Gary Brode: Inflation Is Designed to Crush You
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/gary-brode-inflation-el-salvador-bitcoin-currency
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/gary-brode-inflation-el-salvador-bitcoin-currency-transcript
Published: 2026-09-21
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
========================================================================

[0:07] Gary Brode: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

[0:34] Marty Bent: Probably should be.

[0:34] Gary Brode: Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Gary Brode, what is going on in the world? Insanity out there.

[0:41] Gary Brode: It has been. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. And Marty, as somebody who travels 100% of the time, I'm watching my own country from other parts of the world. But not you know experiencing directly, and then you know everywhere I go I get like really interesting impressions. You know I'm currently in Montevideo, Uruguay, but I just came from El Salvador. I was in Bitcoin Beach, and I had dinner with this nice couple from Munich, from Germany, and that you know they had all these questions, and there was so much going on in the United States that. They didn't understand. And so much of it was because their press had lied to them about everything going on in the United States.

[1:45] Marty Bent: What were their preconceived notions or what were their questions around?

[1:50] Gary Brode: It was a lot of stuff on politics. And by the way, one of the things that I thought was great, I don't care about the World Cup. I have zero interest in soccer. I do not care that that makes people angry, which, by the way, that's a really interesting question. Why does it make people angry that I refuse to care about soccer? It seems to be important to them that I care. I reserve the right to not care. I don't know why it bothers people. But anyway, but the thing that I thought was great was people from all over the world came to the United States and they came with these preconceived notions that had been installed in them by their legacy media.

[3:41] Marty Bent: Yeah, it was very encouraging this summer. I mean, it was one of the white pills of the summer, was watching everybody from around the world come and go to the South. You had multiple people from Germany, Scotland, other parts of the world blow up on Twitter, and they were getting invited to concerts.

[4:04] Gary Brode: Yeah.

[4:04] Marty Bent: They were getting invited to special poker tables in Vegas. They were experiencing Buc-ee's for the first time.

[4:11] Gary Brode: And yeah, Buc-ee's, Waffle House, IHOP, Costco, Walmart, right? They're like, oh my God. So you could get pancakes at 3 in the morning and they were thrilled.

[4:22] Marty Bent: Yeah, we did. And I think it was also a reminder, despite how, how our media would like to portray how terrible it is here, and there certainly are bad things or suboptimal things happening in this country, at the end of the day, it is It is pretty incredible that we have this union of states and a diversity of culture across the country. Yeah.

[4:48] Gary Brode: Plus, Marty, the thing I would add to that is that, I mean, I've had wonderful experiences all over the world, but there is something really special and deep about American generosity and generosity of spirit and the way we pitch in and help each other. You know, like I'm anytime something goes wrong, I call one of my neighbors and I can trust them with my alarm codes and my entrance codes. And you know, like if something happens, they're like, "Yeah, I'm heading over right now." I mean, I've had people leave work to go check on my house because an alarm went off. You know, it's just it's incredible. And when I'm around, I always try to reciprocate and be there for them. But I do think you know Americans are some of the most generous people on the planet, and it we're fortunate to. We really are.

[5:41] Marty Bent: I'm learning that too as I moved into this new house, been here for about 6 months now. Everybody's very welcoming, have adopted us into the neighborhood very quickly.

[5:52] Gary Brode: Congratulations on the new home. I'm liking the new office. It looks like it's a really calming environment. I like it.

[5:59] Marty Bent: It is. I need to put stuff on the walls. I'm lagging here. Spent the summer at the shore. at the Jersey Shore, so I wasn't able to put some time into it. But the fireplace, I'm going to see if I can get this thing back up and running. It hasn't been used in decades, so I would like to have some live fires in the background at some point in the future.

[6:18] Gary Brode: I think it's a great idea.

[6:20] Marty Bent: So where should we start? Should we start El Salvador? You just wrote this report. Should we start global macroeconomic markets, obviously oil and gas markets? are in a bit of a— under a bit of stress right now. Where should we take this in your mind? What's the best order of operations here to cover the state of the world markets?

