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I know Rainn Wilson best as Dwight Schrute from “The Office,” but I get to see a different side of him in our conversation. Rainn tells me how he knew acting was in his blood growing up, and how struggling with his mental health led him on a spiritual journey. He shares what he learned on this journey in his new book “Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution.” Oh, and this will make sense later, but that tidbit about Stevie Nicks? Total myth. All in all, our chat feels like sipping tea in a velvet lounge chair with a good friend.

Please note, Funny Cuz It’s True contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Rainn Wilson, Elyse Myers

Elyse Myers  00:15

Okay, actually, can you just pretend that you’re listening to a fully complete theme song here, I got really in my head. And I tried to make it perfect and I couldn’t. So this is going to be the theme song right here. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Funny Cuz It’s True. I’m Elyse Myers. I am so excited to tell you that I am talking to Rainn Wilson today, if you don’t know rain play Dwight Schrute on the office, and I guess I’ve just made it my personal mission to turn this podcast into like one giant office tribute. I’m having the time of my life. And while that is enough for me to love rain, because he played Dwight, this conversation really took my appreciation for him to a completely different level. We talk about religion, spirituality and partnership in light of his new book soul boom, why we need a spiritual revolution. So two things that are funny because they’re true. Number one, when my manager told me that we had booked rain, I was putting my makeup on for an award show that I was going to like in an hour. And I didn’t really know that this information was coming. It took me by complete surprise, and I just immediately started crying, like really ugly crying. So if you want to watch that video, it’s on my social media, and it’s a good laugh. And number two, when I tell you that this conversation has range, like we go from talking about putting drugs up our butts to religious trauma, so it’s a good one. Okay, let’s get into it. Rain, I am so excited to have you here.

Rainn Wilson  01:50

Oh my gosh, the office ladies were just raving about you. They were just like, oh my god, she’s so crazy in her music. And she’s so funny. She’s so real. And she’s so vulnerable.

Elyse Myers  02:05

That is so nice.

Rainn Wilson  02:06

It’s very real and true.

Elyse Myers  02:08

Not me literally calling rain a liar. Like five seconds into the conversation. I thought about this not only through like this whole conversation, but the next day, I messaged my producer like to voice memos about how I couldn’t believe this was how I responded to him complimenting me. I will never forget this moment and how I feel like I ruined rule. Thank you so much. My husband’s bringing me my ADHD medication so I can focus while we talk. Okay, I’m going to, he’s really quick. Thank you.

Rainn Wilson  02:41

You know, it works faster. You grind them up and snort them.

Elyse Myers  02:44

I love that. Or you can put them in your butt.

Rainn Wilson  02:51

I’ve never started a podcast with someone taking their ADHD meds at the top. What shouldn’t you have taken them like 20 minutes ago?

Elyse Myers  03:00

I should have but there’s a national Adderall shortage. I don’t know if you’ve heard about.  That’s why I said you can put it up here butt, my brain is not focused yet. But yeah, so there you go. There’s enough.

Rainn Wilson  03:14

You can put it up your butt. Any pill.

Elyse Myers  03:18

What is happening?

Rainn Wilson  03:19

You can put up your into your anus. Stevie Nicks you used to have cocaine blown into her anus through a straw. When all of her other.

Elyse Myers  03:33

There’s a name for that. I’ve learned from the show You. It’s called a booty bump.

Rainn Wilson  03:42

A booty bump? Ah, okay. Very good.

Elyse Myers  03:45

What is happening? The more you know, Rain. When I woke up this morning. Did I think I’m going to talk to Rainn Wilson about putting medication up. Uh, but no, no, I did not. But is it happening. It sure is. Okay. So I want to kind of go back kind of to the beginning of your career and like pre office, how you got into this world, like, you are such an incredible actor. And I really wanted to know if you have always wanted to do this. Like if you came out of the womb and you’re like, I am going to be an actor as like a small child.

Rainn Wilson  04:18

Well, there’s an interesting story around that. So my parents got a divorce. When I was about a year and a half or two years old. My I stayed with my dad, my mom left. I grew up. I barely saw my mom. I saw her like, five times before. I was like, 15 years old. Wow. early on. It was just this thing. I would watch a sitcom on TV and be like, I want to do that. Oh, and when I first saw play, I was like, I want to do that. I can I not only that, I was kind of like, I can do that. I think I can do that.

Elyse Myers  04:57

Do you feel that way about everything or just acting?

