Beating Burnout by Just Being

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor and publisher of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Today I’m here with Lawrence Levy, the former Executive Vice-President and board member of Pixar and a cofounder of The Juniper Foundation, an organization devoted to making meditation and Buddhist teachings accessible in a modern context. At Pixar, Lawrence helped turn the company into the media giant that it is today. He describes this period of his life in the book To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History. Lawrence is also a longtime practitioner in the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He’s a teacher at Juniper under the guidance of Segyu Choepel Rinpoche, also a cofounder of Juniper. In our talk, Lawrence shares his insights into a common problem, burnout. Burnout, he says, is a sign that our human needs are not being met, and it’s often caused when our life narratives are out of sync with reality. Prevailing narratives, such as the belief that perfection is possible, that cognitive intelligence is more important than emotional intelligence, and that certainty is always a virtue, prevent us from seeing the stressors in our environment and from paying attention to our inner life.

James Shaheen: Lawrence Levy, thank you for joining us.

Lawrence Levy: Oh, James, it’s a pleasure to be part of this. Thanks for having me.

James Shaheen: Our topic today is burnout, something I hear has been epidemic for decades but has gone in many ways largely untreated. So my first question to you, Lawrence, is about a comment you made when you spoke to members of the medical community at the University of Connecticut not long ago. You said that burnout is not a shortcoming or a failing but a healthy response to an insane world. Can you say a little bit about that?

Lawrence Levy: Yes, you know, I spent a good part of the last year or so really studying this problem of burnout, certainly within the field of medicine, but also within any field. There’s plenty of it in my world, here in Silicon Valley. And I came to conclude that we look at burnout as this sort of negative thing, almost as though it’s a weakness or something. But I came to see it as not a weakness at all but, in actual fact, a healthy response to a toxic world, to a toxic environment. I think that burnout is a signal that says, “My needs as a human being are not being met.” And I put it this way when I gave the talk to the physicians in Connecticut. I said, “Burnout is like the fever you get when you have an infection.” You don’t look at a patient that has an infection and say, “Boy, they’re really weak because they got a fever.” You just say, “Fever is a sign that something’s not right.” And that’s how I think of burnout now: It’s a sign, it’s a symptom of something being wrong.

James Shaheen: So what is it exactly that’s wrong? What are you identifying as the primary causes of burnout?

Lawrence Levy: Well, in terms of causing, I think it has to do a lot with the strains and the toxicities of the environment that we’re in. We largely work in environments, whether it be school or professional life or work life or sometimes these days even home life, where so much of the emphasis is on performance and the administration and the bureaucratic needs of what we have to do that the balance is out in terms of taking care of our needs as human beings. When that balance is off for too long of a period of time, as it is in a lot of environments today, then eventually the body rebels, and it says, “It’s enough. I can’t handle this anymore.”

James Shaheen: So you talk about an emphasis on productivity, a narrative of productivity, as opposed to a human narrative, and you also refer to outer mastery over inner mastery. Can you say a little bit about those things?

Lawrence Levy: Yes. So when I talk about outer mastery, I’m talking about basically the control over our outer world, over the material world. In the last fifty years or more, we’ve become experts at that. We’re living in a period and era of the greatest amount of discovery and prosperity that we’ve ever had. Come here to Silicon Valley, and you see more wealth, more prosperity, more invention than probably any other time in human history. But what I also note and actually correlate with that is that, for some reason, in modern contemporary life, with high levels of prosperity and invention come very high levels of mental anguish and stress and anxiety and loneliness and loss of meaning. I began to wonder a lot about this. And what I saw was that it’s not that outer mastery is a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s a great thing. It moves us forward as humanity. But when it’s all about outer mastery, to the complete exclusion of what I would call inner mastery, by which I mean control over our inner world, then things become out of balance. We may have a lot of prosperity, but we won’t have the kind of contentment and fulfillment and joy that I think we crave as human beings.

James Shaheen: OK, I’ll get to the latter in a few minutes, but I wanted to bring up something that I’ve also heard you discuss. One of your ways of framing this or understanding this overall was to point out that our narrative is out of sync with reality. Can you talk a little bit about that and the stress that it causes?

