Episode 1000 - Episode 1000
Marc:Because I don't know how you deal from day to day.
Marc:I was panicking all morning.
Marc:You know, I don't imagine you were flying in here on the chopper thinking like, you know, I am nervous about Mark.
Marc:No, I wasn't.
Marc:Okay, well, that's good.
Marc:That would be a problem.
Marc:It would be a problem.
Marc:If the president was feeling stressed about it.
Marc:Coming to my garage.
Marc:Coming to your garage.
Marc:Do you think this is the best work you're doing of your life right now?
Guest:That's kind of difficult, you know, because I was in the Beatles.
Guest:Why are you taking the other side of everything I say?
Guest:I'm not.
Guest:You are.
Guest:Why did you want me to do this interview if you don't think I know anything about what you're asking me about?
Guest:I'm just telling you.
Marc:You're done?
Marc:We were having a good conversation.
Marc:Oh, come on, Gallagher.
Marc:One of the first things you said was like, I don't know what you think you're doing down there below 14th Street, but it doesn't matter.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I was trying to be helpful and save you a few years.
Marc:And was your husband your first love?
Guest:Now that I really know what love is, I'd say yes.
Guest:But... What was the other thing?
Guest:Well...
Marc:Thanks for talking to me.
Marc:It was a real honor.
Marc:Really fucking amazing.
Marc:A real pleasure, man.
Marc:A lot of laugh.
Marc:And you smoked your first cigarette in 10 years.
Guest:Yeah, with Keith Richards!
Guest:Come on!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:It's Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast WTF.
Marc:Welcome to it.
Marc:This is the 1000th episode of WTF.
Marc:1000 episodes of
Marc:A lot of talks.
Marc:You heard that amazing sound montage coming into this, the little talk snippet reel.
Marc:A lot of things have gone down over these thousand episodes.
Marc:Life changing for me, certainly.
Marc:Probably for you.
Marc:almost a decade's a long time for anybody shit happens things change for better for worse evolution maybe uh devolution all of it but i gotta be honest man i i don't know that uh i fully wrap my head around this episode because i you know i'm in it you know what i mean i i
Marc:I mean, the life I live right now could not be happening without this show that we started in the garage.
Marc:When I started it, it was bleak.
Marc:A thousand episodes later, I have to say, the effect it's had on my life, my heart, my mind, my spirit, everything.
Marc:Everything is different because of a desperate act in a way to try to keep something going.
Marc:Started out in the old garage with no expectations, not much money, very bleak disposition.
Marc:And slowly but surely, on a personal level, it opened me up to my peers.
Marc:It opened up my heart to the ability to possess some sort of empathy, to engage my empathy, to laugh with other people, to get out of myself, to just move through life in a way that...
Marc:That wasn't horrible.
Marc:You know, it's a thousand episodes.
Marc:This episode is special in a lot of ways.
Marc:One of the big differences, really, between this one and pretty much all the other episodes is that there's no guest.
Marc:yeah spoiler no guest not even a guest interviewing me uh me and my producer and a business partner brendan mcdonald we uh tossed around a lot of big names we even reached out to a few before we just came upon the realization and it was we were like wait a minute wait wait it's our show
Marc:This podcast that you're listening to, this is our achievement.
Marc:This is our passion.
Marc:It's our job, our creation.
Marc:So today's 1000th episode features the creators of this show, myself and Brendan McDonald.
Marc:And we're going to sit here and we're going to reflect on the entire process.
Marc:The experience, the changes, the challenges, the highlights, the difficulties, and the achievements of almost a decade of work.
Marc:We're going to answer some questions sent in by you folks, the listeners.
Marc:And I really, I think most importantly, in terms of what happened on the podcast you're about to hear, we actually talk to each other about our separate experiences with the show and how we deal with each other every week.
Marc:And the long history of our working relationship that has evolved into a very profound and deep friendship.
Marc:It's sort of interesting.
Marc:This is the first time you're going to hear, Brendan, to this extent, certainly.
Marc:But we are two very different people, almost opposites in some ways.
Marc:And we've managed to transcend all kinds of external bullshit and hardships through a professional partnership that has really stood the test of time.
Marc:And it's really kind of evolved into, I think, one of the most important relationships that either of us have.
Marc:We've willed this thing into this amazing library of conversation.
Marc:And honestly, given that, this is probably definitely the longest I've ever talked to Brendan, certainly in one sitting ever.
Marc:And it's a great talk.
Marc:But as I was saying before, I owe all of my success, really all of it in my current incarnation of me,
Marc:to this podcast and uh and obviously to Brendan to all the people all the guests that have come through here you know obviously to some of my own sort of compulsive persistence but honestly as I said before nothing in my professional and and really if I think about it my personal life would have come to be uh without what uh what we created here a thousand episodes ago and that that is a profound bit of business folks
Marc:When I started this, I was bitter, a bit washed up, brokenhearted, and without a lot of prospects in the business I dedicated or committed my life to.
Marc:Yeah, I could do stand-up here and there.
Marc:But all the rest of it, I was like, not going to happen.
Marc:Who the fuck knows what I'm going to do now.
Marc:Let's do this.
Marc:And because of this, everything else happened.
Marc:It's quite a story.
Marc:Weird combination of skill, patience, insanity, a little bit of cosmic timing played into it.
Marc:But I just can't imagine my life without it.
Marc:I need to talk to people.
Marc:I need to put this thing out there.
Marc:I need it to think.
Marc:And I don't always take a second to appreciate what I've accomplished or be grateful for.
Marc:for where I am in my life, but I will do that here in front of you.
Marc:I truly am proud of what we've done with this show, but really it's just been about me and Brendan, the guests in here, and the people who listen, and my brain.
Marc:My neurotic, dread-filled, compulsive, engaged brain.
Marc:I'm grateful for that.
Marc:Could still use some tweaking.
Marc:So again, thank you.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:And I hope you enjoy this thing.
Marc:Again, thank you all.
Marc:Thank you for all the amazing feedback.
Marc:Thank you for letting me know how this show has affected your lives.
Marc:And thank you for listening.
Marc:Now, this is me and my producer and partner in this undertaking.
Marc:Brendan McDonald just basically talking about everything.
Marc:We talk about it all.
Marc:We go over everything from our time at Air America to when we did Break Room Live with Sam Seder to the early days of the podcast and all the way up to the present.
Marc:And I also want to tell you that if you're new to the podcast or you're wondering where you can listen to all of them, you can.
Marc:You can get a Stitcher premium subscription to hear anything older than the most recent 50 episodes, which are all free, by the way.
Marc:And also all the episodes on Stitcher, that's the other 950, are ad free.
Marc:We talk about a lot of past episodes in this show, and you're going to be wondering, you know, where can I hear that?
Marc:But you can just click on the premium button on our site at WTFPod.com to get a subscription, and you got them all.
Marc:I would say a very high percentage of them are evergreen.
Marc:Other than the people I've talked to, many of their lives have changed dramatically.
Marc:Many of them have passed on.
Marc:Many of their careers are different.
Marc:Many of them have...
Marc:gone up and gone down but uh but the conversations hold they hold because there's just a couple of people talking so what how do i want to do it okay okay here's how we'll set it up
Marc:So this is going to set the stage for everything.
Marc:I'm going to play a little bit of the earliest days of me and Brendan together.
Marc:This is us along with our whole morning show crew on Air America Radio back in 2004 with our show, the legendary Morning Sedition on Air America.
Marc:It was the morning show.
Marc:And this is where it all started, really.
Marc:In the studio today, there's two reasons to celebrate.
Marc:Brendan McDonald's in the studio, and you are, who's your team?
Guest:Oh, in baseball?
Guest:Well, the Mets, so I didn't really give a good goddamn about what happened last night.
Marc:Oh, Lord.
Marc:Let's celebrate Brendan's newfound freedom from his peanut allergy now.
Marc:So you're going to go to the ball game and you're going to be able to proudly say, have some peanuts.
Guest:That I never realized.
Guest:Every day I'm figuring out new things that I can eat.
Marc:How long have you not been able to eat peanuts?
Guest:All my life.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:No Snicker bars for you in Halloween.
Guest:No, just now.
Guest:Today was the first Snickers.
Guest:Snickers you saw me eating?
Guest:That was the first Snickers I ever had in my life.
Guest:It's great, right?
Guest:As I was saying to you, I had a problem with it.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Like the first thing I ate was a jar of honey roasted peanuts.
Guest:And I freaked out.
Guest:It was so good.
Guest:And then I got that Snickers bar today.
Guest:And the nuts were not, like it tasted like something was mealy about them.
Guest:I was anticipating something great.
Guest:And the same thing happened with the Reese's peanut butter cup.
Marc:But Reese, you'll start to appreciate that just because it says peanut doesn't mean that has any relationship.
Guest:Well, like the chunky peanut butter, like that blew my mind.
Marc:Did you get the feeling that you were cheating death at some point?
Marc:Dude, I put my whole fist in it.
Guest:No, and I came in before, and you guys were running out of time.
Guest:You had to go back to the show, and I wanted to know what kind of good peanut-type things I should eat, because I have so many options now.
Marc:You ought to get some of those things they roast on the street, because those are pretty good.
Guest:Oh, no, man.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Marc:Don't get those.
Marc:They roast that stuff in bacon fence.
Marc:Man, can't you smell it?
Marc:Now I really want it.
Marc:We'll work out some stuff after this.
Marc:It's 14 past the hour.
Marc:You're listening to Air America Radio.
Marc:That was our show.
Marc:That was where I met you.
Marc:That is it.
Marc:And that was Morning Sedition on Air America Radio.
Marc:I showed up there, radio novice, having no experience.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you were there.
Marc:When was that?
Marc:How old were you, like 12?
Guest:I probably looked it.
Guest:24.
Guest:I was 24, yeah, when we started, because it was 2004.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was 25 later that year.
Marc:And you had been at WNYC.
Marc:In New York, yeah.
Marc:What were you, assistant producer over there?
Guest:Actually, I was the newsroom producer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the woman who I worked very closely with there, her name is Joanne Allen.
Guest:She was the afternoon newscaster.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And she got hired at Air America and brought me over with her.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And then we all just kind of got dumped into there was no rhyme or reason.
Guest:It was just like put this person with over there and put that person over there.
Guest:And we just kind of all sat around staring at each other like for the first 10 minutes.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:I remember it was you, Dan Pashman, Larson, just all these guys with haircuts and the shirts tucked in.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I was like, what the fuck is this?
Guest:I just remember walking in because we had this big first day meeting of Air America Radio was this new thing.
Guest:We were going to fight the Bush administration and right wing talk radio.
Guest:And so I was like, and I knew, you know, Al Franken and Janine Garofalo were involved and people behind the Daily Show were involved.
Guest:It seemed very exciting.
Guest:And I had no idea what my job was going to be.
Guest:I just knew that I got hired.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I walk into this ballroom at some hotel.
Guest:Do you remember that?
Guest:We were like in a big conference or ballroom.
Guest:I remember looking around the room like, oh, who do I spot here?
Guest:I see, oh, there's Al Franken.
Guest:There's Janine Garofalo.
Guest:Oh, there's that Marc Maron guy.
Guest:Like I knew you as a comic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm like, oh, I guess is he doing a show?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's weird.
Guest:And then I remember getting introduced to the various people we were working with and they were like, and yeah, you'll be on the morning show here with Marc Maron.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you were like immediately in my face, like as close to my face as I am to this microphone right now.
Guest:And you're like, so what do you do?
Guest:What are you going to be doing?
Guest:Like, just right there.
Guest:I was like, ooh, okay.
Guest:This guy's coming in hot.
Marc:Panicked.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Completely panicked.
Marc:And I remember going over there.
Marc:Never been on the radio before.
Marc:They hired me to be the funny guy, the sidecar on this trio.
Marc:Mark Riley, Sue Ellicott, and me, the funny guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I remember there was this auditioning process or this process where Jonathan Larson, who was the main producer.
Guest:Yeah, he had come from television.
Guest:He was at CNN with one of the other executives.
Marc:He sat me and Riley down in two chairs and he sat in a third chair and said, okay, you guys go ahead and talk about it.
Marc:Yeah, a test.
Marc:And like within 30 seconds, I'm like, I'm not fucking doing this.
Marc:And I walked away from that point on.
Marc:We're getting up at two thirty three in the morning, getting on the air at six.
Marc:I was jacked out of my mind on Dunkin Donuts and coffee and M&Ms.
Marc:And we were just in it every fucking day.
Marc:Like even that clip you just played.
Marc:Like I have no, honestly, barely any recollection of anything that happened in that fucking studio unless I hear it.
Marc:And then I got, you know, I got to be in the driver's seat.
Marc:It was just me and Riley.
Guest:And we made a big decision, a big kind of turning point for us.
Guest:I think not just in content, but also in like trust of each other and the ability to gauge our instincts was the Monday after Ronald Reagan died.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That we were the left-wing radio network that had launched with new hope for progressives.
Guest:And we got a company-wide dictate from management that we were all to be very respectful about the death of Ronald Reagan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were the first out of the shoot.
Guest:Yeah, we were the morning show.
Guest:Morning show, Monday morning.
Guest:And he had died on a Saturday.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were like...
Guest:fuck that.
Guest:Like this, are you kidding me?
Guest:Like we're in this problem because of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we did a, you know, the whole show was not, we weren't like.
Guest:Dead Reagan Monday.
Guest:We called it Dead Reagan Monday.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we held hands and jumped off the cliff.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:All right, we're going to do this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And we did it live.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We were just relentlessly going over his record.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And being like, is this guy you want to celebrate?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He did this?
Guest:He did that?
Guest:Like, oh, okay.
Guest:Oh, he was a good negotiator and communicator.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, got it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Could talk good.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The thing that was...
Marc:The most exciting part of it and that I do remember is that we were generating original comedy every day in the middle of the fucking night.
Marc:We were assigned, you know, Liz Winstead, who was part of the creative team there originally, had hired all these comic writers and we were assigned a writer for, I mean, what, four, five, six week chunks of time.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:just because they had to get up with us.
Marc:And we would generate full-on radio theater bits that you would produce.
Marc:You would do voices.
Marc:Pashman would do voices.
Marc:Riley would do voices.
Marc:I would do voices.
Marc:You know, the kind of bonds you create in the middle of the night with a group of people, we were the only thing going on.
Guest:Yeah, there was a point where I remember you were like, I don't think I have ever laughed this much at four in the morning ever in my life for a good reason.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was almost that feeling like no one else is alive in the world right now, and we're doing this thing.
Guest:Well, which is kind of interesting.
Guest:It's not unlike this podcast to feel like from the start, well, we're just going to do this.
Guest:We're going to invent this from the ground up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's interesting because one of the things, you know, as you mentioned, we've asked people to write in over the last several weeks and ask questions and as it pertains to the thousand episodes.
Guest:And I find that like people's questions almost take us through chronologically, like how we've gotten to where we got.
Guest:You know, there's this first question I have here by Ricardo says, I know you guys met at Air America, but I'm wondering what you saw in each other to start a podcast together.
Guest:And that's that's an interesting question because it really does stem from us working together in radio.
Guest:And it it answers a lot of what we created with this podcast and how we got a thousand of them.
Marc:Well, the funny thing was, I was just thinking about that.
Marc:I began to trust you a lot because you were running that show in the last form.
Guest:It was established early on because I was an assistant producer, and the majority of my job was to provide support to the elements of the show.
Guest:Oh, we need a comedy bit produced?
Guest:I'll do that.
Guest:Oh, we need research done?
Guest:I'll do that.
Guest:And I think you just started to get to observe and respect my efficiency with that stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And know like, well, I can work with this guy.
Guest:We're not going to butt heads.
Guest:And on the flip side, like I'm a kid who came from comedy my whole life, like loving comedy.
Guest:I've respected what you did before I even knew you.
Guest:So I'm like, well, I want to, like this guy, this is like my chance to like work with a comedian.
Guest:And you seemed so unmolded at that time, even though you're in your forties and you had been doing comedy for like 20 years, it was still like, oh, this guy's new.
