#123: Rainn Wilson on Meditation, The Sexy Nostril Exercise, and Acting as Therapy

Rainn Wilson (@rainnwilson) is best known for playing "Dwight" on NBC's Emmy-Winning, "The Office”. He has also acted in "Super", "Cooties", "Juno", "Monsters vs. Aliens" and "The Rocker" among other movies. He co-founded SoulPancake, a media company that seeks to tackle "Life's Big Questions." He's a board member of Mona Foundation and co-founded Lidè, an educational initiative in rural Haiti that empowers young, at-risk women through the arts. He is the author of the brand-new book, The Bassoon King, which is his laugh-out- loud memoir. We cover a lot in this episode, including: - The value of “as if” exercises from drama school - Meditation practices, and what constitutes a "win" in a session - The origins of SoulPancake and the Kid President video mega-hit - Favorite books, documentaries, and movies - Acting as therapy (even for non-actors) - The basics of Baha'i and what Rainn would put on a billboard - The Sexy Nostril exercise Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies. If I’m not going commando, then I’m wearing MeUndies. I’ve been testing out pairs for about 3 or 4 months now, and, as a result, I've thrown out my other underwear. They look good, feel good, have options for men and women, and their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Not only does MeUndies offer underwear, but they also have incredible lounge pants. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:03Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I am sitting in the darkness on Long Island. I don't know why all my lights are out, but it is very moody in here. And that's not really appropriate to the episode you're going to listen to, which is a very fun, very funny episode with Rainn Wilson, who is best known for playing Dwight on NBC's Emmy-winning The Office. You can say hello to him on Twitter, please do, at Rainn Wilson, R A I N N W I L S O N. He's also acted in Super Cooties, Juno, Monsters vs. Aliens, The Rocker, and many other movies. He co-founded Soul Pancake. I didn't know this before doing my homework for this interview, and I love Soul Pancake. It is a media company that seeks to tackle life's big questions.

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  They put out some amazing videos, including some massive mega hits like Kit President. He's a board member of Mona Foundation and co-founded Li Day, an educational initiative in rural Haiti that we'll talk about in this episode a bit. He's also, last but not least, voice-cracking like Doogie Howser, excuse me, the author of a brand-new book, The Bassoon King, which is hilarious and very insightful. It is his laugh-out-loud memoir. We cover a lot in this episode. I won't go through everything because that would be ridiculous, but here are a few: the value of as-if exercises from drama school, his meditation practices, we talk and compare different methods, the origins of Soul Pancake

• 2:47Tim Ferriss?

  and some of their mega hits, favorite books, documentaries, and movies, acting as therapy even for non-actors, the sexy nostril exercise, and much more. So, thank you for listening, as always, and without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Rainn Wilson.

• 3:07Tim Ferriss?

  Rainn, welcome to the show.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Hey, Tim Ferriss. Good to be on your show.

• 3:11Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to this, and it's just before Thanksgiving, which is, I suppose, appropriate. You've put out a lot of good work in the world, so thank you for that. I'll begin with that.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Oh, appreciate it.

• 3:23Tim Ferriss?

  And I've observed sort of the canon of work thus far, and you've spanned across multiple types of media. When you meet people and they ask you the question, "What do you do?", how do you typically answer that?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Well, it's a little easier for me than it is for someone like you. I mean, I do a lot of different things, but my first answer is, "I'm an actor," because that's where I started. That's my greatest love. That's where I hope to be spending my dying breath. I'd love to be playing King Lear on a stage somewhere and keeling over when I'm 87 years old. So, I'm an actor. I'm also an entrepreneur.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  I like to think of myself as a writer and a humanitarian as well. So throw those in for the mix, into the mix.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  How did, could you describe for people who aren't familiar with it, soul pancake? Because I love soul pancake and have been a consumer and I guess more recently a participant. Had an excerpt from an interview that I did, turned it animation and put on soul pancake, which was extremely

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right.

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  Humbling and flattering, but what it, what it means to be wealthy, I guess, or defining that term. Could you tell people a bit about soul pancake for those who aren't familiar?

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Sure. So when I started getting well-known for being Dwight on The Office, I saw an incredible opportunity to do something distinct, unique, positive on the web. The web at that time, when we were first having these conversations in like 2008, was just the worst of humanity. Just everything, it was just pop-up ads and porn and just crassness and chat rooms. And nowadays, it's actually, there's a lot more positive and interesting stuff on the web, but back then, not so much. I wanted a forum for places, for, for people to be able to discuss what I call life's big questions. That's something

• 5:20Speaker 00

  that's always really intrigued me. What it means to be a human being and all of the questions around that. Those are scientific questions, they're philosophical questions, they're spiritual questions, they're questions of art and creativity. It's what it means to be alive. Where, there was no place on the web to kind of discuss that stuff. So we started as a kind of a blog slash social networking site where we had posts and people could write in their own life's big questions, create member names and interact with each other. And it was really cool for a while. Then we started making some video content

• 6:02Speaker 00

  on the side. Just as a side thing, I had done Oprah's podcast and I started doing some stuff with the Oprah Winfrey Network and making some little videos. We started a YouTube channel. Then all of a sudden, we saw, wait a second. We're way better at making videos than we are at making like web technology for interaction between people. So we kind of ditched the whole, in fact, we did. We ditched our website, we pivoted completely, and we became a media company. So Soul Pancake is a media company. We put out digital content across multiple platforms through the social networks, through YouTube. We do stuff on television. We do stuff for

• 6:44Speaker 00

  brands and advertising. And it's also changed a little bit in that now our mission is to produce inspiring content about stuff that matters. And that's what we're about.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  And when was it founded originally?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  2009.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  2009. And how did you decide on Soul Pancake, or how did the team decide on Soul Pancake as a name? And what were some of the names you decided against?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the really difficult topics that we were gonna try and bring up at Soul Pancake, which is the hardest topic in the world to bring up these days, and that is spirituality. So we wanted something that dealt with spirit. It's not a spirituality site. That's just one of the many things that we talk about. But if you're gonna talk about the human experience, that's part of the human experience. So we wanted something that had a little bit of a tip of the hat towards spirituality. So we literally were like on one of those sites where you, you know, GoDaddy, or one of those sites where you look up website names. We had food items written on the wall on little three by five

• 7:57Speaker 00

  cards. And then other catchy spiritual and philosophical minded phrases. So we had like "holy taco" and "spirit burrito." And we had all these crazy names we were tossing. And funny story, I tell this in the book that I wrote. This was actually in Andy Grammer's apartment. Andy Grammer's a big pop star nowadays. Back then, he was a struggling street musician. So I like to think that maybe we helped him out by having this discussion in his house. But then Soul Pancake was just, it wasn't taken. So we were like, hey, that's perfect. Everything was taken. It was crazy what was taken, like. Who registers the domain name Spirit Taco?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  You know, it's like, come on.

