Peter Trachtenberg on Art & New York City

Peter Trachtenberg is an author of memoirs, essays, and literary nonfiction who lives across the river in Catskill. He has taught writing at Bennington and Pitt, and has a newsletter: Not Dark Yet. His books include 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities, Another Insane Devotion, and The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York.

I start all these conversations with the same question—one I borrowed from a friend of mine here in Hudson. She helps people tell their stories, and I haven’t found a better question to begin a conversation. So I borrow it. It’s a big question, though, and I tend to over-explain it, just like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer however you want—or not at all. The question is: Where do you come from?

Okay. I’ve actually thought about this because I’ve listened to some of your interviews.

Nice.

I come from what is essentially a vanished world: middle-class New York. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in a neighborhood where almost all the kids went to public schools. My father didn’t own a car until he was probably in his 60s, and he didn’t own property until near the end of his life. That was the norm.

It was also Bohemian New York—which still exists, but in a much smaller, vestigial form. People who make art, or whose lives are organized around creative work, can no longer afford to live in many parts of the city.

I wanted to ask you about your book, The Twilight of Bohemia. When you say your life is organized around creation, what does that mean to you? I’d love to hear more about that.

The popular stereotype of a Bohemian is someone who leads a disorderly life—lots of substance use, romantic and sexual excess, never making the rent, and so on. That image has been reinforced through operas, plays, movies, and television. But the model I look to comes from Tosca, the Puccini opera. There’s an aria called Vissi d’arte, which means “I lived for art.”

To me, Bohemians are people whose lives are centered around making art. They might be painters, writers, dancers, performers—whatever the form. Most have had to do other things to earn a living, but art is the central force in their lives.

You mentioned coming from a “vanished world.” Can you say more about what you meant by that? What was that world like?

Sure. Some people would probably disagree and say there are still middle-class neighborhoods in New York—and there are, particularly in the outer boroughs. But it's not just about material conditions. It’s also about a set of expectations and values.

In my case, it was an intellectual world, even though I was the first in my family to attend college. There was tremendous respect for learning. Some of that may have come from Jewish tradition, though neither of my parents were religiously observant.

I discovered the arts as a source of excitement very early. I was an only child, and I’d entertain myself by telling elaborate stories. Once I learned how to write, I started putting them on paper. Reading became my main source of entertainment. Then, as a teenager, I found other kids who were similarly interested. My passions expanded to include music—especially jazz and rock and roll—and later, visual art.

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

When I was very young, I wanted to be an anthropologist. I was drawn to the idea of venturing into an unknown, “exotic” world—quote-unquote primitive, as the language went then. And I actually did that, at times, for my first book.

What interested me then—and still does—is going somewhere unfamiliar and discovering something new. Sometimes that world is right next to me. In the case of my most recent book, it was a world I lived in but didn’t fully understand. I can explain more about that later.

What was your model of an anthropologist? Where did that idea come from?

Probably Bomba the Jungle Boy—a guy in a pith helmet making his way through the rainforest. The old colonial image of the anthropologist.

Tell me where you are now. What are you up to these days?

I live in the Hudson Valley of New York, about two and a half hours north of where I grew up. I write full-time. I still teach privately, but I’ve retired from university positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the Bennington Writing Seminars within the last two years.

I just finished a book called The Twilight of Bohemia, which we can talk more about. I’m also returning to a novel called Ruination, which centers on the bankruptcy and death of Ulysses Grant—set around 1874–1875. I also maintain a Substack called Not Dark Yet, where I’m currently working on a long essay titled “Economies of Suffering.”

So yes, I’m busy.

Let’s talk about the book—The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York. I love that title. It really blows my mind wide open. How did you come up with it? What’s the book about, and where did the story begin for you?

The story began when I lived in Westbeth illegally—as an unauthorized subtenant—for about 11 years. I had been spending time in the building since the mid-1970s because my best friend, a guy named Gaye Milius, lived there. When I moved in, I was subletting—illegally—his apartment on the 13th floor.

It started as an attempt to make sense of his suicide in 2006. He took his life after the end of his second marriage, under really difficult circumstances. He’d spent a couple of months in jail on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, then moved to Colorado to care for his dying sister. Eventually, he returned to Westbeth. He was broke and deeply traumatized by his time in jail.

I think a group of us—his friends—were trying, maybe without fully realizing it, to keep him alive. But it didn’t work. He took his own life.