Guest:He's new at this.
Guest:In a weird way, that's how it felt.
Guest:It felt fresh for both of us.
Marc:What, to radio?
Marc:To everything.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It felt like you were a fresh thing in this one element.
Guest:Like, oh, this is his start.
Guest:This is your rookie year of doing this.
Guest:Even though you'd been doing comedy, you were like, oh, okay, this is how you can use your voice.
Guest:And I think people were telling you that at the time when you took the job.
Guest:Like your peers were like, oh, well, yeah, you could be on the radio.
Marc:You're great at talking.
Marc:Yeah, and I never really thought about that at the time.
Marc:But also the thing about me and you was sort of like it got to the point where...
Marc:just in terms of building trust and efficiency or whatever, we'd be presented with things that either we had to write comedy bits or I had to talk about something.
Marc:And I'd be like, so could you frame this entire topic for me?
Marc:Could you just tell me exactly what this is that I'm talking about, what it means, how it connects to other things, and what is the full arc of what needs to be said and thought here?
Marc:And then I'd have to, you'd break it down for me.
Marc:Sometimes it would be you and Pashman, you just sit there and coach me.
Marc:And then I'd have to integrate it into my own sensibility and then kind of present it.
Marc:So that producer talent thing, no matter how smart I was, I didn't have the contextualization skills.
Marc:So there was this sort of a mind melding going on.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I think I was also learning about myself for the first time that I was good at that, that that's actually what my strengths were.
Guest:When my skillset moved was...
Guest:the actual job of producing talent and working with people to help them shape the things that they want to do and do it in a medium that I have worked in before.
Guest:So we established that kind of trust
Guest:And, you know, that show, unfortunately, you know, did not go past two years due to internal decisions there.
Guest:And we had wanted a continuation of it somehow.
Marc:We got canceled, you know, right at the time that Stern was leaving the air and that, you know, we were we were shut down by the new CEO at Air America, Danny Goldberg, who was just short sighted on some level in terms of us.
Marc:And, you know, he remains a villain in my history of me.
Marc:you know we were sidelined but then there was a faction within air america that wanted to keep me you know in place yeah for when danny got pushed out there was all this politics going on within the thing and they and then i they said i could do an evening show at ktlk out here yeah i wanted you to produce because you were the only guy i could trust to produce it and you know and you were you were into it to the point where you moved out here you left your family your wife at the time i don't think you
Marc:Yeah, I was just married.
Marc:I'd have been married for two months.
Marc:And you moved out here into that weird furnished apartments place.
Marc:Yeah, in Burbank.
Marc:And we were doing a live show at 10 at night on KTLK.
Marc:The general manager hated my guts because I had pissed off Stephanie Miller.
Marc:And we were stuck there and they had an existing contract with the Clippers.
Marc:So we sometimes would have to wait until games were over to start our show in the middle, but we were producing a live show and you were out here doing that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that really solidified our creative partnership.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That time where you were just out here doing that.
Marc:I was here.
Guest:Again, a time we were doing, we were left to completely to our own devices.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You sat at your kitchen table and just built that show.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Like how we were going to, what's the sound going to be like?
Guest:Where are the jokes?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Where are the bits?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And we had to figure out how to create a payroll because Jim needed health coverage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We just made it from scratch.
Guest:That was experience that led to the skills and the wherewithal we needed to actually do the podcast.
Marc:Also, that's when we started working with local improvisers.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Wyatt Sinek, Seth Morris.
Marc:Who else do we have on that show?
Marc:Paul Rust.
Guest:Remember, he was just on recently, reminded us about that.
Marc:Yeah, we would tap into the UCB crew to do these fake characters on... What was that show called?
Marc:Was it just a Marc Maron show?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:On KTLK.
Guest:After that KTLK show, I was then working at Sirius Radio and... Making good money.
Marc:You were on the managerial tract almost.
Guest:Yeah, they offered me stock options and stuff to keep me around there.
Marc:Working with Rosie?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, first I was working with Ron Silver, rest his soul.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, yeah, I was working with Rosie, and I kept trying to sell you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I kept trying to say, I can do a show here with this guy.
Guest:We'll be like the daily show that you guys don't have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because we can be funny, we can do politics, whatever, and they would not bite.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We tried the same with some of the local affiliates out here.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So many times- Couldn't even get it on Pacifica.
Guest:We couldn't get it on free radio.
Guest:So many times I was told that the Air America documentary that aired on HBO was a hindrance.
Guest:That people were like, I've seen that documentary.
Guest:Mark Maroney's difficult.
Marc:Live wire, that guy.
Marc:I don't even remember.
Marc:What did I do?
Guest:I just think you were you, but it seemed like you were hard to work with.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:Yeah, left to the dial.
Guest:That was a documentary that aired on HBO that was chronicling the first year of Air America.
Guest:It wasn't the fall of Air America?
Guest:No, they were positioning that doc as like the rise of Air America.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:Yeah, I know there's one scene in there that caused some problems.
Marc:But so, yeah, so you're at Sirius.
Marc:And then, again, Air America rises from the ashes with a new CEO with new dumb money.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And a guy from within the organization who I think we should credit, Carl Ginsberg.
Marc:Well, he said he reaches out to me.
Marc:He's like, look, we got a new guy here, new money.
Marc:We should do a new show.
Marc:We should do a streaming video show.
Marc:I was like in the middle of a divorce.
Marc:I was broke.
Marc:I was shattered.
Marc:I was a fucking disaster.
Marc:And I'm like, well, I'll do it if you can get them to give me enough money up front to stop this divorce, to pay her so I can get out of this.
Marc:That's the only way I'm going to do it.
Marc:And I need to make as much money as I made on the original Air America, give or take, which was too much money.
Mm hmm.
Marc:and he worked it out man yeah and so i get that job i you know i pay off my ex-wife and then i'm like we got to get brendan in here and he got to bring sam in and to enter this world of streaming video which didn't even exist really yeah i mean i i'm going to say a word out there there will be some people who know what it is but it has largely been lost to time there was a thing called rocket boom which was this
Guest:This woman, I cannot remember her name.
Guest:Someone will look it up or someone's yelling it right now.
Guest:She was doing this streaming video news show that was selling huge numbers.
Guest:She was going to be a big star.
Guest:And everyone was like, we got to have our own rocket boom.
Guest:And that was what Air America was thinking here was they were going to have this streaming video show that all of a sudden was going to become the industry standard for this emerging market.
Marc:an emerging medium.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So we jump in there and I'm like completely emotionally incapacitated.
Marc:There was no way I was going to be able to talk about politics.
Marc:You know, I bring you in and you see that I'm a mess.
Marc:So we bring in Sam.
Guest:And you guys were, you were at each other from minute one.
Guest:Sam in a more gleeful way than you.
Guest:But you were, you know, just in full resistance mode.
Marc:I was in raw, but he was like, you know, Sam is Sam, but boy, did we have some laughs, man.
Guest:Oh,
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And we did, I thought, some funny stuff that I still, from time to time, send to you and go, like, look at this.
Guest:Do you remember this?
Marc:Break Room Live.
Marc:This was funny.
Marc:It's all up there.
Marc:You can go look at it.
Marc:And Sam, as much as we thought, like, he's so funny.
Marc:They wanted to build a studio for us, but we were like, no, we're going to do it in the break room, the actual break room.
Marc:I thought it was a fucking, I thought it was going to kill.
Marc:When you live streamed, it never buffered properly.
Marc:There was only maybe 1,200 people at most ever watching it in real time.
Marc:We busted our ass to do it live.
Marc:This is the one thing I know about you and me, and it's a consistent thing.
Marc:It's like, we go fucking all-in.
Marc:I think we really had high hopes, even when Sam was like, this isn't going to work.
Marc:No one cares about this.
Marc:I mean, I always held on to the idea, and we always worked so fucking hard to do those video pieces, to do the live stuff, to do the interviews, to respect the conceit.
Marc:We had those cameras set up.
Guest:Well, that's a thing.
Guest:We were working really hard based on an idea that nobody cared about, even the people who set it up, because Carl wanted to be able to do this streaming video show with you to essentially sell it as a pilot that would get a television show, right?
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And to Carl's credit,
Guest:Basically, like his thought of you as the driver personality wise for some type of show like that was the correct impulse.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's essentially what got us to start a podcast and say, yes, we can do this.
Guest:The flaw was in what the delivery system would be.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And thinking like we're going to do this live show every day, which is a ridiculous proposition with a staff the size of ours and money, the amount that we had.
Guest:And video.
Guest:It was video.
Guest:That is a ridiculous proposition.
Guest:It was on at a weird time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Three in the afternoon.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:When everyone's at home watching their computer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they thought like it would be a thing people could put on like a work break and da, da, da.
Guest:There was just a total fundamental misunderstanding of the medium and where it was going.
Guest:And everybody was misunderstanding.
Guest:YouTube was only three years old at this point.
Guest:So I give everybody their own set of credit for thinking...
Marc:what might work but what was clear was the thing we were working so hard on was never going to work I just couldn't accept that but I was also going through my own shit but so the money was gone they weren't going to pay us for another year yeah so they ran out of money and they fired us they kind of fired us they said show's over yeah but we had two months or something on the contract we still had an office for some reason
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had an office.
Guest:They didn't make us leave.
Guest:And you and I talked to each other about doing a podcast from the perspective of you had just started to go on quite a few of them.
Guest:Is that true?
Marc:Keith and the Girl, you went on out in Queens.
Marc:That's weird with Keith and the Girl because I didn't frame that as a podcast.
Marc:I knew they were doing some version of radio.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:out of their own place.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that it was popular somehow.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I didn't know how people were getting it.
Marc:I think they had a video element.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But when I went out there, I went all the way out to wherever it was in Queens somewhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And they had the whole setup going and they explained to me what they were doing.
Marc:I'm like, fucking, we got to be doing this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was also you had just done Jesse Thorne's podcast or radio show slash podcast at the time.
Guest:Sound of Young America.
Guest:Again, I didn't know that was a podcast.
Guest:But what I think you another thing, just like Keith and the girl made you say to yourself, like, oh, this guy's doing this.
Guest:Like this was a kid I talked to in his underwear one day in Santa Cruz on the phone.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They did a phoner with me for some event for the radio show when he was.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When he was in college.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know why I knew he was in his underwear.
Marc:Well, that revelation I had when I was listening to NBR late at night in my Queens apartment, that it was Jesse, what was the name of the show back then?
Marc:Sound of Young America.
Marc:Sound of Young America.
Marc:I don't remember associating it with the podcast medium until I really started to see, well, that's what Carolla was doing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's what Kevin Smith was doing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's what Jimmy Pardo and Jimmy Dore were doing.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, those are all people that were doing it before we were.
Guest:They were the guys.
Guest:And I think you said to me, do you think we could do a podcast?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said absolutely yes, because I was now at this point like a two-year avid listener of podcasts.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, I think I had gotten my first iPod in like 2007, video iPod.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was...
Guest:Initially just listening to all the radio shows that I liked, This American Life and Fresh Air.
Guest:And the first time I saw a podcast that I didn't know existed before was Bill Simmons.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So he had been doing it since I think right around that time, 2007.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had been reading his column forever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought, oh, wow, I've never seen this guy.
Guest:I've never seen what he looks like, let alone heard his voice.
Guest:Because I've only ever been reading his column.
Guest:So, oh, cool, let me check into this.
Guest:And coming from what we were coming from, I've worked in radio since college.
Guest:So going back to like 1998, 99, I started working in radio.
Guest:Went to public radio, very austere New York public radio NPR affiliate.
Guest:Even working at Air America, we had a lot of programming directors who came through there who worked in radio, coming out here, dealing with the program directors out here in LA.
Guest:It had been hammered into my brain what radio is supposed to sound like and what it's supposed to be and how it's supposed to do it.
Guest:And I listened to Bill Simmons for about 30 seconds and I was like, oof, now I know why this isn't anywhere else.
Guest:This is not a radio show.
Guest:This is just a guy talking into a laptop or something.
Yeah.
Guest:And I listened for another five minutes, 10 minutes.
Guest:And by the end of that 10 minutes, I was like, this is awesome.
Guest:This is exactly what I want it to be.
Guest:He's talking to like Hench or Joe House or some guy that he's written about in his column for 10 years that I've been reading him.
Guest:And this is exactly what I wanted it to be when I saw that Bill Simmons had a podcast.
Guest:It should be...
Guest:The essence of the person and this niche, a niche of an audience.
Guest:Oh yeah, I read this guy's columns.
Guest:Well, of course, why wouldn't I want to hear what this sounds like?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So a big boost for me and my feeling of being able to, the confidence of being able to do it was that Tom Sharpling's best show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:which I was a listener from way back on the radio at WFMU, was a podcast now.
Guest:And I developed a much more connected relationship with it as a podcast than I ever had just kind of talking about it with my friends as a radio show.
Guest:I didn't necessarily always get to listen to it because it was on at a particular night, Tuesday night.
Guest:Late, right?
Guest:11.
Guest:It would go till about 11 or 12, depending on what hour he was airing it in.
Guest:And now that it was a podcast, this kind of on-demand medium, I had structured a schedule around listening to Tom on the podcast.
Guest:I knew, all right, it's going to be available on this morning.
Guest:I'm going to listen to that on the way in from work and the way home from work, and then I'll have enough to get me through to tomorrow as well.
Guest:Or sometimes I'd get overexcited and listen to it all at once and then have to wait to the next week or whatever.
Guest:And I built a structure around it.
Marc:You had a relationship with the medium.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Those two things were huge in my mind to be like, oh yeah, well, we know this.
Guest:Like we did morning radio.
Guest:We know how to develop a relationship with listeners.
Guest:And we also, from that Bill Simmons standpoint, it's like, I know what I like about Mark.
Guest:Mark knows what's funny.
Guest:Most of the time.
Yeah.
Guest:We know what we can do to our strengths.
Marc:Let's do that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I said, I remember, can you figure out how to upload it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Could we get support for this thing?
Marc:And also, we didn't have a studio other than we knew we could still get into the one we were at because they hadn't kicked us out of the office.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's sort of the known mythology of the...
Marc:Of the show is that, you know, we knew the night tech guy and we would go in and record, you know, this hodgepodge of a show.
Marc:And you talk to Apple and they were like, yeah, great.
Marc:We like Mark.
Marc:And they were looking for people that could do it.
Guest:There was a fan over there, a guy named Scott Simpson.
Guest:He was running the Apple podcast at the time on iTunes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they were willing to give us a banner to give us a little support.
Marc:And then I remember like, well, what are we going to do?
Marc:And I had this idea that WTF was a great kind of blanket.
Marc:It's just like, what the fuck is the great philosophical question of now?
Marc:And we just kind of used that as an umbrella for a series of segments that we tried.
Guest:Yeah, we thought of it more like radio.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I actually remember the first...
Guest:four or five episodes were compiled from one recording session.
Guest:We went into those studios at Air America that we were not supposed to be in, and we just sat, and I think we had maybe three people that we were going to call on the phone.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We had Matthew Weiss, who we worked with on Break Room Live.
Marc:A few with Matthew.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He would come in and do a couple of minutes.
Guest:And we had a time.
Guest:We'd call your dad.
Guest:We'd call your mom.
Guest:And we just recorded all these things at once.
Guest:A couple of monologues of yours, things that you were working into bits that you were going to use on stage.
Guest:And then I just took all this material, maybe three or four hours of material, and then turned it into like five shows.
Marc:right and that was how we did that was just how we had proven to ourselves proof of concept oh this can work and also like i still needed the security of other people around yes like i hadn't quite i would jump on the mic right that's right yeah like i need a booth audience i need to see you in the booth right because i had sort of mastered manning a mic or owning a mic on my own for a few hours yeah but it was still a nerve-wracking experience for me
Guest:Right.
Guest:The first guests we called- Jeff Ross.
Guest:Was Jeff Ross and David Feldman.
Guest:David Feldman.
Guest:Jim Earle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Patton.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And John Oliver.
Guest:Right.
Guest:All in that one day.
