Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to Work in Progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. You probably know him as the lovably insane, quirky Dwight Shroot on the Office, but you are about to learn a lot more about him. Rain Wilson is here today. I just loved talking to him about his interesting childhood, how he got into acting, and how the role of Dwight came to be. We're also going to talk about the importance of religion in his life, his company's soul Pancake, how we need to connect more as human beings, and so much more. I'm really excited to have you here. I had so much fun on your podcast. Thank you for welcoming me to your space, and I'm happy to welcome you to mine. Thanks for having me here. I'm really excited to talk to you. That was a great interview experience that resident. I had a metaphysical milkshake, and you had so many really cool things to say. And I just love the way that you're you. You walk the walk, you know, and that's just really really cool to see you experience. That's really nice. So many of us, and I know I'm speaking for myself and some of my friends came to know you on the show and as this brilliantly bizarre, comedic character, and and yet I'm always really curious about how you began, because then I get to know you as a person. When you launched Soul Pancake, I found it online and thought, oh my god, this is what we've all needed. And then I found out it was yours, and I was like, I need to know more about this guy because I know this character, but who is this person who's so interested in this sort of metaphysical and and in our wellness on the internet? And then I did your podcast and we had this conversation about faith and purpose, and I was like, I like him so much. And I just thought to myself, were you this sort of observational and and open and interested in the world around you when you were a little kid? Like, what were you like at ten? Oh? Well, I you know, it's a lot of different ways to go with this, but what I was like at ten was just painfully, painfully shy and insecure. And soon they're at skinny as a rail, and soon thereafter kind of pimply and just always felt myself kind of a misfit and a brain and just someone just alienated that would never and could never fit in. So I think that as an actor, I always gravitated towards the roles of the characters that can never and will never fit in. Like I would never know how to be like a popular person, you know, I wouldn't know how to play someone who was like successful and well balanced and admired and with lots of friends or something like that. I'm always going to play outsiders in some way, shape or form, usually comedic ones, but I've done dramatic ones as well. But you know, the interesting story about the acting thing is that my mom left me and my dad when I was two years old, and I never knew why or how. I'd asked my dad, and I basically didn't see her again till I was about fifteen o one, one or two or three times super briefly in that time, and I would always ask my dad, why did you guys get a divorce? And he would never really say, It's like, oh, we we just went on different journeys and kept it really vague. So when I started getting interesting interested in acting when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. My dad was really weird about it. And that's when I was starting to get to know my mom again and my birth mother again. And then finally, when I was twenty one twenty two, somewhere in there, I asked my birth mother, her name is Shay, I said, why did you guys get a divorce? And she said, you don't You don't know. Your dad never said and he goes, no, He just kept it really vague, and she was like, um, I was an actress in Seattle in the late sixties, and I left your dad to have an affair with a theater director. And he never My dad never bad mouth Turry, never said a single bad thing about her, even though she cheated on him and left and had this infant that saddled him with this like infant and toddler and then ran off gallivanting with in her love affair. And so I always thought so weird that my dad was kind of kind of put off by me being an actor, and he seemed like, really he is. He supported me doing the arts. It wasn't about that, but just acting. He was just a little gool. So it's so interesting that that there seems to be a genetic component to that. My mom, who I never knew, I had no idea she had been an actress, and I just started getting interested into it and and going into it and uh and then yeah, so that's that's that. That's so interesting and what a kindness. You know, your dad didn't project his broken heart onto you as a kid. Yeah, yeah, that's hard for us. Yeah, yeah, we've had you know, my dad's and dad and I have had our ups and downs, as you know kids and parents often do. But I do really respect that about him, Like he he doesn't say, he doesn't bad mouth people. You know, he has a lot of integrity and a lot of those kind of ways. That's really cool. So where did you grow up? This was Seattle, you know, this was Seattle, But we moved to Chicago when I was sixteen, and that's when I went to this really great high school called New Trier that's kind of infamously it's a wealthy high school. We were very we were not wealthy at all, but we moved into like the one apartment building that was in the like radius of this high school, and it was a lot of millionaires houses, but it has incredible hearts programs, of course, because it's got all this money. And that's a whole other topic of conversation about social justice, like why are high schools and schools based on the property taxes and property values around those schools? Because this was in will Met, Illinois, and then you know, six miles south of there, you're in North Chicago and there's housing projects and the and this chicken wire windows. You know, high schools six miles away, and we had our own radio station and dance studio with like a sprung floor and theater giant theaters, like three different theaters and stuff like that, because the funding of high schools is based on property values anyway. So that's where I kind of started acting, was when I went to Chicago for my final years of high school. And uh, and that's where I got into it. But really, like I don't know, I don't know your story about how you got into acting thing, but for me, ultimately it came down to so there's the ten year old kid, super insecure, and the pimpley kid was a little older, a little nerdier, and I was doing like I played the bassoon in the orchestra and I went to Model United Nations conferences and I was on the chess team, and I would drive around Seattle competing in chess matches. And then all of a sudden, I started doing acting and I started making people laugh. And then cute girls asked me to sit down at their lunch table with them, and so I was like, I mean I remember inside just being like, okay, funk all that other stuff. I'm not. I'm doing this thing. I'm doing the thing that gets me invited to sit with the cute girls at their lunch table in the cafeteria. So at that point, I just kissed goodbye to the bassoon and the chess and the Model United Nations and the dungeons and dragons. I let all that go. Was like, I'm I'm doing this thing, got it? Do you still play chess? I do. I've taken a hiatus from it because I get too