The "What is Money?" Show
The 3 Hidden Languages That Control Reality w/ Neal Flesher
- Robert Breedlove and Neil Flesher discuss their upcoming book "The Right Way to Make Money," which explores human nature through three languages: literacy, numeracy, and money, treating money as a "transjective" domain that bridges subjective and objective worlds.
- The authors use music as a central metaphor to illustrate how harmony requires both difference and proper relation, mirroring how virtue, beauty, and human flourishing operate.
- They examine what music reveals about measure that mathematics alone cannot: the living, dynamic relationship between ratios and human experience, including the role of time, action, and embodied perception.
- Words create shared meaning between minds; numbers establish common measures between mind and external reality; music creates shared experience and belongs to action itself—the eternal present moment.
- The distinction between money and currency: originally unified, they became separated through trust-based abstractions (stamped coins, gold-backed notes), allowing debasement; Bitcoin reunites them by rooting value in energy (proof-of-work) while remaining abstract and liquid.
- Virtue, beauty, and wisdom cannot be reduced to formulas because they require ongoing discovery and right action within concrete contexts; human beings are perpetually in a dynamic relation to reality that demands epistemic humility.