Guest:That was all on the phone with those guys?
Guest:All on the phone with all of those guys, and those are the first five episodes.
Guest:Wild.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we didn't think of them as like, oh, we're going to build these episodes around these guests.
Guest:We didn't know.
Guest:Some of them might not have even worked.
Guest:We didn't know.
Guest:We just did them.
Marc:We were thinking in terms of segments.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:Because we created this in our minds, an umbrella to do anything.
Marc:Right.
Marc:By that point, you had a certain amount of faith in my ability to talk about things.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But also, it seemed like the only real commitment we made was this weird, and it comes from what you recognized and how you listened, was we had to figure out how many we were going to do and when we were going to do them.
Marc:And the idea was Monday and Thursday.
Guest:Because that was a good space.
Guest:That was like my thought about Tom, about the best show was like, oh, well, if you start listening to this show on Monday, maybe you don't get it done until Tuesday or Wednesday and then boom, another episode is out.
Guest:It could fill the week.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And at the beginning that we had to build an audience that there was no kind of like, there was never kind of like, well, we'll throw one up and see what happens.
Marc:I mean, right from the get go, it was like, we're going to do this and we're in it.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And that commitment was insane because-
Marc:As time went on, just what we went through to get those shows up.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It was for both of us.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's not just for you.
Guest:I want to make that clear.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was in my pathology as well that this was like do or die.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We do not come to a Monday or a Thursday without an episode going up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No slacking.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Once we started in New York, there was no stopping.
Marc:We've never stopped.
Marc:There's never been a week since we started where there wasn't a new show.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:On Monday and Thursday.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So I had to somehow get home, figure out how to set up the shit in the garage in a matter of days, obviously.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In order for me to get the show to you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The only difference I should add is that there were some weeks over the course of doing this for 10 years where we did three in a week.
Guest:So it was like Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Guest:We did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just because of like-
Guest:either promotional commitments or something where we were overloaded with guests and we needed to get them out.
Guest:And we would do three in a week, which is why we find ourselves in this position where we've hit a thousand episodes at a timeframe that is shorter than what we would if we just did two episodes a week.
Guest:Like we're here in March and it's our thousandth episode, even though we started in September.
Guest:That's
Guest:Oh, I get it.
Guest:If you do the math, there's something off there, and it's because we have had occasions where we did three a week.
Guest:But the level of panic if something was going wrong was like, we got to get it up.
Guest:And by the way, the level of panic off of a show we were not making money on,
Guest:uh had no real prospects for until we were maybe a year and a half two years in so like all of that urgency was driven by i think both of our essential understanding that this was the truest form of what we were doing like and we had complete control yes so you still had to do your other job yeah producing i was yeah i was working at msnbc yeah the whole time
Marc:Because you didn't come on full time to WTF to what, 2000?
Guest:2013 was when I basically said, this is what I'm going to do with my life full time.
Marc:And I remember I was like, are you sure, dude?
Marc:Because I don't want to...
Guest:If this goes south and you got a family, I don't want... Well, the thing was, you were a little nervous about that, but I actually knew that I was at least a year late in making that decision, just looking at the numbers and everything.
Guest:The show had been self-sufficient and sustainable by 2012, so I could have actually made that choice sooner and didn't, and it was killing me.
Guest:It was killing me to do basically...
Guest:two full-time jobs.
Marc:But the fact that we had complete creative control early on and that it was all on us was exciting but also daunting.
Marc:What happened was I moved back to LA.
Marc:I had my garage.
Marc:It just had a bunch of shit in it.
Marc:I set up a table in there.
Marc:I had my Apple notebook, the big one, and I had this little mixer that I still have that I think we stole from Air America.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Is this the same one?
Guest:That was the one that was in the break room.
Marc:The Samson MDR6, they don't make anymore.
Marc:It's a dumb little analog mixer.
Marc:And so I set that up, and Jesse Thorne told me which mics to get.
Marc:I misunderstood them at first.
Marc:I got a Shure 57 instead of a Shure SM7, which wasn't the right mic.
Marc:I bought these mics, which are hanging mics.
Marc:They're boom mics, and I had them stuck on little fucking...
Marc:mic stands, the desktop mic stands, these giant mics.
Marc:And I'd sit there in the middle of all my garbage, just boxes of storage with guests at a table.
Marc:And it was like that for a long time.
Marc:I remember when I got the booms, it was like a big day when I started moving the boxes.
Marc:But that's how the early episodes...
Marc:In L.A.
Marc:started.
Guest:Well, let's because we're talking about how, you know, most of this is just you and I going back and forth on these decisions and questions and that to go back to the questions that our listeners sent in.
Guest:This one comes from Derek and he wanted to know, is it just you and Brendan that run the entire WTF empire?
Guest:Are there no minions beyond the cats?
Guest:Is WTF DIY?
Guest:And the answer to this is like, yes, with a but, right?
Guest:The thing that we have maintained since day one is that this thing is ours.
Guest:We control it.
Guest:We own it.
Guest:There's no overseer.
Guest:It's just our thing.
Guest:But we have absolutely had not just help from lots of people, but we're in strategic partnerships that help the thing get done, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Probably the other person who works on the show the most is Frank Capello, who's your assistant here in L.A.
Guest:I mean, he assists us both.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he's able to be here if you need him.
Guest:You need him here for guests.
Guest:And that role has been filled over the years by several other people.
Guest:Ashley Barnhill, Sam Varela.
Marc:There's another one for a minute.
Guest:Well, Sachi Azura, who's in New York, helped out on my end with that kind of stuff.
Marc:Who was that one, though?
Guest:Ashley Grashaw.
Marc:Oh, yeah, Ashley Grashaw.
Guest:And Brian Fernandez was your first assistant who was doing stuff for you.
Guest:So they've all been people who've worked on the show or emailed guests or done things of that nature.
Marc:But also early on, Anastasia Kusaki,
Marc:stosh was she was a woman that that worked in the same building as their america who was moving back when i got back to la i didn't have that much money when i started doing the show at home so she was my roommate for a long time right and so she was there during all this stuff where i took the you know the bath with the with the jeans on yeah she helped me like collate all the names of the donors because we were on a donor model
Guest:And that's such a perfect example of how we were operating.
Guest:It was just like, we know it had to be done, and can you help me do this to someone who was a well-wisher or a friend?
Guest:Nowadays, it's a little more routinized in that, like I said, we have partnerships.
Guest:We're partners with Stitcher.
Guest:For our archives, all our archives are at Stitcher Premium, but primarily our relationship with them is with their ad division, mid-roll.
Guest:I was selling the ads myself for three, four years, and it just got to be too overwhelming that my plate was full.
Guest:So every time our plate has gotten full, we've said like, well, how do we move this to someone else?
Marc:But also that's an example of how the business of podcasting grew simultaneously to our being in it.
Marc:Because you and I did not have cash incentive.
Marc:We just didn't know what we were doing other than providing, doing this thing we love doing without really a clear business model.
Marc:Because at the beginning, we were taking donations.
Marc:And it wasn't until just a couple of years ago where we realized that there were still people that were doing a monthly thing.
Marc:A few years ago.
Marc:Yeah, we were like, we're good.
Marc:And some of them were like, no, no.
Guest:We'll still give you $10 a month.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that's absolutely true.
Guest:I mean, the first annual ad that we got, annual meaning they bought for a whole year, was stamps.com.
Guest:They gave us a number of what the cost would be, and we looked at that per episode that comes out to X. All right, great.
Guest:And I said, you want to do this?
Guest:He said, yeah, let's go for it.
Guest:Let's do it.
Guest:Let's try it out.
Guest:And we were making no money beyond the donations that you're talking about that we were asking people to use to support the show.
Marc:And then I was doing the bankroll and I didn't know how to do it.
Marc:And we had to list all the things that were coming.
Marc:Separate the merch from my dumb spreadsheets.
Marc:I had to do that every month.
Marc:I remember loading those envelopes with stickers and swag.
Guest:It's so good to be done with that stuff.
Marc:But I just remember that the business, when you talk about mid-roll, when you talk about that time, you know, like Rogan comes on the scene, Nerdist comes on the scene.
Marc:You know, within a couple of years of when we started, the podcasting landscape started to get bigger with people I knew.
Marc:And people were experimenting with, you know, do we make it a premium?
Marc:Do we not make it a premium?
Marc:How do you grow an audience if it's a premium?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So like in mid-roll was something that came years later that somebody finally got the idea to create.
Marc:Jeff Ulrich.
Marc:Ulrich, who was the- Founder, co-creator of the Earwolf Network.
Marc:Right, with Scott Aukerman.
Guest:Yeah, and was somebody who wanted to work with us on, basically since the moment he started doing that, he was always talking with us and we just developed a kind of collegial relationship with him because he was another guy in our space.
Guest:That's a thing that gets forgotten is that all of us who were in that era starting out doing this, we all communicated.
Guest:Everybody did each other's shows.
Marc:Yeah, I talked to everybody.
Marc:You could talk to Doug Benson or Carolla.
Guest:Is this working out for you?
Guest:How's this?
Guest:Yeah, that was a big part of it.
Guest:And I developed a relationship with Jeff recently.
Guest:because of that type of back and forth.
Guest:He would call me for advice.
Guest:I would call him for advice.
Guest:And then he would say, how are we going to work together on this?
Guest:Well, we don't really need X, Y, and Z. And it became very obvious the type of thing that we needed was help with our ad sales because I was just doing it all myself.
Yeah.
Guest:basically like through old connections.
Marc:Terrestrial stuff.
Guest:Terrestrial style ad selling.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that was a good example of the business growing around us.
Marc:But ultimately to answer that guy's question, you know, yeah, we've had a lot of support and I've had, you know, part-time assistants that have helped out and, and, and managers that, you know, and people in the, Kelly Van Valkenberg is on your team now helps us all the time.
Guest:David Martin as well.
Guest:And, uh, um, Rob Urio, who was like your one, you know, one of the original accountants and he now just manages our books.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know,
Marc:Yeah, well, now we have books.
Marc:But the bottom line is the actual thing that you hear on the air is always me and Brendan, really.
Marc:You know, whatever the support is, but it's always me and you.
Marc:Like, it really is the way it works.
Marc:It's like I do the raw thing.
Marc:I send it to you.
Marc:You do your thing.
Marc:And like we've had opportunities and we had discussions about do we want to start a network?
Marc:Do we want to produce other shows?
Marc:Do we want to be part of a network?
Marc:We knew early on we did not want to be part of a network.
Marc:We had our own thing.
Marc:We were a big podcast and we were doing fine.
Marc:We're not.
Marc:And I don't think either one of us are really sort of entrepreneurial in spirit where we felt like it would be nice to make money not doing anything and just to have something we could sell.
Marc:But we're also workers.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So I don't know that people really realize just how much work goes into this in terms of talking to people, getting ready to talk to people, scheduling things.
Marc:And then your job where you sit with an episode for two, three hours, four hours, however long it takes you to meticulously do the production of the episode and post it.
Marc:But we were busy.
Marc:It really comes down to that.
Marc:It's like, that's the difference.
Marc:Like we, we are very meticulous about how, and we do this and, and what we do.
Marc:And it's very time consuming and it's a lot of work.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But it never changed.
Guest:It's been the same.
Guest:I mean, like things get easier for us and things become more routine, but we essentially are still doing the same process we've done since the minute we started marketing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And it's a lot of work and it's the work we can manage and it's the work we can handle.
Marc:That's the other thing when you're slightly sort of perfectionist and sort of like driven is I don't think you and I are great at delegating.
Marc:The way we do what we do is how we do it.
Marc:Like I sit in here by myself, you sit by yourself and we do our thing.
Marc:It's not so easy to go like, will you take care of this?
Marc:It's like, I'll take it.
Guest:I will say it is easy for me to ask if I'm in a situation...
Guest:It's easy for me to say, all right, I don't want to handle this anymore, like our bookings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And to shift that to an agency that's going to do that, that we pay money to, to handle it.
Marc:Yeah, I ran out of friends.
Marc:Basically.
Marc:I ran out of knowing somebody who knows somebody.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I don't have a Rolodex full of people.
Guest:I don't do well with hunting down folks.
Guest:So it only makes sense for me at that point to work with someone.
Marc:And we work with Central Booking.
Guest:Central Town Booking, which is Joanna Jordan, who was a letterman booker, and she runs her own shop now and books Kimmel, which is a big help to us because we get a lot of the people that come through the circuit.
Guest:They know of our show and they...
Guest:have contact with them already.
Guest:And Abigail Parsons, who's our lead booker, is always on those connected routes, right?
Marc:So now we get pitch people.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:There's a question here from Doug.
Guest:He said, I'm curious if there are some episodes you can point to that really jumped the number of listeners to your podcast over the years.
Guest:It's funny because this happens all the time that you can actually see new people coming in because of a particular guest.
Guest:It just happened recently.
Guest:With Yardley Smith and The Simpsons in general, I think having you on The Simpsons, we saw an influx of people coming that had not been there before, and you can chart that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Mandy Moore is a good example of someone who people were probably coming in because they're fans of hers and had not heard the show before, or they had read the Ryan Adams piece in the New York Times and wanted to hear her talk about that.
Guest:But we noticed the numbers go up.
Guest:And I would just say that that happens consistently.
Guest:Every month or so, there's a guest or two, and you can probably figure out who they are.
Guest:You just look at the list, and you go, oh, I know that person very well from pop culture, and those are usually the ones that make the numbers spike.
Guest:However, we have a relatively stable...
Guest:foundation at this point where it doesn't dip below.
Guest:I would say that over the history of the show, there's really basically two names that jumped the show immediately from one level to another.
Guest:And that was Robin Williams, which was a huge thing for the show and just the idea of what we were doing and how it could work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then obviously Obama, which was like a 3 million download episode.
Guest:It just changed overnight, changed our business.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In terms of the increase to audience, it's still ongoing.
Guest:And you have audience that drops off.
Guest:You have new audience that comes in.
Guest:And part of that is the reason you hear a variety of guests on the show.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also like it's still like despite what anyone thinks and no matter how big podcasting is, it's still a limited slice of the media diet.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's bigger than it used to be.
Marc:But but also like this show is still very discoverable.
Marc:I mean, there were people that watched The Simpsons that were like, I didn't even know this.
Marc:There was a real show.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:My father's not clear how to listen to it still.
Guest:That might be a different case.
Marc:I know, I know.
Guest:That'd be somewhat.
Guest:But that goes into a good point, though.
Guest:It's like beyond just guests spiking the audience numbers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like there's visibility out there that winds up spiking.
Guest:You being on GLOW brought more listeners in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The thing that changed the game for us probably more than anything was that New York Times article by Dan Saltzstein in 2011 that really-
Guest:We were told by other people doing podcasts at the time, this just changed it for us.
Marc:For them, for their podcast.
Marc:Yeah, for the medium in itself.
Marc:That was a big piece in the art section.
Guest:But it really changed our lives.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:There's those three things.
Guest:Robin Williams, that Times piece, and Obama changed our lives.
Guest:When Robin Williams died, my biggest regret was that I never personally met him to thank him for changing my life.
Guest:He made my life better by agreeing to do this show.
Marc:And also, I was so happy that it existed for when he died.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because there was so little of that type of conversation with him.
Marc:Right.
Marc:If any.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, we should also thank your old manager, Olivia Wingate, who was, you know, I think, you know, responsible for a lot of the early kind of press around the show and, you know, getting you out there for things to associate you with the podcast.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And she was a believer.
Guest:Like, that was the thing.
Guest:Like, you...
Guest:Joined with her right when we were starting the podcast.
Marc:Right after we started?
Guest:Just after.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Because you had brought initial episodes of the podcast to your old manager and he didn't get it.
Guest:And so you were like, fuck this, I'm out.
Guest:Again, go back to that idea of like, yes, you and I do this on our own, but there has been help along the way.
Guest:Olivia was huge in that.
Guest:Judd Apatow was huge in that.
Guest:If you talk about an aha moment, that for me as a producer-
Marc:That he listened?
Guest:Not just that he listened.
