Knut Svanholm on Praxeology - Author Cast #4

You have your Shadowy Super Publisher outfit on.

Yes.

Um, uh, for those of you who don't know, this is, uh, Niko. He's my boss. That's what—

Stop saying that.

All right. Yeah, the, the Praxeology book, I, I realized one day that There's a hole in the market for an entry-level praxeology book. I view praxeology as the great missing school subject. To me, like deep diving into the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard after having fallen down the Bitcoin rabbit hole was very, very eye-opening and I just couldn't stop. reading, and I know that a lot of other Bitcoiners have had the same experience, but there's no real entry-level book. Human Action, the, the Bible of praxeology, is like 400 pages long and not very accessible. So, so I thought I'd, I'd make this, and I found the structure for the book from a YouTube series called Prax Girl that I can highly recommend. It's a A, a woman from New York that teaches you about praxeology in short 1-minute lessons. Uh, and I sort of based the, uh, the structure of the chapters on that because praxeology builds from a certain set of axioms that are irrefutable about human action. It's the science of human action, and it starts from a certain set of axioms. Uh, the first one being human action is Um, let's see if I remember it. Human action is purposeful behavior, and you, you can draw a lot of conclusions from just starting at these irrefutable starting points. Yeah, so I got the basic structure there, uh, and added some other stuff that I like, other praxeology, uh, praxeological insights that I really like. There's a chapter about counterfeiting and there's a chapter about argumentation. Based off of Hans Hermann Hoppe's work on, uh, argumentation ethics. And of course, there's a lot of my own thoughts in there. When you write about praxeology, you have to be a lot more precise though than when you write about Bitcoin, and you can't really just grab ideas out of thin air and, and see where they lead you. You have to be sort of more sort of rigid in your, in your thinking. So it was pretty hard to write. Something happened though midway through the process when I realized, or we realized that, that, uh, a lot of the examples in the book are from Robinson Crusoe. That's a concept called Crusoe economics. And it's about when you build insights about economics up from the ground by, by studying Robinson Crusoe and his time preference and what happens if he engages in labor for a long time and then leisure and whatever. And then you, only after you've studied the basic about basics about indivi— the individual and the individual's, uh, subjective values, you add Friday to the mix and see what happens when they start trading with one another. Uh, so I realized at some point that I could use Robinson Crusoe as like a theme for the book and that most of the examples in the book would be Crusoe themed. Uh, so I did that and we rewrote a lot. And then Mel Schilling was the, uh, who's the original editor. I've been working with Mel and Niko, um, before on the Everything Divided book, for, for instance. Uh, so I first did an editing round with Mel and then one with Niko where we sat down with each chapter and, and just tried to make each sec— section a little better. Uh, because we want this book to be a, a real, a real good one. So I would say, uh, Niko is, uh, and Mel are borderline editors now, borderlining co-authors. But, uh,

you're too kind,

sir.

But yeah, I really enjoyed the pro— process. Like, uh, sometimes we would get into like really almost heated arguments over, over some little passage on the book where we disagreed. And then, uh, I guess we just learned how to How to, uh, move on without disagreements. At one point I remember you said like, this is not an argument, this is abuse.

Yeah, exactly.

And I could almost see the tears in your eyes.

There's, uh, a lot in the argumentation chapter about the difference between argumentation and, and mockery. Um, because if, if, if the aim of the argumentation is not to get to an agreement of some kind, Or if you do get to an agreement, but one, the, the deciding party, the party with the power still manages, still chooses to not do whatever you agreed upon, but just do whatever he wants, then that's sort of not an argument at all. It's just mockery on behalf of the slave owner. The slave owner is mocking the slave. So yeah, I enjoyed writing this a lot and I, I know it's going to be under a lot of scrutiny. People are going to call me out and call me stupid, uh, a lot, and I'm looking forward to that a lot too. Uh, and to, uh, you know, argue with people about things in the book, uh, and maybe even make a second edition at some point, but, uh, we'll see. I'm pretty confident that the things in this book are not wrong per se. So, uh, yeah, looking forward to hearing your thoughts about it. Uh, everyone's thoughts. Yeah.

