Sean & Brendan Dempsey Discuss The Fiction of Value

In this special rebroadcast episode of Metamodernism Uncensored, Sean Dempsey revisits a 2023 conversation from Brendan Graham Dempsey’s Metamodern Meaning Podcast, in which a wide-ranging brotherly dialogue unfolds on postmodernism, money, culture, morality, and the strange modern fiction we call “value.”Brendan and Sean explore what happens when value becomes detached from reality. The conversation begins with moral ambiguity in modern film (from Star Wars to Batman), and expands into a deeper critique of a culture that increasingly treats truth, worth, and meaning as subjective constructions. Sean argues that postmodern relativism has escaped the realm of art and infected economics itself, showing up in fiat currency, NFTs, speculative bubbles, Modern Monetary Theory, and the belief that money can be created without consequence. Brendan pushes the discussion into more philosophical terrain, asking whether socially constructed value is always fraudulent — or whether collective belief, hype, and imagination can sometimes create real value after the fact.The result is a provocative and intellectually restless exchange touching on Sam Bankman-Fried, modern art, the duct-taped banana, Social Security, the Federal Reserve, GDP, Austrian economics, the broken window fallacy, AI, education, the wealth gap, and the moral legitimacy of the state. At the center of it all is one deceptively simple question: who decides what anything is worth?Rather than a tidy ideological debate, this episode becomes a genuine dialectic between two brothers: Brendan probing the philosophical gray areas, Sean pressing the case for moral and economic reality. The Fiction of Value asks whether America’s cultural and financial order is built on productive imagination — or on a collapsing tower of abstractions no one is willing to call empty.