Episode 66 – Carpe Diem with Roman Krznaric

Roman KrznaricWhat does ‘Carpe Diem’ mean to you? In his fascinating new book, Roman Krznaric reveals how the meaning of this famous phrase has changed over time, and how it’s been pressed into service as a rallying cry for both hard work and hedonism, mindfulness and political activism.

He also talks about crowdfunding – he rejected a traditional publishing deal to publish this book through Unbound – footnotes, developing new ways to share ideas online, and creating a movement rather than just publishing a book.

‘I’ve always wanted my books to turn into art projects and social movements… My advice is to write your business book about something that you care about, that you’re passionate about, that you consider is important. Do it in such a way that anyone can understand it and work with it and make it practical, but don’t necessarily try and make it fit too much into being relevant to a particular industry, or for a particular product.’

I defy anyone to listen to this interview and not be inspired.


LINKS:

The Empathy Museum: http://empathymuseum.com/

Roman’s site: https://www.romankrznaric.com/

Carpe Diem site: http://www.carpediem.click/

The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/

Alison Jones:                        Hello and welcome to the Extraordinary Business Book Club. Today I’m absolutely delighted to be here with Roman Krznaric who is a social philosopher and the founder of the world’s first empathy museum and also of the Digital Empathy Library, such an amazing title. He’s also a founding faculty member of the School of Life and his new book is Carpe Diem Regained: a biography of Seize the Day. Roman was named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading popular philosophers and his talks and workshops have taken in from a London prison to Google’s headquarters in California. He’s worked as an academic, a gardener, and a human rights campaigner, which is a very full and representative CV and he’s also a fanatical Real Tennis player with a passion for making furniture. Welcome to the Club Roman.

Roman Krznaric:                Thank you for having me on Alison.

Alison Jones:                        It’s a great biography. I particularly love the mix of stuff at the end there.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. Well, I’ve always been interested in the art of living and like the Renaissance idea of trying to be many people, like the many sides of our personalities unfold. In many ways, that’s been my own career path as you mentioned there, I’ve been an academic, but I did give it all up to become a gardener. I’ve been a human rights campaigner and done community work and then I’ve started museums as well. This is the thing that keeps me alive, but constant through it, there’s always been writing, at least for the last ten years I’ve also been a full-time writer. I like to keep all those balls in the air.

Alison Jones:                        And that really ties in actually… I remember when Tom Chatfield suggested that I interview you. He described you – I’ve never forgotten it – he described you as someone who put work in ‘a human and humane context’. I thought, such an interesting phrase. He also said you were ambitious for what people could do, which really chimes with what you were just saying about your own take on your life. Tell me a little bit more about how you became that person.

Roman Krznaric:                I’ve always been obsessed with the art of living. Constantly ask myself every morning, “Why am I doing what I’m doing? Am I doing the right thing?” That led me, from originally being a political scientist and academic, where I was thinking the way you change the world is through changing political institutions and laws and public policy, to focusing much more on the individual and also relationships, how we change ourselves, how we take our own lives in new directions.

One of the first books I wrote was actually for a series for the School of Life, founded by the philosopher Alain de Botton and the book is called, How to find Fulfilling Work. There I did try to put work in a human and humane context. It wasn’t written to try and make organisations more successful. It was to try and help individuals find more meaning in their careers, and follow new pathways, and make changes.

Alison Jones:                        That has been quite an interesting trend hasn’t it? The trend for leadership management work books. To step away from being for professionals and for people who are HR managers and so on, actually more for people, as you say navigating their own path through work and a fulfilling life for themselves, which embraces work, but goes beyond it too.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. I think many organisation have become increasingly enlightening about this and have allowed me to come into their organisations and actually talk about work, because in the beginning I think, maybe six or seven years ago, some were fearful that if I talked about finding fulfilling work … Well, if the employees were listening to me, they might all get up and leave, and change careers.

Of course now, many organisations, business, government, and others recognise that if they want to retain people they have to offer more than just a salary. Of course they need to inject creativity, multiplicity, make people feel fully alive in their work and even try and support their outside work activities in some ways. I think there’s a real shift and that shift partly reflects a shift in society.