Lawrence Levy: Yes. We know the Buddhist philosophy of the Middle Way, or the insight philosophy. And a lot of the insight philosophy is about how the way the world appears to us is not the way the world actually is. And in fact, that we’re functioning by narratives more than we are functioning in reality. When our narrative is out of sync with the way things are, then we suffer. This is one of the theses of the Middle Way, in a sense. And so I took a look at what are the some of the prevailing narratives that might be causing us to feel this experience of burnout, depletion, lack of fulfillment, and so on, and I came up with several. And so, as an example, one of those is what I call the narrative of perfectionism, the sense that in whatever we do, we have to be infallible at it. And this is a strong current through contemporary life where performance, and especially very high levels of performance, is a prevailing narrative. We feel as though any mistakes, any shortcomings, are beyond us, or something we shouldn’t have. And the narrative of perfectionism is out of sync with reality because it’s just not a reachable standard. There is no perfection. We can always do better. And so what that does is basically leads to misery, leads to hardship, because we live under a constant pressure of making mistakes. We can spiral out of control or downward, even with small mistakes. And we sort of torture ourselves with self-critique, in a way, because we’re trying striving for a standard that, at the end of the day, we can never reach. David Burns, who was a clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University, once wrote that perfection is man’s ultimate illusion. It just doesn’t exist. It’s a con game. And it’s not that we shouldn’t strive, but if we strive under a current of perfectionism, we’re going to suffer as a result, I think.

James Shaheen: So in the case of perfectionism, you’re really associating that with a narrative of productivity. Is that right? And it’s sort of a flawless productivity.

Lawrence Levy: It’s that word flawless. There’s nothing wrong with productivity. It’s when it becomes this sort of relentless quest for performance at all costs, never forgiving ourselves, not being able to tolerate any kinds of failures or setbacks, that’s where it becomes a problem.

James Shaheen: So we associate productivity also with a particular kind of intelligence at the expense of another. You refer to, say, IQ over EQ. Is that another part of the way in which the narrative is out of sync with reality? 

Lawrence Levy: I do. That’s another narrative that I talk about, which I call the narrative of IQ over EQ, IQ being sort of cognitive intelligence, EQ being a sort of buzzword for emotional intelligence. And I know that emotional intelligence is a pretty hot topic these days. A lot of schools, a lot of places are paying attention to it. But, in many ways, I think we’re merely paying lip service to it, because in the training of people—whether in school, graduate school, or the professions, pretty much any endeavor—the focus is on the cognitive part of it. In the case of physicians, in medical school, for example, there’s very little emphasis or training placed on the humanistic, emotional sides of what it means to be a physician. The same would be true of business school or other things. So we end up emphasizing intelligence above emotion, and that leaves us with fewer tools to cope with the things that are actually causing distress.

James Shaheen: And along with that, and I think this goes well with perfectionism, you talk about an insidious narrative of certainty. Do you want to say something about that?

Lawrence Levy: Yes, it’s another one. We tend to be uncomfortable in the gray. We want things to be black and white, and so we traffic, I would say, in a narrative of certainty, where we have this vision that things are like this, and we want them to be that way. We want to be right, not wrong. And in many cases, in the field of medicine, just as an example, it’s actually more uncertainty than it is certainty. In our world today, for example, technology is going to do a lot more of the black and white things. I’ll use medicine as an example. When we use genetic testing, for example, this produces probabilities, not certainties. When we’re dealing with quality of life considerations for patients or for aging populations, this is an area full of uncertainty. So in many ways, in our era, uncertainty is the new certainty, and we need to get used to it.

James Shaheen: You mentioned technology, and I’ve heard you say this before: We feel that we’re controlled by technology rather than managing it as a tool. Do you want to say something about that? 

Lawrence Levy: Yes, well, I think that what I would call a sort of technology angst has sort of settled—it’s like a cloud—over modern culture. In a way, we’re at the very dawn of the era of some of these new technologies. Even the computer era itself is still in its infancy, but certainly with social media, smartphones, and all of those things, it’s brand new. And we’re still playing with these as new tools. All of these new technologies, they tend to have some sort of dark side with them. I mean, who knew that Facebook, for example, would be linked with loneliness. Facebook is the most connected technology force probably ever invented, and yet there are articles and studies being written that show that over-usage of Facebook produces feelings of loneliness because the quality of the connections doesn’t satisfy that human need. So we have this technology angst, and I think we have to get technology to work for us, instead of the other way around, where we are being controlled by it.

