Episode 1603 - WTF Origins: A Full Maron Special Presentation
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:How is your what the fuck miss?
Marc:Or your what the fuck Annika?
Marc:No?
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:I hope it all went well yesterday.
Marc:I hope that you're feeling some sort of gratitude or relief that it's over or gratitude for your life or some sort of holiday spirit business.
Marc:I hope you had a good season.
Marc:I hope as we go into the new year, we can sort of get our brains together and figure out how to deal and get through.
Marc:Those are my New Year's resolutions.
Marc:This year, again, I'm going to focus on dealing and getting through.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Right?
Marc:So today we're doing the thing we seem to be doing every Christmas for the last bit of time, for the last few Christmases.
Marc:This is a compilation of a series that we actually did for the full Marin called WTF Origins.
Marc:And this is me and Brendan, my producer and business partner, for many years now.
Marc:Many years.
Marc:I don't even, like you cross some line with the years where you're like, holy shit, it's been that long.
Marc:While you're in it, you don't feel it.
Marc:But we talked about the things that were important in the creation of WTF, as well as the early days of the podcast.
Marc:I want to believe on some level, not just for my ego, that we are historical figures and that WTF is a historic podcast, which it is.
Marc:And on some days, I wonder...
Marc:Did did I unleash this fucking thing on the world?
Marc:Or would it have happened without me?
Marc:Certainly it would have.
Marc:And as things move on and move past, you know, you do reflect.
Marc:And I guess sometimes when we do shows like this, it's good for me to listen to it, too.
Marc:To know that we did something, you know, everything gets plowed under so quickly and it just seems to go into not the rear view, but onto the pile of stuff available that people can find and, you know, kind of all of a sudden engage with, which is good.
Marc:But it does feel like, you know, history and stuff just flies by so quickly.
Marc:And we've done a lot of these fucking things and I've talked to a lot of people and a lot of those talks were kind of amazing and enlightening and touching and informative and, you know, creatively speaking, you know, were my my lifeline to to humanity in a lot of ways.
Marc:And on this episode, we talk a lot about or a bit about the Luna Lounge days where the kind of alt comedy thing took hold in New York City.
Marc:We talk about the Marc Maron show, which was a show that Brendan produced with me out here in Los Angeles after we were pushed out of Air America.
Marc:And then we talk a bit about Break Room Live.
Marc:which was something that we did when they pulled me back in.
Marc:And then we kind of finished with a discussion about WTF and how that came out of all those things, but also out of my experience and Brendan's experience and how we kind of worked together on this thing.
Marc:But it is nice to look back just to make sure because my brain is addled and fucked up
Marc:From the pace of technology and from engaging with it and from age and from, you know, just time kind of flying by.
Marc:But this is a nice thing.
Marc:And I hope if you haven't heard this stuff that you find it entertaining and informative and interesting because it has been that.
Marc:for me, and I believe for Brendan.
Marc:And I would like to say this was all part of this year's bonus material on the full Marin.
Marc:And people can subscribe to that feed by going to the link in the episode description.
Marc:So unless you had the bonus feed, you haven't heard this stuff.
Marc:But again, I hope you enjoy it.
Marc:We'll see what I can remember and how I remember it.
Marc:That's always the interesting thing about getting old is how your brain just kind of rewrites things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, do you feel like you've done that with other things?
Guest:Like there are other times in your life where you've come up with a narrative on them and then all of a sudden you find yourself being told, that's not how it was.
Marc:Yes, but I mean, usually not a full narrative.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But also some people, you know, you're at the whims of other people's memories of people have said things to me where they said it was me.
Marc:And there's just no way.
Marc:There's just no way.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They just put me in there.
Marc:I got an email yesterday from some guys like, you know, we've been repeating this joke of yours in my family for years.
Marc:And I'm like, I don't know what that is.
Marc:I have no idea what you're talking about.
Marc:Literally, it was a line that was like, beans are good.
Marc:And I'm like, what is that?
Marc:Beans?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I'm like, what is that from?
Marc:I don't know what that's from.
Marc:Is there a joke?
Marc:He's like, I thought I heard it on Sirius.
Marc:I'm like, you know, I don't remember some of my jokes, but I remember the impact of that line.
Marc:If it was part of something, it might have been something I just riffed.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:Well, I think this is a good segue because the whole reason I want to talk to you today was after watching you on Dave Cross's new show, which is called Senses Working Overtime.