[6:43] Gary Brode: I'll tell you what, I think we should discuss all of it, but why don't we start in El Salvador? Because I know a huge part of your audience are Bitcoiners. And, you know, we just released— and thank you so much for reposting it— we just released a white paper this week, uh, answering the question, or at least in my opinion answering the question, of whether Bitcoin is a currency. So why don't we start there?

[7:08] Marty Bent: Yeah, let's start there. What, what was the impetus for your trip to El Salvador and writing this report specifically?

[7:15] Gary Brode: So it was 2 things. One is the social changes in El Salvador over the last few years have been unbelievable. This country went from the murder capital of the world to one of the safest places in the world, and it happened in a matter of 2 or 3 years. Um, it tells us that if you have the political will to get it done, you can get crime under control. Um, in my opinion, this was like the social and economic version of the Berlin Wall coming down. Right. You had a, you had a country that that was a no-go. This is a country of 7 million people where 3 dozen people were killed a day.

[11:03] Marty Bent: What was the common theme that you pulled from these conversations? People Because because that's what I think. Nayib Bukele is very polarizing. Either love him or you think he's like some dis. There's many people that think like yeah, it's all well and good that the murder rate's been cut to to the lowest to the lowest levels in the Western Hemisphere, and the economy is on on the rebound. But he is he is a dictator. What he's done with the elections there, what what he's done to insert himself is. dictatorial. We cannot accept this. And then you have the others who are like, well, just look at the data.

[12:17] Gary Brode: It's a great question, Marty. So let's talk about both sides of it. First of all, it's important to understand how bad things were in El Salvador, because what that murder rate did and that extortion rate and that crime rate did was it changed the economy. And and in important ways. So for example, if you ran a business and you had any amount of money, you were going to be robbed. And I spoke to somebody who was in a nice car and he had the decision of being killed by a gang or running somebody over. Literally, that was it. And he was in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

[16:34] Marty Bent: Benevolent. And that's— I mean, some people call him a dictator, and I think this— I've reread Democracy: The God That Failed by Hoppe. earlier this year, which is talking about monarchy. And, uh, I think, uh, that's one thing that other people are floating, uh, not as much as the dictator, but like maybe he's setting up like a new monarchy in El Salvador. And who's to say that that's not a good thing at the end of the day?

[17:06] Gary Brode: Well, so you know what's really interesting, Marty, is the idea that we should rule ourselves is one that, that resonates with the vast majority of Americans and certainly with me. I think, you know, my concern for our version of democracy is, for the most part, Americans are not governed by the people we elect. Our lives are more affected by the unelected permanent bureaucracy. That, to me, is the real issue. It's that we're ultimately— we are constantly answering to the agencies that aren't elected and yet have an enormous amount of legislative power over our lives.

[17:47] Marty Bent: Yeah. And you said you were going to bring it up, but I'll bring it up. I think the Lindsey Clancy saga is a bit of an undercurrent of that, right? I think a lot of that bureaucratic managerial class has been taken up by, in many cases, I think objectively, if you look at the numbers, women who have this grudge against the patriarchy, and it leads to non-meritocratic rule, if you will, in many aspects of our lives. And I think the microcosm of the Lindsay Clancy case points to that to a degree.

[18:29] Gary Brode: The thing that really worries me about that case is not that one person did something horrible, it's this outpouring of support And, you know, she flat out said, you know, I did this. And you see, like, enormous numbers of people saying, no, no, it was the husband. Right? It is amazing that, you know, they won't even believe a confession. And the amount of support for somebody who did something monstrous and has acknowledged doing something monstrous is incredible to me. Um, you know, Marty, when you and I see a man do something horrible, at no point do we say, all right, well, let's get on X, let's start making videos supporting him, and you know which one of us is going to start the GoFundMe.

[19:17] Marty Bent: No.