Rainn Wilson  04:59

No, no, not at all. I didn’t feel that way about anything other than acting. I was obsessed with sitcoms like early sketches like Monty Python and Saturday Night Live and just reenacting comedy sketches and it was absolutely my life. And then I started taking acting classes. And, you know, when I told my dad in high school, like later on in high school, I was like, hey, I want to be an actor. My dad was a little bit weirded out. And he was he’d always been very supportive of me and doing the arts. But he was weirded out, I couldn’t figure it out. So then I started to get to know my birth mother better Her name is Shay. I said to her one day, I was about 18 or 19. Why did you guys get a divorce? And she said, your dad never told you. I was like, no, he never mentioned it. I would ask him and he would dodge the question. She said, well, when I was in Seattle, in the mid-60s, I was an actress. And I was doing plays around Seattle, which I had no idea. And I left your dad because I had an affair with a theater director that I was doing a play with. And so I left him for this theater director, which was only short lived, but your dad was at that point was really heartbroken. And I am really pissed off, obviously. And he was done with the marriage. And I, you know, I don’t blame him for that. And but she was like, wow, she was moved to tears like, well, he never told you that. I was like, no, he never said a bad word about you ever to meet anyone else. So it was really interesting for me to find out right when I was getting really serious about acting and going wanting to go to acting school and stuff like that, that my birth mother had been an actress and I had no idea. And not only that, that my father was so weirdly disapproving of me being an actor. Because he had been heartbroken by his wife, being an actress, and then having an affair with a theatre director. And so there was this kind of like, there were these very complicated Tangled Roots into me being an actor.

Elyse Myers  07:16

What was that like when you learn that? Like, did you talk to your dad about this weird reaction he was having?

Rainn Wilson  07:23

Yeah, I did. I did. My dad was he passed away two years ago, which was very sad. And we were very close. But he was not very good. Like many of his generation, he was not very good at what we would call emotions. So he was not very good at expressing and talking about emotions. I’m not necessarily that good, but I love talking about them. I’ve been in therapy for 20 years, so I love having conversations about them, anyway.

Elyse Myers  07:54

have you like intellectualized your emotions instead of feeling them? Like you’re good at understanding and talking? You’re not as good as feel at feeling them?

Rainn Wilson  08:01

Yeah, I can, I can talk about them ad infinitum. But can I actually be sensitive? In the moment to people and like, in like, intuitively sensitive about what someone might need and step in at the right time, and with the right timing and sensitivity and grace? And like, No, I’m not so good at not good at that. But I think that’s something that you don’t, you can train yourself a little bit. But if your parents didn’t really teach you about emotions and emotional sensitivity to others, then it doesn’t. I don’t know how natural it is. Maybe some people naturally just have it like have because my parents were just emotionally clueless. But by the time I had moved to New York City to go to NYU, and I was doing plays, and he came in, like, saw me in a play. I know he came and saw me play Hamlet in acting school. And he kind of saw like, Oh, he’s actually pretty good. This is real. He was very supportive at that point of time. And when the office got famous, he would buy Office paraphernalia and wear it everywhere. So he would wear a Schrute farms, sweatshirt, and Dwight stuff. And so people would say hey, the office I love the office, he be like, that’s my son’s.

Elyse Myers  09:22

Okay, really quick. This reminds me of when my dad was the manager of an IT department at a college and when the people that worked with him would find out that I was his daughter that he was you know, the father of Elyse Myers. He would be like, Yeah, my daughter’s the taco girl. And he was so proud to say that, and it just every time I think about that story, it makes me smile because it’s so sweet. He’s like, yeah, my daughter, the taco girl.

Rainn Wilson  09:48

He had to white, Dwight sweatshirt and Schrute farms, and I really had to I was like, Dad, that’s really embarrassing. So sweet, but it is pretty darn cute. It’s pretty cute.

Elyse Myers  10:03

All right, we have to take a quick break. But when we come back rain tells us about how he and his wife made their dreams come true. So you said you went to NYU for acting? Yeah. What happened between then and booking the office? What did those years how many years was that?

Rainn Wilson  10:30

God? How much time do we got here, Elyse?

Elyse Myers  10:33

As much time as you’ll give me.

Rainn Wilson  10:36

It was. Yeah, so first of all, I had an amazing time at NYU was a three year intensive program that really taught me so much about acting. I’m so grateful for those years. And I will because I had a lot of talent, but it was very raw. And I had a lot of bad habits as an actor, one of them being this whole emotions thing and not learning, not being very good at emotions. It doesn’t help you as an actor to not be good at emotions and to be disconnected from your emotions. Not so helpful.