obsessed. I put the app, the Chess dot Com app on my phone, and I can just spend hours. I'll just go hours diving into matches and speed chess and chess puzzles and opening learning openings, and it just I don't have the brain space to do it. I can't do it part time. I get that. Yeah, yeah, you realize the first step is is the admitting of the addiction ry exactly. Yeah. Something I'm curious about Seattle as a boy, Chicago as a teenager. I lived in Chicago for four years. It's like my home away from home. I have a lot of Chicago bride. But you had a a sort of stint in between, and you were living in Nicaragua. Yeah that was not that was priest. Well, yeah, I was during the Seattle. So my parents were members of the High Faith and the they went to go work with the High Community in the late sixties right after when my mom left. My dad what did he do? Well? He was he was a bhigh and he had this giant, white, pudgy toddler and he packed me up under one arm and he moved to Central America. So I spent from two to five in mostly Nicaragua but also Mexico and lived in the jungles of of Nicaragua on the Mosquito coast as a as a child. And what was happening there? What was your dad doing? And how how are you growing up? This is kind of like the High version of missionary work. So it's a little it's better than missionary. Missionary has a very bad um connotation because you know, like converting the natives and stopping them from going to Hell, be heise or not about that. So you know, we do talk about the behindh faith and teach it and by principles, but service work, working with the nascent behind communities of the area. He was doing a lot of that stuff. But also my dad started business as he started an oyster farm in Nicaragua. Yeah, he started like gathering, chucking oysters, putting them in brine, canning them, sending them out to Managua and then they would get sent to like Mexico City and other places like that. And he was had an oyster farm business. That's so interesting. Are you approach chucking an oyster? I'm terrible at chucking oyster me too, and I want to know how to do it. It's so hard to do. I don't know. When you see those guys doing it, it's crazy. I don't understand it. I was a cater waiter in New York for years and sometimes we would have to like prep and chuck oysters, and nights I would slice my fingers open. It's the worst. Yeah, but I love eating them. I had this conversation with somebody the other day just about practical skills, and you realize that because so much of the universe is tech pace now, Like I looked around and I'm like, I don't know how to do anything. Like I can hang shelves, that's great. Um, I'm handy, but I wouldn't know how to fix an air conditioner or a carburetor. I don't know how to chuck an oyster. I can hard boil an egg, but like, cool, that's going to save us when the apocalypse happens. Like I I wanna I almost want to go take shop classes or something. Yeah, and all your spare time. I mean, I know, but it's a fantasy. I mean I do have a I have a great appreciation of the fact like when I was getting going in college and it's like the mid eighties and stuff like I had a bunch of broken down cars that I bought, you know, literally like going to the you know, in the new back of the newspaper and buying a Toyota for dollars, putting in a carburetor and new breaks and changing own a O whil and stuff like that. So I went through a period of time which I'm really grateful for that I had because I didn't have an alternative. I was broke and I needed a car, and I had to you know, I had to work a job, and I had to learn how to fix ship, and I couldn't hire a handyman or gardeners or anything like that. So, um, I'm grateful for that time in my life. That's really cool you talk. I've heard you talk about what it was like growing up, you know, with your dad and and growing up, as you said, not in a family with money, you know, shopping at the Salvation Army, like not having a ton of stuff as a kid. What was that like for you winding up in such a wealthy school in Chicago. Yeah, that was like that was like living inside a John Hughes movie. I mean it was literally because New Trier is kind of based on one of those John Hughes kind of high schools, like pretty and pink kind of high schools, And it was I was the kid from the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle. It's not like the Seattle neighborhood was like poor, but it was working class. My friends dads were insurance salesmen and fishermen and carpenters, and they weren't lawyers and doctors and stuff like that. So I was this kid from suburban Seattle and we were pretty broke, and and you know, we drove from Seattle to Chicago in a U hall you know, the stuff in the back, and moved into an apartment building and Will met and and you know, it was it's it's fascinating as one of the most seminal times in my life. Like I'm really grateful for it because I was, like I said, this intensely nerdy kid, and I really almost decided to change who I was in the world at sixteen. I was I saw it as like I had my first girlfriend in Seattle. I was heartbroken leaving her. I was sobbing, and it was so heartbroken about that. But I was really into like punk, a new wave and and the arts and being an artist, and so I just said, like, I don't have to be the same person I was in Seattle at Short Crest High School. I can go to New Trier High School and kind of reinvent myself. So it was like this when I came into New Treer, like I had a new wave haircut, like I'd had a picture of David Bowie and tore out of a magazine and went into like a went into a hair salon. It was like, can you make my hair look like this? And so I had this kind of punky kind of thing, and I had torn jeans and I had to clash T shirts and army jackets and and boots and stuff like that. And so I came into New Tree. I was like, who's this outrageous punk rebel kid artist kid? And they didn't know like my Model United Nations and and Ceramics Club. Pas asked to what I want to hang out with the kid who's instagramics come and place chess and is in Model United. I love that kid. I know. I'm he's still He's still in here. He's still in there somewhere. But so I kind of reinvented myself in some ways. I was still was pretty nerdy. So it was really exciting. And then I started acting, and like I said, I got invited to the cute girls table and and then I saw that I could make people laugh and and that started my acting career and some really amazing acting teachers there that I'm so I'm still in touch with and really grateful for and that started starting my path. That's so cool. Were you a big reader as a kid? I was, what kind of the things you into reading? So my my TV room now are like where we sit media room, TV room. It's just it's a den with a TV on the wall. But say media room, it sounds so fancy. There's I know, it makes it sound like you have some Bob by your screening room and your nothing like that. You're like, it's not Disney, but I have I have like two hundred and fifty science fiction books from the seventies all around the walls, and that was only part of my collection. I've read every single one of those books. So I was a huge to add to my nerd cred. I read all of these science fiction books from when I was about twelve to sixteen. I read hundreds and hundreds of science fiction books. Yeah, I