Guest:And I was watching it on YouTube.
Guest:You guys are very fun together as always.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you started talking about the New York days, the Boston days, the New York days, all the stuff in your past where you guys had a lot of common ground.
Guest:And I realized that in talking about Luna Lounge, it's this thing that comes up a lot on the show, especially people in your cohort.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I'm not really sure that I could... If somebody asked me...
Guest:Like, what's the deal with Luna Lounge?
Guest:I wouldn't be able to tell them very much because I just haven't heard enough detail.
Guest:I could tell lots of people the story of the comedy store, which has been told on our show over and over again.
Guest:I could tell lots of stories about SNL, like as a civilian, as somebody who just heard about it.
Guest:But I couldn't do that with Luna Lounge.
Guest:And so I thought it would be a good idea to ask you some of those questions and get the story from someone who was there.
Guest:So...
Guest:What's the deal?
Guest:Luna Lounge, if anybody's wondering what we're talking about, was a club in the Lower East Side, yes?
Marc:It was on Ludlow Street.
Marc:It's now a hotel.
Marc:The building has been level.
Marc:It's gone.
Marc:It was like a few doors down from Katz's.
Marc:On Ludlow.
Marc:And it was primarily a music club.
Marc:I mean, you know, we could get Rob Sacker, the guy who owned the place, to chime in here.
Marc:But Luna Lounge became a phenomenon because it was really the heart of what became New York's alternative comedy scene.
Marc:So in my recollection of it, the comedy show...
Marc:that ended up there started elsewhere.
Marc:You know, that was sort of the final home of it.
Marc:But the first attempt to do an alt show was not at Luna Lounge.
Marc:And the first one I remember, maybe the first two was done at some small bar that had a small showroom.
Marc:It was put on.
Marc:It was kind of created and curated and booked by
Marc:By Michael O'Brien, the publicist, and Dave Becky, the manager.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Guest:Michael O'Brien.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was part of it.
Guest:Him and Becky.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And both of these guys continued to be, you know, names with top comedy people for the next several decades.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Dave Becky became, like, really the biggest...
Marc:manager in comedy yeah and i also remember like in our first you know five ten years we were always getting guests from michael o'brien well michael o'brien and dave came up together uh you know michael o'brien was just a guy he had very few clients you know in the beginning running his own shop i think he still does and becky you know locked into him and and and becky was that's how it works that side of the business and
Marc:They came up together.
Guest:I think the last time I got an email from Michael O'Brien, it was still from an AOL address.
Guest:I'm not kidding.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So they booked this one.
Marc:And on the show was me and Jeff Ross and maybe Todd.
Marc:Wait, do you remember where it was?
Marc:It was upstairs at some place.
Marc:I don't even know if it was a functioning club.
Marc:It was a small room.
Marc:But then it moved almost immediately to a place called Rebar.
Marc:And that was the show.
Marc:Was Rebar in Brooklyn?
Marc:Nope.
Marc:Nope.
Marc:It was this weird bar.
Marc:I don't know how they found it.
Marc:It was on the west side.
Marc:It was not conducive to what we were doing.
Marc:But that became the first alt-comedy venue.
Marc:It was a bar that was very weirdly kind of, you know, it was one of those places, like, is this owned by the Russian mob?
Marc:What is the style here?
Marc:It was kind of modern but kind of weird.
Marc:And then they had a back area, and eventually they put a curtain there.
Marc:And there was no seats.
Marc:People were sitting on the fucking floor.
Marc:And there was no real stool.
Marc:It had some weird kind of welded modern bar stool they pulled in there.
Marc:And there was no mic.
Guest:Well, so why do you think they were doing it?
Guest:What was the impetus?
Guest:Did they just recognize we have this talent and we need them to have a space to play?
Yeah.
Marc:I think it was a reaction to the alternative space.
Marc:That there was something happening and people like Becky was looking to showcase people, I'm sure.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And to have a place where they had some control over that that wasn't a comedy club.
Marc:And this is when...
Marc:You know, this is when like during Luna Lounge, the UCB moved to New York.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And set up shop before they had a theater and they were coming down there.
Marc:But then when it moved to Luna, it changed hands at some point.
Marc:But again, not to comics.
Marc:But when you say it changed hands, what do you mean?
Marc:Like who was booking it?