Elyse Myers  11:09

Ironically, it helped you very much as Dwight, I would say.

Rainn Wilson  11:13

Yeah, I could tap into this. That kind of odd, alienated, and a lot of people would say to me in interviews, when the office was on, I was like, is Dwight autistic? And it’s like, well, no, he’s not autistic. He might be a little bit on the spectrum in some ways, but he just has a different relationship to emotions than, you know, a regular human being just like Rainn Wilson had a very different relationship to an emotional life as most, quote unquote, normal people, whatever normal people are, I don’t even know what a normal person is. I trained for the theater and I wanted to do theater. I did theater for a long time in New York City. And I never made just to get really like nuts and bolts. Like I never made over 20 grand a year as an actor in New York City in the first nine years of my career as an actor.

Elyse Myers  12:10

Did you supplement with like serving jobs or something like?

Rainn Wilson  12:13

I waited tables, I had a moving company, I bought a van fact my wife and I, when we got married in 1995, we got a couple grand in gifts for our wedding. And I took 1200 of it with her blessing and bought a van. So I was a man with a van and a moving company. I was a lot skinnier back then. And I didn’t have big muscles, but I was very wiry and wiley and I knew how to get futon couches, up and down staircases and stuff like that. But it was a great way because I basically could cheat the tax system and I would get like 40 bucks an hour cash to move people around and then we had a van so we could go camping with throw a mattress in the back and take our pitbulls and drive up to the Catskills and go camping on a weekend.

Elyse Myers  13:07

How did you know to keep at it? Because that’s a very common experience of a lot of people I’ve talked to in your industry is like, it took 10-20, like, just so many years, how did you know to keep doing it and not give up?

Rainn Wilson  13:22

Yeah, it was it was 14-15 years before I got the office of me acting. And I was very fortunate there was a show I got right before the office called Six Feet Under that was on HBO that I had a really nice featured role there that kind of helped kind of people discover me. But so here’s how it worked for me. Like, I wanted to act, I didn’t really care about fame, I didn’t really care about money. So to me, it was that wasn’t the success metric. It’s like do I get to do what I love was my success metric. And my wife and I were always talking about like, when do we bail, she was started as an actor and then became a performance artist and then was loved the writing process. And now as a fiction writer and writes short stories and stuff like that, so we were she had kind of turned more to writing. But we would constantly have these discussions like when do we pull the plug, when do we bail and all this like pursuing a quote unquote, career and just go back to Seattle or go to Portland or Minneapolis, you know, places that we are from, or we had worked and, and just, you know, start a theatre company or teach acting on the side or, you know, try and get jobs and little theaters and just get a different, you know, you know, have a have a day job and, you know, acting on the side of like that, like, when do we do that like, and we looked at that very seriously for a long period of time. But when I would look at my life, I would realize that every year I had just gotten just a tad had bit more work than the previous year or a tad bit better job than the previous job. So there was this kind of very long, slow process that was taking me toward my goal, which was to pay the bills as an actor and not have to wait tables and not have to drive people’s futon couches around in my van. So I seemed to always be headed in the right direction. So that was just enough, like, Yeah, I’ll just do another year. And like, I just got a little bit better job this year than I got last year. I’ll just, oh, I got a little bit better agent this year than I had the last year, I’ll just stick with a little bit longer a little bit longer, a little bit longer. And I’m so glad I did.

Elyse Myers  15:47

What was it like to have your wife’s support? Because do you think you would have kept with it as long as you did without her support? Or would you like?

Rainn Wilson  15:55

I would have no career without my wife’s support. I would have, I really would have nothing without her support. And I people say that, but I really truly mean that. Because, first of all, she didn’t really care about me earning a living, she didn’t have this kind of thing like, well, you need to be earning all this money. There was nothing like that. It was like we’re, we want to follow our dreams as artists. And we want to support each other while we’re following our dreams as artists. And no one loved and supported me more. We went through a lot of hard times went through a lot of ups and downs, but she just would always, you know, believe in me and say the right thing at the right time and give me the right support and the right way,

Elyse Myers  16:48

I feel literally the exact same way. Like before all of this stuff happened for me, my husband, like weeks before had said, We know we’ve been doing so much for me for my husband’s talking here. And like he’s like, the next 10 years or the year of like a lease, and I love you and I want to do everything I possibly can to like, be the like arms that are like holding you up. And he stays home with our son. And I literally couldn’t do this job without him.

