Warsh has been doing since he stepped in, particularly on the KFAB side of things? Fine.

[43:38] Matthew Mežinskis: Fine. Yeah. I'm not a big judger or even trainspotter on everything that they're saying in those meetings. But, you know, seems to be a little bit more independent than was maybe feared by some of the naysayers. But I don't know, you?

[43:57] Marty Bent: Yeah, I think it's— I think he's definitely more independent. I think he was handed a I mean, if you're handed the reins of the Federal Reserve, I do not envy that position at all. No. I do like no forward guidance. I think it's good to have the markets trying to figure out things for themselves instead of reading the tea leaves.

[44:21] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it'd be better if we didn't have central banks at all, but we are where we are. So it's also interesting, If you look at this from basically the Progressive Era, really the end of the Progressive Era, but this is the start of the Great Depression all the way through almost to Newt Gingrich. It was a— I didn't quite realize that, right? But if you look at that, look at that Democrat stronghold on the House. That's the House and the Senate. being run by the Democrats. Pretty wild.

[45:02] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[45:03] Matthew Mežinskis: For, you know, 60-some years. And, uh, yeah, but whether it's Republican, Democrat, whatever, unless you're Jacksonian, ready to extinguish the debt, uh, they both take the debt up. So it's just interesting that there was a long period of American history where it was only Democrat

[45:28] Marty Bent: No, I think to your point, when you talk about the debt, I mean, this is on-balance-sheet

[45:33] Matthew Mežinskis: debt.

[45:34] Marty Bent: I think the topic of conversation around off-balance-sheet debt, particularly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, historically a third rail, don't touch, but that third rail is weakening. The electric current flowing through that rail is weakening and people are beginning You're beginning to see bubbling of conversation around Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, cutting it. And then I think interestingly, in parallel, you had the Trump accounts being launched for children to start. But then last week or the week before, they said they're going to come out and make Trump accounts available to anybody under 40. And so you can see the beginnings of trying to hot swap Social Security out for this Trump account. equity portfolio, index portfolio for people.

[46:28] Matthew Mežinskis: No discussion of Bitcoin there though, right? With the Trump accounts?

[46:32] Marty Bent: No, no, no. Yeah, I think you have to buy indexes. I'm pretty sure.

[46:37] Matthew Mežinskis: Right. Just be in funds. Yeah. I mean, as John Williams used to say from ShadowStats, I mean, you could cut every single thing in the budget except for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and you'd still be in deficit. So that's the brass tacks math of the US federal budget. You can cut the military, you can cut literally every single thing except for those sacred cows, and you'd still be in deficit. So we'll see. Again, I'm kind of— again, I haven't said that this yet here. I think that There's a lot of difficult things going on in the world, right? You know, where I live, it's war right on our borders and stuff.

[47:53] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[47:54] Matthew Mežinskis: It's not going to be politically popular, but I have to at least start addressing it. And maybe you can start to somehow fix the problem long term. But I still would say, you know, the West is still way better than what's going on in Russia, for example. So I'm always balancing those things as well, but we'll have to see.

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[52:08] Matthew Mežinskis: It's already affecting us, man. I mean, the Baltics, every country, and Romania, Poland, we've all been Our airspace has been penetrated by errant Russian drones. And imagine getting a text that there's an air raid alert and your child needs to go to the basement. I don't know about you, but I grew up in the Midwest in the US, and I know you did as well, but we had tornado warnings and they never really happened where we were, but still had them. the warnings, you had the drills, you had everything. But imagine, you know, you got to go in the basement, not for a tornado warning, not for a hurricane warning or anything, but a drone warning.

[53:28] Marty Bent: And I mean, it seems like we've crossed the event horizon too. I don't know.

[53:33] Matthew Mežinskis: Oh yeah. Again, there's no talking around this on a podcast. This is not happening. This is This is happening.

[53:40] Marty Bent: And I don't think people in the West appreciate it unless you're terminally online. And it's, again, going back to the sovereign individual thesis, that's one of the things they predicted. And it's— I can't imagine having to— like what you just described, having to worry about that. But I mean, I don't want to sound like too much of a doomer, but you'd be naive to think that this type of risk is not going to spread throughout the world.