What followed was, in part, absurd—almost comic. In an effort to raise money, Gaye had illegally sold his lease to another friend, who then claimed the apartment. It turned into a kind of slow-motion Keystone Cops routine. This man threatened to sue me if I relinquished the apartment back to the building, which, legally, I was supposed to do.

I had written a long essay about it—about the events leading up to Gaye’s death and what came after—but I realized at some point that something essential was missing. The essay was decent, but it lacked context. Specifically, it lacked Gaye’s context.

When someone commits suicide, the people around them are devastated—but suicide, unfortunately, is not rare. People die in the most tragic, absurd, and pathetic ways all the time. What gave Gaye’s death a deeper meaning, what made it worth trying to understand, was that he had been an artist. He had pursued the gamble of making art. He had staked everything on it. And when he felt he was losing, he took his life. He felt he had to.

To understand that, I realized I needed to write about the building he lived in—Westbeth. Because Westbeth is a building of artists. It's one of only two subsidized housing developments for artists in New York City—possibly in the country. Its 384 apartments, with a few exceptions, are occupied by people who make art in one form or another. That’s how it was designed: as a haven for artists, a place where they could live for a fraction of what the surrounding neighborhood charged. The idea was to give artists a start, help launch their careers, and then—eventually—they’d move out. But the problem was, no one moved out.

What was the context that gave birth to Westbeth? How did a place like that come to be?

It was a project of the Great Society. The building—or rather, the complex of buildings—was originally constructed between the 1860s and the turn of the 20th century. Eventually, it was consolidated and became the labs and offices of the Bell Telephone Company.

Anyone with a background in science or engineering has heard of Bell Labs. This is where the first transatlantic radio broadcast occurred. It’s where the phonograph record and stylus were developed, where radar and a prototype digital computer emerged. Even the first television broadcast happened in those labs.

And what’s the relationship between Westbeth and those labs?

In the late 1960s, a partnership between the National Foundation for the Arts (which would become the National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA), led by Roger Stevens, and a private foundation—the J.M. Kaplan Fund, led by Joan Davidson—put up the money. I’m not sure if they purchased the building outright, but they had an arrangement with Bell, which had by then moved its headquarters to New Jersey, to repurpose the space as housing.

They didn’t have the funds to tear it down and build something new, which would have been the typical approach. So instead, the architect Richard Meier—this was his first major commission, apart from a house he’d designed for his mother—essentially hollowed out the structure. He converted the old labs into 384 apartments, ranging from studios to three-bedroom units. Some of the apartments spanned two floors and were called “triplexes,” though I don’t think any were truly three stories.

What was your first experience of Westbeth? When were you living there, and how did you first encounter it?

I first encountered Westbeth through my friendship with Gaye, which began in 1976. He came to a New Year’s Eve party that my girlfriend and I were throwing in our tenement apartment on Bleecker Street. He showed up wearing a seersucker suit and a T-shirt he had made himself, appliquéd with two rows of latex dog teats. He was a few years older than me—maybe four or five—and I thought, this is the coolest guy I’ve ever met.

Westbeth itself was—and is—a monolith. It occupies an entire square block in the far West Village, what we now call the Meatpacking District. It’s enormous, about three-quarters of a million square feet. The west side of the building faces the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, which at the time had no park. The north side borders Bethune Street, the south side is Bank Street, and the east side is Washington.

The hallways were stunningly long and featureless, with doorways facing each other on either side. Each door typically had a black triangle pointing either up or down to indicate the direction of the staircase—important for firefighters, especially in the duplexes. To get to Gaye’s apartment, you’d take an elevator from the ground floor that stopped at floors 3, 6, or 9. Then you’d walk down a long, dizzying hallway to a second bank of elevators that could take you up to the 13th floor. The only way to reach his apartment directly from the street was if you had a key to a side door on West Street.

He had a great apartment. He had a commercial lease, which meant he didn’t technically have to be an artist to live there, though he was one. He’d originally moved in as a painter, to a smaller unit. Apartments at Westbeth were assigned based on family size. If you moved in alone, you got a studio—no negotiation. Over time, you might be able to get a slightly larger place, but the only way to qualify for a duplex or triplex—maybe even a three-bedroom—was to have children. Income didn’t help you jump the line. In the early days, there was an income cap; you couldn’t earn more than $11,000 a year. That was in the early ’70s, which made it effectively middle-class housing.