Guest:Well, he was a fan.
Guest:He loved the show.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And he came on the show, and he brought you the digital recordings that he made when he was a kid.
Guest:In high school, yeah.
Guest:With Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he said, take them and do whatever you want with these.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was a coup.
Guest:I just remember sitting there thinking,
Guest:we beat like fresh air to the punch on this.
Guest:Or like This American Life, like this is something they would do.
Guest:They would be like, listen to like, this is like the king of comedy right now, king of Hollywood comedy.
Guest:And here is him as a little kid, like basically breaking it open.
Guest:And he found the connection between that and what you were doing and felt simpatico to that and was like, well, here, you use these things.
Guest:And that episode was huge for us.
Guest:And similarly, like for me, from a personal standpoint,
Guest:Having Ira Glass be a champion of the show early on when he was.
Guest:That was a big deal.
Guest:Big deal.
Guest:He helped put us on to NPR affiliates through PRX.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, I remember that.
Guest:And he and Jesse Thorne, and Jesse, we've mentioned his name already.
Marc:We did like 10 episodes that we made available for- Yeah, with beeps and stuff in them so we can air them on here.
Marc:On NPR affiliates.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was exciting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we mentioned Jesse a few times, but he's another person who just kind of gave of himself.
Guest:And Terry Gross, that's another one.
Guest:It's like to have that happen with Terry Gross.
Marc:That was huge, man.
Marc:We're talking about respect in the industry in a way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that when I interviewed Ira, it was all very nerve wracking.
Marc:Me going through the streets of New York to interview Ira Glass, who was this huge...
Marc:huge you know he's huge in radio he's the you know he is npr and and the weird thing is is like and this has always been the secret to my uh success as an interviewer is i i you know of course i've listened to this american life right i of course i've watched a few simpsons but there's very few things that i compulsively follow so i always have a little bit of distance i don't have the proper context for everybody i knew that
Marc:So you're not overly reverent.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:To different degrees.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But I knew that I wanted to be validated by these people.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And the fact that they did, I was sort of like, well, that's something.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But with Ira, I remember getting to his studio where we were going to record.
Marc:It just made sense.
Marc:But I wouldn't let him sit in his chair.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Like I sat in his chair and he sat in the guest chair.
Guest:You did the same to David Remnick a little while ago, I remember.
Marc:Right.
Marc:David, the New Yorker.
Guest:Yeah, like he walked in and you were already in his chair.
Guest:You're like, yep, that's how it's going.
Marc:You got to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We did so much experimenting early on.
Marc:I was in cars with people.
Marc:I love those episodes.
Marc:With Eddie Pepitone.
Guest:Or you went to Zach Galifianakis on the set of that movie he was making with Todd Phillips.
Marc:Yeah, the date.
Marc:Due date.
Marc:Due date.
Marc:Yeah, that was the Zach interview.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then at same time, see, that was what I loved is like you could do that.
Guest:And we had like Zach Galifianakis, but then the same episode where it was actually a two-parter, you talked to an old buddy of yours, Dean Hines, who was like an astrophysicist, right?
Marc:Yeah, my buddy Dean from junior high.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:yeah he's uh he was a drummer in like a little band that i had in junior high and he's got cp and he's uh you know he's always a very bright guy and now yeah he worked on the hubble telescope like yeah i mean i would get so geared up for that stuff like i'd i'd have the fucking equipment in the car turned on driving down the highway in in new mexico or i was driving in a car with maria bamford coming back from this thing we went to to do that you were doing the max
Marc:fun kind yeah jesse thorne sing i was out in the in the streets of uh houston with lucas molandes that's a good one the texan you went and found out about conjunto music conjunto music yeah just by a fluke the creation museum oh yeah the creation museum with ryan singer and jeff tate yeah yeah we we snuck in the gear we i think we had it didn't i have lavalier mics or something i don't remember yeah i think so yeah because we had to do it under wraps yeah
Marc:There was an excitement in sort of defining and figuring out what the show was and the beauty of it was it didn't matter.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:We could do whatever the fuck we wanted.
Guest:Well, when you talk about validation and to have the validation of these type of people like Ira Glass and Terry Gross, by doing those, getting to where we're at today with a thousand episodes and to have the foundation of that be a show that you and I could agree on, this is our sensibility and we're going to make this the way we want and not compromise in that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:To get those people to buy into it and be like, yeah, that's good.
Guest:That's all the validation I need.
Guest:And I know that's weird because they're just people too, but I fundamentally respect everything they do.
Guest:When I got into doing radio in college, my thought was...
Guest:Like if I could have the ideal scenario with my life and career, I want to create something that's like a combination of This American Life and The Howard Stern Show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like I want to put that together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like in a weird way, it's like kind of what this is, I think.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like on a personal note, what's very cool about that is-
Guest:I've had a few times now.
Guest:Well, one, Ira and Terry have both been very nice to us personally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I have still tremendous respect for them, but also now can look at like, oh my God, I got this totally nice email from Terry Gross with her talking to me like a person who respects what I do.
Guest:Is that wild?
Guest:It's really great.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But then there's two things that happen on the air that's very, very validating to me.
Guest:One is when you were on Bill Simmons' podcast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You were talking to him about like,
Guest:our setup yeah what we do and you were telling him like what my role is and he was like god i gotta get a brendan mcdonald i'm like yeah that guy i started this because of that guy you know and he needs you and and then on stern yeah after you had springsteen on yeah some momo yeah calls stern up
Guest:And it's like, hey, did you hear that Mark Maron had Bruce Springsteen?
Guest:What's Gary doing over there?
Guest:You got to fire him.
Guest:He didn't get Bruce Springsteen.
Guest:Mark Maron got Bruce Springsteen.
Guest:And Howard's like, yeah, what is that, Gary?
Guest:Maybe I should have Mark Maron's producer.
Guest:I'm like, yeah, that's number two.
Marc:I didn't even know that one.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That made my life.
Marc:That's fucking great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the Terry Grossing was really like, whatever I do has evolved from an organic beginning in how I do what I do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It is mine.
Marc:Obviously, we didn't invent interviewing, but I don't know that I essentially interview people.
Marc:But when she was asked to do that at live radio event to be interviewed, she said she wouldn't do it unless I interviewed her.
Marc:She requested me.
Marc:And I'd done her show a few times, but I'd never really met her, I don't think.
Marc:No, I don't think you were in the studio with her.
Marc:Most people don't do that.
Marc:But the fact that she wanted me, I was like, oh, my God.
Marc:This is like, you know, this is a big deal.
Marc:The best interviewer in the world.
Marc:So much happened for me that night, really, in terms of my skill set, you know, as in terms of me realizing it, because like, you know, people just come over here, you know, like I'm going to do what I do.
Marc:I'm going to, you know, fidget around and turn the thing on before they get here.
Marc:I'm going to like not look at them when they come in.
Marc:Like, you know, I have things that I do naturally.
Marc:just so they get comfortable and they don't feel it happening.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, I do have a way of doing that and it works.
Marc:But, you know, I don't always acknowledge that I necessarily have a skill set.
Marc:I just sort of can hear things and I wait and I can feel when conversations shift.
Marc:But with Terry.
Marc:You know, it was a big deal because nobody knows anything about that woman and nobody sees her.
Marc:You know, you usually if you're on her show, you know, you're on an ISDN hookup and you're not in a studio with her.
Marc:It's very unclear what her life was.
Marc:And I realized that that's really true.
Marc:And it's not a normal thing.
Marc:Usually with people who are that public, there's information about them.
Marc:But like I did what I usually do.
Marc:Like I was like, how am I going to.
Marc:really find out about her what is she willing to do and also I knew that she's not a live performer we're going to be in front of almost 2,000 people you know I can do that yeah can she is she okay but then I started to really understand that like she trusted me with this right and it was like it was it was it wasn't a big responsibility but I really wanted it to go well for her I wanted her to you know be comfortable and I wanted it to go well there are times in the thing where you can hear you you're like reassuring her you're like don't worry Terry we're
Guest:OK.
Marc:But like it was and then like to do the research, it was just it was interesting because I do have a way of researching.
Marc:I'm not completely unprepared.
Marc:And with her, you know, I saw her like, you know, what was available as a bio.
Marc:And then I just saw these gaps.
Marc:You know, like what was going on those six years?
Marc:Where was she here?
Marc:So like I had to be very deliberate in sort of finding these gaps that would reveal something about who she was.
Marc:But I also knew that was live.
Marc:And my instinct in a live situation is to go for the laugh.
Marc:But I knew in that situation, it was obviously her audience and my audience who were decent people.
Marc:They weren't yahoos.
Marc:And they knew how to be present and behave like an audience.
Marc:But there were definitely moments there where I saw a place to get a laugh.
Marc:And I was like, don't do it.
Marc:Let her have the space.
Marc:Let it sit for a minute.
Marc:It's OK.
Marc:Even it was live.
Marc:And it's hard as a comic in a live situation not to jump on that beat.
Marc:But I was like, this isn't about you.
Marc:It's about Terry.
Marc:Just let it sit and, you know, sacrifice that moment for a real moment.
Marc:And then it made the ones that you did jump in on even better.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I was very aware of respecting her, of making sure she was comfortable in that environment, and sort of carrying the thing as a gracious host, but also keeping it going.
Marc:There was a lot of things that I was very aware that I was doing, and it made me feel like a real professional.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It was one of the best nights of my life, really, that it came off so beautifully.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:There's a list of questions I have here that are things that come up over and over again.
Guest:We should probably just get these out of the way because I figure people are going to ask over and over again.
Guest:Let's just answer them now.
Guest:Specifically, this one came from Brian, but lots of people ask this.
Guest:It says, was that Horatio Sands who did those weird chupacabra bits with you in these super early episodes of WTF?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And some people might not know what he's talking about there, but we do get asked quite a bit about in the early episodes, usually like these are within the first 100.
Guest:We were doing, as Mark and I talked about earlier, we were doing a lot of segments.
Guest:And part of those segments were like sketches with improv comics and other actors.
Guest:But we would try to play them off like they were real.
Marc:It's real Kaufman-esque kind of like, and we never let on for some of them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, the idea was this was part of the WTF moment, right?
Marc:It was also like, it was really a legitimate third segment for a long time.
Marc:It was the only thing that remained.
Marc:We didn't do comedy bits, but we do a monologue, an interview, and then we'd have a second guest that may or may not be real.
Guest:Be real.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And this kind of stemmed from us doing this on Morning Sedition.
Guest:In fact, in the early episodes, we used some of our old Morning Sedition people to do their characters.
Guest:Kent Jones did this character Lawton Smalls, Jim Earl.
Guest:We do the guy who reads the obits, Mort Mortensen.
Guest:And we just treated them like the characters.
Guest:We didn't say this is Jim Earl doing Mort Mortensen.
Guest:Chupacabra was not Horatio Sands.
Guest:That was Nick Kroll, which is actually a bit he brought to other shows, his own show, The Kroll Show and Comedy Bang Bang.
Guest:But here I'll just go through finally for once and for all.
Guest:So if anybody's asking out there, who was this one?
Guest:Who is that one?
Guest:You still get emails when people listen.
Marc:We wouldn't let on.
Marc:We have people go, is that real?
Marc:And it wasn't where it was policy never to say.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So come on now, the nightclub comic from the 70s.
Marc:John Daly.
Guest:John Daly.
Guest:The very first one of those questionable, is it real or is it not, was a guy named Troy Conrad.
Guest:And he went by his real name, but he presented himself as a libertarian firefighter.
Guest:Do you remember that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A lot of people wrote in then.
Guest:They were like, that guy's ridiculous.
Guest:You can't operate a fire company that way.
Guest:Then we had a fantastically funny guy who we used to work with on the radio, too, Dave Waterman, who did a few voices.
Guest:One guy was Kevin LaValle, who was a motivational speaker, but it turned out he was a white supremacist.
Guest:Probably not as funny today, actually.
Guest:Daryl Loomis, who was a high school drug counselor, and it turned out that his way of getting the kids to not do the drugs was just to do them himself.
Marc:And he did salvia on the air.
Guest:Yeah, he'd just do it and freak out.
Guest:And he was also, Troy, the 12th member of the state.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This was after we had David Wayne on, and then we had a follow-up with a guest who was a guy who was supposedly kicked out of the state by David and the other people.
Guest:You're right.
Guest:Then there was a bad drug dealer, bad as in he was not good at it, named Frog, and that was Jerry Minor.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Matt Walsh did a thing, Mark and I were just listening to earlier, a guy named Michael Garvey, who was homebound assistance for the elderly, and he would do it over the phone, and it turned out he just liked talking to them about feces.
Guest:Yeah, about poop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Matt Walsh also did a thing with June Diane Raphael and James Pumphrey, where they were a married couple that had a perfect marriage, but it turned out that really what they were doing was horribly abusing their son.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Did they write a book or something?
Guest:Yes, right.
Guest:And the thing was you make your child pay rent.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:And Toby Huss did a thing called Rudy Cassoni, a guy named Rudy Cassoni.
Marc:The lounge singer?
Guest:He's a lounge singer, yeah.
Guest:Other questions that have come up a lot.
Guest:Well, Boomer Lives, you just addressed that on a recent show, and obviously that's your cat that left and never came back, Boomer.
Marc:Yeah, Boomer Lives, he was a cat that I had for years, and he was an outdoor cat, and he disappeared.
Marc:It was right at the beginning of when I was making Marin, so I don't know what year that was.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was just like one of those- Yeah, it was one of those things where they disappear and you don't know what happened to them.
Marc:You can expect the worst, but he just didn't come back.
Marc:And it just became the mythologizing of that cat.
Guest:Well, and this guy, Chris, said, I would like to hear the snippet of the episode when Boomer meows on the mic.
Guest:And so here it is right now.
Meow.
Guest:That was Boomer, which is also now your logo that you used at the end of Marin.
Marc:Marin, yeah, for the Boomer Liz Productions.
Guest:You used that meow, yeah.
Guest:Lock the Gates.
Guest:A lot of people still want to know what that is.
Guest:People always discover that, and they're like, why didn't I?
Marc:Yeah, and you want to tell them what it is?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I had a very powerful...
Marc:minute or two of movie screen time and Almost Famous.
Marc:I'm the angry promoter in Almost Famous.
Marc:And it's from that scene where Sweetwater bails on their set because Billy Crudup's character gets electrocuted.
Marc:And I'm the promoter who runs up to the bus as they're leaving.
Marc:And I get into a fight with Noah Taylor.
Marc:And I'm like, fuck you, fuck these guys.
Marc:And the bus takes off and I go, wow.
Marc:Lock the gates.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Lock the gates on these assholes, I think.
Marc:And then they buy the gate by driving through it.
Marc:Yeah, they drive through the gate and I chase them in the little golf cart.
Guest:Well, that is the actual origin of that, although we did get this very heartfelt email about lock the gates that I should read right now.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:If you like this.
Guest:Hi, Mark.
Guest:My name is Gabriel from Portland.
Guest:With embarrassment, I write to you.
Guest:Have spent countless hours accumulated in the past listening to your podcast.
Guest:Turned one of my friends to your podcast a while back.
Guest:Was talking to him the other day and told him, I keep waiting for Mark to address the line of the opening of the WTF podcast.
Guest:Fuck the gays, I said.
Guest:He laughed at me and said, lock the gates.
Guest:That's what it says.
Guest:I felt very stupid because you would think after being in this country for so many years, I would speak and understand perfect English.
Guest:I'm Mexican.
Guest:Love and thank you for what you do for all mankind.
Guest:So, yeah.
Marc:He stuck with it despite the fact that- That's what I was thinking.
Marc:Despite the fact that he said, fuck the gays at the beginning of the show.
Marc:He's been a fan forever.
Marc:It's just a weird glitch.
Guest:Or no, maybe he thought you were talking about it in a holistic way, like something that we should all do.
Guest:We should, yes, have sex with everyone.
Marc:Why is there this weird thing that Maren does about the gays?
Guest:Music.
Guest:People ask us about the music on the show a lot.
