TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: The Office’s Rainn Wilson on meaning and happiness | ReThinking with Adam Grant

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

Rainn Wilson was a late bloomer: he landed the role of Dwight Schrute on The Office after over a decade of struggling as an actor. But success didn’t solve all of his problems -- and it even created some new ones. In this live conversation for the Authors@Wharton series, Adam asks Rainn about his unlikely journey to stardom and how it led him into exploring the insights that philosophy, psychology, and the world’s great spiritual traditions can offer on modern life’s existential questions. They also discuss Rainn’s favorite moments from The Office and do some improv when Dunder Mifflin invites a certain organizational psychologist to talk to Dwight. Transcripts for ReThinking are available at go.ted.com/RWAGscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy Sunday, y'all. Elise Hugh here, and today we're bringing you a Sunday pick where we share an episode of another podcast from TED, handpicked by us for you. You may know actor Rain Wilson for his work playing the character Dwight Shrewt on The Office, but did you know that he was a late bloomer and struggled to get work for a decade before he landed that role? In this episode of Rethinking with Adam Grant, which was recorded live, Rain shares how success didn't solve all of his problems and why in truth, it could be a little. created some new ones. He and Adam discuss his unlikely journey to stardom and how it led him to explore the insights that philosophy, psychology, and the world's great spiritual traditions

can offer on modern life's existential questions. And yes, they do also discuss Rain's favorite moments from the office and more. To hear more deep conversations, you can find rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about all of TED's podcasts at podcast.com. Now on to the episode right after a short break.

Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on The Science of What Makes Us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is actor and comedian Rayne Wilson, who starred in the office as everyone's favorite paper salesman, Dwight Shrew. This year, Rain published his latest New York Times bestselling book, Soul Boom. It's a delicious smorgasbord of existential philosophy, self-reflection, psychology, and Star Trek that explores the missing role of spirituality in the modern world.

I was thrilled to host Rain for this live conversation in the Authors at Wharton series. Our goal was to light up your brain, warm your heart, and tickle your funny mode. We delve into happiness and meaning, motivation and ambition, mental health and meditation, and yes, of course, the office. When Rain offered me my dream job at Dunder Mifflin, I couldn't resist asking if he would improvise a scene. Yep, finally living my improv dream. Welcome to authors at Wharton, Adam Grant.

I could not be more delighted to welcome Rain Wilson. Thanks, Adam. Nice to see you. You know, it is not every day that the world's greatest business school welcomes the world's greatest salesperson. Can I call you Dwight? No. No.

All right. I have so many questions for you. Good. And our students had a lot of questions for you too, so we all obviously love the office. Some of us have binged it more times than we can count. I think you're, you played the most iconic character of our time. That's very kind. Thank you very much.

But we don't know much about how you got there. So give us the back story. You have one of the most iconic bald heads of all time. I wish I could say that was a deliberate. was a deliberate decision. Mr. Clean, Charles Barkley, Adam Grant. No one has ever had that thought. You're welcome. Tell us the backstory. I know you were a theater actor for a long time. And this was not part of your plan. Not at all. I was a nerdy little disturbed kid from suburban Seattle. And I grew up kind of with a television kind of raising me and watching all of those great sitcoms from

from the 70s. I would record Monty Python sketches on a Panasonic tape recorder held up to a PBS television station at like 1 a.m. to record Monty Python and then memorize the sketches. And then when I started doing theater, I kind of thought, hey, you know, I'm pretty good at this and I can make people laugh. Maybe I'll go to New York and study theater. And that's really where I thought I was going to make my living. So I spent 10, 13 years. years total in New York, kind of pursuing a life in theater, and never really making it above the poverty line as an actor in all truth. So, you know, the idea of being like a star or a celebrity or making a lot of money and being a part of one of these most iconic shows, like one of those

shows that I grew up watching as a kid, is beyond my wildest dreams and not at all the path that I thought I was going to take. Oops. Uh-oh. I feel like it worked out okay, though. It worked out just fine. Look at me. Look at this. It's incredible. So what happened after a decade? What led you to TV?