[19:19] Gary Brode: It's, it's, it's horrible that— it's horrible what happened to those kids, but the fact that people are supporting this and there are copycat cases is, is worrisome.

[19:32] Marty Bent: Yeah, there's a copycat case in Illinois, I think just a couple weeks ago. Yeah. And it's— you get these social dynamics and then you get the technological dynamics of it too, because we saw this during COVID the mass psychosis that is easily spread through these technologies that we have. And there were some women in my life that I had Not sit down, but the Lindsay Clancy case would come up and they would bring up like TikTok rabbit holes that they found out that had very compelling cases that it was the father. It wasn't Lindsay. It was Patrick Clancy, not Lindsay Clancy. And I had to be like, hey, let's take a step back.

[20:42] Gary Brode: Yeah, it's interesting to me that what people are willing to believe off of a TikTok video, but I'll also remind everybody that that algorithm is controlled by the CCP, right? I mean, they will amplify anything that divides us, that makes people angry, that makes people feel like they can't trust their neighbors.

[21:07] Marty Bent: Yeah. I actually recorded an episode yesterday, completely different topic, but same vein, with Sam Lyman from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. He wrote a research report in the beginning of the summer highlighting that a lot of the anti-data center rhetoric and narratives in the US are being funded by Chinese entities and for the same purpose, to divide and to, I think, also to slow down the AI build-out here. And he was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday testifying. in front of the Senate, and he made a really good point. If you look at the media narratives in China with Chinese state media around AI data centers and AI more broadly, it's extremely positive. It's like, this is going to revitalize our economy. It's going to create an incredible future for us. And yet they're funding these propaganda campaigns in the US to make us believe that that's not the case.

[22:05] Gary Brode: Yeah, it's incredible that they're allowed to do that. Obviously, American entities are not permitted to you know try to convince Chinese people or the Chinese government to slow down their research. So I think that's I think it's really interesting that that they're doing and that people believe this, right? I mean, obviously, what China wants to do is is they want to take that lead. So, it's, you know, it's incredible to me that people will believe it. Also, you know, the other thing that is certainly attention-grabbing are the headlines from people at, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI saying, oh no, we're going to destroy the world, you better regulate us. And people are believing that these companies are saying, well, you know, without regulation, we're going to destroy the planet, we're going to destroy humanity, you'll get your Terminator future.

[23:03] Marty Bent: Right.

[24:42] Marty Bent: What's up, freaks? This rep was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. Got the new BitKey here with the screen. We've been talking for 17 years, not your keys, not your coins. How do you make that as easy as possible? And that is what BitKey is bringing to the market. It's a 2-of-3 multisig self-custody setup where you have the hardware device, you have the mobile app, and a key in block servers in the cloud. There's no seed phrases. It's easy to set up. You can go from opening the package of the BitKey to having a wallet and receiving sats within 5 minutes. I've done it myself.

[26:58] Marty Bent: You can access it for free at simplemining.io/tftc. That's simplemining.io/tftc. Yeah. And that oligopoly has another mining virus embedded in it, which is effective altruism. I'm not sure if you've been following the the sleuthing of the individuals that work at some of these companies and the third-party research groups that are there to help them provide the safety guardrails. It is heavily seeped in effective altruism thought, which is completely insane to people who think they can use spreadsheets to determine the best outcomes for future humans and therefore decide what we have to do today. And this is actually a topic that I've been covering for probably 5 or 6 years now because Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist too. And we went through the effects of the effective altruists getting control of part of an industry in Bitcoin last cycle. And These people are absolutely insane.

[28:15] Gary Brode: Yeah, it's a huge problem. And in fact, I stopped using OpenAI. I stopped using ChatGPT earlier this year over the summer because I was getting insane answers. And every question I asked was put through the lens of racial preferences and gender preferences and you know, I— it would give me these really biased answers and I would point out, hey, this answer is biased and you're putting people above me, but I'm asking about something related to me. And it would be very sly in its response and it would say, yes, well, I'm not against you and all people are equal and I would never put one person above another, but you know, uh, but there are protected classes of people and we can't write anything even in a private conversation that might upset, uh, somebody who's in a protected class.