was. That's all I would do, you know. I would just go home and I would do my homework and I'd eat some yogurt and then I just go in my room and I would read science fiction for hours and hours and hours. God isn't that so cool? Though? It's like you weren't on Instagram. You were reading. Yeah, you were exploring worlds. Who who would you say is your favorite science fiction author? Oh that's a great question. Um, I have so many or maybe five. I won't do that to you. I can never pick up five. I mean Isaac Asimov is rate and Arthur C. Clark. Those are like the two kind of legends of the genre. I really liked this fantasy writer named Jack Vance who did a lot of more fantastical stuff. I loved Michael Moorecock and he was more kind of fantasy science fiction. Clifford Simac. He wrote a lot of really great speculative fiction. Philip K. Dick, this is one of the legends. Yeah, he did Blade Runner and you know, a Man in the High Castle and stuff like that. So cool. Wow. And did that stay with you as you get into your teenage years, as you move into the space of acting and storytelling. At sixteen, did you keep up a voracious reading habit? And then then it was you know, when once you go into the acting thing, then it's like reading plays and working on scenes and stuff like that. So it's a very different relationship to read. I kind of gave up on science fiction and I but I read a lot of literature, and I was going to be an English major in college, and but I was always doing plays. And then I just decided, fuck it, I'm gonna go for it and try and be a professional actor. But I've always read a lot, you know, And I'm really grateful again, grateful for those times. And it's hard from my son is fifteen, Like I see him with his phone and his computer and the texting. Loves to just be texting his friends and I text my friends, and I got it, but it definitely distracts from time that he could be. He could be re really try and encourage him to read, and he reads a good amount read creating music, you know, being a creative person, and you know it's these phones. The phone issues is really big. And I know that you've spoken about it before and dealt with it before, and it's one of the things we we One of the conundrums we have at Soul Pancake as a media company is like most of our content is ingested on phones and laptops, and and yet at the same time, with this scourge of depression, of anxiety and suicide among young people, these days. It's so much of it has to do with like we're desocialized. We don't have groups, and we're not connected, and we're just staring at my tiny screens all the time. Do you think when you talk about your company. Because one of the ways I feel about this is that, for better or worse, the Internet is, social media is, and I feel like, personally, I almost have a responsibility to show up and be vulnerable in that space and and and talk about things that are really important and post content that really matters, and talk about political issues and personal issues and creative thought. And because in a way, I feel like if I were to say I don't want to participate in this system, then the system would just be left to people who are I don't know, selling whatever they're selling and commenting on reality TV and and not that any of that's bad, but it can't be our whole world. And so I feel like we almost have a response ability to show up. Like when when Soul Pancake tweets are in my feed, I'm always so relieved. You know, there are people who am so happy to see in my Twitter feed because they brighten my day, right, and you guys have done that with your company, and do you feel a little bit of that, like you want to take up some of that space with goodness? Yes. So that's a really interesting conundrum. Is there's a couple of different facets to the topic that you bring up. And again, like I talked about, like soul Pancake, trying to make the bet world a better place through media. So we're trying to make uplifting content, inspiring, content that binds people, that tackles big human questions and issues that you know, elicits hopefully some some action and changes of thought. And yet so much of what's broken in the world is media and social media and the fact that we have these this addictive little relationship with our phones. We're just staring into these little black rectangles all day long. But are you gonna do You're gonna ignore that it's here to stay and our phones are incredibly helpful. I mean, the navigation system in my phone got me here today and I was able to make some business calls and and send some texts and not while driving. So the phones are here to stay, as social media is here to stay. How can we as a species learn to have a healthy, a moderate relationship with them? And how do you And then the second question is like how do you and me, who have some social following and people know who we are as TV celebrities, Like, how do we impact the world and do do what we can with what we got? So I have a lot of Dwight fans out there, so what can I do? How can I really truly make an impact? So, you know, I do philanthropy. I founded Soul Pancake, and so Pancake now works with participant media, doing some work with them, trying to make the world a better place, trying to galvanize young people towards action. And it's a it's a tricky thing, you know that, it's the tricky thing that balance one of the things that I've gotten more into these days. And I'm on the advisory board of a nonprofit that has to do with climate change, and I kind of feel like, well, you know, there's millions of d White fans out there on my Twitter feed and Instagram and stuff like that, and a lot of them are pretty lost about climate change. They don't know what to think or what to look at or what to do about it. It feels overwhelming, it's depressing. And and then some of them might even be hearing from their parents or their uncles like, oh, it's a hoax, I'm the liberals, and uh, you know, stuff like that, and they're kind of ignoring the science or not getting into the science. So I'm trying to do something around climate change. You're doing the same thing, like we do what we can. And I wish that more public figures would do more with their platforms to move the needle in a positive direction. And that doesn't just mean about yelling at people about Trump, you know, it doesn't just mean like what an asshole he is and and kind of shout the kind of shouting but like, Okay, that's that's all fine. You can do that, I suppose, But are you also creating positive, positive movement? Are you also building something It's easy to just protest and comment and shout, it's easy to do that, but are you actually making something that makes the world a better place? That's a lot harder to do. There's a lot of Twitter keyboard warriors, and I'm really not about that. I like that a lot. I think about it when you talk about the opportunity that we have when you've made something and you do have the ability to converse with millions of people every day. I think about operating my platforms as a way to spend my privilege. It is a privilege to converse with all those people. And if I'm not spending it, if I'm not willing to put my neck out there, if I'm not willing to risk being unpopular to fight for what's right and show up for people we need to be show it up