Guest:The opening theme is created by a guy named John Montagna, who is my neighbor now.
Guest:Coincidentally, we wound up moving to the same neighborhood.
Guest:You see him around?
Guest:All the time.
Guest:We're kids in the same school.
Guest:PTA stuff.
Guest:John is awesome.
Guest:John did some bumpers for us, too, back in the day.
Marc:Originally, it was ACDC's Down Payment Blues.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:About 30 episodes in, we realized we are cruising for a bruising by doing that.
Guest:Boy, I love that opening, though.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I love John's.
Guest:John's is ours.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And we did a solicitation.
Guest:Just, hey, do you want to do an intro for the show?
Marc:And we got submissions.
Marc:Submissions.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That one would just hit right away.
Guest:And then someone wrote this asking, do you play, you Mark, play all the musical intros to the interviews or are they canned or bought?
Guest:Do you just improv them?
Guest:I must commend your playing.
Guest:It's really come along over the last 10 years.
Guest:So keep on rocking and keep on talking.
Guest:So that's a nice compliment.
Guest:The answer is yes.
Guest:As of around like episode 500, they're all yours.
Marc:They are?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's all the stuff that you do at the end of the show.
Guest:Um, you know, prior to that, we were using John's bumpers.
Guest:And then, uh, anytime you would, if you hear something on the show from the early years and it's a bumper done by a particular submission or something, we identify it on that show.
Guest:Like you would say, uh, this was from so-and-so who sent this in and, uh, you know, we would, we would air it that way.
Guest:But recently we've moved to them being just your bumpers, uh, that are based on the things that you do at the end.
Marc:I appreciate the compliment.
Marc:I have worked hard at becoming better at guitar, and I'm glad that I got the confidence to keep doing that.
Marc:That was one of those weird things that just became a thing.
Marc:I did it a couple of times, and now I do it all the time.
Marc:I don't know why it became a thing.
Marc:In my mind, not unlike the intro,
Marc:the my monologues i just assume that like not everybody listens to my monologues or my guitar playing at the end there's something i do for me uh and and then sometimes i at the end i'm sort of like this is for those of you who are still listening but uh but yeah i do practice and i and i do you know as some of you know who have listened to the show for a long time i've i've played out a few times with jimmy vivino and
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Slash.
Marc:I do my own thing.
Marc:I don't know that I hold my own.
Marc:I do.
Marc:I actually do hold my own.
Marc:I'm all right.
Guest:One last thing that was in here as like a recurring question, and it's really been a recurring question since we solicited emails for the thousandth episode.
Guest:was people just very simply writing in and saying, how is Todd Hansen?
Guest:Because on an earlier episode of this show, Todd, who is the former head writer of The Onion and a very funny, good writer in many other projects, the episode that featured him on this show involved him discussing, for really the first time he ever talked about it publicly, a very real, very intense attempted suicide.
Marc:I had no idea.
Marc:That was, that was like, it just so happened that I was staying at the hotel where he tried to do it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he came and I didn't know when he came over.
Guest:The way that this used to work a lot was when you would spend time in New York for shows or whatever reason you would just talk to the people the way you used to, you know, generally book the show, which would be like, talk to people, you know, and say, Hey, do you want to do this?
Guest:And so then when you would go to New York, you would just say, hey, you want to do an interview?
Guest:And you'd go to either where they live or they'd come to your hotel and you just do it that way.
Guest:And you happen to be staying at this hotel.
Guest:It's like the Holiday Inn Express.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I think in Brooklyn.
Guest:And he came over and he said, I've been here before.
Marc:He got there.
Marc:He said, I've been here before.
Marc:And he told me he tried to kill himself at that hotel.
Marc:And I said, are we going to talk about that?
Marc:He says, I don't know.
Guest:But I did tell my therapist that I was going to be talking to you, which I always think is hilarious that that's what made it OK.
Guest:Oh, Mark Maron's going to be there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You'll be all right over there.
Marc:And we didn't end up talking about it, but we sat on that in case he wanted to talk about it.
Marc:And ultimately, I went back to his home and we did talk through that whole day of him doing that.
Marc:It was like that was all one episode.
Guest:I should let people know, you know, before we go on to answer that question, how is Todd Hansen, that, you know, one of the more moving and intense things that have to do with this show is the reaction to that episode, particularly that we still, to this day,
Guest:get responses from clinicians and educators saying that they use that episode with students, patients, family members to help talk about how to speak to a loved one.
Marc:And also what the thinking is behind the decision.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:And also like a lot of emails from people who were depressed or in the same position.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah, it was heavy and it remains one of the great episodes.
Marc:And I'm happy to report that I had not talked to Todd in a while.
Marc:And I reached out to him and we spoke on the phone and he's doing pretty well.
Marc:He you know, he's still managing, you know, his his mental issues, but he's managing it responsibly.
Marc:He's still with the same therapist.
Marc:He's doing very well with the therapist.
Marc:He still has the same girlfriend that he had for years and they're OK.
Marc:And I guess the big turn of events for Todd is that, you know, he'd never gotten a college degree dropped out of high school, I believe, and started writing for for the onion.
Marc:And like Bard has set up these these programs in some cities where, you know, certain people of a certain economic standing or who haven't gotten a college education can apply to go to college and he's going to college.
Marc:That's awesome for a general humanities degree.
Marc:He's he's still writing.
Marc:He wrote a piece of short fiction that got some attention from The New York Times.
Marc:He does some workshops with another guy from The Onion in comedy writing.
Marc:And and he's thrilled to be going to college and he sounded great.
Marc:And he's doing pretty well.
Marc:And he was happy to talk to me and I was happy to talk to him.
Guest:That's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's another thing I think people want to know.
Marc:That squeak, it's the boom.
Marc:It's not the chair.
Marc:Oh, people think it's the chair.
Marc:Sometimes.
Guest:Oh.
Marc:They're like, fix your chair.
Marc:I'm like, not.
Marc:I'll fix the boom maybe.
Marc:It's got springs on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:What, that's not fun to listen to?
Marc:That and eating.
Guest:The eating is horrible, and I hate you for it whenever you do it, but the noise of the room, I don't mind.
Guest:I'm okay with the squeak.
Marc:Yeah, I am too.
Marc:Like the Roseanne interview with the cantaloupe.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:There's just times where you'll send me a file with someone who's eating or yourself or you're doing something.
Guest:There's times where you've even acknowledged it.
Guest:You've said, like, I probably shouldn't be doing this, but I'm going to chew this gum.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I shouldn't have done this, but I just threw 12 Tootsie Rolls in my mouth.
Yeah.
Marc:It's up.
Marc:There's some people that are so sensitive to it.
Marc:They're literally like, dude, I get these emails like, what the fuck are you doing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I think I've texted you at times.
Guest:Like I will get revenge on you for doing this, this episode.
Guest:Well, it's a good time to talk about this stuff because like.
Guest:There's a lot of people who are interested in what our process is, how we do what we do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This question came from another person named Brendan.
Guest:It's not me.
Guest:I did not send my own question.
Guest:But Brendan here asks, how much on average, if any, is edited from your conversation?
Guest:Does Brendan do all the edits himself or do you suggest things to cut?
Guest:Thanks again.
Guest:Here's to another thousand.
Marc:Well, obviously you do all this stuff on your own, but there are times, like I always will say something after I talk to somebody.
Guest:We talk after pretty much every interview, unless there's time constraints prevent us from being.
Marc:And not that you would notice, but sometimes I say like, there's a moment there that like resonated with me.
Marc:You'll probably feel it.
Marc:Or I think that the core of this interview is around that.
Guest:That's been a big help.
Guest:For you to learn within yourself what the arcs of these things are.
Guest:Because when we first started, my instruction to you was just basically record.
Guest:Just go do as much as you possibly can.
Guest:Then I would take the thing and shape it.
Guest:And what that really meant was a lot of times moving entire chunks around or cutting a lot of material.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But, you know, I just wanted to kind of give you the freedom to talk and go on tangents and go in any direction that you wanted.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, the secret was to get it so that it did seem like a completely uninterrupted, seamless conversation, despite the amount of production that we put behind it.
Guest:Now, like I said, you've done a thousand of these and you're pretty good at identifying that within the conversation now.
Guest:You self-redirect a lot, you know.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Oh, yeah, definitely.
Marc:Oh, that's good.
Marc:Well, I know when I'm talking to somebody, there's a moment where it turns.
Marc:And I've talked about that before, I think.
Marc:About a third of the way through or 20, 25 minutes in, the tone, something will relax.
Marc:And then usually shortly thereafter, there'll be this thing where I feel like, oh, this is the hinge of this conversation or who this person is or what they're struggling with or what shifted or what year.
Marc:There's a moment there.
Guest:And what I am listening for when I'm sitting there with these is obviously trying to identify that spot and then making sure that the conversation as a whole supports that.
Guest:Because if you have that spot, but then there's been an hour of bullshit before that that detracts from it, then that stuff's got to get cut down.
Guest:And that's got to be thinned out so that it's a smoother ride to that point that you're talking about.
Marc:And I think this is a real sort of like pulling back the curtain thing for a lot of people is that there is an organic nature to this show.
Marc:But the fact is, is that you can work upwards of three hours on these things.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:The average length of me working on one is three hours.
Marc:Right.
Marc:To sort of mold a narrative and find an arc and sort of trim the fat and really kind of make these things have this flow to them.
Marc:The funny thing to me is when we have guests say like, God, I was really on top of it that day.
Marc:I'm like, you don't know what Brendan went through.
Guest:Oh, like when they've heard it afterwards?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:They're like, God, it's very clear.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, there have been times where I've texted you in the middle and I'm like, this is major surgery.
Guest:Major surgery.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't have to throw any human being under the bus for that because that's not to say it's any person's specific fault.
Guest:In fact, I can identify one person by name because she brought it up.
Guest:Fiona Apple sent you a message afterwards that was like, your editor did wonders to that because I thought I was all over the place that day.
Guest:And you are correct, Fiona.
Yeah.
Guest:That was a tough one.
Guest:But I do think it was very obvious what the through line was in that conversation.
Guest:And so it might have been hard or time-consuming to edit that, but the heart of it, the core of it was there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I always say that my inspiration in terms of editing this show is generally like a movie editor.
Guest:You're not aware of the edits in a film unless they're really in the forefront trying to make you aware of it, like a Scorsese montage or something.
Guest:But most of the time you watch a movie and you're just being taken from scene to scene.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Where the most important work on that film was probably done in the editing.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:In most films.
Guest:And another thing that always jumps into my head is The Muppet Show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they always had a special guest star.
Guest:And I remember reading somewhere in like a thing about the Muppets.
Guest:People who are guest stars have fans come up to them all the time and be like, oh, I remember you from when I was a kid and you were on the Muppet show.
Guest:Did you do that live?
Guest:Like they thought it was like Saturday Night Live.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And like every shot of the Muppet show is a special effects shot.
Guest:Every single shot.
Guest:There's some kind of rig set up or a ramp or something that probably required several hours worth of time for them to get that to look good.
Guest:But when you were a kid, you just watched The Muppet Show and it seemed like people were there talking with Muppets, hanging out with Muppets.
Guest:And that was always my intention with this.
Guest:Even back when we were doing it with multi-segments,
Guest:where it wasn't highlighted around one interview.
Guest:I just wanted this to sound like you're hanging out with Marc Maron.
Guest:You turn this on and this is Marc Maron's life and his brain that you're hearing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I'm glad we're being transparent about it because I think it is one of the reasons
Marc:That we work so well together, but also one of the reasons that the quality of the podcast remains so consistent is that when you listen to a lot of podcasts, a lot of people just think like, well, just turn on the mics.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But if you're not doing live, there's no real reason not to edit.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:And also what the point I was trying to make is you happen to be exceptionally meticulous and good at it and inspired with it.
Marc:And it's it's it's almost an art unto itself.
Marc:And that's just the fortunate thing that we have in our pairing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But there's a lot of times like people are like, well, they're just turning the mics on.
Marc:I can do that.
Marc:It's like we're not really just doing the same thing.
Guest:It's like people not understanding that like talk show late night talk show hosts have writing staff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that was the weirdest thing when the writer strike happened and people were like, I don't get it.
Marc:I thought he was just doing that.
Marc:Those jokes.
Marc:But these are smart people that don't.
Marc:It's a blind spot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's because the thing that you're actually watching is good.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it allows that illusion.
Guest:It encourages that illusion.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's what we're doing.
Guest:Like, we're not lying to people in the way we present the show.
Guest:We are creating the best possible product of two people talking to each other.
Marc:We're not adding things.
Marc:Right.
Marc:We're taking things out to help them out a little.
Right.
Guest:To help everybody out.
Guest:We could take out more, but I think it actually, from day one, one of my things was I want to preserve the, what do you call it inside of a diamond?
Guest:Imperfection.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like I wanted to preserve those things.
Guest:There was something you did in like one of the very first episodes where you, I turned your mic on.
Guest:We were in the booth together in America and I turned your mic on and you had just shoveled a handful of pretzels in your mouth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you started talking, but you were stuck because you had pretzels in your mouth.
Guest:And then you said, leave this.
Guest:I want this to be on the podcast.
Guest:And you did?
Guest:I left it.
Guest:And I remember that was a moment for me where I was like, oh, these things should be in there.
Guest:You should leave these things all the time.
Guest:So Anna Faris goes to take a pee.
Guest:That should be in the show.
Guest:But this guy, Jack, asked, I've been doing an oral history and recording and transcribing interviews.
Guest:I edit out a lot of like and you knows.
Guest:Does Brendan edit those sorts of words out of interviews?
Guest:Are all the guests pretty well spoken?
Guest:I don't edit a lot of those out, to be honest with you.
Guest:In fact, I hear them and I deliberately leave them in.
Guest:Sometimes if a person has a tick...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That causes them to say like a lot as a punctuation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I will trim those just because it gets irritating.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not for any fault of that person.
Guest:It's a thing they probably don't even realize.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I used to do it with the you knows.
Guest:Oh, and I used to cut them out.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:There were points where you were you knowing or yang a lot over the end of sentences.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, let's just ease those back.
Guest:But I do editing for other things and have done editing for other things in my life where I have cut out almost all the you knows and likes because the situation called for it.
Guest:Like if I'm editing a news interview or I edit this podcast for Chris Hayes, the information is paramount.
Guest:So you want that stuff to come across.
Guest:And if a person is saying you know or like or um, they're often doing that as they search for information in their head, search for the next point.
Marc:One of the great ummers is Sam Seder.
Guest:Oh, boy.
Guest:Is he ever.
Guest:Him and Obama could have an um-off.
Marc:Well, my side of it is my process is usually to somehow trick people into feeling comfortable pretty quickly because I know like I don't know if it's an empathetic thing about walking into a strange environment, but usually when they come in in the new setup, you know, we kind of walk around like this.
Marc:This garage actually looks a lot like my the original garage before I made it into a studio other than I have a very sort of like very specific setup here to where it's clear we're going to do the work.
Guest:And it's a nicer room.
Guest:It's not old and ramshackle.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But all the boxes are unpacked on the floor.
Marc:I haven't really got set up because we're going to have to do some work in here.
Marc:And people know this about me.
Marc:I do turn the thing on before we get started.
Marc:And I just have natural conversations.
Marc:I just find that if you kind of sort of get situated and you're sort of like, where'd you come in from?
Marc:Or what'd you eat?
Marc:Or whatever the hell it is to get into the present.
Marc:And then just kind of noodle around until they're like, are we doing it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That it's good because you've already laid all the groundwork and there's no official start.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Official starts always, I think, begin the thing stilted.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because you're like, OK, you ready?
Marc:Hey, I'm here with like just even if you're not doing it that way, that's the tone that happens.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the person thinks they have to meet that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Some level of professionalism.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, OK.
Guest:We're broadcasting right now.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So just for me to start it, it helps both of us because then I'm just like, I got it on.
Marc:I'm not worried about anything.
Marc:And we're just kind of rambling until we get somewhere.
Guest:Well, I'll point out too that you often start it with a foible of your own or a hang up or something.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Those things have always allowed the guests to feel more comfortable.