Well, I was doing this tour. It was a bus and truck tour of Shakespeare plays. I spent two years on a bus with a group of like 20 actors going from high school to college to community center doing Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet and two gentlemen of Verona. And night after night after night doing 10 a.m. matinees in high school cafeteria. And at the end of this long, long stint on the road, I was on the road with this actor. We got back and we were collecting our mail after being on the road for six months. And he had a residual check and he opened it.

And he had spent three days on a Harrison Ford movie. And he had like a $4,000 check, which was more than I had saved for the entire run of doing the theater. And he was like, yeah, oh my God. I opened my student loans, right? and I realized, oh, I'm going to need to do some TV and film. Okay, so when did you get the call? So then, you know, long story short, I really struggled in New York. I was the only actor in New York who never even auditioned for Law and Order.

Every single episode of Law and Order has seven or eight people that are like loading boxes or washing glasses or mopping. or mopping a floor going like, I've seen him here before, but I haven't seen him around in a while. I didn't even get rejected from that because I couldn't even get the audition. That's how low on the acting totem pole I was.

But I took this comedy show that my friends and I had created in New York, which we called a slacker vaudeville, and it was these weird clowns in this kind of surrealist Pee-Wee-Herman landscape doing sketch comedy, and we brought it to L.A. in 1999. and I moved there, and then a lot of doors started opening,

and then I started slogging along in the world of television and film, and after a nice run on 6 feet under, which was on HBO at the time, and that just opened a ton of doors for me, and it's been an incredible ride ever since. Yeah, it has. Okay, so tell us about your office audition. How did that happen? I had been cast in another TV show, and I had my plane ticket,

and I was flying to Vancouver to go start shooting the next day. And there was a TV executive that I knew, and I was like, oh, hi. And he was like, oh, I'm so excited. We just got the rights to the British office to make the American version. And I was like, oh, that's great. Congratulations. And inside, I was kicking myself because I loved the English office. So we had the table read, and it went terribly.

and I got home and I got a call and they said they canceled the show. Tear up your plane ticket. And I was like, yes. So I picked up the phone. They're like, hey, they're doing this office. And I was literally the first actor in on the very first day of auditions. And I auditioned for both Dwight and Michael. What?

Yes. And mine's just exploded. My Michael audition was terrible. I was such a huge Ricky Jervais fan. I just was doing a Ricky Jervais imitation. I was like, so I'm the world's best boss. I was just doing a lot of mannerisms. It was just awful.

But really, when it came to Dwight, I was like, you know, I know this guy. And it was one of those cases where I was like, there's really no one else that can play this role. I know exactly who this guy is. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with guys like this. I literally played Dungeons and Dragons with a guy named Chris Cole, if you're listening, Chris. Chris Cole had Battlestar Galactica glasses. I'm not making this up. He was skinny as a rail, 97 pounds, and his D&D characters would always be these giant

warriors, and he would draw them with giant rippling muscles. Oh, and he studied fencing. So, thank you, Chris, because although that is not Dwight Shrude. True. The people in suburban Seattle that I hung with were absolutely cut from Shrewdian claw, so to speak. Okay, I have to ask, did Chris eat beats? I don't think he probably ate beats. I think he only ate McDonald's, so, yeah. Okay, so you got the part?

Yes. You become Dwight. Yes. Tell us what it was like to be on that show. The thing that I've since learned is how exceptionally collaborative it was as a a set. As Dunder Mifflin was not collaborative whatsoever, the office was completely collaborative. As long as we got the lines as scripted and got them well, we could say whatever the hell we wanted. And if we wanted to take a scene in a different direction, we would try it because

that's one of the amazing things about it having to be documentary is that we just had two guys with cameras. So if you want to go skip over here or start wrestling, or this, you know, they're going to capture it. Even like on Friends or a Seinfeld set, you know, you have the camera moves and it's kind of blocked. You can't just kind of start improvising or doing physical comedy on the side. So it was wonderfully collaborative. Greg Daniels, the showrunner, was incredibly open to ideas he would have two different

cuts of a scene and he wouldn't know which one to do. And so he would ask the janitorial staff and the security guard and the people. and the people doing craft services, and he would bring them all into the editing room, and he would show them the two scenes, and they would vote, and he would pick that one. There's very few people, trust me, in Hollywood, that work in that way.