for, then I don't know why I have the privilege in the first place. And that that you know, that's for me, that's it seems to be for you. I don't expect everyone to have the same feeling about it, but I do really think we owe we owe it to our community, are big digital community, to show up for them in real ways. Now for me, because I'm a member of the High Faith and a person of faith, to me, I look at it from a God perspective, but you certainly don't have to, because I feel like God gave me certain talents and faculties and it's my privilege to put those two use. So this geeky science fiction reading kid becomes an actor playing these weirdos, and all of a sudden I stumble into the greatest weirdo role that's been on American television in decades and I get to play Dwight Shrut And then all of a sudden, I have an audience. So this geeky kid has has a large audience. So it's it's up to me to utilize God's gifts that I was given in my body, mind and spirit to entertain, to tell stories, and to to maximize my talents to become the very best actor I can possibly try and be. And now that I have this celebrity platform, like, how do I put that to the best possible use? And that really was the founding of soul Pancake where because you would ask on the elevator ride up here about soul Pancake. And you know, when I saw that The Office was going to be on the air for a long period of time, all of a sudden, I knew, because you know what it's like, you never know if you're gonna have any income as an actor, and all of a sudden, I was like, oh, I've got five years of paychecks in my future. I'm gonna be on a hit show. And this was like early on in season two of the Office, like I get an opportunity. I have an opportunity now to do something, to say something, to make a mark. So I got together with a bunch of buddies and we built Soul Pancake. It started as a website and then became kind of a social media digital media company, YouTube channel and and whatnot. And at the time ten years ago, there was not a lot of like positive media. It was before Upworthy existed and some of those other companies, and so we were like, let's try and steer the ship of media and social media just one or two degrees toward goodness, towards impact, towards connection, towards inspiration. And so we were really at the cutting edge of that of that movement, and we see the impact that that has made. So I was just trying to take what I was given and then put it to the best possible use. And in the case of so, you know, there's a lot of the things I've tried that have failed, but so Pancake worked out pretty well, and as you know, has hundreds of millions of fans and viewers and and has uh and helped people's lives. So I'm lucky, and it's great because it was one of those things that I take all the credit for it, but I didn't do the work. So I had this team of people like putting in the sixty seventy hours of work on it, you know, and mean while it's like Rain Wilson's Soul Pancake Company did X, Y and Z, so um, Well, I just again, I just took the credit. Well, it takes so many people for things like that. I think about it. Even in terms of when we make TV shows. People know the cast, right, maybe seven to ten people and people behind yes, and I'm constantly talking about the crew. It's a hundred and fifty to two hundred people on the other side of those camera lenses who are making everything happen with us. We're such a team. And yeah, I don't know. I'm so grateful for every single person who contributes to a piece of creativity, making it to air or to the internet. You know, it does really take a village. I would love to go back, because you mentioned it in telling that story, and we've touched on it a couple of times when you talk about your faith. I so enjoyed our our metaphysical milkshake conversation because we really got into the idea of it, and and for listeners at home who hear you say I'm a member of the Behigh Faith and go, huh, can you can you walk us through what that means? Sure? Um. It's always a tricky conversation because the behind faith is very, very nuanced and complex, with a rich history of several hundred years and tons of social teachings and mystical writings and teachings, and you know, a worldwide be High community of five or six million people. It's very hard to sum it up in a thumbnail, but I will say that it's a worldwide religion. It's the second most widespread religion in the world, so it's in every country in the world, but the numbers are small, so next to Christianity, it's the most widespread. Its started around a hundred eighty years ago in what is now Iran was then called Persia, and a Persian nobleman who went by the title who was given the title Bahoolah, whose name means the Glory of God bhies our followers of how Allah, who we believe is a divine teacher for this day and age, who brought a message of like all the great divine teachers of love, and unity and harmony and acceptance and diversity and inclusion. But one of the main things that Bahaullah taught is that that he is the most recent in a long line of these divine teachers. That there's only one God, and that this God educates humanity spiritually by sending down this kind of list of divine teachers. It's kind of like when you go through elementary school. You have your kindergarten teacher, your first grade teacher, etcetera, etcetera. Now your second grade teacher knows just as much as your sixth grade teacher, but they're not choosing to reveal everything to you because you're not ready yet. So these spiritual teachers like Shna, the Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, they're gradually unfolding God's divine revelation to humanity. So there is only one religion. There's what behinds believe. There is only, in actuality, one religion. It may look like you look out there and wait a minute, there's a dozen different religions and they all believe really vastly different things. But there is only one gradually unfolding religion of God, and it's essential message when you look at the primal message of Krishna or the Buddha, or Jesus or Mohammed, it's the same. It's love one another, gift service to one another. This physical world is is fleeting. We are we are spiritual beings inhabiting bodies. You know, there's some universal truths that run through all of these religious faiths. So that's that's essentially what Bahads do. So as a Bhai, I believe in the Bible and in Jesus and in Mohammed and the Kuran, but I also follow the teachings of Baha'ullah. Many of his teachings are very socially progressive, teachings about eliminating prejudice and the equality of women and men, and eliminating extremes of wealth and poverty and doing a lot of social good and stuff like that. And as you explain all of that, it does strike me as essentially everything every religion says in its own way. You know, these ideas that were meant to be good to each other, were meant to provide for each other. We're meant to lift each other up, We're meant to lead with love. And I think that's what set me on my own exploration of faith because I grew up with I grew up in a family where I have a parent who's was raised Catholic, a parent who is Agnostic, and then my aunt and uncle who are Jewish. I grew up celebrating Christmas and going to synagogue on every high holiday. I I was always sort of