In fact, some original residents didn’t want it known they lived at Westbeth, because it was associated with low-income housing. Still, not everyone was poor, but the overall atmosphere was distinctly middle-class. Many people had families. Outside of my own childhood, Westbeth was probably my first real exposure to family life. There were always kids in the courtyard, kids on skateboards—one of the first places I ever saw that. The hallways were perfect for it.

I’d always envied Gaye’s apartment. It was about 900 square feet, with 18-foot ceilings. He’d turned it into a triplex of sorts by stacking platforms one on top of the other. It had an incredible view of the Hudson. For a long time, my screensaver was a photo I’d taken from the roof, looking out over the river.

Somewhere—maybe in another interview—you said the book was an attempt to pay attention? Can you say more about what that meant?

I’d been hanging out at Westbeth throughout the ’70s and ’80s. When Gaye and his first wife traveled—which they did often and for long stretches because she worked in finance and traveled for her job—I would dog-sit.

In 1995, after he split from Molly, he married a woman named Karen, and they moved to the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He wanted to keep the apartment, though, and had become a flea market picker—someone who finds things in garages, basements, sheds, and sells them at the 26th Street flea market. He had an amazing eye for that kind of thing—just brilliant.

So I sublet from him. I paid him $900 over the rent, which still came out to less than $1,500 a month. The arrangement was that he could come up once or twice a month and stay in the dog room—the small space I’d used when visiting in the past. Every surface in that room was covered in dog hair. You’d have needed two shop vacs to clean it.

He was paranoid. He told me not to introduce myself to the neighbors, not to speak to anyone, because, in his mind, everyone hated us. He believed they were jealous of his apartment—which they might have been, had they known about it. So I kept a very low profile.

I didn’t recognize most of the artists who lived there as “famous.” They weren’t celebrities in the traditional sense. But within the art world, yes—there were known figures. Hans Haacke, a conceptual artist who I believe is still alive, was there. So was Lorraine O’Grady, the conceptual and performance artist who just passed away in December. Nam June Paik, the video artist and pioneer of using video as a medium, also lived there. I’m not sure how to pronounce his last name, but he was the first to treat video as art.

I remember that part of what drew me to this story was the meaning of Westbeth itself. It seems like such a rare, even exotic, thing—a kind of public commitment to making space for artists in a city. That doesn’t feel common anymore. There’s something beautiful in its original promise, and I wonder what you discovered—about art, about the city, about what Westbeth is or was meant to be—as you tried to tell the story of your friend and the building.

One of the deepest things I discovered was that Westbeth challenged my notion of what success in art means.

Since the 1980s—and I’m speaking across disciplines here: visual art, writing, dance, theater, music—success has largely come to mean celebrity. High profile. Money. The person standing alone in the center of a bright, concentrated beam of achievement.

In the '70s and '80s, that might have been someone like Eric Fischl or Julian Schnabel—who, incidentally, has a three- or four-story townhouse just a few blocks from Westbeth that he renovated himself. It might be someone like Pipilotti Rist. Or, among writers, someone like Jay McInerney at the time. I don’t know who the big literary earners are now—maybe Emma Cline, who lives on the West Coast and gets large advances. Or a performer like Mark Morris in dance.

The dominant model has been individual recognition—high visibility and financial reward. A naive way to look at Westbeth would be to say, “You’ve never heard of most of these people. Not all the work is good”—and by “good,” I mean work I think is good. But still, those people, that work, are vital to the spirit of the building. And to the spirit of art. Because art isn’t just an individual endeavor. It’s also—and maybe more essentially—a communal one. That’s how it began.

If you travel in traditional societies—say, in West Africa or Southeast Asia—you’ll often find that every village has several artists. And when their work is sold, it’s sold together. All the masks are presented side by side. All the bracelets, the cloths, the carvings. It’s not individualized in the way we’ve come to expect. You don’t brand yourself or protect a niche. There’s a gold district. A mask district. A batik district.

This ethos aligns more with medieval art than with the art market of today. Think of the cathedrals at Chartres or Reims. No one knows who built them. They were the work of thousands, of generations of architects and artisans. Whole districts participated.

So what do we make of that?

I’d say there’s an ecosystem for art. And Westbeth is a miniature version of one.