• 8:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right, somebody in Montenegro who's just sitting on that waiting for the big bid.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, for his big payday.

• 8:51Tim Ferriss?

  And the, a lot of people know of Kid President and that, that video and then the sequence of videos. Was, was that, did that originate on Soul Pancake?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, not exactly. We were having a discussion early on when we started our YouTube channel. And Devin Gundry, the co-founder of Soul Pancake, was talking. He said, you know, we really need more joy on our channel. Part of what we try and do at Soul Pancake is we try and be of service. So we're a for-profit company, but we're also trying to be of service to the world. It's a, it's kind of a crazy mission. Just, it's an experiment. We're just seeing what happens. So we were looking for joy on the internet. That's a hard thing to find.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Absolute joy, not like funny LOLs with cats on pianos and stuff like that, but actual joy. And Bobby Miller, our channel manager, said, hey, have you seen this kid? Kid President. He only had like two or three videos out at the time that only had like 5,000 views. And he was in Tennessee, a little African-American kid in a suit in a fake Oval Office made out of cardboard. And him and his brother-in-law, Brad Monague, who's a brilliant filmmaker, had done these little videos and were like, let's bring him over. So we just contacted him and said, come over to Soul Pancake family. And a few videos later, when we had kind of given him a little bit more of a budget and some, some better writing

• 10:20Speaker 00

  and some inspiration, they came up with Kid President's pep talk, which has like 50 million video views at this point.

• 10:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's incredible. It's, it's, it's incredibly, incredibly well, excuse me. And I guess across Soul Pancake, you have well over 200 million views at this point. That may not be up to date, but that's, that's the best number I could find. What would you like to, what would you like to see for, for its future?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Well, we we wanna be, Soul Pancake wants to be kind of, for lack of a better phrase, I know this is gonna make some people cringe, I always, ah, drives me crazy, but I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna go there, Tim Ferriss.

• 11:01Tim Ferriss?

  No, go for it.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  And that is, we're gonna be, we wanna be like the Oprah Winfrey for millennials. We wanna be the place that, the brand that has carved out the niche of feel-good, inspiring, uplifting entertainment that digs into big issues for young people. So we wanna own that space, and that's that's our goal as a media company.

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's an admirable goal, I think. Switching gears just a little bit, of course, you mentioned you mentioned Dwight, you're very well-known for for playing Dwight on The Office, but you've picked a very wide range of different characters and projects. What has been the most challenging that comes to mind, and how did you prepare for it?

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Well, that's a good, that's a great and deep question. So, you're getting into the task and the craft of acting. A lot of acting is just like, just stand there and listen and respond and be yourself, and it's not that hard. Sometimes acting is hard, there's certain roles that are are super challenging. I did a movie about four years ago called Hesher with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman, in which I played a dad, a dramatic role of a dad, a pill-popping dad whose wife

• 12:31Speaker 00

  had just died a few months earlier, just kinda stuck in his grief. And that was really challenging, cuz I had to bring, you had to really bring it, you can't fake it, you can't fake cry, you can't fake be sad, you've gotta go to some really dark places in a movie like that to to make it believable and make it pop. So, that was a very hard month of doing that movie, and challenging, and

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I hope, people didn't really see the film, you know, they don't really see a lot of independent films these days, but it's a really terrific film. Metallica does the music for it and it's, uh, it's really kind of badass and sad and profound and funny at the same time.

• 13:17Tim Ferriss?

  How do you explore a dark character like that? Or Backstrom for that matter, I mean, that's, that's another one, which I think people would not immediately envision in their mind as a role you would grab, given the, the amount of comedy that you've done. But when you're, when you're trying to put yourself, uh, develop that character, put yourself into a state that facilitates the character, how, how do you go about doing that? And is it something that you can slip in and out of? Or does that put you into a funk for the entire period that you're doing the, the shooting?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Well, there have been a few times when I have kind of just had myself kind of really enter the worldview of the character. So the important thing when you're playing a character is you've got to see the world through their eyes. If you can really see the world through the character's eyes, then it doesn't matter what lines you have or what scenes you have or what conversations you have or situations, it'll be truthful because you're really tapped into it. So sometimes you, I'm not like all Mr. Method Actor or something like that, but there are certain roles where you, you have to do that. You have to, you have to go there, um, for the duration of the film or when you're on set or at least just around when you're shooting.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  My favorite analogy is there's this acting exercise you do in acting school called as if. So you, you just pretend as if. So now my wife wasn't killed in a brutal car accident and I wasn't addicted to pills, but I can imagine what that might be like. So you act as if your wife, my wife, who I love, I've been with for 20 years. I imagine what that would be like if I were to lose her. And if I were to be on pill, I've certainly been on pills before. I've taken drugs before. I know what that's like. You know, I've experienced grief before. I've lost friends.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  So you kind of cultivate a kind of emotional imagination. There's an emotional landscape. That you try and inhabit and you just go deeply into your imagination. It's just like pretending. I mean, it's basically kids in a sandbox. Like you're a pirate and I'm a space alien. Let's pretend and ready, go. And you just do it on a much, much deeper level. That's really all acting is, is about.

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  And part of the reason I ask is because I wonder when you, when you hear people talk of, say, life imitating art, art imitating life. If learning to go into a very deep, dark, maybe depressive character in any way helps you get out of dark and depressive periods in your own life. So maybe jumping to, to that side of things. Uh, are there any particular low periods in your life or career that, that you were able to dig your way out of or build yourself back up out of uh, that you think are illustrative or important, very pivotal in your life?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Well, that's a great question. Um, that I've never been asked before. I think that, um, when I did Backstrom, I was going through a really hard time in life. It had nothing to do with the office ending. It was just a hard time in life and, um, that was, uh, both challenging and exhilarating to play a character like Everett Backstrom. Uh, for those of you, for those 12 of you who watched the show, thank you. And for the rest of you, fuck off. Can I say fuck off on your podcast?

• 16:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  No, I'm just kidding.

• 16:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  He's a very dark human being. He sees the worst in everybody and he sees only kind of the corrosive in, in reality. So it was, it was challenging and helpful at the same time to be in his worldview, especially when I was shooting the pilot. It was, it was very hard and, um, uh, to go there when, when my life was having a, having a difficult time. But at the same time, I, um, I kind of found it exhilarating. I, I wish I could answer it better than that, but it's both.

• 17:35Tim Ferriss?

  What was difficult, if you're open to talking about it, what was difficult about your life at the time?