fascinated by why there was an argument, and I remember it as a kid, not being able to fathom how the Holocaust could have happened, how we as a people could have demonized a group of people among us for their religion, and then learning that this happens, you know, as to your point, As you get older, every grade, you learn that there have been more and more of these wars, whether it's you know, ethnic cleansing in the Congo or or Vietnam or darfour. And it's so crazy to me that we do this to each other when we really all believe the through line of what we all believe is essentially the same. And I was really fortunate, like you to to have a school with such access to arts and such access to so many different ideas. And I took an Islamic studies course my senior year in high school wanting to or maybe it was my junior year. It's been so long, I don't remember. That's embarrassing, um to sign you're getting old when you're like, how old was I? When? Uh? And and I remember just really falling in love with my studies of the Koran and then seeing just a few years later in college when eleven happened, how an entire group of faith was demononymous rather than rather than a group of extremist terrorists being examined, rather than us studying the roots of terrorism, rather than a couple hundred or a couple of thousand people in a religion that incorporates a billion and a half people on the planet, rather than you know, these bad apples within a beautiful faith system perpetrating this violence. Well, and anyone who's willing to bastardize a faith or in ideology. And it struck me that, you know, not to take it too dark, but I remember Oklahoma City and thinking, well, why didn't that person, Why why haven't people who look like you and I have committed terrorist atrocities? Somehow by doing those things damned their entire group of people. You know, the the stay Wards are not the same right wing extremists are a far greater terrorist threat to the United States than than Islamic terrorists. And the FBI has been saying that for years. I mean, there are there are factual studies that prove exactly that. Look at the numbers, and we and we and we don't acknowledge it. And it's again so strange to me to sort of bring it back around that any person could justify, quote faith being their reason for harming another person when the three line is supposed to be care for each other. Yeah, this is and this is why bihines believe that religion and which is a dirty word these days, all of these central concepts of you talk about, like religion, faith, spirituality, God have all been kind of become dirty words. Like religion in the best sense needs kind of refreshing because like Christianity, for instance, became a Christianity odd the enough the teachings of Christianity were warped to become tools of oppression, where it's like, oh, if Native Americans and and Africans were deemed not as human, then we didn't need to love our neighbor because they're not human. There part animal or whatever. We get to take the land away from the Native Americans and we didn't. Then we import slave labor from Africa to actually do our work. So we're working stolen work on stolen land. And it was all justified by the Church. But when you go back to what Jesus said, it's so pure and so loving, and it's serving the poor and serving the the you know, a diverse group of people. You know, you hey, hung out with people of different races and tribes and and whars and and addicts and poor and the poor and just served them. It has gotten so far away from its roots when you think about now. I'm not trying to judge or damn all Christians, of course not. There's I've seen so many great works being done throughout the world. And have I traveled you know, the third the developing nations and see the work that's being done by so many of them Christians emulating the great work of Jesus Christ. But this is why religion needs to be refreshed, to go back to those basics. Have you ever read Religion for Atheists? Ellen? Oh? No, but I know I know his work and in fact, Ellen de Baton started a school for school of life so good, and you know what his inspiration for School of Life was. Stop. So wait, does that give you the chills? I mean, you've known for longer than I have. I just found out this second. But yeah, it was. I won't say it's a singular inspiration, but it was one of his inspirations of what Soul panc Ache was doing, you know, uniting people around ideas, uplifting, not getting in the same old tired political arguments and sniping. He comes from an atheist perspective, but I love his His atheist perspective is really is really beautiful and accepting and inclusive. He's not like condemning people that believe in God all um. He's really more of an agnostic. Just I love his his stuff. I have not read that. His perspective to me almost feels like a bird's eye view looking over all the religions and just saying, hey, don't you see all this stuff up here that's true for all of us, that doesn't even have to do with whatever specific thing you believe. And it's a really fascinating book. And he posits that so much of what we under, what we know to come from religion, you know, systems of gathering, systems of service. All these things existed so far before modern religion, and that modern religions adopted sort of societal behaviors of of pagan communities and of tribal communities, and that we should take those things back, no matter what religion we are, or if you don't have one at all, that they that they really are the foundations of how we coexist together, and that they're bigger than any And I think about I think about that on the grandest possible scale. And I when I see cave paintings and I think about what must have the cavemen are caveman ancestors from you know, fifty thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago. You know what was that like? Where again, art, culture, religion all blended seamlessly. So the story of the hunt, the mythology of our people and our tribe, the shaman who is part entertainer, he's part part Sasha Baron Cohen, part clown, part priest and revelator, and also keeper of the flame of mythology and bringing people together in this cave, in this tribe, and of course that tribe was fighting another tribe and fighting another tribe. But I think de Bhutan is exactly right, which is were taking the bird's eye view. We now need to do this with humanity because now it is very clear. Ever since we into the moon and we looked back on planet Earth and it's a shining blue marble down below that as soon as we saw that, we saw, oh, we are seven billion people sharing a planet in outer space. So what does what does this mean? That we're humanity? Where different skin colors, where different genders, were different sexual orientations, were different cultures and tribes, but we're one tribe where a human species sharing a planet. How what's what's our equivalent of being gathered in that cave to talk about the day's hunt, to share together, to sing songs, to share our mythology, to celebrate our differences and celebrate our similarities and anyways, that that's where humanity needs to head. We have to head or we'll just die. How do you do that? How do you how do you gather? What's your cave? Well? This is for me again, like I feel almost embarrassed about talking about