First, it’s supported. Residents pay rent that’s a quarter—or even a fifth—of what people pay in the surrounding neighborhood. That alone makes it possible to live there. Most of the residents still have a “B job,” but it can remain secondary to their art. And the building houses a range of people: a few who’ve achieved some degree of recognition—though I wouldn’t say any are wealthy—and many others who aren’t known at all, but who contribute in essential, sometimes mysterious ways to the life of the place.

Some contribute materially. Westbeth has committees: a beautification committee that plants flowers along Bethune Street; a visual arts committee that organizes shows of residents’ work and manages the rental of gallery space. There are two large galleries in the building. The Whitney Museum, which is now located just a few blocks away, has even held its annual staff show at Westbeth. So, yes—there’s a whole ecology here. A model of mutual support, collective energy, and shared space. Something beautiful. And rare.

It's amazing. One of the people I interviewed was a visual artist, a painter named Jack Dowling, who had essentially stopped painting in the early 70s about the time he moved into the building because his apartment was so small, or at least his first apartment. He became the director of the visual arts committee for 12 years, in which capacity he curated 12 years of art shows.

Those art shows are really important in the life of the building, especially the winter holiday show, because it's where these people show who they are to their neighbors. They show their work to their neighbors for the first time. You might invite your neighbor into your studio, but there's no other opportunities for everybody to see what you do.

I would say that in a way, West Beth is a compressed version of what the city used to be like, or certain parts of the city. That's what Soho used to be like, for example, in the 1970s.

Is this the twilight? When you talk about the last artist, you're talking about a way of being creative or being related to art in the city that's no longer tenable.

Exactly. There still are many artists living in the city. They are either very wealthy, they're people who've already been established, or they're people who are living, in their 30s and 40s, they're living with three or four roommates in Ridgewood, in rather remote neighborhoods of Queens and the Bronx or Brooklyn.

There's something about this I'm imagining you as an anthropologist in the art culture of New York. What was your experience of researching the book? Is that a fair assessment of what it was like to research this book and to write this book?

What was it like?

Well, I'm an anthropologist who also has a foothold in that culture. I no longer live in New York. I often had the feeling that I was returning to my roots and looking at an alternate life that I might have led, if I hadn't left the city.

As far as I'm concerned, I've always been primarily a creative writer. But I've worked as a teacher, I've worked as a journalist, I've worked as a publishing freelancer. My life has mostly been marginal.

Marginal? What do you mean?

I mean, financially precarious. I didn't start teaching in a university until I was in my 50s. And I'm actually glad that it worked out that way. But for a long time, I sometimes didn't know if I was going to make my rent. Yeah. I went through periods of my life without insurance, et cetera, et cetera. I was returning to the roots of the art world in the city, but sort of the basement of the art world.

You know, the bargain basement, the place where people are not famous.

Yeah.

Maybe they don't aspire to be famous. Right. Yeah, well, that's what I was curious about. I mean, you paint such a clear... I mean, I love that description that you had a sort of a spotlight of accomplishment on that person, that sort of the individual celebrity as the model of success for the artist.

It sort of overwhelms any other picture or any other possibility. It's very much... I mean, it's a model that really... I mean, it's always been around.

It's the equivalent of the movie star or the literary star, but it really is a product of the 1980s. It's a product of a time when enormous amounts of money poured into the art world, which is a direct result of the Reagan years and the rearrangement of wealth in the country. Yeah.

Some people had huge amounts of money. The critic Donald Cuspitt said it's like that money had to blot something up. Oh, wow.

People wanted to do something with it. What they did was buy art. Yeah. Which, you know, catapulted people's reputations, made certain artists collectible, often when they were quite young. You know, traditionally, it took decades to build a reputation as somebody who was a great artist, somebody who people would want to collect. And now this was occurring in a space of years.

Right. And it's only accelerated since then.

I want to hear you talk about writing. When you think about yourself as a writer or as an artist, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?

The joy is... some of it is because I'm primarily a nonfiction writer. It's always the joy of finding something out, of, you know, and it might be finding out a fact or a story. It might be the joy of discovering the right way to say something. Yeah. You know, and I'm aware that there are all sorts of alternate ways that I could say something.

Tell me about the Ulysses Grant book. How did this come to be something that you're that you want to find out about?

Well, I've always been interested in him. I mean, it's partly... I'll tell you what interested me about him was that he died broke or thinking that he was broke on the edge of bankruptcy.