Maybe this would be a good time to show a little bit of the book as well and maybe read a, read a part of it. I especially enjoyed the, the argumentation, um, chapter where you talk about, uh, if, uh, like for example, with the, with the government, like it's not really, and when you negotiate with the taxman, it's not really an argument when, when you, uh, when, when the goal is not to actually reach a higher truth, which means that, you know, you're not allowed to steal from somebody. So this kind of argument about how much should somebody steal from you is actually just mockery.

Yeah. Before, before you show, uh, show the book, uh, uh, we should explain how the, that the typesetting for this was a bit more ambitious than usual as well. We, we found that we could use the pictures from the original Robinson Crusoe book. Uh, there's one right behind me here. I don't know if you can see it. So the book is filled with these beautiful illustrations. We never did illustrations before like this. Uh, and this beautiful quote from the Robinson Crusoe book. So we have also decided to only release this as a hardcover to begin with because the beaut— the book is too beautiful to be a, you know, cheap pocketbook that you buy in the— in, in a kiosk at an airport like this. This is, uh, this is supposed to be the real thing. It's not a very long book. It's around, it's going to be around 140 pages, I think.

Yeah.

Uh, but it will be a beautiful one and hopefully you'll find it valuable.

Yeah, it will be only slightly shorter than Everything Divided by 21 Million if you read that one. That's, that's 160, I believe. So I think we're gonna hit 140, 160 with about 120 pages of actual content. I think that's the sweet spot for entry-level book. And I just want to say that previously to this book, I've been recommending Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson to people who want to delve into praxeology and Austrian economics. But this is going to be the new book that I'm going to be recommending. I have full faith that this will be the missing piece in educating people about the science of human action. The only science that is really worth teaching because everything derives from it.

Here's a page from the book. We have a bit of a marked section there. All truth claims are justified and decided upon by argumentation. One cannot dispute this claim since expressing an opposing view would be an attempt to justify one's claim by argumentation in itself. So there's that. Arguing is purposeful behavior, hence it's a human action. In arguing, people use physical means, notably their bodies, your, your vocal cords, your tongue, your lungs, to achieve a specific end, an agreement on the truth value of a particular position. So when you argue, you're trying to get to a certain point. Uh, you, you're trying to get to a, the goal is always agreement. You might not reach agreement. And the truth you agree upon might not be the very truthful at all. Uh, you could agree that there's a, a, you know, flying spaghetti monster or something, and that wouldn't really make that more true in reality. But still, uh, argumentation is the peaceful way of resolving conflict. The, uh, the other way you have a, of resolving a conflict is by violent means. And praxeology can tell us what happens when you choose to use one rather than the other.

This has been a great overview so far of, of kind of what the book is and a little bit about the, um, the history of it. Now, can you talk a little bit about the, the content in a little more detail and maybe a preview of the, even the chapter titles, that sort of thing?

The first chapter is called Action and it describes what a human action is and, and why people do what they do or why, like, Praxeology doesn't really concern itself with the whys of why people do things, but instead admits that we all act. The one of the basic axioms is man must act, which means that we must do stuff in order to survive. Otherwise, we, we just die if we don't act. So Man must act is one of the, the axioms of praxeology. And by action we mean purposeful behavior. That is that you do something with intent. You, you, uh, you find yourself in a state of uneasiness and you want to relieve yourself of that uneasiness. And you do that by predicting the outcome of an action and what it will lead to in the future. And then you decide what action to take and you take the action and you see whether, where you end up after having done it. So for instance, if I choose to drink a glass of water because I'm thirsty, uh, if I'm thirsty, I'm in a state of uneasiness. So I, I decide that drinking a glass of water is the highest thing on my priority list right now. I drink the glass of water and hopefully I'm in a state of less uneasiness after I've done that. So that's, that's an action. And the present in praxeology refers to that entire process. So the present and the past and the future are slightly different in praxeology than in the natural sciences. In physics, for, for instance, a, uh, The present is just a point in time or even a point in spacetime, but in praxeology it is the, the time the action takes. Like that's the present. Action, means and ends, returns, labor, capital, time and trade, money, markets, competition, entrepreneurship, progress, prices, purchasing power, time preference, loans and interest, capital theory, counterfeiting, argumentation, and a conclusion.