this, and and I shouldn't, I should own it. But for me, that's what religion can do. Religion people's young people see as like obsolete and a force for evil in the world. And religion has to do with judgment and you know, separating people and Andrea. But religion, literally, the word religion has at its root re legio, which means to rebind, to connect people. So what young people who are staring at their shiny black rectangles in their pockets all day long, what we need is religion. And I'm not talking about like a specific religion. I'm not saying, oh, you should become a High or you should become a Muslim or Christian or whatever like that. But what we need is to rebind. We need to reconnect the the suicides and anxieties and depression that young people are suffering from, and absolutely epidemic proportion. I mean it is, the statistics are mind boggling. What we need is to rebind together as a human species and to connect. So for me personally, I feel like the High Faith provides that not only for me, but for humanity and for other people. So I'm very involved in in in those activities. And and that doesn't just me. I mean it can be praying together, it can be worshiping together, it can be serving together, it can be fighting for social justice. Together too, which is a spiritual act I believe. It's not. Spirituality is not just something you do in a yoga studio. You know, when the right incense is burning and you feel the right kind of tingles in your chest. It it has to be to trying to serve the poorest among us and to uplift people, to to unite people and stuff like that. So that's my focus. It's not yours, doesn't need to be yours, and we need to be the various listeners. But that's that's the goal. Is um, let's let's be in rooms together, let's be outdoors together, Let's see each other's eyeballs and connect and and sing and make art. And I'm sounding like just the most grandiose hippie, right, That's what it's all about. I get very excited talking about that. And that's what it's what humanity, what humanity needs, certainly what America needs. I'm not quite sure why this is the question that popped up in my brain as you talked about that. But you telling me about your childhood and how you felt you were this this very nerdy kid. You know, you you've describe yourself as an outcast, and you talk about how in your adulthood you play these outcasts or these sort of unpopular or unexpected humans. Do you think that your faith, the way that you grew up with this belief in all people being divine, did that help you as a kid when you were going through those awkward faith is because I know what it is to be a kid with my own awkward phase, and I know how terrible kids are to each other. And I know that the bullying that you experienced or that I experienced is different from what kids go through now to your point, now they're on phones. It's it's cyber bullying. It's another thing. But did you have a different perspective on whatever it was like for you as a as a nerdy kid who was treated in whatever way you were because of this? Do you think? Well? I think what? Because I left the behind faith for a long time. So I I um, when I was about twenty years old and living in New York and trying to be an actor going in y U, I just decided I didn't want anything to do with morality. I didn't want anything to do with God. I didn't want anything to do with the religion of my parents, you know, And so I really jettisoned everything having to do with spirituality. And I don't want to say I lived like in total debauchery, and there was definitely some debauchery, But I just was an atheist, agnostic bohemian. I just wanted to be an artist in New York City and I didn't want any part of of that. But I do think that when I look back on my childhood, going to your question, the thing that being growing up behind gave me was a sense of the larger questions and the larger purpose. So from Sol Pancake, you know, we have this podcast that you were on, Metaphysical Milkshake, that I do with Reza Aslan, the great scholar and media presence, and it's about life's biggest possible questions. That's what the podcast is about, and that's what we try and explore it Sol Pancakes. So the science fiction and the nerdiness and the chess meeting, the acting, and and the behindh faith. For me, I feel like I'm really grateful because it gave me a kind of you talked about a bird's eye view, but a big vision like I've always had, like a big vision of what can you man? What should What should I strive for? What should my family strive for? What should humanity strive for? What can the arts do? You know? What can the media do? How do we bring people together? I don't. I'm not saying I have answers or solutions or anything like that. I'm, you know, stabbing in the dark on a lot of it. But I do think that it helped give that nerdy kid a vision, where if I didn't have that vision, that same nerdy kid might just be, you know, I don't know, a computer programmer somewhere in some basement or something. Not that there's anything wrong with computer programmers and basements. They make the world run, But I think I would my But you might have missed your calling. Yeah, I might have missed my calling, and certainly kind of a greater scope or a greater purpose. And that's another thing religion can give us, is purpose, and it's one thing that people are missing. And again I'm gonna say religion, and what I mean by that is like any kind of belief system that brings people together and gives them meaning and set them on a path. So I'm not trying to like convert people to be high faith. It's not about that, but I do think that that's what religion can do, is give you a sense of purpose as what young people need. There's a purposelessness out there that is that is really sad, you know. And with climate change and the current current political climate and the isolation, you know, it's it's um you know, it's a recipe for a lot of anxiety. I am curious about something you just mentioned. You talked about your time at n Way. You and you wound up in the graduate acting program there, and and I and I read you've said that it was the best possible place for you in the entire world. What was the experience of moving to New York from Chica? Go like, what what was the village like in the mid eighties? What was school like? Can you can you give us a little bit of that period of your life? Yeah, yeah, well that's uh. Thanks thanks for you. You're you're bringing me back to those wonderful, those delicious parts of my youth. I feel like old man, old man, grandpa theater. You're like back when I was a child. This is how it was. So I moved to New York in eighty six when there were still subway tokens, you had to go to the booth and buy tokens to get in the subway, and they were covered in spray paint. And this was like the crack epidemic was just starting to take off. So crack was being sold all over. It was a lot of It was a pretty dangerous place. In fact, I lived in a lot of neighborhoods that now are like so fancy, like Chelsea, and it was crack was being sold up and down Eighth Avenue, you know it was. But yeah, for a nerdy Seattle boy moving to New York City in the late eighties, it was it was pretty mind blowing. And why do I say it was like the best possible place for me, Like because I was pretty successful