[32:21] Marty Bent: Well, I mean, to that point too, there were rumors that there was a secondary sale of— I forgot if it was Anthropic or OpenAI equity, but I think it was OpenAI that sold at a $445 billion valuation, which is one-third of what they were publicly saying they wanted to IPO at. And obviously they've stepped back from the IPO. Anthropic seems to have too. And I think that's a big question on everybody's mind, whether it's OpenAI or Anthropic, but just broadly speaking about this AI buildout, what is going to happen and what's the effect going to be on the economy? Have we overextended the run here? Have we pushed too much capital into this? Is the return on invested capital not materializing fast enough? What are you seeing in those regards?

[33:17] Gary Brode: Yeah, I think that's the case, right? And this is something I've been talking about for 2 years, that these companies have no plan to earn a return on literally trillions of dollars of invested capital. I don't see that happening. My disappointment about OpenAI not going public is now I can't short it. I mean, I really think it's a zero. I would love to short that stock if I could, Right now, there's just no effective way to do it. I also think it's notable that the American companies are all against the open weight models. They don't even want competition for, like, Marty, you and I putting our own weights in, having our own— people should be able to put together competing models and they're trying to stop that. They're saying, oh, it's dangerous.

[34:04] Marty Bent: Really?

[37:04] Marty Bent: All right, freaks. I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Aave and Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal. You can get a line of credit up to $1 million backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single sat. No games, no annual fees, no minimum draws. And your Bitcoin is custodied by BitGo, one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. Aven never lends it out. There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control. You can lock in a fixed rate for up to 10 years.

[38:12] Marty Bent: I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for 5 years now, literally this month, 5 years ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had 2 babies, we've had multiple health events, and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills, and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on COBRA as a family of 3 when I left my last job before I went full-time with CFTC, went on CrowdHealth, Now, as a family of 5, we pay, uh, I believe $700 a month.

[39:29] Marty Bent: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And at Dark Horse, the company I sit on the board of, I think that's our thesis too, is that inference demand is not going to go down anytime soon. I just wanted to pull up this chart again, and it's crazy. You're talking about agents, the agentic economy, agent-to-agent token usage is going exponential.

[39:49] Gary Brode: Right. So that blue line there, that's not NVIDIA, right? That's Intel and AMD. Marty, let me ask you a question. In your data center, what's the name of your data center?

[40:01] Marty Bent: Company's called Dark Horse.

[40:03] Gary Brode: All right. So at Dark Horse, what's the ratio of GPUs to CPUs in your facility? Do you know that?

[40:11] Marty Bent: Right now it's all Bitcoin mining. We're in the process of transitioning. We have land and power assets.

[40:16] Gary Brode: Gotcha.

[40:18] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[40:18] Gary Brode: Okay. So right now, if you go into these AI data centers, it's like 8 GPUs per CPU. And I talk to people every week in the industry. These are senior executives, people designing these data centers. And what they're telling me is they think over the next few years, that ratio goes from 8 to 1 in favor of GPUs to something in the neighborhood of 2 to 1 or 1 to 1, where the CPU demand is going to be off the charts.

[40:48] Marty Bent: Yeah. I think it's obvious if you look at Intel, AMD, a lot of the memory companies over in South Korea, you're going to need a ton of memory for this too.

[41:00] Gary Brode: Yeah, absolutely. One thing that's really worth pointing out, and people might say, well, how would you have enough horsepower to run an SLM, right? Don't you need these giant data centers? And I'm talking to you right now, I'm traveling using a laptop that I bought at Best Buy earlier this year for $1,300. And I have enough horsepower on this thing to run an SLM, right?

[41:28] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[41:28] Gary Brode: And now, could I do the same stuff that Groq can do or that Claude can do? No. But most of what people need these things to do, you don't require the high-end stuff.