Rainn Wilson  17:14

Yeah, you know, humans do really well in partnership. Yeah. And we need support, and we’re flawed. And, you know, life is a difficult struggle. And it doesn’t have to be a partner. It can also be a community, it can be a friend group, you know, it can be, but we need support, and we need help. And we can’t do it alone. And we live in this weird Western world. Well, it’s like pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And it’s like, no, you know, we’re vulnerable. And we’re flawed, and we’ve got issues, and we’ve got doubts, and whether you find that in a friend, group community or your church community, or, you know, you know, in a partnership, but, you know, we got to help each other. And this is the, this is the core kind of spiritual issue that we’re facing right now. And this mental health crisis is, screens have isolated us and contemporary society have isolated US political division has isolated us, there’s all these ways that we’re just getting lonelier and lonelier. And, you know, when we actually need support more than ever,

Elyse Myers  18:27

Did you find that being in a cast that was so close knit and together? Like, do you feel like that fulfilled something in you that you didn’t expect when you went onto the cast of The Office?

Rainn Wilson  18:39

Yeah, it was this fam. It was this other family. I mean, we all talk about it that way, like I had a and have a second family. It’s really pretty extraordinary. And, you know, no matter what I’m going through, like I can call pretty much anyone in the office and talk to them about what I’m really going through or struggling with, or whatever and get so much support, and in love in a way and they know me, they we grew up together. I mean, I was older. You know, some of them were very young, like John and BJ and Mindy were, very, very young. When we started for instance.

Elyse Myers  19:17

How old were you when you when you started?

Rainn Wilson  19:19

I started the office. I was like 38 Oh, wow. 39. So really, when it got famous, I was in my 40s when the office like took off. I was already in my 40s. So I was a late. Start a late bloomer. And, but yeah, like I can call Angela Jenner and just share anything that I’m going through and, you know, or anyone in the cast, really.

Elyse Myers  19:48

I was talking to Brian Baumgartner and he shared that when he was kind of figuring out Kevin, he made some creative decisions that were specific to his character that he just like it wasn’t written in scraped, he just decided that like, Kevin can’t rotate at the hips. Like Kevin would be a person that if someone calls his name, his whole body has to turn. Because that’s just how Kevin reacts to things. And that was like, so mind blowing to me because I, I am so good at like improving things. I don’t know if I could act and feel the freedom to read a character and be like, Kay, this character doesn’t turn at the hips. So I’m wondering if there’s anything from Dwight that you put in, that was not given to you, but you, you know, put into the character yourself?

Rainn Wilson  20:39

Well, I will say that I saw Brian, act in the theater, he was a brilliant theater actor and went to theater training school. And I think that’s one of the things that theater gives you is that kind of like, it’s more than acting is more than psychology. Acting is also this physical thing, like you’re using your body and you’re expressing in your body and you need to find things in your body and where were body creatures, you know, we’re creatures not just of the intellect of, or psychology. And so that’s the kind of thing like that that’s beautiful that he shared that that’s kind of a theatre actor way into a character. I would say what, what would I say around Dwight around that? I would say that, I always like if I needed to find white as a character. I would always kind of stiffen and lengthen my neck. And if you notice something about Dwight, like he is kind of like a robot, ramrod neck.

Elyse Myers  21:45

Even watching you do it now.

Rainn Wilson  21:48

That allows him to see the world in a certain way.

Elyse Myers  21:51

Rainn literally just transformed it to Dwight right before my eyeballs. That was so crazy.

Rainn Wilson  21:57

You know, it’s like, almost like a, like a weird bird or something like that. It’s kind of an ostrich kind of thing. And you can if I was ever needing to kind of find the character I would kind of go to the to the neck. How he sees the world.

Elyse Myers  22:17

It’s like a physical trigger to get your brain there.

Rainn Wilson  22:19

Yeah, exactly. And there’s nothing relaxed about Dwight’s like neck and upper body. There’s nothing mellow. There’s nothing you know, his rigidity, his physical rigidity is mirrored by his kind of mental rigidity. Because he has rules like this is the world works according to the shrewd rules, learn your rules, you better learn your rules. If you don’t want to be eaten in your sleep, you know?

Elyse Myers  22:52

Well, now that I’ve sung the Learn your rules song with Rainn Wilson in unison, I’m just gonna sit and think about my life while we go to break. Moving on a little bit from the office. I’m wondering what it was like after you played a character that big? Like, did you find that that character followed you? After and you’ve struggled to find characters that you could play that were not Dwight, you know, like, did people see you as that? And it was hard to move past that?

