Rayne Wilson, welcome to the show.

Alex O'Connor, as I live and breathe, the legend.

It's so great to have you here.

Your book, Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution.

I was really excited to learn that you'd written this,

because that's so much more in my field than what I'd known you for previously.

So perhaps we should begin with the question that you begin this book with, which is, why did Dwight Shrewt from the office write a book about spirituality?

That's a, you know, that's the question of the hour.

And it's a question that has really flummoxed a lot of people. He's just such a vast disconnect. Insert

footage of Dwight here being a, being a weird anti-social dick, and then cut back to me

having this conversation. I think there's a number of different reasons. One is, and that I've

been speaking to people about kind of more and more kind of forthrightly,

which was when I was your age, when I was 17, I went through a lot of mental health issues and

a lot of really deep struggles that had to do with the dark night of the soul. And I felt in my

20s really unmoored, lost, overwhelmed. I had anxiety attacks, depression, a lot of addiction

issues, kind of polyaddicted like drugs,, alcohol, porn, gambling, you name it,

anything that I could kind of caffeine that I kind of get addicted to. I did. And that forced me

to dig a little bit deeper than most people necessarily do in their lives. That kind of forced my hand

of like, why the fuck are you alive? Um, what is this life all about? Um, how do you find meaning and

purpose? Uh, what what grounds you? What is true and what is is not because when you're facing your own mortality

and um you know questioning everything and and when you are in anguish emotionally um that puts

your feet to the fire so during that time period period, I did a lot of reading, a lot of exploration

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