And also for anybody who's watching, those ISBN numbers are not real. So this is just a, just a draft.

Yeah. Uh, like we said, it's 95% done.

Almost

done. Yeah. Those are the chapters. And praxeology sort of tells us that human action eventually, eventually leads to trade. Uh, every interaction between 2 human beings is a trade. And therefore it's closely connected to economics, but it goes deeper than traditional economics and admits a couple of things that, you know, traditional fiat economists simply pretend that they're not there. For instance, that all value is subjective and that There's a difference between a cost and a price. If you choose a certain action, the cost of choosing that action is always lower than the price. And if you choose to, to not do something like buy a bottle of milk, that means that the cost of buying the bottle of milk to you at that moment is higher than the price of the bottle of milk. So Praxeology is sort of like a prerequisite for, for understanding economics in a true manner and not just in a looking at charts and, and numbers manner.

Yeah. And I just want to mention that this, this goes back all the way to Knut's first real book, which is The Sovereignty Through Mathematics. The first chapter there is Everything's a Trade. That really, uh, influenced a lot of my thinking. I, I hadn't read a lot of Praxeology book, any Praxeology book before that. So that was actually, funnily enough, the first touch to Praxeology. Yeah. And it still, it still rings true to this day. And I'm, I'm super happy that we got to do this project together and that we can now actually delve a little bit deeper to what that means, that everything is a trade. And one thing that we go through, you go through in the, in the book is that everybody's a profit seeker. Maybe we, maybe we should go into that a little bit because that's something that is often misunderstood when you talk about profit seeking, like this kind of like socialist mindset that you're not allowed to, especially in Nordics, like, you know, where we're familiar with that, like you're not allowed to seek profits. So, or it's somehow frowned upon, but if everything is a trade, then what drives us is the profit that we seek from it, which is alleviating the felt uneasiness.

Yeah. And it's important to remember that profit is not a a monetary term. It's, it's, it's a psychological term. Uh, you, you can either profit from an action or, or lose from it. Like, we're all seeking profit. That is, we seek to, to, to end up in a, a state of less uneasiness than, than we were previously in. That's all profit is. Like, we, we want to maximize, uh, how shall I put this, We want to get closer to our goals, our desires, or our ends. A human action is seeking an end through a set of means that you choose. And means and ends, it's what it's all about. And money is a very powerful means to a plethora of ends. But it's not the only means we have to reach an end. And, uh, we have to take the— we, we have to consider it as just one means among many. You know, talking is a means to an end. Arguing is a means to an end. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.

Yeah. And I, I think a lot of people confuse the, the ends and means, and they, they start thinking that if you're profit-seeking, then money is actually your ends. where, when actually it's just the means. Like, if money is your ends, what are you going to use that for?

Yeah. And another, another way in, in which people misinterpret words is like they think that money can be idle and just that people can hoard money and that is somehow bad. Uh, but hoarded money or saved capital is always providing the holder with value because it brings you a state of safety. Like if you have a lot of capital, you can be less uncertain. The future is less uncertain to you. Like if you have nothing, the future is very uncertain. You don't know if you'll live through the night, but if you have a lot of capital, your chances are higher that you'll survive the night. So, so money saved is, is providing its owner with a service at all times. So there's no such thing as idle money, and neither is there something, uh, such a thing as a circular economy. Praxeology shows us how everything's connected and every human being is connected somehow. The, the economy encompasses everything. And also there is no such thing as money in circulation, uh, because it always belongs to someone. At each point in time, there's a certain owner of everything. And also, we go into the differences between ownership and possession in this book, uh, and a lot of other praxeological concepts. I shouldn't spoil the whole thing, should I?

