Rainn Wilson

speaker

3,063 appearances 12 recordings 7 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 7 Jul

Rainn Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Know Thyself · E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution · 21 Jan 2025 podcast

And, you know, there's part of me that kind of wants to just give a big fuck you to Hollywood and just move out into the woods and write books and play chess. And I may still do that. So that's one challenge. And sometimes I feel a little bit stuck. Sometimes I feel like I've taken a lot of really positive steps. Like I'm in recovery. I've taken really positive, great steps in recovery.

That's been a really rewarding journey for me. Writing Soul Boom, doing the Soul Boom podcast, having these kind of elevated spiritual conversations has been exciting and uplifting for me. But, you know, can I go deeper? What does that look like? You know, what does, you know, the great spirit, the great mystery, the, you know, the cosmic force want from me in the next, you know...

steps along the path before mortality, you know, rears its ugly, interesting head. One thing I'm very excited about is with my old business partner from SoulPancake, Shabnam Muggarabi.

Almost. We're going to do a documentary on God. called The Notorious G.O.D. based on the chapter from Soul Boom, an exploration of what God might look like in the modern world. I'd love to interview you for it. Are you open? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, great. And, you know, projects like that to me are really exciting. I pitched it as a TV show all around town, and it got turned down everywhere.

In fact, when I went into Netflix with it, they said it was too controversial. which is hysterical to me that you can have like dating shows where everyone hooks up with everyone, no problem. But if you want to do a documentary on God, it's too controversial. So that's the kind of the world that we live in right now. So... those are my main struggles.

And to find, you know, what's the best way for me to leverage what I've learned, what I know, and the stories I want to tell to help a very wounded world right now. There's parts of me that gets very angry and very engaged in the immediate stuff. You know, Trump, as we speak, Trump has just won this election. I see that there's a lot of

injustice going on in the world and I want to scream about it, right? But I also want to have a larger view of where we're headed as a species on this planet and address that beyond the partisan ups and downs of legislation and headlines and doom scrolling and, you know, outrage clicks on the internet. So, in fact, there's a story from the Baha'i Faith

This woman named Rahia Kanum had this dream about this great spiritual teacher from the Baha'i faith named Abdu'l-Baha. And there was a big, a dam had broken and there was a big flood and the water was washing everyone's homes away. And everyone was down trying to rescue people and pull them out of the water. And Abdu'l-Baha was up on top of this hill crying. doing something up there.

She couldn't quite see what it was. And she was like, what's Abdu'l-Waha doing up on top of that hill? You know, we need him down here helping everyone out of the flood. And then someone said to her in the dream, someone said, oh, he's building a machine to stop the flooding in the future. So...

There's nothing wrong with, in fact, it's lauded to be pulling people out of the flood, but there's also nothing wrong with doing something to build a machine or a system or a way of thinking that is going to prevent dam breaks in the future and has kind of a looking at things from a 20,000 foot view, you know, a different perspective.

Well, great question. And it goes to the thesis of my book. And it's something I'm madly passionate about. We sit here across from each other in Topanga Canyon. Is that okay for me to show away Topanga Canyon? It's all right. In a secret hideout in Topanga Canyon, California.

which I would say in a lot of ways is the epicenter of so much incredible healing modalities, spiritual ways of thinking, perspective shifts. But there is a certain kind of contemporary Southern California limitation to spirituality where spirituality is used as a expedient tool to fight one's current anxiety or depression. For instance, I'm crazy busy with my life,

whether I have a job, whether I work at home, I'm raising kids, what have you. Oh my God, I feel so flustered. I feel so overwhelmed. I know I'll listen to a spirituality podcast. I'll go to a yoga class. I'll burn incense. I'll get this app. I'll read this incredibly wise person and it'll recenter and recalibrate my mind

my thinking, my being, my breath, my heart energy, and this will make my life better. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I wish everyone would do that. I wish the world would do that.

If we had, instead of hundreds of thousands or millions of people doing that every day, if we had billions of people centering around their heart every day, taking deep breaths, being in the moment, undergoing a spiritual practice, the world would be a much better place. But

That journey can become very solipsistic, and it can become very navel-gazy, and it can become very consumerist, where I'm going to pay X amount for this podcast, and X amount for this app, and X amount for this audiobook, and the X amount for this yoga class or this, you know, healing practitioner. And in return, I want X amount of anxiety reduction.

so that I can go about my crazy, busy, flustered, overwhelmed life more effectively, then essentially you're just trading dollars for a result. And that ultimately is not a shift. in a kind of a greater awareness, right? So there's another aspect to spirituality which really comes from the Baha'i tradition that isn't talked about as much in the spirituality world. And that has to do with

collectively, where are we going as a species on this planet? And how can we harness and use spiritual tools to make our collective life better? When you really start unpacking Buddhism, for instance, and especially if you read the Dalai Lama, especially if you read Thich Nhat Hanh, but go to the source, the Buddha himself, The main awareness that one is cultivating is compassion. Why?

So that you can relieve the suffering of others. If we only pay X amount of money and get a certain app and a certain book and a certain podcast and certain animal cards or what have you to relieve our own anxiety, and have compassion for ourselves, that's a great place to start, but it can't end there. We have to increase the compassion for other people. And then what do we do?

How do we put that into action collectively to reduce suffering en masse? And... This may sound airy-fairy or pie-in-the-sky or may say, well, that's not really the purview of spirituality.

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