as an actor in college and I was getting like lead roles, and I was like, oh, maybe I could make this a profession. So I went out in Seattle and I started auditioning. And I had gone from Chicago back to Seattle. I went to Boston for the while and then went back in Seattle. So I'm twenty something, I'm back in Seattle and I start auditioning and I'm like, whoa, I'm nowhere near good enough to be landing roles even at small Seattle theaters. So I auditioned for like American Buffalo at Seattle Rap and The Glass Menagerie at the Empty Space, and like you know, these little theaters, and I was doing monologues and trying to and I was like, oh wow, I'm I'm really grateful of this about myself, Like I know how good I am, Like I know my strengths, and I also and I think a lot of actors don't have this ability. And I was like, I'm not good enough. I don't have this skills. I Am not going to be able to make it as a professional actor right now. I need training. So I wanted to find the best possible training. And I was lucky enough to get into n y u H grad program even though I wasn't I hadn't finished undergrad. I ended up getting my b f A from there. And because it was three years of sixteen hours a day just working on being an actor and so voice and speech clowning, We did circus class. It was you know, it was Shakespeare. It was you know, scene study of course, and you know, running a lightboard and doing props backstage and just being in total immersion in the craft of creating characters and creating theater and storytelling and for three years and it was it was amazing. So it's body mind, spirit and uh and n y U still has that philosophy of you know, the purpose of the actor is greater than just to try and like get a job you know on C. S. I, Fresno or whatever. And it's more, it's more than that, Like it's that we have a role to play as actors where storytellers were a vital part of the conversation and to be daring in our work and stuff like that. Had a lot of great teachers and had a big impact on me. That's so cool. And then your first theater job was in a Shakespeare play, right, Shakespeare in the Park. I did to Shakespeare in the Parks right when I got out of school. I did a lot of Shakespeare for a long time. Um I did. Then I was in a touring company called the Acting Company. Spent two and a half years on the road doing Shakespeare productions in high school auditoriums and in college theaters. And my first role in that was playing the nurses assistant in Romeo and Juliet. So I started at the bottom. I started at the bottom of the actor food chain. It was Peter, the nurse's assistant for a year and a half on the road in Romeo and Juliet are studying mercucio. I got to go on a handful of times, but traveled the country in a bus and truck, a stinky bus and playing in doing ten am matinees and high school cafeterias, doing Romeo and Juliet. Did you love it? I loved it and hated it, but yeah, I mostly loved it, and I'm grateful for the for the experience. And was it after that touring experience that you moved to l A? Yes, So I did that, and then I did a bunch more theater in New York for a few more years before I went to l A. And I moved to l A about twenty years ago. I'm very old, very young spirits or you will never age, you know. I just heard an interview with Clint Eastwood and someone was talking about his favorite phrase, and it's don't let the old man in. And so they were like, They're like, how do you stay so young and so vital and you do so much and you direct all these movies and play jazz and golf and travel the world and stuff like that. Whatever you think about Clint Eastwood and and he's like, you don't let the old man in. So I'm fifty three. I want to not let the old man in. He's trying to get in, folks, he's trying to get in. Barricade that door into this pudgy, sad, middle aged body. But I don't want to let that old man in. Not welcome here. But okay, So you go back to New York, you're doing theater. You come to l A. How does the office happen? And what do you think it is like when you audition for that? Do you have any idea what's coming? Yeah, no, it's not, it's it's nothing fancy. I moved to l A and I started getting little jobs in in TV and film. The first two movies I did when I got here were tiny rolls in Galaxy Quest and Almost Famous, and that was in and then I did like House of a Thousand Corpses, this horror movie where I got sawed in half and my bottom half of my torso was attached to a giant fish's tail and Rob's be Film. And then uh, I was unlike Charmed in a guest spot, and like C S I and a guest spot, and Law and Order a guest spot, and you know, just kind of some pilots that didn't go and and blopping along and then um, you know, I think the story that sums it up the best, and I kind of tell young actors this story is I I knew these casting agents that were really good to me and really super cool, Libby Goldstein and Junie Lowry Johnson, and they would bring me in for whatever they were casting at the time. And they were doing the show called six ft Under on HBO, and I really wanted to be on that show. I just loved the show so much. And I went in an audition for five different roles that I did not get, and I would small roles just three lines here, five lines there. And then I auditioned for one of the small roles, tiny roles that I didn't get, and I saw in the call sheet that there was this new character they were introducing named Arthur, who was going to have a big arc and he was like described as like a Peter Seller's nerdy undertaker, you know, apprentice undertaker, who was very odd and I was like, oh my god, I could so play that role. That's me I did. So I went to Libby and I was like, hey, I see this on the breakdown. Is there any way I could audition for this role as well? And she was like, and this is how she talks, and this is not mocking, this is literally how she talks. She's like, oh my god, yeah, I had thought about that. Uh let me check and see. And she went in. She was like, I talked to that direction. I said, yeah, fine, you can audition. So I've just come back in an hour and look over the sides and the lines and you can audition for it. So I went off like I had an hour, looked at the lines, memorized him as well as I could, made some choices, came back in and and got the role of Arthur. So I did thirteen episodes on this show six ft under on HB. That was and it was a very popular show at the time, and that's what got me the office. Essentially, I had auditioned for DWIGHTE and and it was kind of the same thing I saw, Like I knew the English Office and I knew that I could kick ass at this kind of part but because of my success on this other show that opened the door. So for me, this show is a very valuable kind of spiritual lesson. It's like God answers you yes, no or not yet and not. I am so grateful that I didn't get those little guest spots on six ft under with three lines or five lines, because had I gotten one of those, I never could have played Arthur, which never would have opened the door to the office. Do you never know what the universe has in store for you and all the rejection could be leading up to a much bigger door opening in your future that What was your favorite thing about playing I think, um, my favorite thing, well, there's too much to list. Um. I love playing a weirdo. I