Rainn Wilson  23:34

Yeah, it’s been a challenge. Absolutely a huge challenge that by and large, people see me as Dwight, and they see me as doing kind of broader comedy. And they don’t understand that. You know, I spent 10 years doing theater in New York, where you play different kinds of characters, I would do Eugene O’Neill one night, and I would do an experimental play the next and a farce the next, like, actors are trained to do all of it to do Greek tragedy and farce. And so it’s been a challenge. The place that has been really wonderful is the world of independent film, where I’ve gotten to do some really wonderful roles. And some beautiful projects that literally 17 People have seen, but in a way like, I care, but I don’t really care like I did these you know, there’s a movie called The boy that’s this horror film. And there’s this kind of thriller film called Don’t tell a soul and there’s going back there’s the super and Hesher with Joseph Gordon Levitt. And there’s some wonderful independent films that I’ve gotten to do that have been there’s one called permanent I did with Patricia Arquette, that I get to play all kinds of different roles like I get to let my actor freak flag fly from psycho killers to different kinds of weirdos to really dark characters. And so I’ve been thrilled. But you know, I’ll always be known as Dwight, for the most part as the you, it’s so rare that one gets to create kind of what I would call an iconic character. It’ll probably be on my tombstone. It’s like the guy who played to white. But I, but I’ve been so blessed to because I’ve gotten to do all kinds of great other roles. And I do hope that people will ultimately see me as more of like, Oh, he’s a character actor, he can do lots of different kinds of roles like John Lithgow gets to do. He can do horror and thriller, and he can play Winston Churchill, and he can be on Third Rock from the Sun and he can I aspire to be that kind of actor.

Elyse Myers  25:50

I think it is so cool that you are so versatile. Okay, I want to switch gears just a little bit. And I want to talk more about your book. When did you start writing it? How long had you been thinking about wanting to start writing it before it kind of started going into the works? What did that whole process look like for you?

Rainn Wilson  26:07

Well, the origin of soul boom, why we need a spiritual revolution by Rainn Wilson, author of the bassoon King and SoulPancake chew on life’s big questions. Sorry, I’m just reading my cover is twofold one is that I’ve always really been intrigued by spiritual journeys, spiritual paths, and in spirituality. Just conceptually growing up as a high kid, member of the high faith and behind her always learning about other faiths and religions and have a very wide ranging kind of panoply of ideas that we embrace. But also, because of what I realized now was kind of a mental health crisis that I was going through in my 20s and early 30s, where I really suffered a lot from anxiety, I had crippling anxiety attacks, I was really rendered ineffectual by my anxiety would, I had depression, I had addiction issues, loneliness, alienation. And in the 90s, we didn’t really have terms for it. You know, it didn’t. People didn’t talk about mental health crisis or whatever you supposed to just suck it up and kind of get through it. And so I didn’t understand what I was going through. And I was like, when I realized like, Oh, I really have an anxiety disorder. It wasn’t until I was later in therapy, you know, like, 15 years ago, that was like, oh, I have an anxiety disorder that I’ve been trying to medicate. And it doesn’t work. Guess what?

Elyse Myers  27:48

Yeah, spoiler alert. It’s not great.

Rainn Wilson  27:51

And so the author Julia Cameron, who wrote the amazing workbook, the artists way, she said.

Elyse Myers  28:00

I love the artists way. So for those that don’t know, the artists way, is a workbook created by Julia Cameron, that’s meant to get you writing every day, and they’re called your morning pages. And really, it’s just meant to help you schedule your creativity. I’m currently writing a book. And the fact that I’ve been doing these morning pages every day, for almost a year now has been so helpful. For me, I’m not using a lot of that content, but it just helps my brain like create space to be creative. I think it’s so genius. So if you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. Okay, back to rain. It’s so

Rainn Wilson  28:36

But she said, I came to spirituality out of necessity, not out of virtue. And I love that phrase so much like I needed to find spiritual tools to help me on my life. Like, like this morning, at least like I got up, I have a long driveway that’s very sloped, and I walk up and down it really briskly. And then I went in and did a cold plunge. And then I went and meditated for 10 or 15 minutes. And I don’t do that because Oh, I’m so arrived. I’m so spiritual guru. I’m so wise like, no, that’s bullshit. I, I do that. Because to function in my life, I need to do that I need to get in my body I need to do these are tools that I have learned to use that help ground me and just give me a solid foundation. If I was if I want to just have an average day, that just brings me to average. That’s why I created soul boom, just ideas that I’ve been ruminating over for the last 20 or 30 years that were important to me. And then And then lastly, I’ll say that not only important to me, but I think are important to the world because I think people have been and rightfully so kind of jettisoning spirituality and Faith so much. And I get it because there’s so much bad about contemporary religion these days. But I say we’ve thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. Because there’s, there’s a lot of positive beautiful things about faith, belief, spirituality, and even religion itself, that humanity could really use at this very, very difficult juncture that we’re in.