James Shaheen: You’ve mentioned three of the narratives—perfectionism, IQ over EQ, and a narrative of certainty—as being in many ways the causes of the burnout, the stress, the alienation we feel. But you also mentioned just now Facebook and loneliness, and a fourth narrative I have heard you mention is the narrative of individuality. Of all of them, that probably most disconnects us from others, or at least it’s a major contributing factor to the alienation and loneliness that we feel. Do you want to talk about the narrative of individuality?

Lawrence Levy: Yes, in so many domains now, we function like an isolated, individualistic pod. Sometimes it feels like we’re walking around in space suits, and we’re driving our own little cars on our own and making decisions on our own about what we should be doing and how we should be doing it and who we should be doing it with. And we’ve lost a kind of tribal or community mentality of living, and so we’ve lost a culture of mutual support and empathy and collaboration. More than anything else, I think that we are deep down supremely social and connected creatures and beings. When we lose our sense of connection and closeness and community, it produces a lot of hardship and suffering. And that’s what I call the narrative of individuality. It’s out of sync with reality, because it’s a story in our heads born out of performance culture, as opposed to the healthy way of human living.

James Shaheen: I would say that that notion of community and mutual support and collective gain is often lost when we talk about individuality, competition, zero-sum game. I mean, all of those things are so corrosive and in many ways are closely associated with performance culture. Would that be fair to say?

Lawrence Levy: Very fair to say. And it’s not just that it’s disassociated or forgotten about. It’s that we’re losing the skills of how to do it. You know, maintaining closeness, community, and friendship, the bonds that keep us together, is a skill set. We have to develop it. We have to practice it. We have to learn it. And you can be good at it. You can be bad at it. It’s not difficult. Sometimes it’s as simple as smiling at a person in the grocery store checkout line or remembering that a friend is going through a difficult time. So it’s not rocket science, but it’s still something that we have to practice and in some aspects of contemporary life we’ve forgotten about that practice.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting. I just thought as you were talking about how it’s also important to keep in mind the sorts of people we should not be spending our time with. 

Lawrence Levy: Well, yes, I certainly agree with that. We tend to sometimes give too much power away to people that don’t have our best interest in mind. That could be a boss or a certain family member or certain friend or someone that, you know, we’re sort of yearning for their approval or their acceptance or their advice or something like that. But in actual fact, they’re not in that inner circle, that inner tribe of people who really, truly care about each other in a deep and meaningful way. And so we’re putting our trust in the wrong places sometimes.

James Shaheen: We talk about burnout sometimes so casually. “I’m so burnt out,” we often say that. It’s a bit of an exaggeration when we’re simply tired. Yet it is an epidemic, and in its extreme forms, there’s a true human cost. I know you’ve looked into this. What are we looking at in terms of cost?

Lawrence Levy: Well, I group these costs into different categories. At one level, we are creating the cost we feel in terms of stress, anxiety, depression, mental anguish. Why is it that in contemporary society, where there’s lots of wealth, there is so much mental anguish? Why are university mental health clinics brimming with people coming in with anxiety complaints at a rate higher than any time before? So there’s a high cost in terms of mental anguish. There’s also a cost in terms of low levels of a kind of meaning, low levels of joy, of fun, of play. You know, quite a lot of life ought to be just fun and play. And we box that in for quite some time. In business, it’s sort of a badge of honor if you don’t take vacation. Unused vacation is a mark of honor that you’re really dedicated, but that means a lot less fun, a lot less play. And so those costs, you know, take their toll on our experience as humans. 

James Shaheen: It’s interesting, you say that it goes back to this overarching idea of performance culture, because play, fun, joy, those aren’t things we typically think of as productive, and yet they’re so essential. 

Lawrence Levy: They’re so essential. And it’s even worse than that—we see them sometimes as weak. So the more productive we are, the more of the grind we are, that’s a sign of strength in contemporary life. But if you say, “Hey, I’m just feeling burned out and am taking a few weeks off to go to a spa or read a book or something like that,” then that’s almost seen as weakness in our contemporary life. And this is a story that I think we’d be better off reversing.