Guest:They're like, well, this guy doesn't have everything together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, he's got problems and he's telling me about the cat shit on his floor.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Then it just sort of goes from there.
Marc:That's really the only consistent thing I do, which is just make sure the thing is rolling.
Marc:Sometimes I'll get it rolling before they even get in here.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In general, your thinking is, I'm going to get an hour.
Guest:And if we can get to an hour and I can close that up, I'll close it up.
Guest:And if not, we'll just keep going until we're done.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, there's definitely, as you know, there's been people that are difficult and I know that instinctively now, which I might not have known before, but I do try.
Marc:I'm like, it's almost it's more than a therapist, but I'm like, I need this to it needs to go somewhere.
Marc:And sometimes the waiting.
Marc:pays off because there have been times where it doesn't happen for an hour.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, that's the funny thing.
Guest:It's a good thing we talk after every one because you send me a file and I'll look at it immediately.
Guest:And if that file is 90 minutes, that could go either way.
Guest:That could be that it was just a rip-roaring good time.
Guest:Alfred Molina, the other day, I edited that and I was shocked at how little I cut out of it.
Guest:It was a very thorough conversation at like 82 minutes or something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yet you'll send me ones that's like 90 minutes and then we'll talk.
Guest:And you're like, that doesn't come around until like an hour and 10 minutes in.
Guest:So I know like, okay, good.
Guest:We're going to have like a good final 20 minutes.
Guest:But that first part is going to be- You have to figure out how to build around that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, that's a nice way of saying it sort of like, yeah, I, you know, I just, I had to keep them in there.
Guest:You have said those words to me before.
Guest:I had to keep them in.
Guest:Like, it's like a prison, like an interrogation.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Here's some more questions about the process, particularly as it relates to guests.
Guest:And this is a good question, but this guy said some nice things first.
Guest:I think you should hear them.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:You deserve a break and a few moments to reflect on your innovations and contributions to the podcast genre.
Guest:One, a full uninterrupted hour with each guest, no commercial breaks.
Guest:That was intentional.
Guest:We knew that the breaks within the conversation.
Marc:Yeah, we chose to do that.
Marc:There was a period where I'm like, at the beginning, I'm like, we're not doing ads, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like we knew no prerecorded ads for sure.
Marc:But there was like that.
Marc:There was some remnants of like, you know, it's like we have the freedom.
Marc:And then then, you know, whatever I was about to say changed to make a living.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, like to reframe whatever bullshit punk rock integrity you have into like we deserve to be paid for this.
Marc:And this is going to this is how it's going to happen.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Number two, the conversation is one on one.
Guest:No sidekick or publicists.
Guest:I will say that Terry Gross does not allow publicists to sit in the studio with the guests, although those publicists often sit in an ante room and listen.
Guest:Yeah, we don't have that here.
Marc:It's so fun.
Marc:That's one of the great pleasures of doing this is where I'm like, when they show up with publicists, I'm like, yeah, generally, you know how this goes.
Marc:We're going to go in the garage.
Marc:You can sit here in the living room if you want.
Marc:And they're like, but are you sure I can't?
Marc:I'm like, yeah, no, I don't really.
Marc:Oh, I'm sure.
Marc:And then they always ask the artist, who half the time doesn't even know the publicist is coming.
Marc:Because usually it's either the production's publicist or the movie's publicist or the studio publicist.
Marc:So they're like, are you going to be all right?
Marc:And they're like, yeah.
Marc:And then I get in here, they're like, I don't know who that is.
Guest:Well, I'll tell you a great one was and this is she was just doing her job or reacting in the way she should in that job.
Guest:But when you did Springsteen at his house, he left.
Guest:That was how we knew the interview was over.
Guest:I was sitting outside with the publicist and we weren't listening to it.
Guest:The interview was over when you guys came out and he said goodbye.
Guest:He went back up to his house and then we went back into where you were recording to pack everything up.
Guest:And I was asking you, how'd it go?
Guest:Was it good?
Guest:And you were like, yeah, it was really good.
Guest:He talked a lot about his childhood and his dad and we talked some about Trump and the publicist goes, oh.
Guest:Now she's standing there, she has no idea what extent you talked about.
Guest:That was a good moment.
Guest:To her credit, she was a total professional and set up that interview.
Marc:But I think it's interesting to point out too here that we do leave a certain freedom on behalf of the artist or whoever I'm interviewing.
Marc:If they want something taken out and it makes sense,
Marc:We do it.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But, you know, we have pushed back on things and it's oddly almost always it's about somebody else.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Like a lot of times, right?
Marc:I need to say that about so-and-so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Those kind of things.
Guest:My rule of thumb with that, and I'll get back to Jay's email in a second.
Guest:My rule of thumb as a producer and an editor and someone who comes from a news background and has to think about these things ethically is we're not doing a live show.
Guest:So if the person in the moment said to you, hang on, I said that thing about my dad.
Guest:Can you make sure you take that out?
Guest:I don't want to say that about him.
Guest:You would.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because a person is allowed to have a second thought about something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And if you got to the very end of an interview and someone said to you, hey, you know that whole thing I talked about that stretch in my career?
Guest:Can you take that out?
Guest:You in here in this room would be like, really?
Guest:That's the crux of the show.
Guest:Like, why don't you sit with that for a second?
Guest:Because I don't think we should take that out.
Guest:Like, if you can have that conversation face to face with a person, I should be able to make that same decision as an editor and as a producer to say like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on.
Guest:You're asking me to take out the crux of the show.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I can't do that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But the bottom line is, this is not the type of show we're not out to sandbag people.
Marc:And I think you have done this as well.
Marc:People have said things that they didn't notice that they've said, and you've decided, that's just going to cause problems for everybody.
Guest:Usually I think about it from a legal standpoint.
Guest:They just say something that if the person they're saying that about took issue with, they could have a legal case around it.
Guest:Andy Dick.
Guest:Andy Dick.
Guest:He admitted to a felony, first of all.
Guest:That was number one.
Guest:And then the other thing was I think he outed a person by name.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So Jay's email.
Guest:Let me just go back to this.
Guest:So, again, full uninterrupted hour with each guest.
Guest:The conversation is one on one.
Guest:No shameless plugging of the latest project.
Guest:Often the guest is so involved in the conversation he or she barely mentions the reason they're there at that point in time.
Guest:That's happened a lot.
Marc:That's the best we can hope for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not just A-list actors and musicians, directors, comedians, authors get a much needed turn in the spotlight.
Guest:That's also just kind of based on who we can get, I think.
Marc:Yeah, I think that's another thing people need to know is that, you know, we reach out to a lot of people.
Marc:I'm not a miracle worker.
Marc:People just assume like Marilyn can get anybody.
Marc:It's not true.
Marc:There are three people we tried to get for this show.
Marc:We couldn't get him.
Marc:Didn't have the power.
Marc:Didn't have the reach.
Marc:But, you know, we tried to make this, you know, an eclectic show.
Marc:We tried to get a lot of voices on the show.
Marc:But, you know, it's all subject to people's availability, people's desire to do the show.
Marc:Those two things primarily.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The last thing Jay says here is...
Guest:The Obama interview, in my opinion, this should be mandatory listening in every high school civics class.
Guest:There probably should be a lot more engagement in high school civics class, period.
Marc:There should be more civics classes, apparently.
Marc:Most of them have been cut.
Guest:And Jay's question was about editing.
Guest:And he said, you've mentioned that a guest can ask you to delete parts of the conversation.
Guest:Can you estimate how often this happens?
Guest:And the approximate percentage of material that's typically cut out.
Guest:All the things we've just been talking about, I'd say it happens at a very low percentage amount.
Guest:Like there's the estimate of how often it happens.
Guest:I would say maybe one out of every 30.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Does that sound about right to you?
Marc:That sounds high.
Marc:High as in like... It doesn't seem like that many.
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:You know better than me.
Guest:Oh, so you're saying it sounds... Yeah, it sounds... Maybe like one out of every 50?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:Like that maybe it's happened about... And sometimes it's like nothing.
Marc:It's like, yeah, I need to say that thing about my dad.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Here's something that's a question about your monologues.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Are the opening monologues single take?
Guest:Do you plan a topic or theme ahead of time and prepare anything like an outline or are they more free form?
Guest:That's from Allie.
Marc:Well, usually they're free form.
Marc:You know, I'll sometimes wander around the house and write down things I want to cover or things that I did or where, you know, like primarily things that were on my mind or things I watched to remind myself of what I want to talk about.
Marc:But usually they're they're pretty free form.
Marc:And like a lot of times I'll call Brendan a lot and I'll be like, what the fuck?
Marc:What the fuck am I going to talk about?
Marc:I mean, it's like I talked about it.
Marc:I haven't done anything in the last three days.
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:I fucking hate this shit.
Marc:Because, like, honestly, no matter what Brendan says to me about, like, don't worry about it.
Marc:It's like I got two ad chunks.
Marc:I don't want them to be on top of each other.
Marc:And I want there to be space in between them.
Marc:And I like talking.
Marc:But today's not the fucking day, man.
Marc:And he'll be like, don't worry about it.
Guest:But I've also, like, literally sent to you.
Guest:like an outline, I'd be like, talk about this, then add, then talk about this, then add, then introduce the guest.
Guest:And when I do that, you give me an intro that's like 35 minutes long.
Guest:Because I honestly think, and maybe you can disagree with this, but it might be subconscious or what, I think that when you're confronted with those moments, you push yourself to talk even more, like to make sure your self has not gone away.
Guest:I almost feel like you're defiantly saying, no, I am not a nobody.
Guest:I am not a guy with nothing going on.
Guest:I will make sure I have something to say.
Marc:I also think what it is is that when I'm up against it like that, not unlike in stand-up, is I'll start talking, and then all of a sudden it's like, wow.
Marc:I'm thinking out loud.
Marc:It sparks.
Marc:Yeah, and it just keeps going.
Marc:But I would say 98% of it is not outlined.
Marc:It's not bullet-pointed, really, and it's improvised.
Guest:Well, I have to say, though, I'm glad we're talking about this at this moment because it really does speak to what I consider to be my philosophy of the show and why this might be even like a secret to why it's still going after a thousand episodes and why it has the kind of consistency it does.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is that I always consider this show in my head.
Guest:I have since we started doing it.
Guest:a one-man audio journal that happens to have some famous people and other people coming in and out of it, but that it's primarily about you.
Guest:And I mean, that was what I wanted to do in the first place was like,
Guest:Ever since we started working together in 2004, I was like, oh, this guy's great.
Guest:He could be like the next Howard Stern.
Guest:Like, let's do a radio show.
Guest:And then the radio show went away.
Guest:And I was like, well, let's try to figure that out somewhere else.
Guest:And then that went away.
Guest:And then we did the streaming video.
Guest:And it was like, well, this is good.
Guest:We could do this.
Guest:And that went away.
Guest:And then finally, we had this podcast.
Guest:But the unifying thing through all that was like, this guy's personality is what works.
Guest:It's what connects with people.
Guest:And it's like whether it's him talking about his cats or talking about making lentils or whether he's talking about politics or whether he's talking about movies or interviews or whatever, there's something about the way this guy can connect with people.
Guest:And so I still, a thousand episodes in, think of it that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the idea that people are like, I fast forward through the monologues or like, oh, when is this guy going to get to the guest?
Guest:That's fine.
Guest:You guys listen for a different reason.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's not why I made the show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like to me, me sitting down making the show, it's like, what is chapter 999 in the Marc Maron story?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That's the way I think of it.
Marc:Oh, I guess he had Josh Brolin over.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I I don't know if I ever knew that consciously, but certainly it makes sense.
Marc:And I also think it's just my instinct because of what you said earlier that from the very beginning, like I don't know that I wanted to interview people.
Marc:right like you were resentful quite frankly yeah like there was a point in the early goings when you were like i'm a comedian like i i i should be the one being interviewed yeah by people yeah like i'm not just the schmuck who does interviews yeah i'm just i'm not the guy just asking questions right so that was always at the core of who i was sort of like well this is working but i'm i'm definitely going to meet this person halfway yeah
Guest:Right.
Marc:Because it wasn't so much it's my show, but it's sort of like, I'm not just going to sit here.
Marc:Oh man, my show.
Guest:Talk about things I cut out all the time.
Guest:What?
Guest:Whenever, it's gotten less, but it used to be that whenever you did an ad at the top of the show for another show, like something on TV or another podcast or something, you'd read that ad and then you go, okay, now let's do my show.
Guest:There was so much stink on it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There was somebody in it who I knew.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was always the ad buys by people I was resentful of.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There aren't that many anymore.
Guest:All right, here's some general questions, because we did ask our listeners to just send things they might want to know about you, about life in general.
Guest:So here's some general stuff.
Guest:Back in 2016, on an episode with Adam Goldberg and Paul Dano, you mentioned that if Donald Trump became president, you would make him a guest on your show.
Guest:I'm aware how you feel about the sitting president, but I would love for you to make this happen, Christopher.
Guest:I don't think it was that you said you would make him a guest on the show.
Guest:I think it's that we have always maintained that- If a sitting president wants to come on, he can come on.
Guest:If they agree to do the show in the way that we do it, which was what President Obama agreed to.
Guest:Yes, it will be one hour uninterrupted.
Guest:We have final cut.
Guest:Be in the garage.
Guest:That wasn't even a requirement.
Guest:They just wanted to do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that it's not going to be about policy.
Guest:It's not going to be about any specific agenda.
Guest:It's about this person's life.
Guest:And you get to direct that.
Guest:If Donald Trump agreed to that, yeah, you do that.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He won't agree to that, but we do.
Marc:Hell of an hour.
Yeah.
Guest:I tell you, man, if there's anyone in life that I think is equipped to deal with that guy, I really do think it's you.
Guest:I really do.
Guest:Just the way you are able to talk to your dad, I just feel like you have training.
Marc:Yeah, I understand his particular type of charm.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:But but what I but he but, you know, I think he has a lot of like, come on.
Marc:Like there's there's some part of him that like you can push and you can push.
Marc:And it would be interesting because I I do.
Marc:I do think I can cut through a lot of that charm.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I imagine some people are mad I'm even calling it that, but it is that.
Guest:Oh, it absolutely is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This made me laugh just because this guy's angry about this.
Guest:But still, I should just say, this made me laugh.
Guest:Why are you so obsessed with who's friends in Hollywood?
Guest:Not many people are worried about this.
Guest:They're human beings, too.
Guest:Who are you friends with?
Guest:Jeez.
Guest:Please talk about this on your 1000th episode.
Guest:Thanks, your fan, Aaron.
Guest:I don't think... You know what, though?
Guest:I know what he's responding to.
Guest:What?
Guest:Is that when you have people on... Yeah.
Guest:like especially when they're in the same movie exactly right and i think it speaks more to your fundamental desire for this to be a kind of small town business like you like it's a community of people like you know when you see people in movies
Marc:Don't you want to believe that Robert Redford and Paul Newman were buddies forever?
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:You see people work in movies, but now that I've done the work, and even with me and Mark Reilly back in the day, my on-air partner on Air America, we did not socialize.
Marc:You're not hanging out with glow people.
Marc:No, and it makes complete sense, but I think it's just a kid in me.
Marc:It's like to think that everybody in that movie, they probably have the best time.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, because they did a good job making you think that they were friends.
Marc:They're all friends and they probably have a great time when they're not in the movie.
Marc:People still do this.
Guest:We just spent a week with the country believing that Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are in love with each other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because they did a song on a show that was about the awards they were nominated for where they played lovers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, they're good at that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But people were still insistent.
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:They love each other.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Have you ever been sitting across from someone and thought, this person is completely full of shit, like they're lying to me right now, and I know that's not how it went down.
Guest:I was wondering how you handled it.
Guest:Brit.
Marc:No, I've never felt like that someone was completely lying to me, but I do know that I can generally tell a bullshit artist.
Guest:And you can sense a narrative crafting and myth-making.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I mean, I know when someone's following their script of themselves, and I know when somebody's embellishing.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But sometimes those are great.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, Bob Zemuda, I pretty clearly remember going, come on.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:No.