[54:11] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. No, I said it, I think, on the last show with you. I've said a few times, it's already happened to Americans on bases. Whatever you think about the Iran War, I don't support any offensive wars of America, but they happen and they started that war. And I thought it was Frankly shameful. I mean that the Iranian Shahed drones—it could have been Russian augmented drones—they didn't say specifically, but it was Iran and Russia. It's one and it's it's both sides of the same coin—the Shahed drone model. But that killed the first six Americans there in Kuwait in the bases, and America wasn't prepared for that.

[55:57] Marty Bent: Well, especially in the US, because you have members of the Sinaloa Cartel going to the front lines to learn how to use these drones. I mean, showing up as mercenaries, but really using it as like an education trip.

[56:12] Matthew Mežinskis: It's, it's nuts. It's nuts. Yeah.

[56:24] Marty Bent: That's my hope. My great hope is that we're just being pushed to the precipice and we wake up one day and say, okay, this is getting too crazy. Let's focus on the good productive stuff. But how long that period lasts is yet to be determined. I mean, you have the Neil Howe acolytes saying we got the fourth turning, probably won't find a resolution to any of this till the 2030s, after the turn of the next decade. But yeah, I think it's going to be crazy times.

[56:57] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. I mean, monetarily, we can stick on the military stuff for a second, but monetarily, that's what I'm seeing as well is the big things with the way that Bitcoin's growing, the trends, something that might be as large as the government monetary base, about $100 trillion, which might just be rounding to a number that wouldn't mean anything, but that stuff's going to happen late 2030s where Bitcoin's going to be about as large as $100 trillion, which is probably, or could be, $80 to $100 trillion could be the number where Bitcoin passes the growth rate of central bank money in the world. That still just means it passes it.

[59:33] Marty Bent: it. I can't imagine investing a trillion dollars in a naval ship today considering the Houthis can just get one of these drones and hit a trillion-dollar asset in the sea.

[59:45] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. Yeah. S. hasn't spent anything on Ukraine in two years, and they're still fighting. They're still fighting, even gaining territory against the Russians. So they're doing you know God's work for us on the eastern flank of Europe. But I do fear this political division will keep going and. if the hard right of France, say, wins next year— the French president is, people don't maybe know or may not know in the US, but the French president is probably one of the more powerful presidential offices in the world based off of old Charles de Gaulle. It's a 10-year term potentially. I mean, it's 5 plus 5 and they have a lot of powers.

[1:00:53] Marty Bent: I did not.

[1:00:55] Matthew Mežinskis: I mean, I saw it happen.

[1:00:56] Marty Bent: I didn't sit down and watch it though.

[1:00:57] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, I didn't, I didn't watch it either. Just watched some clips. But he is the son, I believe, of the author of The Sovereign Individual. Is that right?

[1:01:05] Marty Bent: Yep.

[1:01:06] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. Yeah. So You don't have a take on that, or did you see any of the clips?

[1:01:13] Marty Bent: I didn't. I saw that he was on it and dive into any of the clips. What were they talking about?

[1:01:18] Matthew Mežinskis: No, it's just— it was about— I mean, again, this is— people can just take a look at the map. But this thing that kind of goes back to— again, I'm anti-commie, anti-Nazi, like both Baltics and Poland. We were occupied by both. the fear that we have, especially with this harder right sort of crop that is coming up that I would say Tucker Carlson represents, is saying that, oh, well, you know, we should just let Hitler roll over Europe. You know, Czechoslovakia, it's not a real country. The Baltics, not real countries. You know, Darryl Cooper said, I think somewhat famously now, a couple years ago on Tucker's podcast, that like World War II, the reason it became What it did, you know, is just because of Churchill, this evil villain.

[1:06:36] Marty Bent: Yeah, like you see what's going on in Brazil and it just feels like stuck in the middle with you situation. It's like, all right, let's just— and it's funny because, I mean, you know this, I've had many, many people on the show who are very pro pro-Russia. And it's interesting to get both sides of the perspective, I guess. One, I guess, neutral comment that I make that I think is, uh, what I like to see is like Europe finally realized, like, at the end of the day, regardless of what you believe or not on both sides of the argument, I think it'll be a net positive. In the future that Europe's saying like, okay, we can't depend on the US, we got to do our own. Yeah.