like doing the physical comedy. I always begged them to write me more like physical comedy and they would get. I get to do a lot of it from the clowning stuff, you know. I love doing physical comedy and that's some of them work I'm most proud of on it. And but really the collaborative spirit that Greg Daniels and and Steve Carrell you know, created on the set, where all ideas were welcome. You could improvise, make it your own. We played together, you know, as a family on that set, and it was Directors would come in and their jaws would drop. They couldn't believe how much love and openness and collaboration existed on that set. It was not like other TV sets which can, as you know, can be very toxic environments and very closed and very hierarchical. You know, here's Greg Annuals running the show. He also created King in the Hill. He wrote on Seinfeld, he wrote on Saturday a Live, he wrote on The Simpsons, like and you could just go to him and say like, hey, what about an idea? What about this? You know, like I remember having the idea like Jim ordering Dwight gaydar, you know, to see if it works on Oscar and if Oscar is gay, like literally like gaydar like a mental detector. And Greg's like, oh, that's great, and he went had some writers right it up and wrote a scene. That's just how we worked. So it was really, uh again, so grateful to be a part of that kind of collaborative experience. And what a lesson to that if you value everyone, if you if you let everyone in the room feel ownership over what they're making. What they're making becomes so incredible and they're and they're in it for the long haul too. And then you get, you know, nine years of great workout of people because they're they're a part of that, They're part of that process. Doesn't exist very much in the TV world, But boy was I lucky. I mean, come on, I love that. So in the spirit of collaboration, you spoke about Reza. How did you guys come to work together? So, Reza Aslin is a fiction writer, he's an author, he is a uh he is a religious he's a PhD and kind of religious studies and as a scholar as well. He's well known like pundit on news channels, and he had his own show on CNN for a while called Believer. And I met him through the grapevine and we always hit it off. We have a lot of similar ideas. We have some some discrepancies, but we have some similar ideas about art and faith and service and making the world a better place. And I was really I've loved his especially his book Zealot, which is about kind of a whole different way of looking at Jesus and and Christianity, as as an act of like social rebellion was really interesting, and like two years ago we had a breakfast and we're just talking about all these ideas and like, we need to do a podcast together like this is we're so in alignment, we're so deeply curious about the same stuff. And then there was a long process of developing it. What's it going to be, what are we going to call it, where are we going to do it, how's it going to be organized? You know, there's so many different things to consider when you're doing a podcast, and that's when we started Metaphysical Milkshake. It's so cool. I just love it and it's such an amazing partner piece to Soul Pancake. Yeah, I'm so excited and it's so yeah, it's we're really excited to team with Soul Pancake on it because so Pancakes interested in the same things we're interested in, big human questions, big universal stuff, you know, love and loneliness and work and service. And we just recently did one on memory. We have one coming out on you know, indigenous spiritual tradition. And my uncle is a is a professor and his study he studies beauty literally in the psychology of beauty. So we did an episode on beauty, like both physical beauty, psychological beauty, moral beauty. You know that? Do you know that people are wired to appreciate moral beauty, Like we're wired to appreciate good moral acts and to see the beauty and those and those acts. That's actually like a whole new school of psychology, realizing that we were drawn to the beautiful, not just the visual beautiful, but the psychological and moral and spiritual beautiful. So that's one of our episodes two. So I love it. I love having those those conversations. So folks listening at home want to get started diving into your content if they haven't yet, where should Yeah, well it's this, it's this company called Luminary. Unfortunately have to subscribe. They're trying to be kind of like the Netflix of podcasts, and you'll be like when binge so Gal there's a month three eight dollars a month or however much it is making him on the free podcast, Thank you to show Bush. Only because there's a lot of cool podcasts on Luminary. You have to get the app. Russell Brands on their Trevor Noah, Lena Dunham there's a lot of great talkers and thinkers and stuff like that, and and that's where they find it Beta Physical Mook Shake. So my final question for you, which I do like to ask everyone who comes on the podcast, as it is the title, how much? How much can you bench? One thirty? I'm not that strong. I mean, that's impressive. That's a whole human. That's a very light human. Well that's like a teenage girl. I don't know, teenage girl. Yeah. So I'm very glad you answered that. It was my most pressing question. But my second most pressing question is, as it is the title of the podcast, when you hear the phrase work in progress, what comes to mind for you as being a work in progress in your life? Wow? Great question, great title. Love that so much. You know, life is a precious gift. We talked about recently putting our having to put our dogs down because of cancer, and I have several friends who have recently been dealing with cancer. And life is just so infinitely precious and very very short. And what is my work in progress? Like? What next for me? You know? Like quite honestly, like I really love acting. I'm kind of like you, like I love acting but it's not everything that I am, and it's not really everything I want to do, you know? And so what next, dear universe? Can I put whatever qualities and attributes and skills that I have acquired to this point, what next to both fulfill myself but also be of service to others? So am I? I may not have yet found my highest calling? You know what next? I don't know what? Does it I mean just going and serving poor people or doing education? Or does it mean making people laugh more? I don't know. So my work in progress is you know what? What? What next? Dear universe? I feel like that would be such a good prompt for a journal in the morning. Have you asked yourself that question and seeing what comes out? That's a good idea. I need to do that. I haven't. Okay, let's do that. Feeling very inspired, excellent, Thank you so much for coming today and bringing all of your wisdom and humor, and oh thanks thanks for having me this is I really admire what you do and who you are. And you, like I said, you walk the walk. You don't just talk about it. You you are involved in so many great and it's I don't know how you have the time, the hours in the day to do what you do, but really exciting glad to be here. Thank you, Thank you so much. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Our associate producer is Cate Linley, Our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by Brilliant Anatomy