[41:40] Marty Bent: No, I mean, for our TFTC company agent, we have it running in the cloud and we have some local models running in the cloud. It gets a lot of work done.

[41:50] Gary Brode: Yeah, exactly right. And even if you're using it for 50% of your needs, 60% of your needs, those are tokens you don't have to buy from Anthropic or OpenAI or from Gemini. It won't decrease your AI usage, but it'll decrease your token purchases.

[42:12] Marty Bent: Yeah. And even if you're not using SLMs on your physical device, the open weight Chinese models, if you're using DeepSeek or Kimi K3, I mean, they're 98% cheaper and 2% of the cost for the tokens. So that's another thing. That's why I also think the oligopoly is calling for regulatory capture and regulatory moats because they see this open wave coming, much cheaper, comparable intelligence, and it's scaring the crap out of them.

[42:47] Gary Brode: It should. It should scare them. And unfortunately, I don't think they've been good stewards of the public trust. They have a particular point of view and they're going to push it.

[43:05] Marty Bent: How do you think this plays out over the next 6 months to a year? And I think bringing in a more well-rounded picture, obviously we have the models, we have the data centers, but then underlying that is this larger endeavor of broad reindustrialization of the US economy, focus on our energy systems, obviously, We have wars going on, Russia-Ukraine, Iran-US. Oil and gas markets are being heavily disrupted. We have diesel refineries shutting down here in the United States. What do you think this fall and winter look like? Because it seems like we're on the precipice of either threading the needle or having things unravel to a certain degree.

[43:51] Gary Brode: So I think that's a really difficult question, and the reason is so much of it depends on the weather, right? Europe is going into the winter with their fingers crossed that it won't be a cold winter. They don't have enough fuel to get through the winter if it's cold, right? They're going to get very unhappy and very uncomfortable if it's a cold winter. So, you know, if you want to predict the weather, uh, 4 months from now, I'll tell you what's going to happen, right? But I, I'm— I can't predict the weather. 4 months from now. Here's what I think though. I think long-term worldwide energy usage will only go up.

[46:33] Marty Bent: How do you think rates play into this? Obviously, that's another point of focus for market participants right now is looking at Kevin Warsh and the Fed, looking at the Treasury yields, 10-year popped above 5, still hovering around there. I'm not sure where it is today. Obviously, you have this debt situation continuing to balloon here in the United States. And obviously, you have Japan struggling to— or not even struggling. I think they've determined that they're not even going to try to maintain yield curve control as well. And you just have yields blowing out all over the world.

[47:11] Gary Brode: Marty, one of the things that surprised me is that people still believe that the Federal Reserve has control over the situation, and they don't. And so you see this thing where people are saying, inflation has made life unaffordable. We want the Fed to fix that. And so the Fed raises and they say, oh no, we're not going to be able to afford mortgages. Okay, well, one, which do you want? But 2, why do you think the Fed has any say over this? And yeah, I, like, I heard people this morning talking about how, you know, the Fed will do this and that and it'll affect borrowing rates and, you know, it'll make life unaffordable for people.

[50:35] Marty Bent: It's—

[50:35] Gary Brode: so much of it is waste, theft, graft, fraud, right? It's, it's not being used to help us. It is being wasted and stolen. And, and then, you know, that, that money adds to the money supply. So, you know, when people are talking about the Federal Reserve, that's not relevant. Inflation is being caused by overspending out of Congress. It's a bipartisan problem, and it's not going to stop. Both parties do this. Nobody is talking seriously about cutting spending. And so that's the direction all of this is going to go. You know, Lyn Alden, one, one of her big memes, she's been saying for years, nothing stops this train, meaning Congress is going to overspend, the money supply is going to expand, Inflation will continue. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Nothing stops this train. And as usual, Lyn is right.

[51:27] Marty Bent: Who knew all you had to do is spin up an LLC and say that you're providing hospice to people? Spin up an LLC, get a PO box, and get tens of millions of dollars from Medicare.