[1:07:26] Matthew Mežinskis: No, I mean, and that also, to be fair, although I'm, I'm fine with sort of the Trumpian attitude there, but that was already happening after the invasion of Crimea. I would again say this is where I think normal Republicans have more to say here. Doesn't mean you have to fund, right? I mean, like, you haven't— the taxpayer has paid $0 for Ukraine in the last 2 years. There's, uh, Europeans have bought systems on behalf of Ukraine from the US, but that's a reimbursement of prior old systems that the US purchased. It's like shrink-wrapped in warehouse. But the taxpayer hasn't paid anything. But the point is, it was already happening.

[1:09:58] Marty Bent: No.

[1:12:11] Marty Bent: Yep.

[1:12:12] Matthew Mežinskis: Russian savage hellscape started at 54%. Currently 58%, behind every single country on this chart. Literally, this is why I literally tell you people, look who's banned on Twitter. They are literally spouting propaganda for a shithole. Sorry to say it, but the country is a savage hellscape shithole. They— 2 in 5 do not have safely managed sanitation services according to the WHO. So I don't think Tucker Carlson knows this.

[1:12:48] Marty Bent: WHO or World Bank?

[1:12:50] Matthew Mežinskis: Did I say World Bank? Sorry.

[1:12:54] Marty Bent: WHO.

[1:12:54] Matthew Mežinskis: Okay. WHO.

[1:12:57] Marty Bent: Yeah. The— do we trust the WHO? That's the question.

[1:13:03] Matthew Mežinskis: Well, I mean, do you think they're specifically singling out Russia? Usually, usually these world bodies Nothing would surprise

[1:13:14] Marty Bent: me.

[1:13:14] Matthew Mežinskis: Nothing would surprise me. Usually these world bodies cover for Russia, right? Go in the UN where Russia has a veto of the Security Council and see what it says about their savage hellscape invasion of Ukraine.

[1:13:27] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:13:28] Matthew Mežinskis: I think this, of all of these countries, all right, are going to be fairly accurate equally. Or fairly inaccurate equally.

[1:13:42] Marty Bent: I'll say

[1:13:42] Matthew Mežinskis: that.

[1:13:42] Marty Bent: Do you think there's any resolution to that, or maybe resolution ending to this? And we're coming up on what, 5 years?

[1:13:48] Matthew Mežinskis: Coming up on 5 years. Yeah. They're going to keep fighting. You look at the polls, they're going to keep fighting. Again, they're not asking for Americans to fight. They just want support. They keep fighting because it's a tyranny. It's a dictatorship. There's no private property. There's no rule of law. So they're going to have to make it too expensive for Putin to tell even his people, like, yeah, I'm just going to keep slaughtering 50,000 of you a month, because he's getting close to 50,000 now. a month that are getting killed, captured, or maimed with his invasion. So

[1:14:38] Marty Bent: it's insane. That's the scale of that. So like more than half a million.

[1:14:42] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah.

[1:14:45] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:18:05] Marty Bent: It's not really pro-Russian. It's more like pro-Trump, like the whole Yeah.

[1:18:10] Matthew Mežinskis: Well, you see, you see Trump. Trump, I don't think, knew how to solve it either, right? He said he'd solve it in one day. It's been 2 years. He hasn't solved it. You know, he's got Musk to try to cut off

[1:18:21] Marty Bent: the— The more accurate description is amenable to Trump's foreign policy as it relates to Russia.

[1:18:28] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah.

[1:18:30] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:21:35] Marty Bent: Pro-Russia is a mischaracterization. It's amenable to Trump's foreign policy as it relates to Russia.

[1:21:41] Matthew Mežinskis: Well, and that, that, you know, that I think is shown to not be that good. Let me go— let me show you this. It was a year ago tweet, and I think it was very informative of what he actually understood. Like, for example, like the stuff that I'm saying versus the reality of the situation. So just on the— yeah, so I hear you, first of all, on the Trump foreign policy. Look, I— it was hard for me, but I did try to give him the benefit of the doubt the first year. But I think this is enlightening. He posted this about a year ago, a little over a year ago, September 2025.