• 17:42Speaker 00

  I was just going through some family stuff and marital stuff and personal stuff. That was, that was just really difficult. And then I was flying up to Vancouver, shooting Backstrom, and it was, it was just a hard time. So it was just a really challenging time.

• 18:02Tim Ferriss?

  On multiple levels, what do you do, when you feel overwhelmed, what do you do to improve the situation?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Um, well, you know, I have a spiritual faith that I rely on, that I use. So I use prayer and meditation as tools to center me and bring me back kind of into reality. I also find that for me, like, acting is a wonderful escape because I, you get out of your own head and you get to go into someone else's head. And, you know, it was like that on The Office too, and doing comedy, you know, and life was good and life was bad. There was something wonderful about coming to Dwight and I could just put Rainn Wilson

• 18:50Speaker 00

  aside and just all of that bullshit and, and clear it out of my head and out of my heart and just beat Dwight Schrute. And sometimes it was just, just super, super fun to do that. So those are some of the tools, acting is a tool, prayer and meditation is a tool I use to kind of bring myself into the, into the world.

• 19:13Tim Ferriss?

  And your, your faith, I know I'm going to massacre this because I've only read it and not heard it said, but is it bahai? Is that correct?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, bahai.

• 19:22Tim Ferriss?

  Bahai, there we go, thank you.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Like, bahai, how you doing? Yeah.

• 19:25Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to come back to that, but what does your, when you meditate, what does that look like? And do you do it on a daily basis? What, what's the, the, the format of that?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I try and meditate every day. There's no format in the Baha'i faith. It's just greatly encouraged to meditate. When you pray, you're communing with the Creator. You're communing with the universe. You're putting stuff out there. And when you're meditating, you're listening to the universe. But it's really pretty simple. I get a great deal of benefit. If I even do a 10-minute meditation, and out of that 10 minutes, if four of the minutes, my mind can be very still and very silent. There's great guided meditations. Now, there's apps. There's all kinds of things you can do for meditation. But for me, it's just about, I won't say silencing the mind, because that's impossible. The mind is, those thoughts are always going to pop up. But those thoughts pop up, you just notice them, you identify them,

• 20:22Speaker 00

  you let them float in front of your eyes, almost like, you know, one of those old-fashioned Wall Street ticker machines. And, and, and you find a tremendous, I find a tremendous amount of peace, serenity, and bliss in just being in consciousness. And consciousness is not thought. Consciousness is just being. I am this being. I am not separate from the giant being of Earth and the cosmos and the universe. And just being in that stillness is incredibly rewarding. I get a, I get really a ton of clarity, and I get a ton of energy from it.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  And these have been proven in scientific studies, by the way, in all kinds of things, from healing trauma, to giving you more energy, to giving you more focus in your work. It's, meditation is a pretty incredible tool.

• 21:18Tim Ferriss?

  And lowering cortisol. I've been spending time interacting with some researchers at Johns Hopkins, a gentleman named Roland Griffiths, and also a gent named Adam Gazali, who runs a neuroimaging lab at UCSF. And what's been very interesting, and we don't have to go down the rabbit hole with this, but it appears that When you, if you look at experienced meditators and brain activity, and I'm blanking on the particular area, I think it might be somewhere in the parietal lobe, but I could be off. In any case, there's a portion of the brain that is thought to contribute to the separation of self and other. So it's associated with, let's just

• 22:00Tim Ferriss?

  call it the ego, and that is inhibited both in the use of, say, psilocybin, which was found in magic mushrooms, but also you experience a similar type of pattern in experienced meditators, which is kind of cool. And

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Well, I know that they, oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 22:16Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, go ahead.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I heard a fascinating thing on the radio once where they did a study and they found the happiest man in the world. So they did a brain scan and they found the happiest person they could possibly find. And this guy was, I think he was an American, but he was living in Wisconsin, but he was a, he was a student of Tibetan Buddhism. And at the time when they did the brain scan, which charted out as the very happiest, he was in the process of meditating, and it was a meditation of kind of universal compassion. So it's a meditation where you're feeling at one with everyone and great compassion

• 23:00Speaker 00

  for everyone on planet earth and every, and all beings on planet earth, not human, animal, plant, what they're going through. And in so doing, that achieved like the greatest happiness. That, that kind of goes along with what you're saying.

• 23:13Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely. And it's, I mean, there is a sort of, even if you are self-interested, there's a biological benefit to empathy and compassion meditation. And, and I just to reiterate something you said, because I think it's so important, is that, you know, I try to meditate 20 minutes each morning. And like you mentioned, there are apps like Calm and Headspace that are very helpful for this. But even if I'm just violently, violently, excuse me, let me try English again. Violently getting punched in the psyche by like my to-do list and worries and anxieties and thoughts for fifteen or even eighteen minutes out of twenty. If I have two minutes where the mud kind of settles and the mind is clear,

• 23:57Tim Ferriss?

  it has an incredible impact on the entire day for me.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  And I feel exactly the same way. That's exactly my experience. Even out of a ten-minute meditation, if I can just get two or three minutes in there where I have almost achieved thoughtlessness and just kind of a serene bliss, it's like getting, it's like taking a power nap. And it helps you through your whole day.

• 24:21Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And I had, I think it was Tara Brock who said this to me, but it might have been someone else. But they said, if you just come back to your breath or a mantra or whatever it is that you're focusing on, if you're doing concentrated meditation, it's the coming back that is the practice. So if you're just distracted and you're basically just bouncing off the walls mentally with your monkey mind for those nineteen minutes, if you come back even once, you can consider it a successful session. I think for type A personalities, that's really important to keep in mind. You mentioned something I'd love to explore a little bit, which is that acting can be a wonderful escape, and I'm paraphrasing here, but from your own head. I was actually watching Amy yesterday, which is a documentary about Amy Winehouse. And very sad story, tragic on many levels.

• 25:06Tim Ferriss?

  But she produced some beautiful music from bad experiences. And so she was able to escape her own head by putting these poems, which became songs, on paper. Are there any particular exercises from, whether it's acting school or improv or otherwise, that you think could benefit non-actors who just want to help create new avenues of thinking or embrace some type of therapeutic effect of getting outside of their own head?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, um, specific ones, I suppose I could go into, but I I studied with a great teacher at NYU, uh, uh, named Paul Walker. He's he's he died of AIDS, but he was a an exquisite, uh, teacher and he taught theater games. And for me, that was a real revelation because I had, when I had tried acting early on, I was very stiff and very in my head and cerebral and kind of stuck and kind of like, it was very conscious, like, how am I gonna say this line and how do I best look when I'm turning this way? It's just a very self-conscious style of acting that was bad. It was sucking. So what Paul got

• 26:22Speaker 00

  us doing in acting school at NYU was just playing. And there's something incredibly freeing about playing like a kid and that your impulses as an actor and your impulses as a kid at play are really the same thing. Like I said before, it's deeply pretending. So, you know, are there specific exercises? I mean, I suppose I could think of some, but, you know, how much fun is it to play red light, green light and, uh, for 20 minutes or duck, duck, goose? And then to move from those exercises into more and more imaginative kind of improvisations, but where where you allow yourself to just play like a child.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  And sometimes children play and they're competitive. Sometimes they play and they're very serious. Um, it's not all kind of this general like wee kind of stuff. And I found that so freeing and it was the, it was the key for me as an actor that kind of broke me open and got me out of my head and just got me in my body and in that place of kind of pure imagination and spontaneity that you really want as an actor.

