Oscar and Rainn Get Awkward
We celebrate our 100th episode with one of our favorite officemates!
Greetings, Office devotees, Soul Boomlets, and anyone who's ever believed the world needed a better boss—
This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn sat down with his old friend Oscar Nuñez for what happens to be our 100th episode.
Over the past hundred episodes, we’ve found ourselves wandering back into the halls of Dunder Mifflin every now and then. We’ve had Angela Kinsey on. Ed Helms dropped by. BJ Novak recently sat down with Rainn. Now Oscar. Soul Boom has never been an Office podcast (there are plenty of wonderful shows devoted to that already) but we also can’t pretend that one quirky little sitcom about a struggling paper company in Scranton hasn’t become part of our DNA.
Maybe that’s because The Office was always about more than paper. Yes, it gave us staplers in Jell-O, fire drills gone catastrophically wrong, CPR performed to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” and a beet farmer who somehow became one of television’s most beloved characters. Beneath all that, though, it was a show about flawed people trying to work together, find purpose, build friendships, fall in love, forgive one another, and make it through another Tuesday. In other words, it was always asking surprisingly human questions.
Naturally, in this episode, Rainn and Oscar reminisce about the good old Office days, tell stories from the set, and slip effortlessly back into the rhythm that comes from spending nearly a decade working side by side. If you’ve ever wondered what it sounds like when Dwight Schrute and Oscar Martinez have had twenty years to mellow out, you’re in for a treat.
But old friends have a way of wandering into deeper waters.
Oscar reflects on his family’s journey from Cuba, discovering comedy later than most, and growing more comfortable with uncertainty. Not uncertainty as a problem to be solved, but as an honest way to move through life.
One of the great things about making Soul Boom has been watching conversations follow their own path. Guests arrive to talk about a new book, a film, or a television show, and somewhere along the conversation with Rainn inevitably moves toward the questions that actually keep us awake at night. How do we become wiser? How do we stay open? How do we hold onto our sense of humor without losing our sense of wonder? Those questions don’t belong to one religion, philosophy, or television series. They belong to all of us.
Reaching one hundred episodes has us feeling grateful—not just for the remarkable guests who have shared their stories, but for this community. You’ve followed us from conversations about neuroscience to mysticism, comedy to climate, politics to prayer. And every so often, we’ve found ourselves back in Scranton, discovering that the people who once made us laugh also have something meaningful to say about what it means to be human.