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The "What is Money?" Show

Society Is Breaking — And It’s Already Started w/ John Vervaeke

The "What is Money?" Show

Robert Breedlove

Money, History, Cryptocurrency, Finance, Investing, Breedlove, Bitcoin, Rabbit Hole, Robert Breedlove, What Is Money, Education

4.8724 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2026

⏱️ 187 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this conversation, John Vervaeke joins the show to examine why modern society feels increasingly detached from meaning, truth, and shared reality. They explore how fragmentation of attention, breakdowns in sense-making, and the collapse of shared narratives are driving social instability, polarization, and existential confusion. They discuss money as a collective meaning structure, how cultures lose coherence, and why civilizations don’t collapse all at once — they dissolve through loss of relevance, trust, and wisdom. From cognitive science and philosophy to Bitcoin, spirituality, and the crisis of modernity, this episode explores what it means to live in a world where consensus itself is breaking down.

Transcript

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0:00.0

My type was tall, long, blonde hair.

0:02.3

Sorrow is short and black hair brunette.

0:05.0

I had come to the conclusion that my attraction,

0:10.3

my sexual-emotional attraction, radar,

0:13.0

I'd come to the conclusion that I had been just letting that run instinctively,

0:16.5

decadent romanticism, and realizing that was really screwing me up, getting me into bad relationships.

0:22.6

And so I decided to do active open-mindedness.

0:25.6

I got very, very clearly, what's the type I keep getting attracted to?

0:28.6

Physically, physiologically, because first appearances, she didn't trigger my initial type.

0:34.6

So my salience radar wasn't going off. But instead, I had a sense there's something more to this woman.

0:42.4

In an economy where money is not being manipulated or printed, the movement of that price gives you maximum information about supply and demand. But if the money is being printed arbitrarily, well, then you don't know. Like, did the housing price go up because there's more dollars in circulation or because people actually want more houses? So you basically are introducing

0:57.5

noise into the channel. And so to the extent noise is a lie or a deception and private property

1:03.3

of savers is being violated. So the people that are saving in the currency, they want their

1:08.0

purchasing power to, you know, stay the same or go up over time or having their

1:11.1

purchasing power diminish.

1:12.1

You know, we're in this culture today where people often celebrate, or at they say you know it's a stated want to

1:32.5

celebrate first principles thinkers first principles thinking you hear this a lot from like

1:38.9

you know Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs talking about the importance of first principles

1:43.8

and it always struck me as a bit ironic that they named that in a plural, right, first principles.

1:51.7

Clearly there's different principles that are probably first in different categories.

1:55.7

But if you really distill it all the way down, as a Neoplatonist would likely agree, there has to be one

2:02.7

first principle, right? There can only be one first principle by definition, because if there

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