by Rainn Wilson
The best use of our desktop Internet? Easy. Fantasy football. We had a league for six of the nine seasons of The Office. Myself, Brian Baumgartner, and John Krasinski were all avid participants, as were many crew members and writers. Trades were going down like on the floor of the stock exchange. Research was being done and strategies for benching and starting players were being constantly hatched. I know what you’re asking. Once. I won once. Thanks, LaDainian Tomlinson!
Oscar Nuñez had the only computer with a functional speaker attached. He would spend the entirety of his days on the set doing background work in other people’s scenes while watching the most ridiculous YouTube videos you’ve ever seen. He loved watching random fistfights, karate competitions, judo matches, and MMA highlights. He also loved to watch endless videos of people falling down, running into things, “wracking their balls,” and generally wounding themselves.
Dwight’s blog. For the first several years of The Office I wrote a blog in Dwight’s voice. Blogs were just becoming a “thing” in 2004. This began in season one, when we had no working Internet and were pretending to do actual work on spreadsheets and Word docs. I, in character, started writing some imaginary blog entries for Dwight. I showed them to the producers and they called NBC, who started running them on their website. I believe I was the very first actor to write a blog as his character. It was a lot of fun, and writing as him helped me understand Dwight’s voice.
Steve Carell has some very active and serious sweat glands. When the temperature would get hot or he would get nervous, he would erupt like Vesuvius and there would be a flash flood of sweat down his face. (There was a famous early Jimmy Kimmel appearance where Steve was so nervous that sweat just started POURING down his face in sheets. They joked about it and there was a funny bit later where he appeared in nothing but a towel, having just taken a shower to rinse off from his flop-sweat attack.)
To counteract this absurd physiological abnormality, the temperature on the set was situated at a ridiculously cold 64 degrees. This temperature issue was a constant struggle and source of great pain in the cast, especially for Jenna Fischer, who wore skirts and thin blouses all day long, and for Angela Kinsey, who has no discernible body fat and is the size of a baby sandpiper. Over the years, as the show got more and more luxurious, eventually the women of The Office got space heaters, which were surreptitiously placed under their desks to help with the arctic acting conditions.
Things I was known for on the set: coffee breath and hurting people.
I have literally wounded pretty much everyone in the cast. I have hit John Krasinski in the eye and enormous nose with an icy snowball and various other desktop objects. I have accidentally punched Phyllis and Brian Baumgartner multiple times. In a football scene I tackled to the ground Creed (who is ninety-seven), who then knocked over Leslie David Baker (Stanley), who then fell on top of Angela. I have thrown Angela on top of desks and car hoods and spanked her randomly (far too hard), leaving severe and debilitating bruises every single time. (Truth be told, she bruises like a tiny, overly ripe, albino nectarine.) I once stupidly threw a five-pound dumbbell in Darryl’s office up in the air for no reason and it came down on Craig Robinson’s head, leaving a lump the size of a hard-boiled egg. In the “Beach Games” episode I accidentally kicked sand into Leslie David Baker’s eyes and he had to be rushed to the hospital and have his enormous eyeball washed out and treated for a scratched cornea. This is my chance to apologize to the entire cast. I’m sorry. It’s a wonder that I was never sued. (I wonder when the statute of limitations runs out?)
People always ask, “How do you say all those lines with such a straight face?” The fact is we never did. We “broke” and laughed ALL the time. Just watch the bloopers (which are all over YouTube). In fact we often had to hold the filming so that the laughter could die down enough to shoot. The worst culprit? Easy. Brian Baumgartner. You could sneeze wrong or say a silly word like rumpus or porcupine and he’d start to lose it.
The longest inappropriate laughter was during the episode “Lecture Circuit,” when Dwight and Jim are put in charge of the Party Planning Committee and Dwight hangs tiny brown and gray balloons and a banner that reads IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY. John and I literally could not stop laughing. We laughed until we cried. Production needed to be shut down for a twenty-minute break while we gathered ourselves and returned to film the scene.