James Shaheen: You talk about outer mastery and inner mastery, and you refer to the bureaucrat, who is necessary, who is administratively useful, and encourages or insists upon productivity. Yet there’s also the inner mastery, and here’s where we start to find the antidote to burnout, or at least as you see it. You referred to your arrival at one point at Pixar, and you referred to Pixar as the starving artist. I mean, maybe that’s a good way for you to illustrate for us the difference between outer and inner mastery and their necessary dependence on one another in achieving balance.

Lawrence Levy: The Middle Way, as you know, is a deep and extraordinary philosophy that goes back two thousand years to these great Eastern philosophers and Buddhist masters. But one way to illustrate it is like this. You can imagine that there are two people inside of us. One person is a bureaucrat, and the goal of the bureaucrat is to get things done. There’s just stuff that has to get done in life. We have to wake up in time, get to the airport in time, make sure we have enough money in the bank, and all of these things. The bureaucrat tends to be a worrier, a very pragmatic person. And then there’s another person inside of us that we could call an artist or a free spirit. And the free spirit doesn’t care anything about getting things done, just wants to live and love and laugh and play and connect with friends and create and enjoy, smell the roses. And one application of the Middle Way would say that the Middle Way is a philosophy of harmony. It says that anytime we’re stuck in extremes, suffering will be the result. So the Middle Way would say that if we’re stuck in either of those two inner extremes, then we’re likely to experience some kind of frustration and hardship. If life is all about being a bureaucrat, all about getting things done, then we may accumulate a lot of stuff, we may have a lot of money, trophies, you name it, but we might one day wake up and wonder, did we ever truly live? And if we’re stuck in the other extreme, where life is all about playing and creativity and love and laughter, then we may smell the roses a little bit, but we might be frustrated for lack of momentum. And what the Middle Way would say is that we have to harmonize these two forces. We need to push off of those extremes so that we can have enough momentum, enough bureaucracy, in order to keep our lives moving forward and productive in those ways, but without killing that artistic, creative spirit inside of us, so that along the way we remember what it means to love and laugh and play and have all those kinds of experiences. I often say this was the secret to Pixar, because when I first joined Pixar in 1994 it really was the quintessential starving artist, incredible creativity, no momentum, and the company as a whole was extremely frustrated by that. And so despite all that great creativity, the overwhelming feeling was frustration for lack of momentum. What we really did at Pixar was put enough administration, strategy, structure around those creative forces to give it momentum without killing the creative spirit. And in many ways, that’s also one of the secrets to overcoming this kind of burnout problem.

James Shaheen: You talk about an organizational culture that can achieve the kind of balance that you’re referring to, and I imagine that’s what you achieved at Pixar, which turned it into the company it became.

Lawrence Levy: That’s true. Pixar worked very hard on its culture, and it’s a constant balancing act. It’s like meditation. It’s constant effort, you can never take it for granted, you have to come back to it every day. But Pixar built an extraordinary culture of collaboration, because in any endeavor where you’re striving to do excellent work or something like that, it’s the product of these forces that have tension against each other. In Pixar’s case, there are creative forces, technology forces, business forces, and they tend to pull against each other, and it requires a culture of collaboration in order to just kind of resolve all of that. And we were successful at creating that there.

James Shaheen: I’d like to talk a little bit about the antidote. You know, when you talk about how we respond to burnout in a healthy way, in terms of treating it, you begin with meditation, and more specifically, Buddhist meditation. How do you see that?

Lawrence Levy: I do. Buddhist meditation and philosophy has been the object of my study and much of my life for the last twenty years, but my starting point for this is to ask, how do we move to a healthier narrative? How do we move to a healthier way of being in a toxic kind of culture? And the first thing I would note is that there’s no magic wand. There’s no quick fix for this. It’s very easy to pay lip service to self-nurturing and throw in a meditation class on a Thursday night and a yoga class on a Monday night. There’s nothing wrong with any of those, but I think they’re not by themselves enough. Sometimes I call that checkbox meditation—you know, “I’ve meditated today. I’ve done my yoga class today.” That’s great, but it’s kind of like throwing a bucket of water on a forest fire. It’s not strong enough of an antidote. And my years of studying and looking at this and working with a teacher on this brought me to conclude that self-care, self-nurturing, this antidote to burnout that we’re talking about, has to be a continuous habit of self-nurturing and mutual support. It has to be continuous. It has to be the right kinds of things, and we have to do it with others in a mutually supportive environment. It’s much like food or exercise. It’s no good going to the gym once a month. It has to be regular. And it’s the same with this. And I think there are three elements to it that I call meditation, learning, and connection, and perhaps we’ll get into those.