[1:30:47] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I mean, as I've been saying for almost 5 years now, I hope— maybe hope's not— maybe it's weak here, but yeah, like you, I am very anti-war and would like to see a resolution to this at some point soon. Similarly with Iran. Because I think there's a ton of potential to do good right now considering everything that's happening in the world of tech and productivity. And we have the potential for a golden age globally if we'll take it. But realpolitik gets in the way a lot of times, unfortunately.

[1:31:27] Matthew Mežinskis: It does. But I think the World War II analogy is probably most apt right now. You know, that there is no elected government in Russia and they're not going to, you know, Putin's just going to do whatever he can and he's not going to, you know, democracies actually would be more prone to stopping the war. As we know, democracies like to extend wars with the printing press, right? But they're still more prone to stopping the war Due to blood and treasure being lost and families speaking out, right? Even though it could take a long time, as we saw in the history of the US and Afghanistan, right?

[1:33:45] Marty Bent: Yeah. I got to run here in 5 minutes. I did want to end it on a Bitcoin thing.

[1:33:51] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah, that was a big—

[1:33:52] Marty Bent: No, it was good. We haven't done that. We haven't done that in like a year. I'm happy for the deep dive on that. And I think it's important, as I've said every time that we've—

[1:34:03] Matthew Mežinskis: Well, I'm glad to get on and give a different perspective because I'm well aware of the audience that I speak to. But

[1:34:09] Marty Bent: yeah,

[1:34:10] Matthew Mežinskis: it is what it is.

[1:34:11] Marty Bent: But you mentioned Bitcoin getting integrated in the banking system if and when that happens. Yeah. And I've kept it in the back of my mind to bring up because I do think it's an interesting, underappreciated data point that I've been seeing on the back end, just talking to companies involved in this area of the market, which is Bitcoin collateralized lending and the cost of capital. and the amount of capital that is opening up to these Bitcoin collateralized lending desks.

[1:34:45] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah.

[1:34:46] Marty Bent: Capital, the amount of capital's going up dramatically, lines of credit being issued, and then the cost going down. And so I think you're seeing credit funds, some banks, obscure banks, I think, being willing to lend against Bitcoin at 6%, 7% to these lending desks, then obviously they're putting some margin on top of that. But I think the base cost of capital for Bitcoin collateralized loans is falling. And so if you're looking for a fundamental indicator and data point that things are going in the right direction for Bitcoin, I think that's one of actually the most important that most people don't have any insight to, that it does seem to be trending in the right direction.

[1:35:30] Matthew Mežinskis: Are you seeing that 6%, 7% from Banks or non-bank lenders?

[1:35:36] Marty Bent: I think non-bank lenders particularly, and that's via competitive forces of other non-bank lenders coming in with more capital. And so you're seeing—

[1:35:46] Matthew Mežinskis: Yeah. No, I think it's great. And by the way, that could be the answer to— I've posed this question a lot, but the power versus exponential question, right? And again, brass tacks, I just mentioned it earlier, during our projection of what could happen in the 2030s, but $80 to $100 trillion, that's what the power curve projects by late 2030s, 2040, let's say for Bitcoin. That could be about the level where this, which is the monetary base, which we've been talking about a long time, which is only about $26 trillion at the moment, but if it goes on the same trend that it's always been on, which is, you know, not that fast, actually.

[1:40:24] Marty Bent: You heard it here first. Look at the charts, touch grass. Log off of X every once in a while. Matty, it's always a pleasure, sir.

[1:40:36] Matthew Mežinskis: Likewise, my friend. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to my my my my digressions there, and I appreciate chatting with you every quarter.

[1:40:47] Marty Bent: We're gonna win. We're gonna win.

[1:40:48] Matthew Mežinskis: Yes, we will. Yes, we will. Freedom, democracy, anti-commie, anti-Nazi.

[1:40:54] Marty Bent: We're gonna win. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes A day early and ad-free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time. Okay.