Why Inflation Is Designed To Crush You with Gary Brode

Gary Brode, a macro investor and frequent commentator on Bitcoin and monetary policy, sat down with Marty Bent of TFTC to discuss his recent trip to El Salvador, the mechanics of inflation, and why he believes Bitcoin is a functional currency that could serve as a lifeline for those crushed by the existing financial system. Brode had just released a white paper asking whether Bitcoin is a currency, and much of the conversation flows from that question. But the episode ranges widely—from the transformation of El Salvador under President Bukele, to the nature of the Federal Reserve's power, to the economics of AI inference versus training, to the surveillance state embedded in modern chatbots.

El Salvador: Safety, Bitcoin Adoption, and the Bukele Question

Brode spent a month in El Salvador, and the country left a deep impression on him. He describes a place that went from the murder capital of the world—where three dozen people were killed per day in a country of seven million—to one of the safest places in the Western hemisphere, in just two or three years. "It tells us that if you have the political will to get it done, you can get crime under control," Brode says. He calls the transformation "the social and economic version of the Berlin Wall coming down."