Guest:He talked to you for like two and a half hours, and I don't think there was, you know,
Guest:10% of truth in the whole thing.
Marc:Yeah, some of it started with truth, but that's what he does.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:It's entertaining.
Marc:The one time that someone genuinely lied to my face for an hour that came out years later was Steve Renazzisi and the 9-11 story.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was a complete lie that he had survived 9-11.
Marc:No one really knows.
Marc:I'm not even sure he knows why he fabricated the thing.
Yeah.
Marc:But I wasn't about to go like, no, you didn't fucking.
Marc:Bullshit.
Guest:Can you imagine if you actually did that?
Guest:Like a guy's telling you he got out of 9-11 and you're like, no, come on.
Marc:I mean, he's paying the price for that.
Guest:Next time he should just tell people he did 9-11.
Marc:Oh yeah, maybe that'll help.
Marc:Maybe that'll get him out of it now.
Guest:What is something you never would have expected you would get the opportunity to do or experience that the podcast made possible?
Marc:Almost everything.
Guest:Everything since starting it.
Guest:That's literally true.
Marc:Both of our cats.
Marc:No doubt.
Marc:No, like, you know...
Guest:There's a picture right there of you and the President of the United States in your house.
Marc:In my garage.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, but to actually be able to sell tickets as a comedian, to do a TV show, to do my own TV show, to write a second and a third book, the one that you and I put together...
Guest:Work with De Niro.
Marc:Yeah, work with De Niro, play guitar with Slash, be on a popular television show.
Guest:Keith Richards called you a fun one.
Marc:A fun one.
Marc:Yeah, talk to Keith Richards, talk to my heroes, you know, know people I never thought I would know, you know, have friends I never thought I would have.
Marc:I mean, everything you have to understand that when I started this, you know.
Marc:People knew me, but it was not really a great thing.
Marc:It was not a great story.
Marc:I was an intense, angry, sort of struggling guy that had been around a long time with not a lot of opportunities and not that hopeful.
Marc:And so, you know, everything I've done since then to buy this house.
Guest:Yeah, same with me.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Buying a house was huge and that would not have happened without the podcast.
Marc:I was so proud of you.
Marc:I was so happy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's so funny because I don't have a wife and I don't have kids.
Marc:So like you have a kid and anything you do, I'm like, ah, look at that.
Marc:Brendan did a house.
Marc:It's so nice and very invested.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the house that Obama bought and not because of any taxes or anything.
Marc:We bought it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, speaking of Obama, there's this question.
Guest:What feedback, if any, did you receive from Obama after he did your podcast?
Guest:That's from Jeff.
Marc:Hold on, I'll text him.
Guest:Oh, do you still have those wires in your room?
Guest:Can you still use those?
Guest:I got rid of those.
Guest:They came and pick them up finally, the old house.
Guest:We didn't get any feedback from him directly, but indirectly, people at the White House did tell us that he really enjoyed it.
Guest:In fact, I got this email from a White House staffer named Liz Allen.
Guest:She said, I was going to email you this week to let you know.
Guest:This was a while ago.
Guest:I was going to email you this week to let you know that a giant photo of Mark and the president in the garage is hanging in the halls of the West Wing.
Guest:The photo office hangs photos on a regular rotation from recent events.
Guest:It's fun to walk past that one and recollect their conversation.
Guest:You know, we were also told by the people in the White House that they, in 2016, when he was leaving office, that they considered the WTF interview as one of the best of his presidency, which is very flattering.
Guest:And Pete Souza, his photographer, I was in email communication and he said, I know the president enjoyed doing the podcast very much.
Marc:Oh, that's nice.
Marc:And didn't Axelrod say something?
Guest:Oh, Axelrod started his podcast because he was inspired by the one you did with the president.
Guest:Yeah, I loved it.
Guest:Yeah, that was something.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And if anyone wants to hear us talk about that, you know, you may think we're giving short shrift to that specific moment on this episode.
Guest:But we did a whole episode about that.
Guest:It's episode 614 and it's available still for free in our feed.
Guest:You can go listen to that.
Guest:It's the one right after the Obama episode.
Marc:Called The President Was Here?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Was there ever a point during these almost last decade of episodes when you seriously, seriously considered ending the podcast?
Guest:And every damn episode listener, Andy.
Guest:Also, Val asked the same thing, and she said that if there was a time when that happened, thank you for not doing it.
Guest:I don't think we ever really had that time.
Guest:Well, we had the patent troll, and that was a serious case of thinking that the podcast might end if we didn't go right.
Marc:Oh, yeah, and we also thought we'd get fucked.
Guest:Yeah, if you're not aware of that.
Marc:But it wasn't our decision.
Guest:Well, I think, though, that if they had said, we're going to sue you, we would have decided, well, we just got to end this so that we don't get killed.
Marc:That was horrible.
Marc:How long did that go on for?
Guest:Well, we first started getting letters from this.
Guest:If you don't know what a patent troll is, it's somebody who says, you know, I have a patent on this idea and you're in violation of it.
Guest:And this guy was sending them around to podcasters saying he held the patent for podcasting.
Guest:That was in February of 2013.
Guest:And it scared the shit out of us immediately.
Marc:Well, at first we were like, what are these?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sam Seder was the one who told us like, yeah, this is real.
Marc:I had no idea what a patent troll was or how they did things or what.
Marc:So basically these letters were like, you know, please contact us to discuss a licensing fee.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know, not how much it would be or whatever.
Marc:It was a shakedown.
Guest:Shakedown.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But the thing was is that they could, if they could prove that their patent was legit, they could sue us for the money, for back money, for everything.
Marc:It would have changed the game for everybody.
Marc:And once we started to realize what was happening, it became just a panic.
Marc:And there was a few other podcasters that got them.
Guest:Well, Adam Carolla was being sued already when we started getting the letters.
Marc:By that troll.
Guest:By this troll.
Guest:Adam Carolla and I believe HowStuffWorks and a couple of the big networks like CBS, they were already being sued.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I said, we got to figure out what's going on here.
Guest:Get in touch with Adam.
Guest:What's their strategy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I can remember just totally in a panic over this because it would have shut us down.
Marc:Would have shut everybody down eventually, maybe.
Guest:Or would have set a precedent for them to- There would have been a totally different way of making podcasts.
Guest:And so this is where the kind of political strategy had to kick in.
Marc:Well, that was when we started contacting the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Marc:And like, I just needed information.
Marc:Like, you know, what is patent trolling?
Marc:How does it work?
Marc:Who are these people?
Marc:And it got to the point where we were calling them so often.
Marc:I was calling that woman.
Marc:What was her name?
Marc:Julie Samuels?
Marc:She was my contact at the EFF, who I just reached out to about this.
Marc:And I was calling her so much asking her questions.
Marc:She says, well, look, I'm not your attorney.
Marc:We're not representing you.
Marc:But here's some information.
Marc:You should contact an attorney.
Marc:But it was just I was in such a panic over this because then another letter came and then another letter.
Marc:And and I knew that I knew that it had to be within their parameters of what they fought for.
Marc:What is the basic dictate of that foundation?
Guest:They're a nonprofit that deals with digital rights.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Basically, they've been champions of keeping the internet free and making sure that it's open source and then fighting back against any political movement that would restrict that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So a lot of net neutrality stuff that they've been big proponents of.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But patents are a big deal to the software community, developers.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's what we learned from them and from from doing research at the patent trolling business is huge.
Marc:People who amass patents.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because there's this this shady district in Texas where they can file these.
Guest:They could set up phony offices.
Marc:They have sympathetic judiciary.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And this is basically like a town that's funded by like the patent troll lawsuit.
Marc:Yeah, and what they would do is they'd get old patents and then revive them somehow, and then the patent that we were dealing with, it was about an indexing system.
Marc:It was a very specific part of the technology that had to do, that he said he did it with cassettes, or I don't remember, but it was an older patent that was kind of then reconfigured to apply to podcasting.
Marc:But I kept pestering and pestering her, and we sort of built a relationship with them.
Marc:And then we finally directed people to them
Marc:They wanted help in fundraising for something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They definitely considered us an ally as a proper platform to work with that helped get their mission out.
Guest:And if that meant that they should take up the cause of fighting...
Marc:this patent assertion entity uh and trying to re-examine the patent that might be a good cause for them as well like put that that was that was the pitch yeah it's like how is this not in your periphery how is this you have this problem with the podcasting medium which is a technological medium yeah how is this not exactly what you guys do yeah and then you know i think it was that broad yes and then they chose you know to take on the case yeah and
Marc:You know, as part of their trip.
Marc:Yep.
Guest:And they have a lot of pro bono lawyers at Harvard.
Marc:Like they did something that we could never pull together.
Marc:But during that time, we had to learn about prior art in order to disprove a patent.
Marc:You had to prove that something existed like it before it.
Guest:I just want to make it clear to people listening that of the thousand episodes that we've done this show in nearly 10 years,
Guest:We probably worked harder on this one thing than all the other individual things we did on the show, just in terms of like really sitting down, learning something we never knew before, figuring it out and figuring out a strategy that was the best possible way to publicly move forward with this thing.
Guest:We were so panicked because I remember there.
Marc:We would have been done.
Guest:And it still took a couple of years, but- It was in 2015 when their examination of prior art, meaning prior art is evidence that this idea existed before the patent that this guy was claiming.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they found it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they said, this is proof that the patent is invalid.
Guest:And that was-
Guest:It was introduced in 2015, and it wasn't until May of last year, May 14th, 2018, that everything was final.
Marc:Yeah, because they tried to appeal it.
Guest:They tried to appeal several times.
Marc:Right, and that doesn't generally work with these.
Marc:It was a beautiful thing, all of it, the way that...
Marc:We all worked together, but then it became a bigger cause and part of a bigger issue.
Marc:It was a fight that's rarely won.
Marc:I was on the phone with congressmen.
Marc:I cannot stress how much work we put into this.
Marc:Because the fear was that these guys could put a valve on it.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:They could put a toll booth on it.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:It was heavy, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So I guess, yeah, we thought, not only did we think we were going to lose the podcast, but there was that moment, it's sort of like, can they just take everything we've built?
Guest:Right.
Marc:Man.
Guest:Well, I will also admit to you, I've never told you this before, but there was a time where I thought, this is probably it.
Guest:Let's end this.
Guest:And it was when all the Louis shit went down.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:I was really torn about continuing the show in the light of how much Louis was representative of, like, the history of our show.
Guest:Like, you know, we had that Slate thing that named it, like, the best podcast episode ever with you and Louis.
Marc:The two-parter?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:We've got a large chunk of that episode in our book.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Just so much history of the show was around, like...
Guest:you and him and the kind of humanity behind your conversation and uh it was just one of those moments where i was like yeah what the fuck do you know about people and this was in the fall of 2017 when it was like you know this is at the height of like the me too movement yeah and i i just remember thinking like are we culpable in this like is is is the myth making around like
Guest:cults of personality humanizing yeah are we and and it's not just this one individual like could be lots of individuals and I I sat there and had this conversation with my wife and I thought I said like I love this show too much and have put too much of myself into it
Guest:It's such a fabric of who I am and what our whole lives are, my whole family.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That I wasn't going to be able to handle it if it started to get like broken down.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like as a bad thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like this show is actually doing a disservice by having this narrative out there about people and then it's wrong.
Guest:Oh, right, right, right.
Guest:You know, I don't want to be like The Cosby Show.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Marc:How'd you reconcile that?
Guest:Uh, my wife Dawn told me to sleep on it and think about it.
Guest:And she said, I think it'll hurt you a lot more to get rid of the show.
Guest:But I will say I went to bed the night I had that conversation.
Guest:I said, I think I was leaning like 60, 40 to calling you the next day and saying we should wrap this up.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's something I've, if I have a big piece of advice to give people, like my short time on this earth, it's like sleeping on things works.
Guest:It has worked every time I've ever done it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like to just be like, hang on, let me put a pin in this and think about it again tomorrow.
Marc:Well, I'm trying to understand exactly.
Marc:So you, you like, it made you wonder whether or not,
Guest:Well, there's so much stuff coming at the Tarantinos of the world for like, what did you know about Harvey Weinstein?
Guest:Oh, right, right, right.
Guest:And they've had to answer for like-
Guest:their culpability in that.
Guest:And I really put that on myself.
Guest:I think I elevated a lot of the people we've put on this show in my mind to a certain amount of nobility.
Guest:They come on, they share this stuff, and this is who they are.
Guest:And you don't ever know who anybody is.
Marc:People are fucking incomprehensible.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:No, I but I think that's true.
Marc:But I but but that's also and I appreciate you telling me that we don't have a lie detector sitting here.
Marc:No, that's true.
Marc:And we're also not asking those kind of questions.
Marc:But but the nature of the culture.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You didn't want to be, you know, kind of plowed under with someone else's garbage.
Guest:Yeah, and outside of my control.
Guest:And that's the type of person I am.
Guest:And one of the whole reasons we do the show the way we do is because we control it.
Guest:It's you and me.
Guest:We make all the decisions.
Guest:And that was getting to a point where I felt like suddenly these decisions were being taken out of our hands because of what we'd done in the past with other people.
Guest:And I think maybe if it wasn't Louis, I wouldn't have had those thoughts.
Guest:But because Louis had been so entwined in the fabric of, like, the mythology of our show.
Guest:And also my life.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:You know, and we handled that in the most, you know, empathetic, responsible, honest way we could when it happened.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that was that.
Guest:That's how I felt about it walking away.
Guest:Because that was immediate.
Guest:Like, that was in the heat of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think I just in the days following that response, I thought, you know, is that good enough?
Guest:What about our entire archive?
Guest:You know, what about how we've, you know, and then part of it was like thinking about just being more sensitive to how we present people and their stories.
Guest:Like, is this person's experience being represented also by someone else's experience?
Guest:That's the opposite of that, you know?
Marc:But that speaks to my point in that the hour we have with people is not an interrogation of their sexual history.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, even with Ryan Adams and the Mandy Moore thing, I didn't even talk to Ryan Adams about being married to Mandy Moore because, like, why would I talk about that?
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, it had nothing to do with the conversation.
Guest:But that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about is that, like, I don't know that...
Guest:two years ago even, we would have thought to have Mandy Moore on.
Guest:Both of us as like two middle-aged guys that did not listen to Mandy Moore music and did not really have her in the foreground of our thinking.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like it just might not have been because we wouldn't have thought anything about her experience would speak to us or the audience that we present to.
Guest:And I think that if anything has happened, it's been a shift for me in being like,
Guest:Her experience is probably just as worthy as anybody else.
Marc:Yeah, that's the movement working.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:In the sense that, you know, there's always been sort of a call for diversity, a call for, you know, equality.
Marc:And I think we do, you know, the best we can in booking the show and getting people that, you know,
Marc:We ask a lot of people to be on it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And a lot of different kinds of people.
Marc:And there's some people that I just don't know.
Marc:And there's some people, but certainly Mandy Moore, we had her on before this story broke.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:Because she was pitched to us.
Guest:Yeah, we didn't have her on in response to the Ryan Adams.
Marc:No.
Marc:And also because like, well, you know, she and I watched a bit of the show and I thought she was good.
Marc:You know, you found the sort of crux of, you know, where she came up in music and what she was up against then and that struggle.
Marc:And it turned out to be a great conversation.
Marc:But I think that just by virtue of being more sensitive to other stories and other lives and, you know, working against that sort of.
Marc:white entitlement or male entitlement or, or just the, you know, the rationalization of sort of like, I don't know them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's sometimes that's no reason not to know them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, and, and I think that is a fundamental indication of, of a change we've made in the show, you know, out of necessity, but also out of desire.
Marc:And, you know, I think that by doing the way we book it now and by trying to balance things out and trying to, to hear stories that might not be part of our lives, we, you know,
Guest:they turn out to be great i think that it's really it's been apparent to me that a lot of times i i will present you with people who i know you don't know and i'll give you a like i'll just give you like a small short little summary version of like why this person might be interesting to you right even if you haven't seen you didn't see jane the virgin you know like that but i was like no i think this is good i think gina would be good you know
Marc:And I can't watch everything, and I don't.