My dad is now in his 80s. He worked for the same company, IBM, for 51 years. Now his great need, psychologically, was security. Because he was a refugee after the second world war. He just wanted to have a house in the suburbs and have a steady job. Now, today me, his son, I’m looking for freedom and meaning in work. He would never have tried or never expected to find deep, meaningful … a meaningful career that satisfied all his passions and talents. More and more people want that today, which is partly why there are such astonishing statistics on job dissatisfaction. Most surveys show between 50 and 60 percent of people are unhappy in their careers. Whether it’s a taxi driver or an investment banker, everyone’s on a search for a path to meaning.

Alison Jones:                        And that leads us perfectly to Carpe Diem Regained. I love the fact that you’ve done a biography of the phrase, which everybody knows, but perhaps people don’t think terribly deeply about. Why does Carpe Diem matter? How does it fit into your intellectual, professional life and perhaps everybody else’s?

Roman Krznaric:                Yes. It’s one of those phrases, which of course has been around for 2,000 years, since the Roman poet, Horace first said, “Carpe Diem – seize the day before time runs out on you.” It’s been extraordinarily popular. The actress Judy Dench recently had ‘carpe diem’ tattooed on her wrist for her 81st birthday.

Alison Jones:                        I love that.

Roman Krznaric:                I think its relevance today is partly that we all know we live in an age of distraction, where we’re checking our phone 110 times a day on average. We’re living increasingly mediated lives, where we’re experiencing the world second hand through screens. Seizing the day is partly about getting back in direct contact with our own lives and the world around us.

It’s particularly interesting. If you ask a group of people what carpe diem means to them, they give very different answers.

Alison Jones:                        Yeah. I thought that was fascinating in the book. It should never struck me, but I realise I’ve used it in different ways throughout my own life in fact.

Roman Krznaric:                Well, right. I’ve always used it, before I wrote this book, in the way that you find it in the film, Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, which is about carpe diem as seizing opportunities, whether it’s career change, or rescuing a crumbling relationship. But for some people, it’s about wild, hedonistic indulgence from free love to gastronomic extravagance.

A new meaning, which is really extraordinary, is more and more people see it as meaning being in the here and now.

Alison Jones:                        Yeah. The mindfulness thing.

Roman Krznaric:                It’s the mindfulness thing. Attention to the present. Ask people a hundred years ago, they would never have associated carpe diem, seize the day, with the idea of being in the present moment. I think that’s particularly interesting, but I think also politically it’s fascinating, because look at the women’s march against Donald Trump, just a couple of months ago. That was about a collective carpe diem carnival, almost, atmosphere, trying to take seizing the day from the individual to the collective level.

There’s a hunger I think, in public life to try and really seize these political opportunities at a time of change. Where we’re at now, where the system of representative democracy is crumbling. Can we seize the day on this large level and I think in organisations and businesses too. When you’re at a time of change, you’re thinking, “Okay how can we seize this moment and what could that possibly mean?”

Alison Jones:                        And of course there’s a whole infrastructure entirely devoted to enabling us to mobilise faster than we’ve ever been able to before, at scale.

Roman Krznaric:                Yes, but it’s double edged. Of course, one of the things about modern mobilisation politically is it’s relatively easy, because of digital culture and social media, to get people onto the streets, for your particular cause. The Occupy movement had 400 … I’m sorry, it’s particularly easy to get people to like you and support you online, so the occupy movement did have 400,000 likes within six weeks, but it is relatively easy to get people onto the streets as I just said, easier than it was in Paris in 1968. The problem is, what do you do with them when you’ve got them there? In other words there’s mobilisation but not necessarily with organisation…

Alison Jones:                        Yes.

Roman Krznaric:                …and so one kind of needs to do both.

Alison Jones:                        Yeah. That is fascinating. And I know you took a slightly different route with this book to the traditional, you published it with Unbound. We talked to Scott Pack of Unbound before as well, so I think regular listeners will have a sense of how that works, but those are listening for the first time … Just tell us a little bit about how that worked for you, why you took that route, and how the experience was for you.

Roman Krznaric:                Right, so Unbound is a crowdfunding publisher and they’re quite wonderful. They’re innovative and interesting. In a way they’re a tech company. I did something unusual, which was that I turned down an offer with a regular publishing house, to publish with Unbound instead. I wanted-

Alison Jones:                        Ah. That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. Because, a lot of people go there when their books have been rejected by the standard publishers. Maybe they were publishing something unusual, the main publishers don’t want, because they tend to like publishing footballers’ biographies and cookbooks.