So he didn't have an ego about it. And that generated a good feeling in the cast that was pretty astonishing. I remember we had a director came in who had just come from directing a show that shall not be named, Desperate Housewives. And he said, oh my God, first of all, no one on that show is even talking to each other. And they wait in their trailers until they absolutely have to come out, and many of them won't do scenes together.

But you guys not only six years in, talk to each other, like you love each other. You come in, you hug, you high five, you laugh. And we kind of all, as we were shooting it, we were all kind of new, like, you know what, this is probably going to be the best job we ever have, hands down. I think I've shown more office clips in my classes at Wharton than all other movie and TV clips combined. Nice. And I'm curious about what you learned. It sounds like there was quite a contrast between the dynamic you had on the show and then the office you were creating at Dunder Mifflin. But what did you learn about making work better and creating good jobs?

Well, one of the things that was astonishing to us in making the office was how popular it was with high school and college kids who had never set foot in an office. we thought we were making a show for work folk in their 20s and 30s that had a jerk boss and had office romances and struggles in the office. And that's what we thought we were making the show for. And then all of a sudden we were like the number one show among teenagers. But the other thing that's pretty nuts is I cannot tell you how many times I've seen written online or people have actually told me that they longed to work in a place. like Dunder Mifflin.

And I think they're getting confused. I have so many questions. The spirit of the show, the heart of the show, the love by four and in between the characters that's revealed in the show, the vulnerabilities are what people fall in love with, and they mistake that for being a kind of really lifeless corporate drone in a paper company. Because first of all, this whole idea of like, it's the worst kind of hierarchy, patriarchy of like the boss who kind of knows it all and you're a captive audience. You can't flee their jokes or their whims. So that feels very like 1950s, kind of. And the kind of the drudgery

of the nine to five and everyone is in their little box, there's so many things about it that that feel timeless and yet completely outdated. I would agree. If you were going into Dunder Mifflin, if Jan hired you, said, Michael, we've got Adam Grant here, conference room, five minutes.

And Adam Grant went in the conference room with Michael and Dwight and Jim and Pam and Ryan and the whole gang. What would you be working on at Dunder Mifflin? Wow. I think this is the cool. fullest day in my job ever. Yes, sign me up for that.

That's your next book, by the way. I would totally do that. Can we play this out for a second? Do it. Okay, can you be Dwight? For you, I will. Wow, he wasn't kidding. Play this out.

Mr. Schut. Shrewd. I'm sorry. Hi, Adam Grant. Nice to meet you. I understand you're the assistant regional manager. Is that right? That's correct.

Tell me what you think is wrong with this place, Dunder Mifflin. Let me start at the beginning. Everything. I think there is an incredible amount of dead wood. Here's my list of who should be fired by this afternoon. I'm happy to take on the task. Hmm.

I noticed your list says Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, and Jim. Yes. What's your beef with Jim? I don't have a beef with Jim. He's terrible. He's an idiot. He's stupid and he's ugly. Okay.

If I gave him his own office where you didn't have to look at him all day. You can transfer him to the Stanford or Utica branch. All right. Interesting. What does children's sales performance look like? Can I have a raise? What have you done to earn a raise? I am a tireless worker and I close every sale and I answer the phone no matter the time of day.

That's interesting. I've actually heard all those things about. I've also had your car detailed as we've been having this conversation. Oh. That's so small. We need of you. I don't think I authorized that. And I'm a little creeped out right now that you did that.

But I appreciate the sentiment and the dedication. I found $2.17 in the various ashtrays. You're welcome. You can have them if you want them. Wow. Thank you. I will say... How much longer is this improv going to go on?

I do have to ask you a question, Mr. Shrewt, which is... I've heard you're incredibly dedicated. You're conscientious to the max. You scored off the charts on our assessment of industriousness. and diligence and grit. Angela Duckworth actually vouched for your grit personally. Good. I have beautiful grit.

We did get some feedback that you don't always play well with others, and sometimes you even stop people from doing their jobs. That's ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous, too. Ridiculously true. Really? Yes. Because their incompetence is not.