Marc:And I don't know a lot about a lot of the people I talk to, but they're people.
Marc:So I just need a way in.
Marc:My instincts about not having people on is usually like, do they have a story?
Marc:Can they tell it?
Guest:Right.
Guest:What we should emphasize is that...
Guest:The general rule of thumb in booking prior to that was always like, are you already interested in that story?
Guest:Is there already something about this person you're interested in?
Guest:And I feel like that's where the bigger shift has had to come is to say like, that doesn't have to be the primary reason we book a guest.
Guest:It could be this person you know nothing about, but there's a story there to uncover.
Right.
Marc:You know, I'm kind of a softy as I get older.
Marc:And I'm much more open and willing to take things in.
Marc:You just have to get me there.
Marc:You can lead me there and I'll drink.
Marc:And you can teach an old dog new tricks.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, good.
Guest:I'm glad that I did not decide to stop working on the show.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:I had no idea.
Guest:Well, I would never have told you that because you would have freaked the fuck out.
Marc:You think?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't even know what version I would have thought.
Marc:I would have had to understand where you were coming from.
Guest:I think I was afraid that you wouldn't.
Guest:I don't know that you would have understood that from my perspective.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I don't know if I would have in that moment for those reasons at that time.
Marc:Yeah, but no, I understand it now.
Guest:Well, I think this is a good question for personal reflection here.
Guest:It's a very good kind of summary question.
Guest:And it really goes to your kind of personal evolution, which is what we've been talking about over the course of a thousand episodes, really, is that one-man audio journal that I talked about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this is from Adam.
Guest:And he says, given where it all began, just one question.
Guest:Is being Marc Maron getting easier?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Being Marc Maron is getting easier because when you've been as desperate and as angry and as insecure and as destructive as I've been in my life, you know, personally, and you realize that, you know, all you've been doing your whole life is working towards this one thing.
Marc:By the time I started the podcast, I believed that I had failed at the one thing and that there was no more things.
Marc:And this was it.
Marc:But what started to happen, which happened in my 40s,
Marc:And it happened in a very specific way, in a unique way, which was that I was doing something that really showed my most authentic self and really engaged all parts of my heart and mind and creativity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that it began to resonate like something relaxed in me.
Marc:There was a pride.
Marc:There was a there was a self-esteem that comes from accomplishment of working your whole life.
Marc:And somehow in the last half or the second half or, God forbid, the last quarter, you make it.
Marc:there was a big part of my struggle that was relieved.
Marc:And a certain amount of fear went away around doing stand-up and around being who I am and about owning myself because now everybody owned it.
Marc:Everybody who listened to me, it was part of me.
Guest:Well, I think, you know, it's interesting.
Guest:You're articulating something that people who listen, I know they feel the same way.
Guest:Like these two emails, I'll read them back to back.
Guest:And it's, I think, a very, you know, it's just two people, two guys.
Guest:But I just I think a lot of people receive your growth as a positive and as a thing that not only is good for you, but good for them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Mark, I write to you as a fan of the early days of the podcast and honestly well before.
Guest:I was a devoted Conan kid as a teen slash preteen, and I used to love how weird you would make stuff and how you would win the audience back.
Guest:I looked into your standup after that and followed you since, and once WTF took off, I was so excited and proud of you.
Guest:I'm roughly 30 years younger than you, but have always related to the sadness and anger and thoughtfulness you've put out in the world.
Guest:The care you've recently grown into, the ability to recognize yourself and your limitations, but not in a self-pitying way, rather in a way that offers a possibility to grow and learn despite your positions of privilege has been very illuminating.
Guest:Your growth from I am angry at the world to I am angry at myself to I am learning to reconcile my anger with a way in which I am capable of improving the world is very inspirational to me.
Guest:Thank you for that.
Guest:That's from Joel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's a similar message here from Ryan.
Guest:As someone who followed you since my frustrated days sitting in a cubicle listening to tickets still available and thinking, shit, I hope this guy is okay.
Guest:I'm glad to see your success.
Guest:I didn't realize that I cared about your career back then.
Guest:I guess seeing someone who shared similar frustrations see some reward because of them gave me hope in a fairness that I didn't believe in.
Guest:Your success directly contradicts the cynicism and frustration that brought it.
Guest:Your success felt like our success when us is the people who have been rooting for you.
Guest:I'm glad you didn't kill yourself, and I hope you get Dylan or Tom Waits at some point.
Guest:I think that's the only way to top the Obama interview.
Guest:Congratulations, Ryan.
Guest:I feel the same way as that guy.
Guest:I feel personally linked to your progress in this.
Guest:It's more than I was just rooting for you.
Guest:I invested my own sense of self in making sure you were doing okay.
Guest:I understand why people can connect to that.
Guest:That it means something.
Guest:Your personal progress means something to people.
Marc:Yeah, it gets me choked up.
Marc:But the weird thing I realize about me is that my struggle primarily, and I think people who know me or who are deeply connected because we're kindred spirits know that all I've ever tried to be was myself.
Marc:I'm pretty much all in all the time.
Marc:Everything's riding on even the littlest things I do.
Marc:But but but on the other side of that, I got to be honest with you in that and with the people in general is that, you know, having known you for so long and however our relationship is involved, like it's weird because like we've been doing stuff together for a long time.
Marc:And even with break room when we had to go on the road for the Guardian and we're trying to make rec recording things and shooting things at campaign events and uploading them like, you know, we've been, you know, in the trenches together around creating things.
Marc:what became this show when you moved out here away from your wife and did all that stuff.
Marc:But like from the day that you said you were coming on full time with this, you know, my concern was sort of like that moment where you tell me that and I'm like, are you sure, man?
Marc:Because like, you know, I don't want to, if I tank this crap this out, like, and you're like, no, no, I, I, you know, I believe me.
Marc:I, I, I know what I'm doing.
Marc:And I'm like, Oh, of course you do.
Marc:But my point is, is that I,
Marc:Like at all these different points in your life, even though we don't share a personal relationship, like most personal relationships, like, you know, after you got married, that was one thing.
Marc:But like when you had a kid, you know, I get, you know, I was crying for you.
Marc:And then like, you know, when, when you, you, you got the house, I was so proud.
Marc:And I was like, yeah, Brendan got his first house and we made it to, you know.
Marc:And then, you know, when Owen had the health issue briefly, I was like, I was so worried.
Marc:Like, I'm very invested in our relationship.
Marc:And I don't know that I could have done any of this without you, man.
Marc:I think about it all the time.
Marc:Anyways.
Marc:Well, I appreciate every second of it, honestly.
Marc:And also, like, I hate when I, if I, like, I know when you're mad at me.
Marc:What do you mean?
Marc:Like, there's some times where I bring shit up and you're like, you know, I can just tell, like, just even when I'm talking to you, like, when you're talking to, like...
Marc:And someone who knows you really well that like like like in the middle of it will be like, OK, you're right.
Marc:And you don't even say anything.
Marc:You know, if I lapse into a defensive mode about something or I stand for something that, you know, is innately not correct.
Marc:And I know like I'm not honoring my my my higher self.
Marc:And you're just you know, you have to point it out to me like there is an element of like, you know, I have to live up to your standards as well.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Which are high.
Marc:But I just think, you know, I think our desire to live up to each other's standards and expectations has gotten, you know, it's somehow or another it matches.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and in a weird way, because the intensity levels are different.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think the focus is the same.
Marc:And I just think the innate trust we have in each other in terms of of of making this work, really.
Marc:But yeah, man, I love you.
Marc:And I think we've done a great thing here.
Guest:Yeah, well, I mean, obviously I feel the same way.
Guest:I owe you my life like I do.
Guest:I mean, it's one thing for me to be like, I'm going to gamble on this guy.
Guest:I want to attach my wagon to him and I want to do with him what other people have done with other high-level talent.
Guest:That's a pipe dream if the other person doesn't give a shit.
Guest:There's a lot of things that people give each other throughout life.
Guest:We've talked about it during this recording that we owe a lot to a lot of people that help elevate this, what we do.
Guest:And a lot of the generosity has been extremely valuable to us.
Guest:But nothing is just nothing.
Guest:ever is more valuable than your trust in me.
Guest:If you didn't trust me, it'd be over.
Marc:How would we even?
Guest:No, right.
Guest:Like I said, I feel the same with you.
Guest:I trusted from the start.
Guest:Okay, yeah, that guy, he's going to be the guy.
Guest:But your ability to buy into what I was selling and to be okay with it and to trust me implicitly
Guest:To the point where you said when we started this, how are we going to do this in terms of ownership?
Guest:And I said, whatever you think, man, I'm here to do it.
Guest:And you said, we're going to make this 50-50.
Guest:And I thought it was crazy at the time.
Guest:I mean, I don't think it's crazy now.
Guest:I think it's fair.
Guest:But, I mean, that's just a hell of a thing.
Guest:It's a hell of a thing for me.
Guest:Like, that was 10 years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we've talked about, like, how you've evolved as a person and you're, you know, but you don't have to evolve that much if you thought back then, I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to give half of it to this guy because I believe in him.
Guest:That's a big thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and, and, you know, in terms of the stuff we've been able to get from it, obviously like we've made a good living.
Guest:We're just doing, we're doing a show that we want to do.
Guest:We're doing a job that we want to do.
Guest:How many people do jobs?
Marc:They love that's what you said to me the other day.
Guest:It wasn't that long ago where I'm like, you know, you're getting kind of down on yourself and you know, you're feeling like maybe you weren't, maybe your best work was behind you and whatnot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you're like, we get to do this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You said, how do you feel?
Guest:I said, I feel great.
Guest:I said, are you kidding me?
Guest:Life is a nightmare.
Guest:It's a nightmare out there.
Guest:Have you looked lately?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And most people's jobs suck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's not any fault of their own.
Guest:That's just the fault of what the system is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we get to do this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we're our own boss.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's an amazing thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then we solicited these requests for questions for this episode.
Yeah.
Guest:And we got a lot of them.
Guest:Thank you, everybody who emailed in.
Guest:And if we didn't get your questions, there were literally thousands of them.
Guest:So apologies for not getting to them.
Guest:And I know how you feel, because I remember writing into Roger Ebert when he had a website, and they never answered my question, and I was crushed by it.
Guest:So please, don't take it personally.
Guest:Don't be me and Roger Ebert.
Guest:We had so many.
Guest:But the thing that was very obvious as I read them, some of them intensely personal,
Guest:and heartfelt is that it really, really matters what we're doing.
Guest:And that's as much a gift to us as anything.
Marc:Oh, it's the best.
Marc:I cry when I read emails almost every time I get new emails.
Guest:Almost every time.
Guest:I have one here that I wanted to read.
Guest:It says, Dear Mark, I first started listening way back in the mid-90s.
Guest:Episodes, not decade, obviously, and
Guest:As I'm sure many fans, listeners have told you over the years, your podcast has helped me through some seriously rough patches of rock bottom and feeling helpless and alone.
Guest:I'm glad the podcast was there for me.
Guest:After surviving a suicide attempt and wondering why I was alive and if I deserved to be, the first thing I did was listen to your show.
Guest:It was a hard road back to getting my life on track, making amends to those I hurt, and finding a reason to keep getting up and trying.
Guest:But you were there when I felt too ashamed to talk to anyone in my life, even those who I knew loved me.
Guest:Your show has meant a lot to me, and I'm not saying it's the only reason I'm alive today because that would sell short so many important people, most of all my wonderful wife.
Guest:But your show was there while I was finding the courage I needed to put it all back together.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Thank you for everything.
Guest:And his request to withhold his name.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, we get a lot of messages like that.
Guest:I mean, that's a very specific and amazing one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just that overwhelms me to a degree that I can't even express.
Guest:And what I started to think about after seeing this kind of time and again in these emails that came in, you know, specifically around this thousandth episode.
Guest:is that's really what people do for each other.
Guest:The ultimate goal of this whole game is can you make it better for other people?
Guest:Can your happiness be equal to those around you?
Guest:And there's so much goddamn suffering and there's so much that's not good.
Guest:But people can help other people.
Guest:And it really is.
Guest:I honestly believe that the collective good is the whole reason that we're here.
Guest:We have a civilization.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And.
Guest:You know, it's just like it doesn't just have to be a podcast.
Guest:It could be like you talk to some guy at the library or you, you know, help somebody out at a grocery store.
Guest:And it's a really, truly humbling thing to have people out there in the world that put a point on it and say, it's you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's you, you, your show, this thing that you put out in the world.
Guest:And, you know, I can't think of a better reason to keep doing it.
Marc:Yeah, I agree with you.
Marc:It was like this is, I think, for both of us.
Marc:We certainly didn't expect almost any of what happened to have happened, but just this sort of connection to have the comfort of people having a pretty...
Marc:real conversation yeah you know when you're feeling lost or in a dark place or or you know like you have no hope you know just a couple of people talking yeah is enough to sort of like oh it's okay you know to ease the loneliness to to sort of get you out of your head you know you know long enough to to sort of reconfigure enough to to keep moving forward is sort of
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:And it's like it's really what it's all about.
Marc:But you and I were never greedy.
Marc:We were never really about the money, except we wanted to make enough money to earn a living and get paid for the work we do.
Marc:And, you know, and we've gotten more than that.
Marc:And that's a great thing.
Marc:But the sort of the other kind of result of doing this is just to make people feel less alone in the most horrible places in their minds, in their lives, you know, in their situations, you know, of all kinds, you know, whether it's depression, they're in the hospital, they lost somebody.
Marc:It's just just to be able to sort of like, well, these people are having a serious conversation about heavy stuff and it's OK.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:OK.
Guest:Well, we used to joke with ourselves like.
Guest:years ago, like, Oh, how many more of these can we do?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Let's get to a thousand.
Guest:Like that was always kind of like the, the, the far off number.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's here now.
Guest:And it's funny, like, uh, Lynn Shelton, who, who is, uh, you know, someone you've worked with a lot.
Guest:She's friends with both of us.
Guest:Uh, I was having coffee with her and, uh, she said, so, so what do you think?
Guest:How much longer do you think you're going to do the show?
Uh,
Guest:And I was like, I'll do it as long as Mark will do it.
Guest:And she's like, oh, that's funny.
Guest:He said the same thing about you.
Guest:That's what I say to everybody.
Guest:Yeah, but that got me thinking.
Guest:There's actually two ways that you could take that response.
Guest:That if you're saying, I'll do it as long as the other guy will do it, it could mean, well, I feel like I'm done, but I want the other guy to feel satisfied and I'll keep going.
Guest:Or it could be like, look, I'll go on indefinitely, but if the other guy says, let's wrap it up, I'll wrap it up.
Marc:And I know which one I am, but I'm interested to know from you, which one are you?
Marc:No, I'm not.
Marc:No, of course not.
Marc:I'm not ready to wrap it up.
Marc:Sometimes I wonder, like, you know, is there going to be always going to be people to talk to?
Marc:And I think that, like, my assumption was, like, you know, how long could this last?
Marc:Not because of us, sort of, like, just because of the way culture works.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Well, we did the one thing that they say you got to do, and it's you hold your audience.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, like, I'm good.
Marc:I'm not good.
Marc:You know, what else am I going to do?
Marc:But it is so nourishing and exciting for me, no matter how much dread or anxiety I go through.
Marc:No, I'm not the guy that's going to... I'm not waiting to quit.
Marc:The fuck am I going to do?
Marc:I still do stand-up.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, this and stand-up are the two things you control.
Guest:As long as you have a microphone in some context, you can do one of those two things.
Marc:I've never said that I'm going to quit the podcast.
Marc:I've many times said, like, I'm done with this stand-up shit.
Marc:All right, well, so let's keep going.
Marc:Okay, I'm in.
Guest:All right, let's do it.
Marc:All right.
Marc:That's it, folks.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:I'll play a little guitar.
Marc:All right.
All right.
guitar solo
Guest:Boomer lives!