Wow.

Shortly before his death, when he could no longer speak—he had throat cancer, the result of smoking twenty cigars a day for decades—Grant could only communicate by writing notes. One of the last things he wrote to his doctor, and I’ve seen the actual notebook at the Library of Congress, was:

“Most men are nouns, but I seem to be a verb.” And then he added: “That is, a word that signifies to be, to do, or to suffer. I signify all three.”

My God.

I know. One of the great mysteries of Ulysses Grant is that the people around him couldn’t decide if he was deeply profound or deeply oblivious. Not when it came to the conduct of war—there, he was unquestionably sharp—but as president, it was harder to tell.

He reminds me of Chauncey Gardiner, in a way.

Yes, in some ways, he was like Chauncey Gardiner. Smarter than that, of course, but he had that same enigmatic quality. He was laconic. And I think it was James Garfield—who later became president himself and was assassinated—who made that observation.

During Grant’s presidency, he was surrounded by corruption. Yet it seems clear that he himself wasn’t corrupt. He was absolutely straight. But he couldn’t say no to friends. He was overawed by wealth and by wealthy people.

It’s amazing. Just free associating a bit—what you said about Grant reminded me of something from my own childhood. I grew up outside Rochester, and George Eastman—of Eastman Kodak—also famously took his own life.

Eastman? As in Kodak?

Yes, George Eastman of Kodak. Toward the end of his life, he had some sort of spinal fusion. He was in a lot of pain. But he committed suicide. And I’ll never forget his suicide note. You quoting Ulysses Grant brought it back to mind. Eastman’s note said something like, “I have done it all. Why wait?”

Wow.

Right? I had never encountered that kind of—hubris, maybe? Or just finality. But he was a giant—the Brownie camera, the whole photographic revolution. It left an impression on me. Anyway, I want to come back to The Twilight of Bohemia. You’ve been promoting the book. What has that been like? I think you had a reading at Westbeth itself. What was it like to tell the story there, in that space, to that audience?

It was fantastic. Really. The place was packed. And I was reading to the very people I’d written about.

I was anxious about it. People generally don’t like being written about. Even when it’s not critical, they often find something to be upset about—something that feels like a betrayal or misrepresentation. I’ve experienced it myself. Every time I read a profile of myself, there’s always at least one thing that feels off. And there’s nothing you can do about that.

Surprisingly, the only pushback I received was from someone who asked, “Why didn’t you write more about the vibrant young tenants who’ve moved in recently?” And it’s true—there are younger people living at Westbeth now. But the population is still predominantly folks in their sixties and seventies.

Part of that is simply the rate at which apartments turn over. But I had to admit: I began writing this book just before COVID. I signed the contract in 2019. My plan was to come into the city a few times a week, do interviews in shared or semi-public spaces, and hopefully meet people through each other in that way—very organically.

Instead, the day I did my first interview, the city went into lockdown. And Westbeth, being home to so many elderly residents, was even stricter than the rest of the city. You couldn’t even deliver food to someone’s door. You had to leave it at the front desk.

So the interviews all had to be remote—on Zoom or by phone. Some people didn’t know how to use Zoom. It became a sort of game of telephone. One person would introduce me to another, who’d introduce me to another, and so on. Most of them were older. Not all—but most.

What’s the state of Westbeth now? Is it still functioning as a home for artists, or has it become just another apartment building?

It’s still a home for artists. You still need to be an artist to get in—unless you’re acquiring a commercial lease, and I’m not sure any new ones are being offered. It’s no longer federally subsidized in the way it once was, though I believe the Kaplan Foundation is still involved.

According to the building’s administration, it’s now self-supporting. Though it still receives some assistance. For instance, it gets a tax abatement from the city—because otherwise, the taxes would be astronomical.

It also still receives some federal funding. After Hurricane Sandy, the entire basement flooded. And Westbeth got “build-it-back” grants from the Biden administration to help with the repairs.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, we’ve got just a little bit of time left before we wrap up...

It is meaningful to me as a dual phenomenon. First, as a community of artists. It’s not a commune by any means, but those gallery shows really matter—they're enormously important to the spirit and ethos of the building. It’s also an example of middle-class housing. Like the kind I grew up in.