Okay, I'll tell you what. So, it sounds like you want a raise, you asked for that. Yes. I hear you also want a promotion. Yes. If I give you a list of ways that you can make other people better and then offered you a raise and promotion if you hit those targets, how would you feel about that? I feel does not compute. And seem. And seen. It's good. He's good. Okay, so what you've worked on now, you've worked on a lot of projects, you've worked with a lot of people. My goal was to try to figure out what motivated Dwight Shrewd and then connect what I cared about to Dwight's motives. How well did I do? You scored off the charts. That was amazing.

That was absolutely incredible. Yeah. Well, thank you. How would you have done that with Michael? Well, are you going to give us your mic? No, we don't have to play it out. My read of Michael was that he's actually not a bad guy, but he really wants to be famous. and his antics are in front of the camera.

And so I would try to get him off camera would be my first thought. My second thought would be to help him see that becoming a famous hated boss is probably not the ideal place to land. Well, I think he was famous before the cameras were there,

putting on a live show for the audience, and then the cameras just threw kerosene on the fire. Yeah, I'd want to hold up a mirror and have him see how disliked he is, and then the hope is he wants to be loved. Although I remember him also saying he wants people to fear him and love him, and he wants them to be afraid of how much they love him.

That's true. That's very good. You've seen the show. Once or twice. Yeah. So I want to talk about a bunch of other things, but before we temporarily leave the office, I had two questions about your experience on the show.

One is you achieved success a lot later in life than many people in your industry do. How old were you when you were cast as Dwight? I was 38 when I was cast as Dwight, and I had a peculiar baby face, so I appeared younger, but I was older, but by the time the office was really kind of off and running, I was in my early 40s. And one of the great things about Dwight is you can't really put your finger on how old he is. Sometimes he seems like he's 25, and sometimes he seems like he's 45.

So it's just kind of this general area. But, yeah, it was very interesting for me to achieve fame kind of in my 40s after a long long, long slog of trying to pay my bills and be a professional actor. It's such an interesting contrast to a dynamic that I think a lot of people watch, which is the opposite, of somebody gets too much success too soon. It goes to their head. They end up with a giant, fragile ego. They lack humility.

They end up becoming more takers than givers. There's a whole syndrome that I'm sure you've watched a lot of people fall victim too. What is your version of that? That's what happened to John and Jenna and Mindy and... BJ and I'm kidding. No, but I am struck. We've known each other for a few years now, although we haven't met in person until now.

And I'm just blown away by how down to earth you are. Like you don't have 19 handlers. You book your own flights as far as I can tell. Is this who you are? Is this your character? Is this a function of the late stage at which you achieved your success? Well, it's something I've talked about a little bit recently

and has been blown completely out of proportion. I talked about how at times, not all the time, at times, I was very, very unhappy while doing the office. Here I am in a job that is beyond my wildest dreams. Here I am making millions of dollars, making people laugh, I'm being nominated for Emmys, movies are being offered to me, development deals, all kinds of amazing opportunities that if you had cut back to six years before, it's me not even being able to get the law and order. A janitor, audition, let alone the job. So it was an incredible transformation in my life.

And it did go to my head. There were a lot of times when I was really wrestling with my ego and when I was very unhappy because it wasn't enough. And it goes to that kind of essential human not enoughness that we're often dealing with, where we can't just 100% and absolutely be in total kind of grace and gratitude for the gifts that we have that are right in front of us, but we're always yearning and longing for the thing that's just outside of our grasp. In this case, like, why didn't my movies work? Why didn't I get offered better movies? Why didn't I get this other

development deal? Why didn't I get more money for this? Why did Jeremy Piven when they, for Christ's sakes. I can't answer that question. But this is part of kind of the spiritual conundrum. And, you know, I'm a member of the Baha'i faith. And the son of the founder of the Baha'i faith, Abdul Baha, came to America about 100 years ago. And there's a story I love because he landed in America.