Marc:Yeah, I mean, at some point, you know, moved from Rebar, and then it became Luna Lounge, and the show got a name, Eating It.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:You had me and Jeff Ross and, you know, Louie and Silverman and Janine, Zach.
Marc:You know, the full Colin Quinn eventually.
Marc:Eventually, people made their way because Singer made it appealing.
Marc:You know, at the beginning, comics like Colin and Patrice and stuff were like, you know, were you guys just doing comedy for nothing?
Marc:They made it seem like it was amateur hour.
Marc:It was an open mic.
Marc:And I always treated it as a place to work out.
Marc:In a way that I could not work out in the comedy clubs.
Marc:And I think eventually that became sort of a thing.
Marc:I think, I don't know why, I don't know if Colin was adverse to it at the beginning, but he ended up coming around.
Marc:And then like the state guys, I think arguably Stella probably started at Luna Lounge.
Marc:And some of them were doing solo standup.
Marc:Some of the UCB people were doing solo performances.
Marc:So it became this huge scene.
Marc:And it was sort of the center of a comedy thing between performance art, sketch, and stand-up that actually got a hip kind of following to it.
Marc:It was like you'd go there on Mondays.
Marc:There was a line out the door.
Marc:And I was just this cranky fuck.
Marc:And I hated everybody that was coming in for some reason.
Marc:And I'd get up there and do my little thing.
Marc:But I was like, you know, why are all these people here?
Marc:And I remember Will Ferrell came down.
Marc:Celebrities would start coming down.
Marc:And it became a thing.
Marc:And they put couches in the back.
Marc:It was a weird seating situation.
Marc:But there was a stage back there and all these couches and people would sit on the floor and stand around the room.
Marc:All the comics of my generation, most of them eventually performed there at least once or twice.
Marc:Chappelle would go down there.
Marc:But that was later.
Marc:Early on, it was a little more raw and a little more weird.
Marc:But then it got pretty mainstream-ish.
Marc:Perfect.
Guest:And so it just seems like that the initial show that happened at Rebar and that moves over to Luna is a really hospitable gym for you at that time.
Marc:For me, it was all I thought about.
Marc:When anyone would talk about alternative comedy, I didn't really care because I didn't come out of that.
Marc:You know, like, I mean, I started, I was already, like, I'm older than all these fucking people now anyways.
Marc:You know, so I started even before Louis, like, Nick DiPaolo's more like my generation New York comic.
Marc:Dave Attell.
Marc:You know, I started in comedy clubs.
Marc:You know, I started in the late 80s, you know, in Boston, then came to New York, and, you know, was kicking around.
Marc:So by 1995, you know, I've been working as a professional comic for seven fucking years.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So for me...
Marc:It was really just a place to work out in a way that I wasn't beholden to anybody.
Marc:And, you know, and the idea of it was you couldn't do new material.
Marc:So that was the challenge.
Marc:Oh, so wait, hang on.
Guest:That was like a philosophical idea behind the show?
Marc:Initially.
Marc:You got to go up there with something new every week.
Marc:Talk about your day, whatever.
Marc:Wasn't a place to do your act.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I'm like, great.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's, I would just get up there.
Guest:That's like what you're doing now.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And sometimes it really wouldn't work.
Marc:I mean, sometimes it was just, but it would, it did kind of train me to do this thing where you just get up there and drive and drive and drive until you find something.
Marc:And if you don't find anything, it's so sad.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:yeah sharpling talks about that all the time about you know he was a regular he used to go every monday and he talks about how it was it would be this amazing thing where just some nights you were just on fire and it was like it was this inspired lunacy just coming out of you and then some nights you were just tanking so hard like yeah like in a way you'd never see anybody else yeah
Marc:Yeah, it was so painful.
Marc:It's terrible.
Marc:But I can get right there now.
Marc:I'd get up there with the wrong attitude and be mad at the audience.
Marc:And there was some serious tanking sometimes.
Marc:And I'd have to go into that front bar and just be like, I got to get out of here.
Guest:Was the music scene already jumping by the time you guys started doing it?
Guest:You know, dude, I missed all of it.
Marc:What do you mean by you missed it?
Marc:You just didn't care?
Marc:No, I spent my life in comedy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, like I miss that.
Marc:I mean, what music scene?
Marc:So what is happening in 95?