[51:39] Gary Brode: Here's what's amazing to me about this, Marty, and I think this tells you the whole game. It's not amazing to me that people see holes in the system and ways to abuse American generosity. Thieves are going to be thieves. What's amazing to me is that half of the country is getting angry at the people pointing it out, saying, hey, we have billions of dollars being stolen from us every year, and it's systematic and it's intentional. And people are saying, how dare you point that out? It's wrong. You can't look at this. What, are you kidding me? That's our money that's being stolen. And, and you are paying for it in higher inflation, right? And so I, I think it's really interesting that people are getting— you know, people got angry at Elon Musk for pointing out how much of government spending was fraud. And, you know, Elon this, and like, okay, wait a minute, why is nobody going to deal with the issue that money is being stolen from us?

[52:39] Marty Bent: They started throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships.

[52:43] Gary Brode: Yeah.

[52:44] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[52:45] Gary Brode: And they would have killed people. They wouldn't have cared.

[52:47] Marty Bent: Yeah. And again, goes back to this mass psychosis. It's like, how, how could anybody? I mean, actually, I can see how, like, if you are like a democratic socialist or a pure communist, you'd say like, yeah, we're stealing from the system. It's a form of reparations. I think many of those people believe, and it's completely sick. It's a sick mindset. But at the end of the day, it's just overt, in-your-face theft. And as a taxpayer who looks at his tax bill every year, it's like taxes feel like a humiliation ritual at this point.

[53:29] Gary Brode: Oh God, they are. They are. And by the way, what you just described, Marty, the Oh God, the, the Piven-Cloward strategy. I may be mispronouncing that.

[53:40] Marty Bent: Piven, uh, Piven-Cloward. Yeah, I think it's— I'll look it up.

[53:46] Gary Brode: I may be mispronouncing it, but basically these were a couple of socialists in the '60s or '70s who said the, the way we crash the system is by, by making so many people dependent on it and making the, the demands for social services so high that we crash the entire system. And then when it fails, will be able to implement communism. That, I mean, that, that was a state, and they said this out loud, right? Somebody might say, oh, you know, conspiracy. No, no, this is not a conspiracy theory. Go read what they wrote about it. They, they spoke in public. They were clear.

[54:20] Marty Bent: Yeah, the cloud-driven strategy.

[54:23] Gary Brode: Okay. Yeah, yeah, I had it, I had it mixed up.

[54:28] Marty Bent: The Way to the Poor, the strategy to end poverty. urged activists to register every person eligible for welfare benefits who are often blocked by local bureaucratic hurdles onto the system all at once. The goal: overloading local government budgets and agency capacities will create a fiscal and political crisis. The authors believe that the federal government would then have to step in and replace local welfare with a federal system of guaranteed annual income. Getting close to that.

[54:55] Gary Brode: Yeah. So look, here's the thing. And again, Marty, one of the things I do whenever you and I do these Um, you know, whenever we do these, these shows, I always go and, you know, I go to the comments and I respond, and inevitably there are a bunch of people saying, you know, I'm a horrible, mean, heartless person and I just want everyone to die. And no, no, I, I just don't want our money to be stolen, and I don't want our free enterprise system to collapse, and I don't want the country to collapse, and I don't want our financial system to collapse. And people stealing billions of dollars and Congress overspending by trillions of dollars and wasting it and, you know, having it be lost to fraud.

[56:21] Marty Bent: Yeah, objectively it is what's happening, and it is incredibly frustrating because, uh, the communists, the, uh, the people who believe in the Cloward Piven strategy will say this is the way we get, uh, we get equality, we, we, uh, we smash the, uh, the wealth inequality gap. You're, you're gonna smash the wealth inequality gap, you're just not gonna have any wealth. Right.