Chapter 16
SOUL PANCAKES
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Some friends of mine and I needed a name for our new website venture. We got out some four-by-six note cards and started writing words we loved for the potential name on them and taping them all over the walls of singer/songwriter Andy Grammer’s crappy West Hollywood apartment in 2007. (He was still a street musician on the Third Street Promenade at this point and not the international pop sensation of “Honey, I’m Good” and “Keep Your Head Up.”) We sat on a recycled couch and stared up at the words in front of us. We needed something really special.
We had been talking for some time about a website that would explore “Life’s Big Questions,” that would dive into philosophy, creativity, and spirituality, attempting to make conversations about those topics cool again.
Then began the very bizarre quest to find an available domain name that worked for our idea. We knew we wanted a food item of some kind, something to “chew” on, something to “cook up.” My original idea, Metaphysical Milkshake, was, like me, clunky, pretentious, and full of dairy.
We tried a number of different domain names with the word spirit at the top. Our first choice? SpiritStew. It was taken (damn!), so we tried SpiritSouffle (also taken), SpiritSandwich (an existing food blog), and SpiritWaffle (a hippie restaurant). (Note: SpiritHákarl was available, but hákarl is an Icelandic dish made of rotten shark meat. That’s why the name was available.)
We tried leading off with Profound, but that didn’t really resonate. Same with Mystical and Holy.
Then we moved on to the word Soul as a header. Somehow, some way, soul-crushingly, our top choice, SoulTaco, was also taken. This devastated us. I mean, who the HELL would have bought the domain name SoulTaco.com?!?!
Taped onto Andy’s tacky textured, cream wall sat the word Soul on a card and Pancake on another, not far away. My eyes connected the dots. It was a delicious combination. Fun and accessible, it had an irreverent tone that referenced spirituality but didn’t seem precious or overly serious. It was chewy and buttery and, most of all, the name stuck in your head. Like one of Andy Grammer’s songs. (Which he insisted on practicing over and over again in his thin-walled bedroom down the hall while we were trying to pick our URL name.)
Miraculously, the domain was available and SoulPancake.com was born.
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You see, in 2007 or thereabouts the Internet was a pretty sad place. There were far fewer positive options than there are these days. Whether it was degrading porn, cruel gossip, crass trolls, or meaningless materialism, the Web was a place to explore the very worst that humanity had to offer. It was like Caligula’s Rome instead of Augustus’s Pax Romana—filled with sadism, mindless debauchery, and pop-up ads for Viagra and credit scores. (Although the banner ad for cheap car insurance with a little Obama dancing the Cabbage Patch was pretty fun.)
A year earlier, when The Office was starting to take off, I knew I had a delectable opportunity. There were going to be resources available to do something really cool on the Web. I wanted to create something good and interesting and beautiful in that otherwise Hieronymus Bosch–esque landscape.
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After some long consultations and soul searching with some spiritual-philosopher friends of mine, cofounders Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry, we decided to create a destination on the Web for people interested in exploring big ideas through the portals of philosophy, creativity, and spirituality. We wanted our endeavor to be a successful business venture and not a nonprofit, because we felt there w
as a large, young audience out there that was longing for positive content. We wanted to try to make a beautiful Web destination with lots of eye-popping art, thought-provoking articles, inspiring videos, and discussion boards where people of different belief systems could come together and share their hearts and minds. A place to explore what it means to be a human being. Having myself been on a dramatic spiritual roller coaster earlier on in my life, and being fascinated by the mystical journeys that we all take on our short, eighty-year rides around the sun, I wanted to create a place where it would be safe to talk about the soul and faith as well as other big philosophical ideas.
The term spirituality had become so misused that people had a tremendously adverse reaction to the actual word itself. Similar to moist, phlegm, and Bieber. As I mentioned earlier, people seemed to associate the word spirituality with either 1) church or some kind of known religious institution, usually fundamentalist, or 2) a kind of hippie-dippy, airy-fairy, vague notion of a mystical pursuit that involved precious, tearful connections regarding auras, crystals, and yoga pants.