In my case, it was a positive choice, partly because I saw that the world of publishing was changing. That, of course traditional publishers are struggling in a digital world. I thought, “Well, if I’m gonna write say, 10 books in my lifetime, each taking three or four years to do, at least one of them should be done somewhat differently, trying to keep up with the times.” I also like the democratic nature of the crowdfunding experience where it’s literally, if you don’t have support from your readers, if they don’t think your idea is good enough, you’re not going to get your book published.

In practical terms, in more utilitarian terms, I’ve got say, 500 people who supported my book and they’re now ambassadors for the book, cause they feel involved… Some of them even pledged at the level, not to just buy the book for 20 pounds, but to be an editorial advisor. I sent them drafts of the chapters and they gave back comments. That was a really interesting process.

Alison Jones:                        And of course they’re all engaged in it, cause their names are in it as pledges aren’t they, which is a really lovely thing about Unbound I think.

Roman Krznaric:                That’s right and of course that’s what books were like in the 18th century.

Alison Jones:                        Yeah.

Roman Krznaric:                You would have subscribed to Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, just like you subscribe to books on Unbound today, so I think Unbound is showing how disruptive the potential is for new kinds of publishing. It’s a very interesting model.

Alison Jones:                        As somebody who’d been through the traditional process three times before, I think, hadn’t you, what surprised you, or delighted you about that process about going through the crowdfunding? Was it hard slog, or was it just a pure delight?

Roman Krznaric:                Well, it was a hard slog in the sense that, when you’re trying to get people to support your book, in general most supporters are friends of family, or family, or fans of your books and so on. The way you get them on board is by sending them lots of emails, or writing them lots of blog posts that go directly into their inboxes. Basically, for someone like me who’s not a natural marketeer, it’s all a bit embarrassing after a while, when you’re sending reminders to people, a few times. But it is…

Alison Jones:                        And you do have to send a few reminders don’t you? It isn’t just one and all the money comes rolling in.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. In terms of… I studied it quite closely. I kept very close study of the data on it and basically I thought, even among my closest friends, or let’s a group of around 200 people … When I sent our the first email asking for a pledge, around 10-15 percent of them supported. By the third email I’d sent about 60-70% of them had supported. In other words, most of them did actually want to support, but they just didn’t get around to it. People do need a few prompts. On that sense, that experience is quite different from normal publishing of course.

My book funded really, pretty fast, you know, in about 40 days. In fact, I didn’t really have to sweat and struggle too much for it. On the other side, where Unbound is interesting … Their model is interesting is that once you’ve raised your money, the publishing process is pretty similar. You get your editorial input and in fact you get more design input than you normally would. You get to help choose what kind of paper your books published on, but really you’re getting the same service that any publisher provides, which is structural editing and design and marketing and so on. It’s really the front end of the process that the fundraising bit, which is different.

Alison Jones:                        That’s fascinating. Thank you. It’s really interesting to hear it from the authors. I mean, Scott had done it through Unbound as well, but it’s really interesting to hear your perspective on it. Did you say if you’re an author you’re not typically the kind of person who feels really comfortable sending out lots and lots of direct mail, so yeah, it’s interesting.

It slightly cut out there, what was the email at which you got the 70% of support?

Roman Krznaric:                It was the third time I wrote to people. Actually, I increasingly made my emails funny.

Alison Jones:                        Interesting.

Roman Krznaric:                You know, kind of joking in various ways, a bit more lighthearted and a bit more chatty. That seemed to work a treat. It was a really fascinating process, but of course I also got random supports. The author Phillip Pullman was the first person to pledge to my book, just by chance.

Alison Jones:                        Oh wow. That’s very cool.

Roman Krznaric:                That was very lovely and people come out of the woodwork, you know, complete strangers, supported the book as well. I mean, I was lucky in the sense that I’ve got a fairly reasonable Twitter and Facebook following and so on. I did get a fair amount of funding through social media. I think in general, it’s your loyal friends and family who are going to be there for you.

Alison Jones:                        But you have to make it worth their while, with the funny emails and the rewards! Brilliant.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah.

Alison Jones:                        One thing that really struck me about the book, it’s very accessible. It is very accessibly written. It’s very engaging. It does also have, which you’d expect with your background, it’s got a very strong, scholarly framework. I was just really interested in how aware were you, of the tension between those two modes and how did you balance them? I notice particularly you used end notes, rather than footnotes. Just interested in your thinking behind that.

Roman Krznaric:                I’m constantly struggling to write books which are, what I think of as sort of … Where the intellectual framework is very strong, but that you can almost not see it, hopefully.