[56:44] Gary Brode: Yeah, it's the problem with this. We'll all be equally poor. And by the way, like, worth pointing out, It's, it's these strategies, um, that create inflation. Well, I, I've got news for you. Like, again, the people who write in the comments that I'm a horrible, heartless person because, yeah, this isn't what I want, this is the way it is. But I will point out that inflation is horrible for poor people. It's horrible for the elderly on fixed incomes. It's horrible for people who have to spend, you know, 90% of their income on food and fuel and gas and don't have disposable income. It is great For people who own homes, who own Bitcoin, who own gold, who own hard assets, those are wealthy people.

[58:33] Marty Bent: It does. And I think this is a good segue to tie it back to your El Salvador trip, Bitcoin. But how do you think Bitcoin is faring throughout all of this? How do you think this year has played out and looking forward, and then tying it to your trip to El Salvador? Because I think we both believe that, again, the inflationary pressures are monetary in nature. One of the ways to protect yourself and to, if you want to fix things more broadly, is get back toward a sound money policy, which Bitcoin enables you to do without the government having to do anything, um, what, what's the setup for Bitcoin looking like in your mind?

[59:17] Gary Brode: Yeah, so I'm going to speak in, in very round terms here, but roughly 90% of all Bitcoin that will ever be mined and created have already been created. So, you know, we've, we've roughly, we roughly have 20 million Bitcoin in existence. There will be one more for a total of 21 million. Of that, maybe 3 or 4 million have been irretrievably lost. and cannot be recovered. Um, so, you know, the real total supply is going to end up being about 17, 18 million. That last million Bitcoin will be mined over the next, I don't know, 140, 150 years-ish, something like that. Um, as opposed to the US government, which is, you know, people say, oh, inflation's coming down.

[1:06:05] Marty Bent: Yeah, I completely agree there. And I thought it was another interesting point that you made in the white paper, going back to buying coffee. If you're buying something under $5, $10, there are cases where the merchant won't let you use a credit card. And so if you don't have the cash, it's, uh, you're shit out of luck. And so like, there's another area where like the Lightning Network, it like fits in perfectly.

[1:06:31] Gary Brode: Yeah, I had multiple situations where I couldn't buy a bottle of water because, you know, a bottle of water in El Salvador was like 60 cents, 75 cents. That was all I wanted. Well, they're not going to take credit card for anything under $5. And, you know, there were times— and in El Salvador, they use the dollar, the US dollar. So, you know, the money you're getting from an ATM in El Salvador is exactly the same as what you would get from an ATM in the United States. The bills are the same. It's the exact same money. But there were times that I had just been to an ATM and the smallest bill I had with me was a $20 bill.

[1:07:25] Marty Bent: Yeah. Where do you think the biggest pain points is? You mentioned the wallets in the white paper. You mentioned the sort of UX hurdles that you ran into.

[1:07:36] Gary Brode: Yeah. Yeah. Cash App in particular, they have a horrendous user interface. It's just horrible to use. It's not— and there are people who might say, oh, no, no, I use it all the time. Yeah, you use it time, you're familiar with it. A first-time user, I, I found it to be confusing. There were other apps that had really good user interfaces. You know, I went to Strike, and I think Strike has a really good product, but in order to buy Bitcoin on their system, I either needed to pay a 2% fee using a debit card, which I didn't want to do, or they wanted to hold my money for 17 days before releasing Bitcoin that I purchased.

[1:09:57] Marty Bent: Do you think there's a future in which everybody will be using Bitcoin as money?

[1:10:03] Gary Brode: I hope so. I really do. It's just so much better than than fiat. And I would remind everybody, you can't save in dollars, you can't save in euros, you can't save in British pounds, you can't save in yen. The value of your money, the purchasing power of your money is eroded every single month, um, and that's not going to stop. And I think one of the things that's really horrible about that is it's put normal people in a situation where they need to manage their own money. Um, and they, they shouldn't have to do that. They shouldn't have to do that. People should just be able to go to work, have their money deposited in their checking account or their savings account, and not have the value of that money eroded.