He was going to do a speaking tour, essentially, kind of like Adam Grant does. And a reporter said, hey, do Baha'is? believe in Satan. And Abdul Baháh said, yes, they do. And the reporter's like, oh, what is Satan to a Baha'i? And Abdul Baha said, the insistent self. So I love that idea that Satan is not some boogeyman creature with red scales or something like that, but that we have this battle within us. And this is in every faith tradition in the world. But I came up against that hard during the office. And it was just to ask my wife. It was so. very difficult times, and I had to do a lot of soul searching during that time and therapy

and whatnot to kind of come out on the other side of that. And that might be a life lesson for every single person here to just enjoy it more. It's kind of startling to hear because this is as good as it ever gets for an actor. I'm sure you've thought many times, no matter how successful I become at anything I do in the future, there will never be another office. Absolutely true. And you didn't enjoy that as much as you would. I didn't know. I wasn't in the present moment. And in Soul Boom, I draw on a number of different faith traditions, but in Buddhism, there's a concept of the hungry ghost. And in kind of Buddhist practice, we're a few billion hungry ghosts on the planet. And the hungry ghost is someone

who has died, who is living in craving, living in constant craving, and is constantly unsatisfied. So in the death realm, they're reaching, craving, longing for, grasping. You just described everyone's worst stereotype of Wharton. But truthfully, like, why business? Is it to make money, to achieve fame, to have control, to have high status? I think these spiritual questions are very relevant, no matter what your career path, but especially to people that are seeking to change things and shake things up through entrepreneurship. I think it's important conversation to have.

Let's talk about Soul Boom a little bit because I was floored by this book. I expected it to be funny. It is. I didn't know it was going to be this deep and this broad. I feel like you're delivering a message that could not be both more timeless but also more timely

for a generation that's about to enter the workforce or re-enter the workforce. I've been teaching here for 15 years. I have a lot of conversations with students who feel like there's a gaping hole in their life around purpose or meaning and they've filled it with ambition. And that sounds a lot like the hungry ghosts that you're talking about.

So talk to us a little bit about your case that we need not a religious revolution, but a spiritual revolution. Yeah, I think that's very well said. And I really relate to that, by the way. I think that in order to really make it as an actor and show business, you have to be incredibly driven and you have to be incredibly ambitious. You need that coupled with talent and a lot of luck. That hungry ghost phase that I went through when I was on, the office,

was really one driven by kind of like an unending ambition. But I think one of the things that I'm most grateful for is the mental health crises that I've undergone in my life. Did you just say you were grateful for having had mental health crises? Yes, I am. Can you unpack that for us? Sure. When you turn to the teachings of the Buddha, his number one rule,

the four noble truths is life is suffering. When the Buddha used the word suffering with the translation, the original word in Pali Sanskrit is Dukha. And Duka means kind of anxious discontent, right? So life is anxious discontent. And maybe some of you can see some heads nodding, have felt some anxious discontent in their lives. Why aren't things the way I want them to be? Why can't it be more like this. I want this outcome and why does this person keep acting this way and how come I didn't get what I wanted and we live our lives with those gears grinding. We're wired to do that as human beings because it's what's kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years. But how does it come to play in the modern world? So for me in my 20s when I was struggling as an actor trying to get an

audition for law and order, I suffered a lot of anxiety and depression and addiction. And a addiction issues, loneliness, and again, through trying to substitute purpose and meaning and vision for ambition, thinking that, oh, once I get this next big acting gig, then I'm going to feel content, then I'm going to feel at peace. And it's always just outside of my grasp. And then I get that big movie, and it doesn't do well, I need the next big movie. I need the next big thing. And you can apply this to any career that one wants to undertake. But what it forced me, me to do these mental health issues was to get a lot of therapy and to do a lot of soul searching, a lot of meditation and praying, and a lot of reading of the world's holy writings.

I feel like that work that I've done on the spiritual side of being a human being and my spiritual reality has brought me great peace and vision and mission and purpose that can feed my creative life and also help me to like write a book and spread the word and also talk to young people about this most great crises that's happening right now. There's two great ones. There's climate change. Maybe we'll get to that later. But the mental health crisis that's affecting young people and destroying young people and tearing their lives apart is something that spirituality does hold some answers to. So without me suffering, I never would have been driven to read and explore these issues that I've written about that I would never have allowed me to transform from a hungry

ghost into the incredibly handsome international talent you see sitting before you. I love that. As you were describing your experience, I was thinking about what Talban Shahar calls the arrival fallacy, the misguided belief that once I get this job or this recognition or once I fall in love and get married, or once I have kids, fill in your wants, that everything will be different. And I think Hemingway put it best when he said, you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

