By now, Rainn Wilson hardly needs an introduction. Since his breakout role as Dwight Schrute on the legendary sitcom The Office, Wilson has had a steady stream of acting, directing, and producing roles (he's also, unsurprisingly, one hell of a narrator). In 2008 Wilson cofounded SoulPancake, a multimedia company built on the philosophy of making the world more spiritually connected. His new audiobook, Soul Boom, distills the spiritual lessons he's gleaned through his various projects in one place, with his unmistakeable voice as guide. While he was in the studio recording, Wilson graciously answered our questions—check out his video responses, lightly edited in written form, below.

Audible: You published your memoir, The Bassoon King, in 2015. How did writing Soul Boom compare to that experience?

Rainn Wilson: It’s interesting. As I wrote The Bassoon King, I realized that in my life story there were a lot of questions that needed exploration and answering. There were a lot of metaphysical, and philosophical, and spiritual issues that came bubbling to the top as I told my kind of relatively comedic life story; there was some stuff around my faith journey and mental health journey, and struggles and failures. And this really sparked me when I finished that book, like, “Oh, there’s another book here, and that is what I learned along the way." 

So, if Bassoon King was my life story, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution is everything that I’ve learned over the last several decades about how we need a spiritual solution to our own issues and problems—but how also humanity needs a spiritual solution to overcome the difficulties that we are confronted with as a species on a planet spinning through space. So it went from kind of sillier stories about youthful failures and rejections and funny stories on the set of The Office to a more profound kind of journey of self-discovery. And who knows where this will go next?

Much of your work in Soul Boom and the media company you cofounded, SoulPancake, is in the service of breaking down barriers between people and creating a more connected world. How did you get involved in this work?

How did I get involved in SoulPancake and this idea of breaking down barriers to create a more connected world? That’s a really great way of putting it. SoulPancake, Soul Boom: two books with the word “soul” in them.

SoulPancake was a media company that made uplifting content that brought people together. “We make stuff that matters” was our tagline; we dig into life’s biggest, most profound human questions. These are things that have eaten away at me since I was a kid really, and I just realized that there’s this connection between exploring what it means to be a human being and realizing that joy, gratitude, connection, community, artistic expression—what it is to be a human being is to be engaging in those things, and people are hungry for those ideas. So SoulPancake was a book and the digital media company that we created, we made thousands of pieces of video content that has over a billion views, and now I’ve moved on and gotten a little deeper with Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, which is about our two-fold path that we take: We have our personal path towards personal well-being and transformation, and humanity has its path toward transformation and well-being as well, and there are core spiritual principles that underlie both of those journeys.

In your opinion, how did the COVID-19 pandemic affect the state of human connection?

Ah, the pandemic is very complicated, I talk about the COVID pandemic in [Soul Boom]. We were far more disconnected because we were isolated in our homes. A lot of people suffered in that isolation, and at the same time, sometimes it brought out the very best in humanity. I remember hearing about, in New York City, people banging pots and pans every evening to celebrate the front-line workers that were out there saving lives during the pandemic.

There were times that humanity came together and it really was the best of times and the worst of times. But it truly did disconnect us in terms of it created even greater stakes for young people in this mental health crisis that’s going on.

In this book I talk about a lot of pandemics that are going on in the globe: climate change is a pandemic, but so is racism and sexism and materialism—thinking that somehow having more stuff and accruing more stuff is going to bring us happiness, bliss, joy, connection. And guess what, it’s not. So I get to go into loneliness and a lot of other pandemics that are going on and try to find some solutions, some deeper meanings and deeper connections that people are hungry for right now, post-pandemic.

What do you hope listeners can take away from Soul Boom? 

What do I hope listeners will take away from Soul Boom? First of all, my mellifluous voice. 

I don’t know that this book provides answers so much as it provides more questions. And I hope it raises a conversation, sparks a conversation, about life’s biggest questions: what it means to be a human being, the journeys that we’re on, the paths that we’re on, both individually and collectively as a species. I hope it makes people laugh—there are a lot of dumb jokes tucked away inside what I hope are some profound spiritual and philosophical and psychological ideas. So it’s a smorgasbord of everything. Like I say, I threw a bunch of spiritual spaghetti up against the wall and I don’t know what exactly is going to stick. Some things people will respond to, some things people may not, and that’s okay. But I’ve pretty much covered every topic in here: God, death, consciousness, joy, meaning, purpose, social transformation, justice—it’s all in here, so there you have it.


Soul Boom is available on Audible now.