James Shaheen: So you look at meditation as one of the solutions to the problem of burnout, and yet you see it as so much more. It’s not simply another technology that we deploy.

Lawrence Levy: That’s right, not at all. I think if we see it just as a technique or as a technology then it actually becomes limited, and in actual fact, it can even add to our stress, because now it’s just something else that we have to do. The way I see meditation is that a meditative life is really a way of living. It’s a way of experiencing life. I don’t think we just meditate for ten minutes a day, and then go on with our lives. I think we bring all of this meditation, this learning, to inform and infuse and replenish us all the time. Meditation is really a tremendous means of personal replenishment. Otherwise, life can deplete us, so where do we go in order to gain that replenishment? Well, meditation and these great lineages of practice and learning is a great way to do that. You know, when I sit down to do my meditation in the morning, I feel like I’m sitting down in a palace of of wisdom and insight with all these great masters, and I’m tapping into this, and it infuses and it informs my life all the time, and I feel it’s a way of living, not just a technique that I’m trying to use to decrease stress, for example.

James Shaheen: One interesting way to look at it may be: It’s not so much that I bring my meditation to my life; rather, my entire life is brought to the practice. 

Lawrence Levy: My entire life is brought to the practice, that’s exactly right. You know, I was at a retreat once with my own teacher, Segyu Rinpoche, and somebody asked him, “How often do you meditate?” And he said, “All the time.” He doesn’t sit in meditation, you know, with his eyes focused on an object twenty-four hours a day. But that space, that way of being is something that he never lets go of. And so that’s an example of that. 

James Shaheen: OK, so that’s meditation. Why don’t you take us through learning and connection?

Lawrence Levy: So say we have a meditation practice, right? This is a contemplative practice. It’s like our space for self-nurturing. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but it does have to be regular. But a lot of the question is what do we bring into that practice? What information, what ideas are we bringing into that contemplation? And that’s where the learning comes in. And this is where some of the great Buddhist texts and things like that can really help us ask questions like what is peace of mind? What is compassion? Is compassion just being nice to everybody? I don’t think it is. So what, in fact, does it mean to be compassionate? Can we be compassionate, or is that just sort of the expression of our ego? What is emotional harmony? The Buddhist teachings have a lot to say about emotional well-being. What does it mean, for example, to be irrationally angry versus to stand up for ourselves when there’s an injustice? There’s an important difference between those. You know, quelling our emotional anger doesn’t mean we become weak or meek. Not at all. We’re engaged in these practices to become stronger, centered, grounded human beings. So there’s a lot to learn about these things, which is one of the things I love about this tradition. And then the connection part is acknowledging that we have to have a nurturing, supportive community to do this with. We have to help each other. That includes teachers and guides who can help us along the way, as well as friends, spiritual friends, a safe space that we can be and learn and gain from each other. And there was a book by Johann Hari called Lost Connections. Actually, it was published this year. It’s a book on depression, and he makes a point in there that says happiness is a social thing. So whatever we think of happiness and contentment and the meaning of that, I think it turns out that it’s something that we do together. If we see both our agitation and the joy of our life as something that we share with a network of people around us, that’s the thing that will make a difference.

James Shaheen: And that’s also probably where we work with others to change a system that is the cause of this kind of burnout. 

Lawrence Levy: Yes, well, the system is a problem, and I hear this a lot, which is like, what good is any of this? If the system is just constantly pressuring me, whether it be a hospital system or a school system or a startup in Silicon Valley, or whatever it is, there’s a corporate system out there that is imposing itself on me and making all of this very difficult. And I totally get that. I mean, the system is obviously a coconspirator here. It’s a coconspirator sort of everywhere. That’s what’s creating this toxicity, because the system itself doesn’t really care about us in the ways that we’re talking about. It doesn’t necessarily care whether we’re burned out or not. So we need to change the system to make it more human, and I think that over time, I hope at least that over time, we will get better at that. But there is danger in sort of blaming the system for everything. You know, we don’t have to change the system to at least value self-care and to do something about it. We don’t have to change the system to be a friend to a colleague, to smile at people, to embrace people, to engage people in a friendly way, and we don’t need to change the system to at least see ourselves and those around us as human beings first, and whatever else we happen to be doing second. And so there’s a lot that we can do in the meantime while we’re also working on the system. 

