Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson and I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Ronald Pursar. He is Professor of Management at San Francisco

State University. He is also the author of the wonderful book, McMindfulness, How Mindfulness

Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Professor Ronald Perser. Thank you for joining us.

I'm current affairs today. Thank you, Nathan. I'm super excited to be speaking with you on this topic.

I'm excited to talk to you too, because you and I have been Facebook friends for a while,

and I was thrilled when I discovered you had written this book on mindfulness.

Let's start.

Perhaps you could give us an overview of what this mindfulness industry that you're writing about in the book is?

You know, how big is it?

Where is it?

What is it?

Just if you could tell us a little bit about what it is you're targeting here.

Sure.

Well, the title of the book is Mick Mindfulness, which should probably already signal some ideas around what the book is about. But yeah, I'm a professor of management at San Francisco State, and that's my discipline, organizational studies, management studies. At the same time, I have a kind of a long history of

being involved in Buddhist studies and Buddhist practice going back to my mid-20s. So I had these

kind of parallel streams running in my psyche for many years. And sitting here in the heart

of Silicon Valley, what kind of popped up

on the radar, probably around 2010 or so, maybe, I started watching YouTube talks at Google,

and they were having all these mindfulness gurus come into the Mountain View, the Google campus.

And that really caught me by surprise.

I'm like, what's going on here?

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