I think your book really speaks to this in you spend a lot of time on inner work and sort of walking us through what you learned spiritually that helped with your mental health. I'd love to know what came out of that. And I think our audience is probably curious about that too. One of my favorite quotes that I throw around a lot is we're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. And as deceptively simple as that phrase is, for me, that means a tremendous amount. And the understanding that I am an essence, a spiritual being, and I get 80 or 90 or 100 years, I hope, in this magnificent, fleshy tuxedo,

running around, is to me puts everything into crystal and clarity. Every day is a kind of spiritual test. Every day is a spiritual obstacle course where I'm going to be beset with things that are going to make me impatient or frustrated or feeling less than. And I get to use spiritual tools to help me combat this, you know, what's coming at me. I know, what's coming at me. I know you've also worked a lot in positive psychology, and there are so many tools from positive psychology that are essentially spiritual tools, like gratitude is a great one. Meditation is a tool that works on so many different levels, so I have a daily meditation practice. And one of the things that meditation does is it allows you metacognition.

And as Arthur Brooks writes about in his new book, this idea that when I'm in a meditative state, there's a part of me that gets to float above and look down at my thoughts and go, oh, I'm not my thoughts. And there's part of me that gets to look down and have feelings. I'm like, oh, I'm not my feelings. Like, my reality is greater than my thoughts and my feelings and certainly greater than my body. I think the way that you just articulated metacognition is really compelling. And I think...

Well, I want to say something about that. Yeah, please do. I wake up in the morning. I look at a couple of emails and make my half-calf latte and my... and my head is a beehive. So it's just, I need a practice to help me gain kind of perspective. And I will also say that I have this beautiful little bench out in our backyard.

That's gorgeous. We have an olive tree and some flowers, and there's tons of hummingbirds out there. And sometimes I'm trying to meditate. I just can't meditate for shit. And so I just turn and I just witness the beauty and majesty and wonder of the hummingbirds and the leaves and the trees. and the wind and the light through the leaves.

Anne Lamont has a great book called Help Thanks, Wow. And those are the three prayers that you say. You say, help, God, help me, thanks, thank you, God, gratitude, and wow. And then I just try and live in the wow. And if you can live in the wow for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, just like, this is fucking great, man. Listen to those birds. I didn't know hummingbirds chirped.

Wow. Oh, like if you can live in that, to me it helps my day tremendously. I could take a data-driven test, you know, on one of your websites and... Man after my own heart. And find a 12.5% increase in well-being over the course of that day when I had lived in wonder. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me, and there have been a few papers showing that even when people do transcendental or loving-kindness meditation, sometimes they come out more. self-focused. It's like, I want to be more loving. I'm going to be kinder. I'm going to be more generous.

How do you think about making sure that whatever reflective or contemplative practice you do isn't self-centered? Well, I think that's a problem with how spirituality is viewed in contemporary society, because really spirituality has become commodified and has fit into our kind of capitalist way of doing things where it's like, I'm really anxious, I'm out of balance, I'm angry all the time, let me download this app and subscribe to this mindfulness app, let me download this Eckhart Tolly podcast, let me subscribe to this roomy quote of the day on Instagram, let me go to my yoga class, and I'm doing all this so that I can reduce my anxiety. So it's a transactional nature. I'm going to spend this money and I'm going to invest this time,

so that I feel better. So it really pisses me off, that spirituality, which is all about connecting with the mystic, divine, beautiful purpose of the universe in service and in community and in transcendence with others has been commodified to such an extent that it becomes this selfish act of like, I want my life to be better. That was a great screed against make mindfulness, exactly what the world needs.

If you think about the void of spirituality, the sense of purpose and transcendence that a lot of people are looking for in life, I remember Derek Thompson wrote a great Atlantic article a few years ago on workism, where he said that work has taken the place that religion and faith and spirituality traditions used to hold in our society. I read the article, and I thought, yeah, I teach a lot of students who pray to the high priest of hustle and who worship at the altar of status. Like you were saying earlier, I don't think we should strive to strip work of it. it's meaning. I want people to have meaningful, worthwhile jobs. But there is a sense in which this gets blown up or reified and work becomes too important as a part of somebody's identity and their contribution to the world. And I wonder how you've navigated that. So with this perspective

that you bring to the table, how do you think about your work being meaningful but not the most important thing on earth? You know, I had this incredible acting teacher named Zelda Fitchandler. She always talked about the shaman. And I always loved that, that she compared actors to shaman. And it sounds a little self-important, but what it does is then it elevates being an actor. I'm not just someone who memorizes lines and tries to make them sound convincing. I'm someone that gets to play all kinds of roles in theater and film and TV, in spoken word, gets to use language. and tell stories that help shape our culture.