• 27:34Tim Ferriss?

  And and I think it seems to me also when you put yourself in that place, much like meditation, you have to be present state aware. You can't be worrying about something that you have scheduled two weeks in the future or

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:51Tim Ferriss?

  resenting something like somebody had to cut you off in traffic that morning. You have to be in that moment and be effective and to have fun. You just can't be distracted by those things.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, like we'll do a thing where you, I just remembered, because I did it recently at Soul Pancake. I did some sessions with the, with the employees at Soul Pancake. I do kind of games and improv stuff. Where everyone has a number from one to 10. There's two teams of 10 on each side of the room. There's a stool in the center of the room with a shoe on it. The goal is you've got to get the shoe and then get back to your place in line, right? It's a pretty simple game. But then you also do this game called Sexy Nostril. Where you write down adjectives and you write down body parts. So it could be angry, sad, lonely, energetic. Those are the adjectives and then body parts, you know? Ear lobe, testicle, anus, shoulder, blade, you know? Fingernail, whatever.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  And you draw one of each. And then you try and play a game manifesting those characteristics. So if you have sexy nostril, and then you have to play that same game of getting the shoe and getting back to the line. But you're a person where the center of their energy is in their nostril. And it's a very sensual, sexual energy. And you're just kind of, it helps you create a character and play as that character. And it's, it takes you out of your head and it just gets you in your body and gets you kind of feeling and responding. And I love teaching that stuff. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it's super fun. And for me, Tim, I'm in my head a lot and it's kind of sucks. So there's certain tools that I have to use to get by.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  So I've learned in my life, I don't remember every day, but there's certain things I have to do to just be out of my head and just to get to normal. I'm not talking about like being like really super effective. Just to get to normal, I have to do meditation. I have to do some exercise. If I, if I can get into nature, great. If I could play some tennis, better. And acting is that same way. Acting, rehearsing, uh, playing characters. These are the things that get me out of my head and out of just analyzing every goddamn thing that comes down the pike and leaves me miserable and making really bad choices.

• 30:10Tim Ferriss?

  I am laughing because I spend so much time in my own head. And when people are like, are you going to write another book? I'm like, well, actually, I can't contend with another three years in my own head right now. So no, I'm going to be putting that off. And we're, and we're gonna, we're definitely, I want to talk about your book. Before we get to that, I guess you mentioned exercise. You also mentioned tennis. Are there any particular types of exercise? Or how do you exercise? What is your, your routine, your ideal exercise routine?

• 30:41Speaker 00

  I'm the worst. First of all, I'm a big fat slob. So I'm, I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I don't have the four hour work week and the four hour body down and the four hour this. I'm like, I could do four hours of video games.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  The four hour video game diet. I, I jog, which I love doing because it also clears my head. And there's something physiologically, which I'm sure you know about, about walking and jogging, that it actually is really healing to the brain because it, when you do it, the energy goes back and forth between the both lobes of the brain. So when I was reading about that, I was wondering like, why, so when I go jogging, I feel so refreshed. And it's not just the exercise. It's also, it's also that physiological component. I play tennis about twice a week. I'd love to play more like three or four times a week. When I'm on, when I play tennis, it's all your focus on the ball and the focus on your movement

• 31:44Speaker 00

  and these kind of spiral movements that you're making. And that really gets you out of your head good. And then recently, just literally in the last year or two, I've been doing some weight training,

• 31:57Speaker 00

  which I find just, I feel really good doing it. But everything I do is super light and really undisciplined. So please don't, don't, there's not going to be a Rain Wilson diet and exercise book coming out anytime soon.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  I feel bad even talking to you about it because you're like the Zen master of all things. Exercise.

• 32:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, the good news is it's very, very minimalist. So we could definitely talk about that another time, anytime. The next few questions I'd like to ask, and I have a feeling that, well, Baha'i is definitely going to come back into this. But to fire off a couple of very short questions, and the answers don't need to be short, but they can be.

• 32:41Tim Ferriss?

  When you think of the word "successful," who is the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Successful?

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Oh, man, you're killing me.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  I don't have anyone coming to mind. Is that weird?

• 33:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's not weird. We could try another adjective. Maybe when you think of the word "admirable," who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 33:15Speaker 00

  You know,

• 33:18Speaker 00

  when I think of admirable, I do a lot of work in Haiti. And there's a lot of people there that I've met over the years that have given up big careers, they've given up a lot of money and a lot of potential in the United States to go live and work Haiti. And

• 33:40Speaker 00

  just to be of service to people that don't have much. And to me, that's really admirable.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  There is a woman I'm thinking of that taught school her whole life in Haiti and then retired and had a little bit of retirement money. And then she, her name was Sue Puzo. And she retired and went to her house and the next morning there was a ring at her doorbell. And there was a little Haitian boy and he said, "Hey, I heard you used to teach." She said, "Yeah," and he's like, "Well, I need to learn how to read. Will you teach me how to read?" And she's like, "Okay, come in. Let me give you a little lesson." And she gave him a few little exercises and some sheets to work on. Then the next morning, he knocks on the door and there's three little boys there. And he's like, "I brought two of my friends. We all want to learn how to read." And she's like, "Okay, come in." Then the next day there were more, the next day there were more. All of a sudden, this retired school teacher who's in her seventies

• 34:33Speaker 00

  has created a school in her backyard. And I'm not exaggerating, it's all in her backyard of her house. And there's classrooms, there's a tool shed has first grade and a palm frond has kindergarten under it and the third graders are on her deck and in her kitchen are the fourth graders and she's hired teachers and she's used her retirement money and what little inheritance she had to hire teachers and start a little school and then she even rented the house next door to house these homeless street kids. And I got to see this firsthand many times and many trips down to Haiti and watch the evolution of the school. Eventually, her and her husband just got too sick and too old to continue it and

• 35:17Speaker 00

  they had to transition the kids into other places, but when I think of admirable, like really admirable, you know, I know a lot of billionaires. I know a lot of actual like billionaires. And people with a lot of money, I know people, I know movie stars and people that are very successful in the entertainment industry. Nothing against them and a lot of them are really admirable, successful people.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  But that's what, when I think about that, like what really moves me in my heart about, you know, what is admirable, it's selfless giving to someone else. To me is truly admirable.

