Gold has been used as money in many places for a long time. It hasn't been the only form of money, and people stopped using it and went back to it at times (China flip-flopped).† But it is generally no longer used as money in the modern world: who uses it to buy groceries, or cars, or land? It's mostly used as a store of value: people generally trade cash/fiat for gold because they think they'll get cash/fiat back for it at some later date. There is little in gold as gold that is useful to most people (maybe some industrial process).

As the papers that the podcast pointed to indicate, there is nothing special about gold in protecting against inflation. The price fluctuations of gold, relative to USD, seem to be more crazy than any inflation most people have seen or are likely to see. Most people aren't going to experience crazy inflation unless there's some other crazy things happening in their country/area:

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102

Per the research done for the podcast, there doesn't seem to be anything special about any asset class that would protect you better than any other asset class.

I think aurum is a fine element, as are argentum, cuprum, platinum, etc. It's just whenever finance (and especially inflation) comes up there's all this talk about gold and I have no idea why. Just because it was used as money in the past, and there was for a time a link between modern cash and gold (as a kind of 'compatibility' layer), does not mean there is any point in treating it as special now. It certainly can be used as a store a value, but why is it better than anything else?

† The Aztecs didn't find it anything too special: it was shiny and flexible, so they used it simply for personal adornment (jewelry).