And I was really fortunate with The Office because those genius writers wrote the words that I got to use to help shape culture. I remember when I was talking to Greg Daniels early on, I'm like, what do you hope to do with the Office? And he goes, you know, American Comedy is really bad right now. I want to move American Comedy like one degree in the right direction. It's like steering the Titanic.

You have to move it by one degree and then it ends up going in the right direction. And guess what, he succeeded. More than a degree, you reinvented American comedy. Amazing. So as I allowed myself more and more to be a shaman, I'm like, oh, you know, I've got a platform because I'm an actor. I'll write this dumb book about spirituality and God and souls and the meaning of life. Maybe some young people will read it and respond to it.

Maybe not. I do work in climate change. We do climate change storytelling. And that's really exciting to me and jazzes me. So I forget what the question was, but the answer is shaman. It's a good answer, and I think every shaman today has a podcast. And I'm going to be starting one, too. We were waiting for that news.

Let's talk about the extensions of Soul Boom into some of the other work that you're doing. So I remember when I read the geography of bliss and thought it was an ingenious look from a Grump's perspective at what might actually drive happiness. I was overjoyed when I found out that there was going to be a TV show that you were going to host, trying to find the world's happiest place. Yeah. So you've scoured the world for happiness secrets. What have you learned? We got to go to Iceland, one of the world's happiest places.

Bulgaria, one of the world's unhappiest places. Ghana, West Africa, one of the most optimistic places in the world. Thailand, one of the most kind of spiritually connected places. And then I got to bring it back home to Los Angeles, which is a... God-awful, culturalist void. Do you try and bring what I've learned back home? Although there are a lot of hummingbirds. Too many, freaking hummingbirds, if you ask me.

You've got to do something about that. So you went to five places? Five places, it's amazing. In the book, I referenced the grant study from Harvard University, which I'm sure you know tons about. And they followed these 300 men for like 80 years to find what made them have a good life.

And it all boiled down to essentially connections and having better, deeper, richer, more frequent connections. And guess what? We live in a time of increasing isolation when we're all doing this all day and connecting less and less. And that's really what I learned out on the road. And it was so beautiful to see whether it was, you know, these beautiful Valky Viking women in Iceland singing and holding hands and walking doing a cold plunge into the Arctic ocean, whether it was a communal group of people in Ghana, growing cocoa beans and collaborating together

and trying to kind of uplift their community, whether it's in Thailand where people spend their birthday, not receiving presents, but on their birthday, giving to others. They spend their birthday, going and feeding the poor and tending to the monks and monasteries and temples and giving of their time, which I thought was a wonderful inverse.

And in Los Angeles, where everyone has a podcast. But again, it really was just about these beautiful ways that humans connect and how that's where the work lies. The work lies in just bringing people together in unique ways, creating bonds of love and unity and community. And social change based in grassroots movements of loving people working together. I love this idea of turning your birthday into giving as opposed to getting. I'm also struck as you talk about the Iceland experience.

Durkheim called it collective effervescence, the idea that we're going to be immersed in a group with shared energy around a common purpose. And he described that as the most transcendent experience that people have. We were at the Eagles game on Sunday, and there was an amazing AJ Brown touchdown, and the whole stadium erupted,

and all of a sudden it hit me, I don't have that in my life other than going to a sporting event. Like we feel that at the family level, But the community level, that's gone. I think you put your finger on something really important. But what religion, I believe, can give folks at its best is a group of common folks coming together, seeking transcendence,

seeking communion, seeking connection with nature, with God, with eternity, living, especially if they're doing service to others and serving the poor and coming together to give of their time and their energy and their schedule and their status to serve other people. And I do think that humanity is missing something by having lost that transcendent need to commune in community. Let's put the commune back in community. Well put.

I think it's time for a lightning round. Okay. All right. Here we go. Pass. You're fired. First question. What kind of bear is best?