• 35:55Tim Ferriss?

  Su Prusa.

• 35:59Tim Ferriss?

  And you, you have an educational initiative, as I understand it. And I'm gonna probably mispronounce this one too, is it Lide?

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Uh, Lide.

• 36:07Tim Ferriss?

  Lide, so close, but so far.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:12Tim Ferriss?

  That, can you describe what the Lide is doing in Haiti?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, my wife and I went down to Haiti to tour some schools before the earthquake, just a few months before the earthquake. So it was like six, six and a half years ago now. And we fell in love with that country. And I really encourage you, all your listeners, to go down to Haiti and give it a tour and check it out because you fall in love with the country. It's a beautiful country, as ravaged as it is, as poor as it is, as desperate as it is. There's something magical about it. It's, um, uh, it's, uh, it's really the, the culture, the art, the music, the people, the sense of humor, the food, the life is really infectious. People really fall in love with it. So we fell in love with it. Then

• 37:04Speaker 00

  the earthquake happened. So we started going down and doing this trauma work with adolescent girls after the earthquake where we'd use the arts to kind of heal trauma. And then we saw all these incredible effects of using the arts with adolescent girls, um, and education for adolescent girls and literacy for adolescent girls. And then the more I was reading about it, uh, you know, I, I read a lot about, and the United Nations recently had a study, and you're going to hear more and more about this, that the number one way to eradicate poverty in the world is to educate girls.

• 37:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, totally.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Girls' education is the number one way.

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, because if you educate, if you educate a girl, you're ultimately educating a family. And I hate to say it for the male gender, but there's a lot of like playing craps and drinking and so on.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  No, I always say, if you educate a girl, she, she educates her children, her cousins, her aunts, her mom, her sisters and her neighbors. If you educate a boy, they move to the big city and become an Uber driver. And that's, or the equivalent, that's what always happens. So we got into this arts education and girls' education. So we're out in rural Haiti, we're way out in the north of Haiti. We go to some really far out places that most Haitians don't even know exist. And we do arts and self empowerment, self esteem workshops, and literacy, and then we give scholarships and try and get the girls in the educational system.

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I will, I will link to that organization in the show notes along with everything else for people who want to, to learn more about it. Going a little micro, I guess, besides the Bassoon King, what is the book you've given most to other people as a gift?

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Um, uh, the book I've given the most as a gift is called The Family Virtues Guide by, uh, I think it's Linda Popov is the last name, I think, P O P O V. Uh, The Family Virtues Guide is a really interesting thing I give to parents. It basically talks about virtues-based education. And it's for all kids. You could be atheist, you can be Catholic, Muslim, you can have faith, you can be agnostic, whatever. One of the recent developments too in education has been around, you can call it whatever

• 39:35Speaker 00

  you like, I like calling it virtues, but you can call it character traits or positive character leadership traits, whatever. But teaching a kid the stuff they don't learn in school about virtues. For instance, what are virtues? Compassion, honesty, kindness, humility, perseverance, determination. All of these are positive virtues. You can look at them from a religious standpoint, you can look at them just from a, just a entrepreneurial, you know, standpoint. But kids really thrive when they learn these virtues and the world is really hurting because the kids don't have them nowadays. They don't learn them in school and a lot of times they don't learn them from their

• 40:20Speaker 00

  parents. So Family Virtues Guide gives all these exercises to, we have like a virtue of the week, like we'll have determination as a virtue of the week and then every day we'll check in like, hey, how was your determination day? And my son Walter, who's 11, like he'll go like, well, I was really having a hard time and then I got really determined and I, I pushed through and I finished the test and, and I feel really good about myself. So, um, and so creating a consciousness about these character traits is, uh,

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Really important. It's a great tool for teachers. There's also a teacher's guide by the same author, and I just think it's a goldmine.

• 40:59Tim Ferriss?

  That, I'm so glad you brought that up. It's very Ben Franklin. I've been looking for a book like this, and not because I have children, but because I've always wondered, why aren't these traits or characteristics or virtues, like very similar to sort of a rete in ancient Greece, why aren't they taught in a progressive way with exercises? Because you can, you could ostensibly put something like that together, a curriculum where you have sort of comfort, challenges, and exercises that develop each of these, or test each of these.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  And I feel like, I feel like the Family Virtues Guide is just the beginning. I think you could go way farther than it goes, and I think you're right, there could be an entire curriculum base around this stuff. But what is incredible is when you bring your consciousness to it, like what happens when you bring your consciousness to compassion, and you have a child, an eight-year-old, or even a teenager, noticing compassion around them, and then noticing when they're compassionate to someone else. Like, compassion can be trained like any other muscle.

• 42:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely. I mean, completely. I think there's also a neurological basis for that, there would have to be, that I would think if you're digging the groove and the sort of mental record player for compassion, it's going to become more and more of a reflexive action or thought pattern, at the very least.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite documentaries or films?

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Um, I have tons of favorite documentaries. Um, now, you really, you stump people with the questions, because they're so, um, goddamn you.

• 42:41Tim Ferriss?

  They're highly specific. We could come back to this one, too.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Okay, let's come back to that. Let me mold that.

• 42:46Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we'll come back to the documentaries. Another highly specific one, what purchase, it doesn't have to be a purchase, but it could be something free, but what purchase of a hundred dollars or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory?

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Um, okay, this, it's not a hundred dollars or less, but I have to talk about it.

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do it.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Okay, so I was snoring and um, I was driving my wife crazy and I was kind of snoring more and more as I was getting in through my forties. And so I went in and then I got this mouthguard from my dentist that not only stops me from grinding my teeth, but it kind of moves my jaw forward like, like just by half an inch or something like that when I sleep. So it clears like this air channel and like all of a sudden, like I'm breathing better all night long and not snoring and I'm getting like a way better night's sleep and it's completely transformed my life. And it's so funny that it's just this little plastic mold, you know, you put that your teeth in the mold and I, I, I wear that in my, in

• 43:55Speaker 00

  my, in my sleep and it has just, it's literally changed my life. A piece of plastic in my mouth has changed my life.

• 44:02Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. And that's something people can experiment with also if they don't want to go to the dentist. I mean, as someone who's worn way too many mouthguards because I had a habit of enjoying getting punched in the head or kicked in the face doing combat sports, which I don't recommend for anyone who wants to preserve cognitive function. Uh, yeah, you can just get something in a sporting store. And I guess the plus is if you're sleeping and they, and you have a home intruder, you also have sort of home game advantage. Uh, but uh, what is something that

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Can I kick, can I kick you in the face or the head?