Marc:I mean, that weird, that amazing, you know, meet me in the bathroom thing.
Marc:That was the early aughts.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But a lot of those bands got their start at Luna.
Yeah.
Guest:right the strokes interpol yeah yeah yes the national they were around i guess but i didn't know them you know it just wasn't my thing i don't know what i was doing at your time like mid like 1995 the person who became the biggest after starting at luna was elliot smith was he around
Marc:He may have been.
Marc:I don't remember him.
Marc:They weren't on the shows with us.
Marc:But maybe he was around.
Marc:I really was so detached from music in general then.
Marc:I just didn't go to any of it.
Marc:I don't, I missed all of it.
Marc:But it wasn't like the world's crossed over.
Marc:It wasn't like, you know.
Marc:Well, I think probably with some of the performers it did, but not me.
Marc:You know, like I think that like the, like I was always sort of an outsider, but I think around the, you know, like Cross was out in LA.
Marc:He really wasn't.
Marc:around new york yet but like i imagine with some of the state guys and with some of the with garofalo i'm sure there was crossover in terms of hanging out and stuff but i didn't hang out with people right so i didn't see it but you know at some point you know there was a lot going on you had pianos down there right with todd todd and uh david cross came to new york tinkle yeah tinkle at pianos and that was a venue that had comedy alt comedy there's a lot of those kind of shows coming up
Marc:I do know it waned.
Marc:I remember it kind of waned, you know?
Marc:And it became less vital.
Marc:Like, at the beginning, it was very vital to me.
Guest:Well, but do you think it became less vital because it became more mainstream?
Marc:Yeah, but, you know, the heat came off it.
Marc:I mean, dude, it was crazy down there.
Marc:You know, like when something pops in New York, it's like this lines around the block.
Yeah.
Marc:And then, like, I remember at some point, it's like nobody's waiting anymore.
Guest:Well, that then is a place where I think the page turned for you, and it's probably what led to ultimately radio being an option because, you know, you talk about all the things you had in development that didn't wind up happening, and
Guest:Having already done the like comedy exploration thing, you're now faced with, am I just going back to clubs?
Guest:Am I just going back to being a feature somewhere?
Guest:Or do I take this new gig, which is probably why at that time in your life, taking the radio gig made sense.
Marc:Oh, my God, dude.
Marc:Like, I was like spiraling by now by the late 90s.
Marc:You know, I had not sobered up yet.
Marc:I was in a marriage I was unhappy with.
Marc:I was living in Queens.
Marc:You know, she was thinking about having kids and I was like, I just wanted to die.
Marc:And I was doing segments on a local TV network.
Marc:You remember that?
Marc:The desk segments for Metro TV.
Marc:And in my mind, I was like, well, maybe this will work out for me.
Marc:I'll just find a local gig.
Marc:Because everything had crapped out.
Marc:Deals crapped out.
Marc:I did not build relationships on the road like you were supposed to.
Marc:I wasn't doing the type of comedy that anybody wanted.
Marc:You know, I would, you know, I could work in San Francisco.
Marc:I could work in Boston.
Marc:There were places I would go and headline, but, you know, I wasn't a known quantity.
Marc:And when, so, you know, then the marriage breaks up in 99.
Marc:So I put all my fucking, you know, eggs into the sober basket and I'm just like working that and doing comedy and,
Marc:doing meetings, hanging out with Mishnah, getting a divorce, locked out of my apartment, locks changed, subletting way down on Delancey Street.
Marc:And I don't know, man, once that all fucking came to pass,
Marc:I was able to go back to the apartment in Queens, which I kept.
Marc:And then I split.
Marc:And I sublet the apartment in Queens to some fucking loser guitar player who never paid me.
Marc:Friends of Jody and Stoli's downstairs.
Marc:And when I got to L.A., it was like I had to start all over.
Marc:I had to fight to get involved and pay my dues in the alt scene there.
Marc:That's when I got my name on the wall at the comedy store finally.
Marc:2002, 2003.
Marc:I felt like I just wasn't, if it wasn't because I was sort of some mythic guy at the comedy store, I don't know how it would have went for me really in LA.
Marc:I didn't like doing all the alt shows and I don't know, dude.
Marc:But what happened was ultimately by the time the Air America opportunity came out,
Marc:was presented to me and I was sitting around and you know, I didn't have a pot to piss in really.
Marc:And I couldn't, I couldn't turn it down.