Sun Bear. Tibetan Sun Bear. Favorite office episode? The injury. Favorite office character other than Dwight? Creed. Favorite Jim Prank on Dwight. Putting the desk in the bathroom.

Classic. I thought you were going to go for when the phone was full of nickels and then you slammed yourself. Yes. That's the psychology one because that was based in, yeah, Pavlovian conditioning. That's why I loved it most. Okay.

Your favorite scene that you improvised on the office? The scene where Michael had two Michael heads and I was dressed as a Sith Lord and we were having a conversation in Halloween about firing Dwight. And I was like, don't fire Dwight. Yeah, should I? I don't know.

That was all improvised. We'd have to rewatch that. What is the Dwight attribute that's most like you? Seize the world in an offbeat, odd, fractured way. And his trait that's least like you. Bullying. Tushay.

Something you've rethought lately. I've rethought assault weapons bands due to Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of that particular issue around gun control on his podcast. Me too. That's a great episode. This one,

I have to say, comes from a student. As a person born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I have to ask, how much time have you actually spent in Cretton, Pennsylvania? So one of my favorite events that ever happened in my life, the office had just started. I got a call, and they were like, they want to pay you an extraordinary amount of money, and sign autographs and help open the Steam Town Mall. Remember, I'm 40 years old. I've been broke my whole life, trying to make it as an actor, and I was like, oh my God, this is incredible.

So I land at the Scranton airport. The mayor's entourage picks me up with a full retinue of police cars and a limousine and full sirens. And the mayor is like, come on in. They're making me an honorary Lackawanna County Sheriff. And they're giving me the key to the city. I was bigger than Justin Bieber, you know, for a day.

And when the office ended, we went to Scranton and we did a parade. We stayed up until 4 a.m. All the bars stayed open, and it was just nuts. So here's to you, great city of Scranton, Pennsylvania. You've been doing a lot of work on climate change. You in part have a mission to make climate change fun and even occasionally funny. Can you tell us in a sentence how to do that? One sentence? Sure, I can do this in one sentence.

And here continues the sentence into saying that I've been working with this nonprofit called Arctic Base Camp and now Climate Base Camp. and we try and speak science to culture and to power through using hysterical media activations that are attention-grabbing and targeted towards the movable middle because too much climate work focuses only on converting the already converted or else arguing with the people that will never be converted

of the importance of climate change. That was a sentence. Woo! Do you have a favorite example of one of those activations? We towed an iceberg from Greenland to COP26 Conference, Climate Conference, in Glasgow, Scotland, and set it up in front of the conference center so that it was melting as the attendees were going into the conference. And we bottled the water from the iceberg and gave it out, along with data points, about the melting global ice sheet.

And we got a lot of very interesting media play. and it was also very hard-hitting. Wow. Yeah. Excellent. I have a lot of takeaways from this conversation. I learned that you have a real vendetta against law and order. And a little bit, Jeremy Piven.

A little bit. I wasn't going to say it. What's a closing piece of advice or wisdom you'd love to share with our audience? I had an acting teacher, Andre Gregory, who had the movie My Dinner with Andre, which everyone should see. And I met with him once, and I told him I was feeling pessimistic and kind of run down and he grabbed my arm

and he was like 80 years old. He grabbed my arm and he was like don't do it. You need to be optimistic. You need to bring hope. You need to feel joy. Don't get cynical. You cannot get pessimistic. If you're pessimistic, if you're cynical, they win. The forces of darkness want you to feel pessimistic so you'll sit on your couch all day and do nothing. You've got to keep hope alive. And I really think that that is the clarion call for young people these days, that there is a lot of hope.

Humanity can transform and come through these very difficult and dark times to a much more beautiful, vital, connected world. That's not pie in the sky, naive, eye-rolling, daydreaming. That's absolutely true. And it's something we can all work for even in a very small way. Beautifully said. Thank you for coming, Rain Wilson. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard.

Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winning, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quinn, Ben Ben-Banchang, Hannah Kingsley-Mah, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin, original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Layton Brown. Everybody eats hummingbirds. I feel like your alter ego would know the answer to this. Yes. That needs to be an app, like Ask Dwight, like Chat GPT. I think a Dwight G.P.T would be a big thing. Dwight G.P.T would be idiot.

Hawks.