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  I tell you what, I'll start doing neck exercises. You can start working on your hamstring flexibility and then uh, I'm happy to let you give it a go.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  All right. Boom, we're on. Oh, this is good.

• 44:48Tim Ferriss?

  We could put it on soul pancake. That, that could be very inspiring.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Rain Wilson kicks Tim Ferriss in the face. It just needs to be a 15 second video.

• 44:58Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's, yeah, it can be used on Vine. It's very, uh, very multi-purpose. I, what, what is something that you believe that other people think is insane? If anything, I've got plenty for myself, but I'm, I'm curious if, if anything comes to that.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  I have so, I have so many things that I believe that people think are just insane. I believe. That world peace is possible. I really do. I believe that, you know, some things are gonna have to change where it's not even close to being there yet. But I do believe that humanity can put its worst nature aside and find a way to come together. And we see aspects of this more and more. I mean, look at the, the way the Western states are, are acting and interacting and what had the tragedy in France and the, and the way the, especially the Western world rallied around France. And, you know, um, there's a couple of, uh, folks out there.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  There's a couple of countries that are some, that have some big issues and some big problems. But I truly believe that humanity can do this. We can come together on world peace. We can reduce our armaments, uh, to what we need to defend ourselves. And we can just work on making a better world. I think that we can get there. Um, I think that it's really easy to just be negative and like, oh, that's bullshit. We'll never get there. Not with people the way they are and people that are... Like, that's such an easy fallback position. So I guess that's something else that I believe is that cynicism is a disease that robs people of the gift of life. And it's just, it's easy. It's way easier to be negative, sarcastic, and cynical. It's an easy fallback position. And it's much harder to be hopeful and positive and proactive.

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  I completely agree. And I, I think also that there's a, by being against passive armchair cynicism, it doesn't mean you're against constructive skepticism, if that makes sense. A lot, a lot of people feel like, oh, you're saying I can't be critical. It's like, no, I want you to be critical, but I want you to be critical in a constructive way where you're actually making mistakes of ambition as opposed to mistakes of sloth.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  What's your intention in being critical? Is your intention in being critical to make the world a better place or to bring enlightenment? Then great. But if your intention in being critical is to bring people down and hold people back, and they're like, ah, that'll never work, then, you know, that's just bullshit.

• 47:19Tim Ferriss?

  No, I agree. One, one of the more interesting discussions about world peace that I've seen was actually an experimental class at Stanford with BJ Fogg. It was part of the persuasive technology lab. And I think it was peace innovation is what they called it. But what they realized very quickly, they had a, they had a class that was full of... Many people from, of course, different genders, different cultures, different religions, and they had a lot of trouble on agreeing upon what world peace would look like as a single concept. And what BJ did, which I thought was very smart, he said, okay, if we're having trouble agreeing on what world peace exactly would look like, let's agree on some of the antecedents. Like, what are the components that would at least have to

• 48:01Tim Ferriss?

  be part of something that looks like world peace? And so they started creating these subcategories and smaller, addressable components of world peace. So, at the very least, I mean, thinking about that problem-

• 48:16Speaker 00

  That's super smart.

• 48:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, would improve things. And you might not get to perfection, but you can at least improve, get to better. Are there any common misconceptions about you?

• 48:28Speaker 00

  I think the most common misconception of me is that I'm like Dwight. And just people know me as Dwight, and they're like, they see me in the airport, it's like, Dwight, it's Dwight, hey Dwight. And, you know, which is a really weird question also, when people say, hey, are you Dwight? It's like, well, I played Dwight, but I can't say I played Dwight, because then I sound like a douchebag. Because I'm like, well, no, I actually, I played Dwight. It's actually a very Dwight-ish thing to say. But it's a weird thing to say, yes, I am Dwight, because I'm not Dwight. I'm Rain. Was one of like a hundred different

• 49:09Speaker 00

  characters that I've played in my life is Dwight. So that's kind of weird. So I think that's a misconception.

• 49:16Tim Ferriss?

  What do you, in Ed's Rain, what do you have most in common with Dwight? And what do you have, what is completely different about the two of you?

• 49:29Speaker 00

  I guess what I have most in common is principles. I don't always hold up to them, by the way, but I kind of have high principles about what I should do, what people should do, and what's right. And what do I have least in common with him is-

• 49:52Speaker 00

  I think he's just much more regimented and authoritative and thinks in boxes and straight lines, so I don't work that way. I'm quite the opposite.

• 50:09Tim Ferriss?

  And why did you decide to write a book?

• 50:14Speaker 00

  I had a story to tell. I knew that I had a lot of funny anecdotes and, you know, most of the stories is comedy. Most of the book is just, I just tried to make it funny, and I think it is very funny. It's my own peculiar look at the world. But I also had a story to tell, and that story was, you know, when I look back on my life, when I founded Soul Pancake, and I actually, this happened when I wrote the introduction of the Soul Pancake book that came out about five years ago, I realized that, you know, this spiritual journey that I've been on, which is part of my journey as a Baha'i, a member of the Baha'i faith, is really interesting to me. It may not be interesting to anyone else.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  To me, it's very interesting. Growing up in faith, losing faith, becoming an atheist, and having nothing to do with God, or faith, or devotion, or religion, or anything like that, and then slowly, very slowly, over, you know, a decade of search, going on a spiritual search, to find myself, to find God, my place in the universe, and, to me, that's a really interesting through line that runs through the book. So, it's eighty, ninety percent comedy, but it has a little bit of this kind of spiritual quest in it. And I think that we're all on that spiritual quest. We're all like Kwai Chang Kean, wandering around the Old West, you know, looking for our identities and for meaning in the world.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  And that's okay. Meaning doesn't have to be accomplishment in the traditional Western sense, through accruing crap. Meaning can come in a lot of other ways. So, it helped me find a lot of meaning, and that's why I wrote the book.

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  So, with, you had the Soul Pancake book, Chew on Life's Big Questions, and then Now the Bassoon King, My Life in Art, Faith, and Idiocy. What did you learn in the process of making the first book that helped you with the second book?