And maybe this is just nostalgic or sentimental, but to me, the spirit of New York was always the spirit of a middle-class city. One of the tragedies of New York now is that it’s become a city of the super-rich and, on the other end, a population of people who are marginalized—lower-middle-class, impoverished, or entirely destitute and homeless.

And what of Bohemia? How do you think about Bohemia in the Hudson Valley? There’s obviously a relationship.

There’s definitely a relationship. Artists here face similar pressures. Not quite as extreme, since housing is still somewhat more affordable—but it’s heading in the same direction.

For example, I lived in Tivoli for years. We couldn’t afford to buy a house there. We could’ve continued renting, and maybe that’s what a true Bohemian does—just keeps renting. But my wife and I, now in our sixties, really wanted to own a home. So we moved to Catskill. It’s about ten miles north—maybe half an hour away.

And how is it in Catskill?

I wouldn’t say I have a real community here. Some of that’s complicated. There’s also just no central gathering place. I mean, there’s Citiot. Which is… okay. I just don’t like the name. Is there a place like that in Hudson? A gathering place where you know you’ll run into people?

There are likely several. That’s how I’d put it. There are many places where that might happen, but is there one place that serves that purpose for everyone? Not really.

Tivoli was smaller, so there was Tivoli General. For me, back then, it was also our friend John Corcoran’s studio. We’d hang out there, especially when it was still in the garage.

Yeah. Or Murray’s, when it was really flourishing.

Right. There was definitely a time when I felt like I’d run into everyone from “my” Hudson—though not all of Hudson. You know what I mean? When there were fewer choices.

But that was a long time ago. Now there are so many different subcultures. It feels fragmented. If I were going to do another long nonfiction project, I’d consider doing a book about Hudson.

Yeah? What’s the appeal? What draws you?

Well, I’d organize it around Warren Street and Fairview. Fairview is technically zoned as part of another community, but to me, it’s still Hudson. And it really captures the class divide—the way creativity is tied, or yoked, to class in this town.

Can you unpack that a little? What do you mean?

Well, for all I know, there may be plenty of artist studios on Fairview or along Columbia or State Street. But the galleries—the ones that are visible, marketable—are all on Warren. That’s upper-middle-class and wealthy Hudson. That’s where the art is seen.

Which brings us back to this idea of Bohemia. I loved how you described it earlier—a life organized around art, around making things. What does that mean in 2025?

I don’t think we have a complete answer. Unless you’re someone who lightning strikes—someone whose work is recognized and rewarded fairly quickly—it’s harder than ever to cobble together a living as an artist.

Yeah. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I want to say—I really feel a connection with your background. You grew up inside the art world, or at least found your way into it early. You dove in, and you found home there.

I think about my own suburban childhood—it felt very banal. I loved stories, comic books, sure, but I don’t think I really encountered art. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think I’d ever met someone who truly organized their life around making things. I remember saying this at John’s studio—he was an artist. And it hit me that I hadn’t met many people like that before.

Well, for example, what you do—your profession—it’s a kind of anthropology. It involves writing, listening, telling stories. You’re documenting the human world. The closest analog would be a commercial artist. You get paid for it.

That’s kind. That’s nice of you to say. I don’t think of myself as someone participating in art.

If I were going to make distinctions, I’d call it applied art rather than fine art. Like someone who paints for advertising. I learned that from Milton Glaser, who I once interviewed.

Wow—Milton Glaser.

Yes. I ❤️ NY—that’s him. A brilliant mind.

I once wrote a piece for Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine, about people who work in what I called “the desire industry”—advertising, fashion, branding—and how they reconciled that with a more contemplative or spiritual path. They weren’t all practicing Buddhists, but they moved in that sphere.

What did you find out from that?

One of the most memorable conversations I had was with Robert Thurman. Of course—Uma Thurman’s father. And a major figure in Tibetan Buddhism. His wife had been a fashion model, and he was this towering authority on Tibetan thought. What stuck with me was his clarity around desire. He said, essentially, that desire is everywhere. It animates the world. Our entire economy runs on it—on the exploitation of existing desires and the creation of new ones.

But it’s all illusion. And still, people practice. Even under the most hostile circumstances. He talked about the Tibetan people, living under occupation in a country where the dominant regime is actively trying to stamp out Buddhism—and yet, they practice. Either in secret, or in exile. They keep going.

That’s beautiful.

Yeah.

Well—I want to thank you so much. This has been a joy. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate your time.

Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.

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