Would it be possible to take the word back in some way? we wondered. What could we do to make it the teensiest bit “cool” to talk about our hearts and minds and souls?
I had been wrestling with the word myself for quite some time and had come up with a peculiar spin on it. Spirituality, the way I had come to see it over the years, really referred to any expression of our higher self.
Example: We share a number of behaviors in common with monkeys. Both species like to poop and fornicate and fight and eat mangoes and groom themselves a great deal. We both have hierarchies, revere status and power, and hoard shiny things.
There are also a number of things we do that monkeys don’t. We like to ponder our death and our fate as well as meditate and marvel on/at the beauty of the universe. We pray to a Creator and find meaning and devote altruistic acts of selfless service to one another. We long for purpose, share gratitude, and seek to connect hearts on ever deeper levels. We make artistic works of incredible mystery and vivid beauty. We make music. We dance. We weep and laugh. We love with a searing intensity.
It’s those things, the things we don’t have in common with the monkey, that, in my mind, are spirituality. The life of the spirit part of ourselves that is beyond the material, the animal, the base. It was those things we wanted to explore with SoulPancake. And we wanted to kick ass and have a great sense of humor while doing it.
The lens that we all settled on to view these disparate topics through came down to the phrase “CHEW ON LIFE’S BIG QUESTIONS.” We at SoulPancake didn’t have any answers or agenda. We wanted to make a playground for our users to search through these issues by themselves and find their own truth, just as I had done in my youth. We were really creating a tool that I might have used when I was a confused twenty-eight-year-old.
Humans have been chewing on the big questions of life since we were dancing by firelight in ancient caves and placing our handprints on the walls, drawing the spirits of the animals we hunted, and telling stories of ancient gods and the mysteries of existence. The ancient Greeks were awfully good at discussing and dissecting these most basic of human issues: free will, beauty, meaning, morality and ethics, and metaphysics. The Greeks themselves (especially Plato) were greatly inspired by the Jewish and Zoroastrian philosophies and the more mystical teachings of the Torah and the Pentateuch. Humanity continued these crucial conversations into the following centuries in the debates of Muslim poets and philosophers, the monasteries of the Middle Ages, and the bistros of Paris and Prague. The conversations continued, from the dorm rooms and coffee shops of twentieth-century universities all the way through to the message boards of the “question collective” on SoulPancake.com.
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First we designed a website and brought on board our incredible creative team of Shabnam Mogharabi and Golriz Lucina, who have led our vision and aesthetic from the very beginning and continue to do so today. Golriz was a marketing and design genius from New Zealand and Nashville who has given our brand a vital, creative look and feel. Shabnam, our incredibly effective CEO, did her thesis at Northwestern’s journalism school about a magazine that could make spirituality cool and relevant again for a young audience. When she heard about my plans through an early interview I did, she tracked me down and begged to be a part of it. And thank God she did, because her journalistic expertise was crucial to our launch and her business acumen has greatly aided our company.
We launched with a piece or two of content every day on our website, which was a tremendous amount of work. But most important, it was the Question Collective, where people could post and respond to each other’s Life’s Big Questions, where the site really took off. It was a dream come true to watch thousands of people diving into HUGE questions of life, philosophy, and humanity with creative gusto and open hearts. And the best thing? Pretty much troll free. All right, there was one guy who did call me “Lame” Wilson. And that one still stings a little bit. Full disclosure.
Probably the thing that helped us the most was a woman you might have heard of before called OPRAH FRIGGIN’ WINFREY! Right as we were launching, I did a podcast with Oprah in Chicago for her Soul Series radio show. It was supposed to be a fifteen-minute conversation and we ended up talking for almost an hour. We discussed the ideas behind SoulPancake, the Baha’i Faith, and my life’s journey, getting along famously all the while. Later, we would begin our foray into video production by creating what Oprah would call “little pieces of light” for her new channel, OWN. That set us down the path of doing more video production work for television and the Web. (And we’re forever grateful, Ms. O!)
