Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and today's guest is somebody who I have been wanting to talk to for a while.

Oliver Berkman, who wrote the mega, mega bestseller 4,000 weeks time management for mortals and the new meditation for mortals.

And he is somebody who is really, really interesting and thoughtful about subjects

that we've been talking about a long time on this podcast, like optimization, productivity,

systems, habits, achievements, just like what to do with this limited space that you have

on this earth. So he and I have a really good conversation about his approach, some of

things I'm writing about in my book, and also topics like digital detoxification that we've been talking about for a long time on the show. But before I get there, my novel came out on Tuesday. You can get it wherever you get your books. Amazon's being a little wonky, but if you order from there, it will ship no matter what, like even if it says it's out of stock, there's like a weird warehouse thing going on, but could also get the novel wherever you buy books, whether it's Barnes & Noble, Target, bookshop.org to support your local booksellers. And if you love the book, I would appreciate if you went on Amazon and gave it five stars in a review and good reads, Storygraph or anything else. If you want to come see me in person, I'll be the night of this episode comes out. So on Thursday, I'll be in the Lower East Side on the 27th at P&T knitwear. We'll put a link in the show notes to that event. We'll also, I'll be in Staten Island on Sunday and then St. Louis on Monday

night. That event may be sold out by the time you're listening to this, but we'll put a link

in the show notes. If not, you can check that out. But really excited to have that book out in the

world. Let's get to Oliver Berkman. I think you're going to love this discussion and it's going to

prompt a lot of thinking

about a lot of the conversations that we've been having on this podcast.

Let's jump in.

Oliver, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks very much for inviting me.

Well, I probably had more people in my life say to me, hey, you need to read, and it used to be

4,000 weeks, but now it's Meditations for Mortals, which I think is both a mark of how

impressive your books are, but how pathological I perhaps am on some of the things that you're

pointing out in your book.

So it's great to be speaking.

I think this is, this conversation comes at a great time.

I'm going to anchor this because I've listened to so many of your interviews in preparation

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