Marc:Like there was no way I could, you know, I had the apartment still in New York and you know, I was political enough.
Marc:So it was really, again, a sort of, I couldn't see a way around it.
Guest:You know, this kind of brings us back to what we documented last year with our Morning Sedition series.
Guest:And so if people are listening to this and they haven't heard that, you can go back to last year.
Guest:We did a series of several episodes on the Full Marin here about Morning Sedition called Good Morning Geniuses.
Guest:That was our radio show.
Guest:and you can listen to that with some clips that we played from the show and from our time there, which was basically the next two years of your life.
Guest:I think all of this stuff, including Back to Luna Lounge, is stuff that were not for these things in your life.
Guest:You would not have gotten to the podcast.
Guest:Well, that's for sure.
Guest:They're all very important and a good part of your origin story.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Even just talking about...
Marc:These these turns like, you know, I don't generally put the memories together like that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, to where Luna Lounge happened.
Marc:And then, you know, I start fucking around with sobriety and fucking around with a woman.
Marc:And, you know, I'm married, you know, two or like three years and I'm already blowing it.
Marc:And then that whole marriage blows up because, you know, I make I just remember, dude, it was 90 years.
Marc:Must have been 99 or 2000 where I'm like, you know, I'm just like in a room sweating and a year sober with Mishnah.
Marc:Like, are we doing this, man?
Marc:Because I'm going to leave my wife.
Marc:She goes, I guess so.
Marc:I'm like, good enough.
Marc:You know, and.
Guest:That's always a good trigger puller.
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:I'm in.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Just the whole fucking thing blew up.
Marc:And then, you know, conversely, she blew mine up again.
Marc:Yeah, but those trauma points of chaos, relationship chaos, and yeah, sobriety, all that stuff.
Marc:Yeah, it does haze things a bit.
Guest:So I told you to tap into whatever trauma you had around this topic.
Guest:And the topic is the Marc Maron show.
Guest:Did you do any tapping?
Marc:Yeah, well, I'm doing it now.
Marc:I mean, I did it today.
Marc:You told me this morning, you know, to get in the zone and KTLK.
Marc:I remember KTLK.
Marc:I remember you moving out here, you know, and you just had a baby and you were living in.
Marc:No, no.
Guest:I didn't have the baby yet.
Guest:I had just gotten married.
Marc:Oh, that was it.
Marc:Just got married.
Guest:Literally just got married.
Marc:And you just bolt and you're living in these furnished apartments.
Guest:Those were kind of cool.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I found that charming.
Guest:What were they called?
Guest:Were you in the Oakwoods?
Guest:No, it was just called like Burbank Community Living or something like that.
Guest:Burbank Long-Term Living.
Guest:It was like you would live there if you had like a three-month stint on a Disney show or something.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like those other ones.
Marc:I think they're called the Oakwoods that some people lived in.
Marc:But I just remember that, you know, coming out of the morning show, coming out of morning sedition, this weird panic on the executive level when the shakeup at Air America happened.
Marc:And we had some clandestine group of consultants and marginal characters from the brass who wanted to keep us in the fold as the new CEO failed.
Yeah.
Marc:And the idea was that Scott Elberg, I don't even remember his position, president.
Guest:He was a vice president.
Guest:There were like a couple of vice presidents.
Marc:And then Scott Krantz.
Guest:Gary Krantz.
Marc:Gary Krantz.
Marc:I know his brother.
Marc:They had some sort of finagled something out here in L.A.
Marc:because we got fired off the morning show and we wanted to keep in the game.
Marc:And they finagled something with KTLK.
Marc:Stephanie Miller had the morning show there.
Marc:So that was part of the condition of us getting anything.
Marc:was that I had to make nice with Stephanie Miller.
Marc:But the one thing we did have by that point were chops and- And fans, and fans.
Guest:There was a devoted, hardcore, and I mean, that I think is the reason why we wound up doing the show in LA because-
Guest:people like there was, there were petitions back when that mattered, you know, and, uh, and, and the, uh, the petitions, you know, kept coming into the air America offices, keep Mark and Mark on the air, blah, blah, blah, morning sedition.
Guest:And that, that meant something.
Guest:And that's what, I guess my question is, I'm wondering, because I remember it all kind of going down, but I was outside of it.
Guest:You being in it, like, what were you hearing?