Elyse Myers  30:31

I, man, I can’t tell you how much I relate with that. Because as I was trying to, as I found myself really caught up in the Christian church that I kind of accidentally found myself in and was studying and then going so far the opposite way, because I was so hurt by it by the people in it. And I was like, Absolutely not want nothing to do with that? There was so much of me that I lost with it that I did like that. That’s, that’s where I had to really find the middle ground because it isn’t just black and white, like, how do I like how do I reconcile what I need versus like what I didn’t from faith and spirituality and religion and the doctrine and the rules, like you don’t I mean, it was very hard for me to really sit and think and it made, I had to be very present in my body. And I had to be very honest with myself of like, what is my pride talking? Like? What does my family need? What are we missing personally, like a spiritual faith? Like, is there is there something out there that I’m not connecting to, because people have gotten in the way of that of me being able to see and feel and encounter that, like, there’s been so much back and forth of me that’s like, having to sort through that. And it’s unfortunate that human beings can kind of get in the way of all of it. Yeah,

Rainn Wilson  31:51

Yeah, the faith community. First of all, you’re singing songs. Yeah. Do you miss singing songs with big groups of people, that’s really awesome. And really, of super uplifting and important. And they should have secular sing along. In church, you can just get together and be singing, about love and life and you know, singing together as powerful, but, you know, being part of a group that is where the intention of the group is transcendent in the sense that the intention of the group is we’re longing for and expressing something about something more than our just our grimy little human needs. Yeah, that there’s something more to this life than this physical life than just kind of eating, drinking, pooping, having sex, buying things and dying, and to be part of that kind of community. With support and love and transcendence, is really, it’s special. It’s beautiful. And it’s, and it’s rare. And but it’s but, you know, there has been so much negative issues around so many of the organized religions that I understand people being like, I don’t want anything to do with organized religion, and they’re just like, well, you know, and have that kind of reaction and I get it.

Elyse Myers  33:17

how it was, was a goal of yours when writing the book to take the emotion out of it, and kind of give more history. You know, like, for people like me, like people that experienced church and were hurt by it now are trying to figure it out. Like, was it more just like presenting all of that what you know, and what you’ve learned about spirituality and religion, so that someone can get like a fresh perspective on it?

Rainn Wilson  33:43

That’s very well said. And that’s exactly it. It’s just about a fresh perspective on spirituality to say, we’ve all been kind of religiously or spiritually traumatized in some way, shape, or form. Whether it’s through, you know, divisive politics, or bad church experience, or what have you. We need to refresh and revitalize how we view spirituality, and see that there’s an incredible amount of like, inspiration and tools for self-care, for self-love for self-transformation. And for building community. I’m not trying to convert anybody to anything. It’s just like, hey, let’s just talk about some spiritual tools and concepts and you know, and see what happens.

Elyse Myers  34:31

Really cool. Well, Rainn. Thank you so much for joining me today. I can’t believe I got to meet you. I just want to give you a big internet hug. It’s so good.

Rainn Wilson  34:42

It’s such a pleasure meeting you. I love what you do. I love your honesty, your vulnerability and awesome sense of humor, and so thrilled to be on your show. Thank you for having me. Thank

CREDITS  34:54

Alright, that’s it for my conversation with Rainn Wilson. Check out his latest book titled Soul Boom out April 25. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, if you liked the show, give us a rating and a review. It helps listeners find us. Okay, I’ll be back next week. Bye. There’s more Funny Cuz It’s True with Lemonada Premium, get access to all of Lemonada’s premium content, including my five questions with Rainn Wilson coming out this Friday. Subscribe now and Apple podcasts. Funny Cuz It’s True is a Lemonada Media and Powderkeg production. The show is produced by Claire Jones, Zoe Dennis and […], our associate producer is Tiffany Buoy. Rachel Neil is our senior director of new content and our VP of weekly production is Steve Nelson. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer, Paul Feig, Laura Fisher, […] and me Elyse Myers. The show is mixed by Brian Castillo and Johnny Evans. Our theme song music was written by me and scored by Xander Singh.