19 - Addison Wiggin, Dan Denning and Anya Leonard on Homercide and the Marketplace for Ideas

In this week’s episode of the Bonner Private Research podcast we offer something a bit different... Instead of your regular, scheduled programming, we have for you a sort of "digital symposium," in which we were joined by not one but three exceptional minds. Addison Wiggin, New York Times best-selling author and host of The Wiggin Sessions podcast, moderated the event. We were also joined by Dan Denning, coauthor of The Bonner-Denning Letter and long time favorite of this audience. And finally, Anya Leonard, founder and director of Classical Wisdom and host of the excellent podcast, Classical Wisdom Speaks. From the battle for the classics and the ongoing attempted “Homercide” underway in academies across the west, to common conflations, messy misnomers and nomenclatorial non sequiturs in the cutting-edge world of cryptocurrency, our panel took a deep dive into subjects both ancient and contemporary. We are trying to connect the dots between the censorial impulse prevailing in our culture and the attack on sound money as a means for honest, hard-working people to save and invest for their futures. From Socrates to Satoshi, the special panel discussion, up next. Bullet Points 00:50 - Intro 02:40 - START 03:40 - Introductions Anya Leonard, Dan Denning and Joel Bowman 06:30 - Anya’s Battle for the Classics - The Final Frontier for Western Thought 07:30 - Are the Classics too “white”? And what on earth does that even mean? 08:10 - Classical texts and their influence on the Founding Fathers 10:25 - Our place in the “long chain of humanity” 11:40 - Hegelian dialectic, power structures and cancel culture in the material world 14:20 - The “living canon” and the conversation that informs that evolution 15:25 - Is “Cancel Culture” really erasing diversity? What would Borges say? 16:10 - Antonio Gramsci and the long revolutionary march through the western institutions 18:00 - How the modern monetary regime facilitates revolution 18:40 - Redefining “money” as a means of controlling human behavior 19:40 - Defending classical liberal and libertarian values in the face of violent threat 20:40 - Social media as an amplifying tool of repression and control 21:55 - In defence of the free market (also, background church bells) 22:40 - State issued digital currencies as a weapon against freedom and privacy 24:40 - The market alternative to fiat cryptocurrencies 26:10 - Separating “fiat” from “tangible” 27:10 - The totalitarian centralizing impulse vs. the market’s decentralizing 27:40 - Shumpeter’s Creative Destruction in hyper-acceleration 29:10 - The tale of Addison’s lost bitcoin 33:10 - Loose monetary policy and subsequent malinvestment and bitcoin as a lifeboat for third world hyperinflation and capital controls 36:10 - Cryptocurrencies as a bet against government profligacy 38:30 - Bitcoin and the “altcoin” explosion - and the confusion around “inflation” 41:25 - The “use case” for money and the market’s preference for utility 44:40 - The scarcity argument for gold AND bitcoin 45:20 - Time is Money and Addison’s Swiss cultural appropriation (CANCELED!) 47:00 - Classical lessons about devaluing money, inflation and the end of the Roman Empire 48:40 - Committing “Homercide” and the butterfly effects of canceling history 51:10 - The Far East and South America... preservers of Western Culture?