James Shaheen: In terms of how we see ourselves and each other, you used a few lines that were descriptive of a particular person in two very different ways. For instance, you said “She is a patient,” or “She is a human being who suffers.” What’s the difference there?

Lawrence Levy: Well, yes, I gave this little thought experiment to the physicians out in Connecticut, and I gave two actually, and the first one I said to them was to do a meditation and actually contemplate the difference between these two phrases. The first phrase is, “I am a doctor,” and you can replace the word doctor with anything: I am an executive. I am the editor of Tricycle magazine. You can put anything you want in there, but “I am a doctor” versus the other phrase, which is, “I am a human being who works in the field of medicine,” or “I am a human being who works at a startup or who teaches people,” or whatever it is. So I am a doctor versus I am a human being who works in the field of medicine. And what I think we find is that when we self-identify with the word doctor or whatever it may be, what that does is it constantly affirms that performance narrative. And when we self-identify with the word human, it opens up a whole world of possibilities for how we may act, behave, and see other people. And the same is true for the one you mentioned. If you do a similar meditation on the difference between “She is a patient”—because to a doctor, a patient might just be a number, just the disease state, how do we treat the disease?—versus the other statement, which is, “She is a human being who is suffering.” Again, it opens up a world of possibilities. Yes, we have to treat the disease state, but the person that’s experiencing that disease is a human being, and there’s a whole lot of other factors that might go into how that person is experiencing that disease and how we might treat it. And so these are the kinds of changes in narrative that can really make a difference in our lives.

James Shaheen: That’s very consistent with Buddhist thought. I think there’s a much stronger solidification around an identity like “I am a doctor,” than something as fluid, opening, and evolving as a human being, say. And even so, we’re still identifying as something, but the latter identification seems much more useful for our purposes anyway.

Lawrence Levy: Yes, not just useful, I think, more in sync with reality. You use the words fluid and flexible when you describe being a human being, that’s exactly right. As human beings, we are in constant transformation, in constant change. We are emotional beings. We are imperfect. We make mistakes. We need each other. We have all of these things as human beings that are more in sync with the way things are than these other narratives of, you know, doctor, executive, or whatever it may be. So these shifts, just like the Buddhist training tries to do for us, try to unlock us from these kinds of extreme positions and put us more into this, yeah, it’s not as well defined, but it’s more real. It’s who we are. We’re kind of messy, and it gets us more in touch with that.

James Shaheen: It’s a greater degree of acceptance of uncertainty, I would say, and potential.

Lawrence Levy: Absolutely, and greater degree of acceptance of all of these things that make us human. Let’s take an example right out of the heart of Buddhist thought: the first noble truth, the truth of suffering. The truth of suffering says it is just part of being human to suffer. I think the Buddha was one of the first people, one of the first humanists, one of the first psychologists to look into the human heart and say, wow, it’s frail in there. It’s challenging in there. There’s a lot of suffering in there. But we don’t like to own that because we feel vulnerable about it, or we feel shame, or we feel weak, or we have all of these stories that sort of block us from the nature of that humanity that the Buddha and other masters really pointed out two thousand years ago. And when we begin to own that more, when we begin to cast aside the shame and the denial and all that and accept our humanity, I think we make for more hope, a better future, more joy and contentment in our lives.

James Shaheen: I think that’s an excellent place to end on that high note. So thank you, Lawrence Levy, for your time and for your wisdom. I hope we have a chance to talk again soon.

Lawrence Levy: I loved it. Thanks for having me.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to my conversation with Lawrence Levy, author of To Pixar and Beyond, on Tricycle Talks. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org. Tricycle Talks is produced by Paul Ruest at Argot Studios in New York City. I’m James Shaheen, editor and publisher of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thank you for listening.