Alison Jones:                        Yes.

Roman Krznaric:                So, in this book, Carpe Diem Regained, I worked with a team of researchers and we spent time in Oxford University’s Bodleian library going back over 500 years worth of manuscripts, looking for the meanings of carpe diem and seize the day, through history, and trying to classify them and then apply … I was trying to apply them to the modern day. It was quite an academic exercise. But, then when I write the books, I’m trying to be a storyteller of various kinds. I’m trying to tell stories about individuals and about ideas and to connect with people’s personal experiences. I always want there to be that scholarly framework, so hence my book has four, five hundred end notes in it. I can’t stand footnotes on the page. They drive me mad. I think they’re such a distraction, but I always …

Alison Jones:                        Oh, I love footnotes on the page. That’s so funny.

Roman Krznaric:                Oh, I just want the reader just to be reading the text and reading the ideas and not constantly checking where something comes from. But, equally, me as a reader, I always in the end want to know where something comes from …

Alison Jones:                        Yeah.

Roman Krznaric:                Where’s that statistic from? Where’s that quote from? I do pack in the end notes at the end. I do like the clean page. And of course, as more and more people are reading online about 25% of my books are read online. Having the footnotes on the page doesn’t really work online either, in terms of eBooks I mean.

Alison Jones:                        Yeah.

Roman Krznaric:                So I think the end note is the way to go, certainly for me … We did have a big debate about whether there would be no notes whatsoever. But in the end we did pop them in.

Alison Jones:                        You popped them in. There’s a good whack of them as you say. I did enjoy them. They do things like, obviously they cite … Most of the time they’re just telling you where the information’s come from. They’re giving a citation, but occasionally there’s quite an arch observation by you as well, which some of the reasons I love footnotes on the page. Just that little digression by the author. Terry Pratchett is of course is the master of that. That’s interesting. Thank you.

I notice as well on your sites, you’ve got this new initiative called, click essays, which – we’re speaking on the 21st of March – it hasn’t launched yet. But by the time people are hearing this, it will have launched. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Roman Krznaric:                Right. I was thinking about how to spread the ideas of the book, because for me what’s a priority is not being a writer, but being someone who tries to invent ideas, which are useful for the art of living in social change. That’s what I see that I’m doing. Getting my ideas out in the world is partly requires books, but partly requires videos and podcasts and new kinds of web initiatives. The one I’ve done here … I’ve worked with a fantastic digital designer, called Ted Hunt, who was one of the people who made Innocent Smoothies into such a great digital brand. He’s worked with Alain de Botton as well. His idea was that what we need to do is what are called, Click Essays, which is a form, which aren’t used very often. It’s an experimental form.

Imagine a short extract from the book, maybe say three, or four hundred words. You can read that online in an essay, but as you read through it, all the words aren’t on the page at once. You actually get it sentence by sentence, so you read one sentence and then you click the page and you’ll get the next sentence or two, and so on. So, you go through at your own pace. Part of the idea there was to give people control of reading and give them time to pause, and think about the ideas. Cause often even if you see a 1,000 word article online, 90% of people won’t get to the end of it.

With the click essays it kind of lures you through, but it also … It’s been designed to be highly shareable, so if there’s a quote, for example from Jean-Paul Sartre on the page, you can click a Twitter, or a Facebook icon and you can share it and it’ll share an image as well automatically on social media.

It’s an experimental form that one of these click essays coming out every week for ten weeks, so it’s got ten extracts from book. One of the ways they’re different from the book. Even though they’re extracts, they’re highly edited, cause I discovered as I wrote them, was that just taking an extract didn’t work by itself. It was a kind of different poetic form. It’s almost like Haikus on the page and so one has to work with the digital infrastructure that you’re given. It’s been a really fascinating process. It’s an experiment. We’ll see whether it’s spreads the ideas in new ways as people start sharing these essay extracts online.

Alison Jones:                        That’s absolutely fascinating. It’s almost like doing a kind of, movie adaptation of the book isn’t it? Except, for a completely different mode.

Roman Krznaric:                Yes, that’s right, so if you go to www.carpediem.click, you’ll see these little ten icons. They’re like ten mini films, extracts from the book. They’re a really interesting form to experiment with. Also, it’s not expensive to do either. It’s not like hiring very expensive video animators or something, to animate the ideas.