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Well, um, that was the answer is what I learned in writing the introduction to the Soul Pancake book was that, oh, there's a much larger story to tell here. What I learned in writing The Bassoon King is, and I highly suggest everyone writing a memoir at some point in time, Tim, maybe that's your next book. Maybe it's just a story of your life, because people just love stories of people's lives and their struggles, their ups and downs, and their positive things. But what I learned is like, how many of my greatest failures and tests have really made me who I am today? Like, I'll give you a quick example. I was cast in a Broadway show when I was about, um, 29 or 30 years old, my first Broadway

• 53:03Speaker 00

  show, and I sucked. I bombed. I have a chapter called, "I Bombed on Broadway." I, again, I was very in my head. I was very stuck and cerebral and stiff, and I couldn't get out of it. And I tried, and I tried, but I just was terrible in the part. But after I finished that show, I was kind of like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm never doing that again. I'm never gonna get stuck in that again. I just, I can't. Life is too short. I'm too miserable. And I, I gotta be me as an actor. I have to bring who I really am as a, as a human to my acting. So it's, it's quirky. I'm offbeat. I'm odd. You know, I'm, I'm a weirdo. I draw,

• 53:44Speaker 00

  I buy shirts at the thrift store. And this is, this is who I am, and this is who I have to be. So, um, I, it really changed me as an actor and as an artist. My, and I went through hell in that Broadway show. But if I hadn't gone through that hell, I never would have been able to play Dwight Schrute. I never would have had the success that I had in LA and on TV and film in doing odd characters if I hadn't gone through that terrible, terrible ordeal. So that was an incredible thing to learn from writing a book, looking back at those failures and how they can be transformative.

• 54:25Tim Ferriss?

  I think if I ever write a memoir, I'll have to do it soon and it'll be called 14 Minutes Into My 15 Minutes. A short biography of Tim, short memoir of Tim Ferriss before it's irrelevant.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  What are the core tenets of the Baha'i faith? Because you, it, correct me if I'm wrong, but your parents, or at least one of your parents, were also Baha'i, is that right?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I grew up Baha'i, so the tenets of the Baha'i faith are, Baha'is believe that there is only one God, and that this creator, all-loving, all-knowing creator, wants to educate humanity by sending down divine teachers every 500 or 1,000 years. These divine teachers, you know a lot of their names, like the Buddha, Krishna, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  They come to various people at various points in time, kind of giving an updated lesson in spiritual evolution from God, the Creator, because God wants us to mature spiritually, just like we're maturing technologically and materially. And we're not there yet. So, Baha'is believe that a man named Baha'u'llah, and that name means the glory of God, that Baha'u'llah was an actual person who was, lived in Iran in the mid 1800s. He proclaimed himself to be the promised one of God, the newest, the latest of these divine teachers. He was in a Muslim country, so he was persecuted and locked up in prison and tortured and banished,

• 55:58Speaker 00

  and his family was killed and tens of thousands of early Baha'is were martyred. And he spent his whole life being banished and in prison, and he wrote many hundreds of books and tablets that Baha'is believe are holy and that contain the solution for the world's problems today. So, Baha'is are hard at work at kind of healing the world spiritually. Theoretically, that's what we're doing.

• 56:23Tim Ferriss?

  And do you have

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  any type of, or equivalent, or approximation to say the Ten Commandments, for instance? Because I find that, if you look at, say, the Ten Commandments, I mean, a lot of them seem like pretty good rules.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 56:40Tim Ferriss?

  Good guidelines, even if you are atheist.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  An atheist.

• 56:45Tim Ferriss?

  Or, or otherwise. And are there, is there a similar sort of to-do and not-to-do list in the Baha'i faith?

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are basic core tenets of the Baha'i faith. So, one is the harmony of the human race. So elimination of racial prejudice is super important for Baha'is. We're all one members of one human family. No one is better or worse from their skin color. All religions are one. The essential harmony of, I think you dig this one, the essential harmony of science and religion. You know, we live in a world where science and religion are so at odds and they can't see eye to eye. And the secular science folks are like, oh, religion is bullshit. And the born again fundamentalist religion people are like, oh, scientists are full of shit. And Baha'is believe that they're both manifestations of the creation of God.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  That science is there for us to understand the physical world that we're in. It's very real. Religion without science is mere superstition, according to Bahá'u'llá. One of the important teachings of the Baha'i faith is the individual investigation of truth. So, every person is on a journey to find the truth for themselves. And that's an important obligation for everyone to undertake, is finding their truth for themselves. The equality of men and women. So this was taught by Bahá'u'llá in the mid 1800s, that men and women are equal.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  And a universal education. And another teaching is the eventual universal language. That if we have a universal language that runs throughout the world, that that will be... You talked about those building blocks to world peace. You know, a universal language that was spoken by everyone on the planet, in addition to whatever their native language was, would be super helpful, so that everyone could communicate with one another. It sounds kind of simplistic, but it actually would be super, super helpful. We seem to be heading that way, kind of with English right now. It's kind of becoming a universal language. You go to Europe, you go to China, you go to Russia, like everyone speaks English as a second language. So those are some of the key teachings.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  There's no clergy in the Baha'i faith, which I really like. There's no one above anyone in the Baha'i faith. No one has a station above anyone else. So that's, that's a cool thing.

• 59:14Tim Ferriss?

  And when you pray, what does, what does praying look like? Do you have any, any... Favorite or common prayers, and the reason I ask is that, again, even for even for someone who is non-religious, I think there are things that can be very useful, even if they're just viewed as philosophies. For instance, the serenity prayer is very similar to the meditations of a lot of Stoic philosophers. And I read a lot of Stoic philosophy, and I find the serenity prayer a very helpful thing to memorize and consider on a regular occasion. Do you have any particular prayers that you have found helpful over the years? Or most recently?

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love the serenity prayer. It's really, it's really beautiful. I love especially the second half of the serenity prayer, which doesn't get as much focus. You're essentially saying, "God, grant me the courage to do the things I can." So, and that's an interesting way of looking at the world where we live in a very self-will-powered world. Like, it's like pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, and you are what you make yourself. And it's interesting, if you, if you believe that there is a creative force, an all-loving, all-seeing creative force that runs throughout the universe, you know, that force can be tapped into, you know? You can turn to it, and you can ask for help, you can ask for

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  courage, you can ask for serenity. I think, to me, the most important prayers, and the ones that really helped balance me out, like we talked earlier on in the conversation, are prayers of gratitude. And if I can be in gratitude every day, if I can turn to the divine presence around me and just say, "Thank you for my health, thank you for the beautiful sunlight, thank you for enough food in my refrigerator, thank you for keeping my son happy and healthy," it shifts my day, you know, and it shifts my whole perspective. Because I can easily get like, how shit, how come I'm not a movie star, and how come

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  I'm not getting the work I want to get, and, you know, how come my book's not a number one bestseller? You know, it's easy to get into that negativity, but prayers of gratitude I find really helpful.

• 1:01:37Tim Ferriss?

  And you know, coming back to getting out of your own head, I think that it ties into sort of compassion and empathy and looking at the world through a lens other than your own at the same time. I mean, I find that as someone who's hardwired to be kind of type A, hard-driving, achievement-focused, focusing and driving hard on something is not the difficult part. It's stepping outside of that torrent of self-focused thought to exhibit gratitude and actual appreciation that is challenging. And that's the piece that requires more practice, which is...