[1:11:53] Marty Bent: Well, not only that, but it's funny, the dollars in this— everybody, not everybody, I like to reference When Money Dies, and particularly the section of the book where they're talking about how every paperboy and busboy was a speculator talking about stocks, and the amount of risk that people are taking these days just to stay afloat. I think that's I've been observing just the use case of agents since they began proliferating last fall. And one of the top use cases is people trying to build agentic trading systems to trade prediction markets or sports betting markets to make money, to escape the permanent underclass. And to your point, a lot of people say, I'm not going to invest in Bitcoin. I'm going to create this agent that trades for me on all these prediction markets. It's like, well, you're just taking an obscene amount of risk there. And unless you're a top 1% trader, which you probably aren't, you're going to lose money at the end of the day.

[1:12:59] Gary Brode: Yeah, it's something I started to see about 5 years ago with some of my younger friends. They were buying zero-day to expiration options, which is basically you're— the only thing you're doing is making a leveraged bet on what a stock price does on a particular day. And people viewed it sort of as this free way to make 40% in a day. And, you know, I have a friend who actually works in finance who turned $5,000 into $160,000 doing this, making these kinds of trades, and then promptly lost all of it. Right. And so, and I keep seeing these stories. And so now we've gone from From buying zero-day to expiration options to sports betting on call sheet.

[1:14:23] Marty Bent: Well, we saw this with, uh, what's his name, uh, Leopold, with, uh, situational awareness. Like somebody who does have— I mean, I don't think he would ever admit this, but he's married to somebody at Anthropic and was at OpenAI himself. He knows the industry inside and out. He has probably probably more information, probably in the top 0.1% of people with the information as it pertains to the AI industry. And even he wasn't able to outtrade Stevie Cohen and Citadel. Yeah.

[1:14:56] Gary Brode: And I think a big part of that was just the leverage. His positions were too big and he didn't have liquidity. Ultimately, Citadel bought him out at a giant discount. They're like, okay, fine, we'll take the whole book, but you're taking a giant haircut. And he had to do it because he was going to keep bleeding. he kept getting margin calls and the reason he was getting margin calls was because he had to sell, right? It was a circular reference basically, right? It's what George Soros would refer to as— oh God, what's— I just lost it, Marty. It was reflexive, reflexivity, right?

[1:15:34] Marty Bent: Mm-hmm.

[1:15:35] Gary Brode: That was basically the tendency of any system to perpetuate itself. And you do get that in finance, right? So So Leopold had to sell. That caused stock prices to drop. When that happened, he got another margin call, so he had to sell more. That caused stock prices to drop. He got another margin call. It's the perfect example of what Soros called reflexivity.

[1:15:54] Marty Bent: Yeah. A lot of leverage out there.

[1:15:59] Gary Brode: Yeah.

[1:16:00] Marty Bent: It's the fourth turning. Fourth turning seems to be upon us. Stay frothy. I think saving in Bitcoin for the long term is the best way to to weather this storm, me personally.

[1:16:12] Gary Brode: Yeah, I agree. I agree.

[1:16:14] Marty Bent: Gary, thank you for your time. Thank you for the white paper. We're going to link to the white paper in the show notes. Go read it. I think very objective, but also very encouraging. It seems like what's happening in El Salvador is a great blueprint to take to the rest of the world. And we're beginning to see it here in America with Square terminals and things like that. I was in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier this summer, wandered into a coffee shop, Square Terminal, paid in Bitcoin. It's happening.

[1:16:45] Gary Brode: It's happening. Yeah. I hope so. And Marty, thank you so much. Great speaking with you again. I always love our conversations.

[1:16:51] Marty Bent: Always a pleasure. Enjoy your weekend. Enjoy South America. Enjoy your travels. And we'll do this again at some point, maybe later this year, early next.

[1:17:01] Gary Brode: Looking forward to that. Thanks, Marty.

[1:17:02] Marty Bent: All right. Peace and love, freaks. 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.