Alison Jones:                        No. I love it and as you say, it gives the space around the text, which is something that your eye can just skate over a page sometimes, can’t it? You lose the friction and you lose the actual ability to be taking it in. You almost read faster than your brain can take it in. I like the idea that you are forced to say, “Yes, I’m ready to move on and click.”

It reminds me to … Completely different, but it does remind a little bit of, do you know Watt Pad just released a new form, where they have these stories told by text message and you have to click to load the next text message and the story gets told message by message.

Roman Krznaric:                No, I haven’t seen that, but it’s very much of that form in a way. But, of course there’s the … Sorry go on.

Alison Jones:                        I was going to say, what were you fascinated, a sort of cognitive aspect of that as well. How you take in differently, because you’re physically involved in moving the story along and you’re making the decision about when to move on. I just wonder if there’s a difference in how you engage with the content, and sort of cognitively whether it’s retained better, or whether you kind of have a different relationship with it.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. I haven’t thought of that. That’s really interesting, because when I look at the click essays, created by my designer, Ted Hunt, it’s almost like each sentence is an image that goes into visual cortex.

Alison Jones:                        Yeah.

Roman Krznaric:                It’s something that registers in the brain like a picture, and of course we’re much better at remembering pictures than words.

Alison Jones:                        Absolutely. Its not an undifferentiated block of text that you have to sort of separate and make sense of it. Something you can almost absorb in it’s entirety.

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. Be interesting to kind of study retention rates, comparing these different forms. The text message form, from WattPad to the click essays I’m doing, compared to normal text. And maybe compare them to something like an RSA Animate, which.. I’ve had one of those made from one of my talks called, The Power of Outrospection, speaking for ten minutes and the brilliant illustrator, Andrew Park is illustrating the ideas at super high speed. It’s incredibly compelling. It goes at a very quick pace.

Alison Jones:                        There’s a PhD right there isn’t there?

Roman Krznaric:                You can write it. Not me. I’ve finished writing my PhD. I’ve had enough.

Alison Jones:                        Okay. Leave it with me. You know, one thing we haven’t talked about, but I really did want to ask about, because I’m so fascinated by it, was the idea of the empathy museum and I can’t think of a good segue there, but can you just tell me a little bit about, what on earth is an empathy museum?

Roman Krznaric:                A few years ago, I wrote a book called, Empathy: a Handbook for Revolution. The idea of the book was that that empathic idea of being able to step into someone else’s shoes and look at the world through their eyes, was something that could change our individual lives, change society, change organisations.

I also felt it needed to be catapulted into public culture, create a new conversation about empathy, so I had the idea of the book. We should set up empathy museums. At that stage, I had no idea what one should look like. I set up an organisation, which is now a charity called, The Empathy Museum and we appointed a director, wonderful artist and curator called Claire Patey. We put on exhibitions around the world.

One of them is called, A Mile in My Shoes, which has been on the south bank for instance and you walk in and there’s … It’s a gigantic shoebox. You walk inside the shoebox … It says, A Mile in my Shoes on its side and there are some shoe fitters in there, who will fit you with a pair of shoes, belonging to a stranger. It could be the shoes of an unhappy investment banker, or of a refugee, or someone whose been in prison, or a sex worker. You can literally pop on their shoes, walk a mile in their shoes, while listening to an audio narrative of them talking about their life.

Alison Jones:                        Oh I love that.

Roman Krznaric:                It’s quite beautiful and brilliant and it’s spread in many countries and many organisations. We recently did something at the Lush conference, at the National Trust as well. Taking in shoes, collecting stories and trying to spread empathy. In fact, we did it a couple of months ago, in the houses of parliament. We had our shoe shop open there for MPs and PAs to put on the shoes of people who’ve worked in the NHS. From cleaners, GPs, receptionists, to managers and neuroscientists.

Alison Jones:                        That’s a wonderful, living metaphor isn’t it? That’s so powerful and engaging. And now also, from the perspective of this podcast, I love it because it’s the idea of taking something that’s expressed in a book, in text and giving that incredible, creative spin on it, to make it more of a movement and the two amplify each other don’t they?

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. For me, I’ve always wanted my books to turn into art projects and social movements, of various kinds. And sometimes that happens spontaneously when … In fact, when I wrote about the empathy museum in the book, there were schools in many countries that started putting on their own empathy museums, creating their own versions. A school in Missouri, a school in Hobart in Tasmania. I think that’s wonderful. A guerrilla style-change. Guerrilla empathy, but it’s great that the ideas can jump off the page and into real life in some ways.