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna come back. We're gonna wrap up in just a few minutes, but I have, I will come back to the documentary question. I've not forgotten. But in the meantime, if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say?

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Maybe it would be a billboard that says, "Don't be an asshole." Because that would make the world a lot better place. Maybe someone driving along will be like, "Oh, you know what? Maybe I'm just gonna be not as much of an asshole today. I'm not gonna cut people off on the road and ignore my kids and, you know, backstab someone at work. How about that? Don't be an asshole."

• 1:03:03Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any particular place you would put that?

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Anywhere in Los Angeles.

• 1:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? And if you could just place us in time or in, I guess, in place, and where were you? What were you doing at 30? And what advice would you give yourself?

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  So at 30, I was a starving New York theater actor, just kind of going around trying to get acting work. And, you know, barely making 17 grand a year doing theater. I did a bunch of side jobs. I was a man with a van. I had a moving company. I think that what I would talk to myself about is you have to believe in your capacity. You have to believe that your capacity is greater than you could probably imagine what it is. To me, this is a kind of a divine question. God has given us talents and faculties and it's up to us to discover them

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  and expand them to their maximum and use them for maximum service in the world. So, uh, I had a lot more capacity at thirty than I thought. I thought of myself as like, well, you know, I could be, I could get some acting work and maybe I could do an occasional guest spot in Law and Order and, uh, and make enough money to just get by as an actor so I don't have to drive this damn moving van. That was like the extent of where my imagination was for myself. And so I would just say, you know, believe in yourself deeper. You're, you're bigger, you're bigger than that. Dream, dream bigger, I would say.

• 1:04:45Tim Ferriss?

  Dream bigger. That's another, that could be your second billboard. After Don't Be An Asshole, you should have primed the pump with that and then a mile later on Sunset, you have Dream Bigger. Just so, just so their dreams aren't of being a bigger asshole.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  Favorite documentaries or films?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Oh, man, there's so many, dude. Favorite documentaries, I've seen thousands of them.

• 1:05:09Tim Ferriss?

  Just, just one that, one that you love. Just one that you recommend a lot.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  The Act of Killing, did you see that?

• 1:05:15Tim Ferriss?

  So good and so brutal. Oh, my God.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  I mean, nothing goes to the heart of the human condition and the violence of, of, of human beings like that documentary. It's where, uh, it's set in Indonesia and they, uh, go to all of these men that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people in a, in a rebellion in Indonesia and has them reenact how they killed people and make it into like an action movie. They actually try and make sections into an action movie just to see what happens. It's this kind of grand social experiment and it's, it really goes into the dark side, the shadow side of the human condition. In a, in a way that is so, it's heart stopping.

• 1:05:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  And I really like dark stuff a lot. And I would say my favorite movie of all time is Apocalypse Now. And every time I've seen Apocalypse Now, um, it, I, I see the world a little bit differently. And again, I think you learn a lot about the positive side of the world by kind of studying the dark side. And, um, again, it goes into that, into the very worst of humanity and in war. And in so doing, I always find it really inspiring and kind of, I come out of watching Apocalypse Now like uplifted. You know, I don't know. Maybe that's just me.

• 1:06:32Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's not just you. I had, uh, the, the most decorated special operations commander during the entire Iraq conflict. Uh, Navy SEAL commander named Jocko Willink on, uh, the podcast. And he said effectively the exact same thing. So it's, it's fascinating to see how it can span from, uh, military to entertainment. But when you're, when you're thinking about the human condition, I mean, you do need to consider the entire picture. Uh, and not be like the blind man touching the elephant. What is an elephant? One's touching the trunk, one's touching the tail, one's touching the foot. And you really have to take in the macro picture if you want to have a positive impact and understand what you're trying to navigate.

• 1:07:11Tim Ferriss?

  I think in some capacity, uh, do you have any ask or request for my audience? This is effectively the last question and then we'll, we'll get into where people can, can find more about you and so on. But do you have any ask or request for the people listening?

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Well, you know, buy my book, buy my fucking book. Is that, is that possible to say?

• 1:07:36Tim Ferriss?

  No, that's, that's totally fair. We'll, we'll get a, I'll ask for a second request or ask. And the book, by the way, folks, I mean, the Bassoon King is hilarious, a lot of laugh out loud moments. It's a, it's a very fast, it's an easy read and, uh, very, very honest. So if, if this is what, what your appetite, then you should check it out. And I'll link to that in the show notes, uh, as well for people. But, um, any other ask or request?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I would, I would ask people, um, I would ask listeners, I don't want to sound like pretentious asshole, but I would ask people to dig deeper.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  We can make the world a better place. We can ask more of ourselves. We can do more for others. And I think that our life is a journey and to dig deep on your journey and the world will benefit from it.

• 1:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. And you said this already, but the advice to your 30-year-old self, I think everybody could take it, which is believing that you have more capacity than you might think and dreaming bigger. It's just, that's been so incredibly useful in my life. And I look back and I'm just like, wow, I cannot believe I was driving in first gear for so long. What the hell was I doing?

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  That's a great way of looking at it.

• 1:09:01Tim Ferriss?

  Where can people find you online? And where would you like them to go online also?

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Well, they can find me at at Rain Wilson on Twitter and Instagram. I'm on Facebook, of course, all that nonsense. They can check out Soul Pancake, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out leadehaiti.org. And check out the incredible work that is happening in the fields of girls' education, arts education, and what's also called informal education, where it's like education under a tree. That's the future. And if you want to help change the world, it's through education, I believe, that empowers people to make the change in their own communities. So, check that shit out.

• 1:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  100%. Yep. If you want to not only help break cycles of poverty, but create problem solvers instead of problem creators or passive participants in the world, then education is the force multiplier. Well, Rain, for those people who are going to try to find you on the social webs, Rain with two N's, it's been so nice to chat with you and thanks for, thanks for taking the time.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  This has been a blast. You're great at this and you need your own show, but after I kick you in the face.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know what, this, I've never, I haven't said this in a, in a long time. Actually, I've never said this. Who am I kidding? That makes me sound like even weirder than I am, but I'm looking forward to hanging out and getting kicked in the face.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Perfect.

• 1:10:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I may insist, I, I, I get veto power on the footwear, but besides that, I think we're in good shape.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  And I won't wear my high heels.

• 1:10:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, thanks for that. And, uh, and Thanksgiving, as you said, being grateful should come not just once a year. And thank you for that reminder. Rain, everybody listening, uh, you can find show notes, links to everything, all sorts of goodies that came from this conversation at fourhourworkweek.com and click on podcast, all spelled out, or just go to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:12:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.