Let's, let's not go through all of it. But yeah, that was funny, the, the circulation part, because I think that was like one of the moments In the editing process, once we, once you said that and we realized that we have to change all the words of that mentioned circulation in the context only in the

book. Yeah. We, we, we found the word circulation. Yeah.

We were contradicting.

Yeah. Contradictioning ourselves.

I, I would go as far, like, this is not a Bitcoin book, let's be clear. Like, this is a praxeology book. Bitcoin is not even mentioned once, even though there's in the COVID there's Bitcoin orange. We can talk about that later. But I would go as far as to say that understanding praxeology is prerequisite to understanding Bitcoin. Like there's too many people who are in it for tech. Like it's not a technology, you know, Bitcoin is sure. I mean, you can say that it's, it's an information network and it has nodes and it has computers and it's a technology in that way, but it's also much, much more. It's something that, like Satoshi said, there's really nothing Nothing to compare to. And I think that's a fallacy that a lot of people fall into. They start comparing it into stocks or money or whatever technology, and it's none of those and all of those. So yeah, maybe go into that a little bit.

Yeah, I try to not mention Bitcoin at all in this book, but I guess I mentioned it in this interview. But that's one of the One of the things I set out to do when writing the book was like, I'm not going to mention Bitcoin once because I, I find the creative process to be easier if you set some limits to what you can and cannot do, uh, because then you force yourself to think in other ways and, and that somehow makes the process easier.

Maybe a little about, a little bit about kind of, uh, how it came together in, in such a short time and, uh, A bit about the editing process, how that went?

Yeah, I, I, I have a friend's, um, I have a friend here down here in Spain who has a, uh, an apartment and he was, you know, kind enough to, to lend me this apartment so that I could sit, I could sit in this apartment and write the book and not have, you know, my kids and my wife around to, to, to ask me stuff all the time. So I had some time by myself and it's always good to like zone out when you're trying to write something because You, you sort of need that peace of mind and as soon as you get interrupted in the process, it gets very hard to, to find your way back. But yeah, so the, so the writing process was pretty smooth. Uh, but I think that the book really came alive in the editing process and, and also when we decided to, or when I decided to put Robinson Crusoe everywhere instead of, instead of Alice and Bob. But the editing process, we, we had, uh, we spent like on average 2 hours on each chapter, I think, Niko, uh, just reading through the entire thing and, uh, making sure that every sentence was the best it could be. So yeah.

Yeah. Basically the process was that we would, uh, spin up a Zoom call. We would open the cloud documents looking at the same thing, and then Knut starts reading through it. And then I was, I'm like, hold on a second, that sounds stupid. Like, let's, uh, let's, uh, try to work on that. Like, oh, that, that doesn't work. And then we would go into this like, yeah, of an argument and then come up with some kind of suggest— suggestions and then move on.

Yeah. And we haven't, we haven't killed each other yet, so I, I guess it's, uh, that was

really

educational

process actually. Like, yeah, it was. Sometimes it's, of course it's annoying when somebody's saying like, no, that's shit. Like, of course, of course it is. It's super annoying. But, uh, I think we, we did good.