Things were buzzing along. Our mission was getting clearer.
I remember once on the set of The Office, Ed Helms asked me, “What’s this SoulPancake thing I’ve been hearing about?” I told Ed that it was a website where people could explore creativity and spirituality.
Ed responded quizzically, “Aren’t those things kind of mutually exclusive?”
I think Mr. Helms addressed a very sad fact in our contemporary culture. Art and spirituality, as I mentioned before, are simply different branches of the same expression of human transcendence. It’s pretty pathetic that being creative, expressing one’s soul, and creating things of beauty should be so separate in our society from the expression of the divine, the sacred, devotion, and faith. This is a new and not healthy thing, I believe. Throughout history, humanity has linked the expression and sacredness of the divine and the creation of art. Only today are they so compartmentalized. From Navajo rugs to the Sistine Chapel, from the whirling dervishes of Sufism to the statues of the Buddha, from the stories of the Mahabharata to Handel’s Messiah, art and devotion have always been inexorably connected.
The founding team wrote a cool art/think book called SoulPancake: Chew On Life’s Big Questions, and it became a New York Times bestseller. We made an iPhone app and moved deeper into television production, eventually doing a special for OWN, a documentary for MTV, and a music special for VH1, among other projects.
But it was on YouTube that SoulPancake found its voice and its purpose. We became a funded YouTube channel and entered a great relationship with Google, providing daily video content that sought to uplift and challenge our viewers and “Make Stuff That Matters.”™
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It was an exciting time, finding talent to collaborate with on our mini-network. We started shows like Live a Little with Candace Carrizales (Hunan Penguin), The FlipSide with Ben Shelton, and SubCultures with Erin Cantelo. We had shows featuring cutting-edge artists and man-on-the-street interviews. We profiled the homeless and staged gigantic street art installations. Our subscribers grew and grew. But it was two shows that we green-lit at the end of our first season that really put our channel on the map.
When we started brainstorming content, one of the topics I insisted we explore was the big D. No, not Deflate
gate. DEATH! I knew we had an opportunity to tackle this tremendously difficult universal human issue head-on, and our curious and brave audience would be up for the ride.
We started working with the talented filmmaker and actor (and fellow Baha’i) Justin Baldoni (Jane the Virgin), who approached us with a great idea. My Last Days was an exploration of what it means to experience life as related by people with terminal illnesses. No one knows better the intense gratitude, passion, and deep-hearted experience of living life to its fullest than those who are face-to-face with their own mortality on a daily basis.
What Justin and SoulPancake created was breathtaking. Heart-wrenchingly life-filled stories brought to us by noble souls at the tipping point of death. Instead of maudlin, tear-jerking videos that leave you depressed, what Justin created were inspiring stories that filled the viewer with light, hope, and purpose. They were videos that could literally change your outlook on life as they moved you to your core. I would run into people who would tell me that they watched a My Last Days video every single day to remind them what a precious gift life is.
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The show truly made its most profound impact when we profiled the late, great Zach Sobiech, who was diagnosed with osteosarcoma when he was fourteen. Zach was an angel. He glowed with love, wisdom, kindness, and life. He loved music and recorded several of his songs before he passed away. His gorgeous melody “Clouds” was made into a star-studded music video that went viral right before his passing.
When Zach died at age eighteen, “Clouds” went to number one on the iTunes chart and all proceeds (through Rock the Cause) went to the Zach Sobiech Osteosarcoma Fund, which is connected to the Children’s Cancer Research Fund, raising over $1.2 million for research into a cure for this devastating children’s cancer. That amount, doctors at the fund related, was potentially sufficient to be a catalyst for a research project for an effective treatment. In other words, Zach’s courage, passion, talent, and sacrifice might someday lead to a cure for the cancer that ended his life far too soon.