Alison Jones:                        Oh absolutely. That’s fabulous. Thank you. I’m very glad I asked about that. Now, what’s your one best tip? So, there’s people listening to this will be dizzied by the amount of stuff we’ve covered today. But, if we bring it back home, is there somebody listening who’s struggling in their throws of writing their first business book. What one tip can you give them to hang on to?

Roman Krznaric:                I think my tip might be a bit subversive, which is, don’t write a business book. Or, at least don’t try to. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. When I wrote my book on empathy, I wasn’t trying to write a book for business or organisations. I was trying to write a book that would appeal to individuals about change in their relationships, but also trying tackle problems in society from approach it in a quality to our failure to step in the shoes of future generations and campaign on climate change.

Now, as it happened, unintentionally, that book got picked up by businesses and suddenly I was standing in front of 2,000 people at the Canadian Human Resources Professionals Association, talking to them about empathy. I think it was the fact that I hadn’t tried to make my books fit into business thinking, which made them attractive to certain kinds of audiences and particularly CEOs, who are trying to change the culture of their organisations.

I’m no business expert, so I can’t tell you how to run your management more efficiently, or how to be more innovative with a particular product. You can do that. You can read my ideas and then apply them to your world, so my advice is to write your business book about something that you care about, that you’re passionate about, that you consider is important. Do it in such a way that anyone can understand it and work with it and make it practical, but don’t necessarily try and make it fit too much into being relevant to a particular industry, or for a particular product, or anything like that.

Actually, in the end, the books that are going to be really successful are the left field ones in general, which are more important for their creativity or originality. Of course, there are always books where you want a practical guide. I found this too, in my book, How to Find Fulfilling Work. In my book, you can’t find anything about how to write a CV, right? It’s about meaning.

Alison Jones:                        Yes.

Roman Krznaric:                That’s my best selling book, and it seems to be very relevant to people.

Alison Jones:                        Brilliant.

Roman Krznaric:                So, that’s my advice. Write your business book, by not writing a business book.

Alison Jones:                        We love a bit of subversion. I love that. Make it original and authentic and something that people can really get a hold of. Love it. I always ask my guests to recommend someone else to invite on the show, someone with something interesting say, about the business of books. Business books in particular, but not necessarily. Who would you suggest that I invite on?

Roman Krznaric:                I’m going to be very naughty here and I’m very sorry, but I have to recommend a book by my wife.

Alison Jones:                        A bit of nepotism. Love it.

Roman Krznaric:                Which is actually coming out the same time as mine and it’s called Donut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist. It’s published by Random House Business Books.

Alison Jones:                        I saw something about that at the London Book fair last week actually. That’s interesting, a flier I think…

Roman Krznaric:                Yeah. You would have seen it around. This is a book about how to re-think what economics should look like, because the idea is that people are being taught economics using text books from the 1950s, based on theories from the 1850s, trying to make them ready for the world of the 2050s, which is mad. It’s the kind of book, which has become very relevant to people, because it’s relevant to people to think about circular economy, relevant to making organisations improve their supply chain.

It’s that big picture of, well what should economics really be for? What are we all trying to do? Shouldn’t we all be trying to make profits or make something else? Thrive and balance on the one planet that we have, so the book I recommend is Donut Economics. I would recommend it because it is written by my wife, but I would recommend it anyway.

Alison Jones:                        Fantastic. If she doesn’t get back to me quickly, I’ll be back onto you saying, “Could you just have a quick word and … ” With a pincer movement, we’ll get her on the show. Brilliant. Thank you. Now Roman, if people want to find out more about you, more about Carpe Diem Regained, and your other books, where should they go?

Roman Krznaric:                The first place to go to really is my new website for my new book, which is www.carpediem.click. That’s one place you can go, or visit the Empathy museum, Empathymuseum.com. Or, if you can spell it, go to my own website, which is romankrznaric.com. R-o-m-a-n-k-r-z-n-a-r-i-c.

Alison Jones:                        Don’t worry. I will put all the links on the show notes, so people don’t have to at least try to work out how to spell that. Thanks for the tutorial at the beginning, on how to pronounce your name. That was much appreciated. Actually, not as hard as I thought. Wonderful. It has been such a pleasure talking to you. So much food for thought there. Thank you so much for your time.

Roman Krznaric:                Thank you Alison.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.