Yeah. And I think it's educational for both of us because like, for one, just having fresh eyes on it and, and someone coming up with better suggestions, that's, that's good in itself. But also when you have to like defend a standpoint or, or, uh, you have to steelman your arguments, that's how you learn. Uh, or that's a very powerful way of, of learning something is to try to argue for it. Or try to argue against it. And you have to argue with yourself and you have to really dissect a proposition to see if it's correct. And, uh, when writing about human action, you'll, you'll, you'll have to like really walk through it in your head so that you're not saying anything that contradicts itself. Um, yeah, so a very, uh, very rewarding process, I would say. And there's, uh, we should say something about the, uh, the foreword. The, the foreword is being written at the moment. By Rahim Taghi Sadeghan. I hope I didn't butcher his name too much there. I've been trying to learn how to pronounce his last name, but I'm very proud that he said yes to to writing the foreword. He's one of my favorite Austrian thinkers out there, and he's also in the Bitcoin space and a very friendly guy. So yeah, very happy about that.

Let's talk about the COVID

Yeah, the COVID

Yeah, I think we're both extremely proud of it, so I want to mention it.

Yeah, you want to screen share the COVID maybe?

Oh, sure. Yes,

we can see it behind you, Knut.

Yeah, but we can actually do

that. Actually, I already have the text.

Actually, actually, Niko says actually all the time.

Yeah, I love actually. I'm an actually maximalist. There you go.

The, the story about the COVID is that we, I, I just made a draft. I had this idea in the, in my head about the, mostly about like the, the font, but really nothing else. And just tried to find a picture and find, found a picture of a scale that I, I, I sort of liked. That was just the, uh, an outline for a cover. And then you came up with the idea that there should be something in the scales. And we riffed on that for a while. And so all of a sudden came, came the idea that an apple and an orange, that says it all. So it's apples and oranges. Uh, praxeology is all about differentiating between apples and oranges. What constitutes a homogenous good is also a subjective thing. So you, the homogenous good in this case could be apples, oranges, or fruit. Uh, I mean, or stuff. What do I know? Like, it's up to the, uh, up to the buyer of the product to come up with what homogeneity means to them. That's also a big part of praxeology. And the apple, uh, and the orange, uh, were a good, good fit for the scales, I think. Uh, and note that the, uh, this is a bit of an Easter egg, but the, the orange is Bitcoin orange. It's the, the orange color from the Bitcoin logo. So yeah, just subtly hinting about that every—

And the fiat green, you, you might say it's a, it's a fiat apple.

Yeah.

I really love, love this. Like, this is really perfect. Like, it's one of those moments when you see something and then you can't unsee it. Like, it's, it's just too perfect. So like, like you, you always, like, it's a, it's a saying that Um, you shouldn't compare apples to oranges, but that's what praxeology is all about, like mutually beneficial trade. So actually you, you can, if, if, if an apple is what you want and orange is all you have, then your only choice is to, to trade the apple for them, for an orange. And for you, it's a, it's a mutually beneficial trade at that point.

Yes. And it works like clockwork. Orange. Anyway, this is what it looks like, and I, I think it's so beautiful that, that's, that we will only release hardcovers and no, no softcovers because this, this book is too beautiful to be a softcover.

Yeah, I, I think this might be one of, one of the first ones that we don't do a softcover unless there's like an overwhelming request for it, which I don't think there will be.

We hope there will be a—

Ebook and, uh, ebook and, uh, and a hardcover should do it.

And an audiobook. Um,

oh yes, of course.

We'll see who, who'll narrate this one. Uh, probably Guy Swann, but we haven't talked to him yet, so we'll, uh, we'll see about that.

This is where all of our, uh, listeners and viewers need to tell Knut to read his own audiobook.

Ah, uh, So I'm gonna narrate it. No, I don't think so. I'm, uh, I'm too busy having, too busy having fun staying poor. Yeah.

But if, if somebody in the audience does want to give it a go, uh, my inbox is always open to it. So just, uh, let us know. We'll, we will want somebody very soon reading this and making an audio version.

Yeah. I, I, I think we, we should talk to Guy first though, if he's interested. Anyway, uh, this is the Praxeology book and, uh, yeah, I never talked about it before, so this is, this has been a fun experience. Uh, I hope you like it. Uh, I had fun making it and I hope you enjoyed reading it and I hope you read more about Praxeology.