Guest:Were you hearing from those people who were doing those like back channel deals to try to get you on in LA?
Marc:Basically, I remember, and I don't know where it came within the arc of things, but I remember, you know, I packed up, I went back to Los Angeles, and Elberg came out there and took me to Dantana's and said, look, this is just a placeholder.
Marc:We're going to get you back on the air in the mornings, but this will keep you in the mix to do this morning show or whatever that show was.
Marc:I don't even know what you call that show we did.
Marc:A late night show?
Guest:I envisioned it as a late night talk show, variety show, a la what was on the networks, but just on the radio.
Guest:That was my goal for it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, you know, that was encouraging.
Marc:But by this point, though, like, I don't know how you felt, but I'm like, there was enough fuck you and me to be like, I can just go back to my life here, whatever the fuck this is.
Guest:I do remember that.
Guest:I remember that it was weird that it was like there was a moment.
Guest:No, dude, you know what I remember?
Guest:I remember that once you had moved everything back out there, they were like,
Guest:there's a chance to keep the morning show.
Guest:Do you remember that?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:They were, they like suddenly were like, they realized the error of their ways.
Guest:Everyone had browbeat Danny Goldberg and was like, he'll change his mind now if you want him to.
Guest:And you were like, you already moved me back home.
Guest:Like I'm already out of the air.
Marc:There's a lot of fucking around going on.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, just sort of like, but it wasn't a guarantee.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:I do remember that.
Marc:And I do remember saying that it didn't sound like a sure deal though.
Guest:Why would you feel confident about anything they were doing at that time?
Marc:Yeah, because I didn't even understand what these different groups were.
Marc:There was trouble at the castle, whatever.
Marc:What were Elberg and Krantz doing?
Marc:What were all those suits doing?
Guest:I mean, I know I think all those guys thought they were going to finally, they were going to take, they were going to rest Air America away from the progressive activism ecosphere and really just make it radio.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which was what Scott Elberg's background was, Gary Krantz's background, where these were clear channel radio guys.
Guest:And they, you know, to Scott's credit, he saw you as a good person to bet on as a radio host.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In any event, you wind up coming back to L.A.
Guest:We know that this thing is going to get set up.
Guest:You asked me directly, will you come out here and produce this for me?
Guest:Because, you know, I got to get this off the ground like morning sedition.
Guest:And I agreed that I would come out until the end of March, that if we could do it for like a ramp up of like three months, which winds up biting us because the time got crunched.
Guest:But I said, yes, even though I just got married, I'm trying to start a life here in Brooklyn.
Guest:I will come out.
Marc:Well, for me, I wasn't going to do it without you.
Marc:I wasn't that kind of radio guy.
Marc:I didn't care enough about that.
Marc:you know, working in radio to be set up with some producer I didn't trust or some lackey or some, uh, you know, uh, tired old timer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that, that meant a lot to me.
Guest:Like that was a, that was a key motivator to, to doing it was you, you did exactly say that you said, I wouldn't, I won't do this if you don't want to come out and do it.
Guest:And I was like, well, this guy's known me for less than two years and
Guest:You know, we've worked together for whatever it's been, 18 months or so.
Guest:And if he trusts me with this, and, you know, I'm 26 at that point.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Like, I felt like that was enough of a sign that I should go do this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we just had to build this thing from scratch.
Guest:I came out there...
Marc:And it was a two-hour show, right?
Guest:It was supposed to be two hours late nights starting at 10 p.m.
Guest:on the West Coast.
Guest:So if you're trying to listen on a live stream on the East Coast, it was one in the morning.
Guest:And the promise was this is going to be syndicated.
Guest:So we would wind up doing it so that people in New York could wind up listening to it maybe the next day or the next morning or whatever.
Yeah.
Guest:And that was a lie.
Guest:Oh, well that becomes the, that becomes the key lie that ends the whole thing ultimately.
Guest:But we went out there with this idea.
Guest:I remember going over to your house in Highland park and just sitting at your kitchen table and basically going through everything we did on morning sedition to see what kind of thing would still work.
Guest:My thought about it was like,
Guest:well let's just do like what fucking conan does we'll do conan but for radio like you know you you be the the conan and like this is late night but with but on the radio with mark and you know we then incorporated some of the characters that was the other thing the guys who were used to be writing for us at air america who still had their jobs at air america they now had no work they were like writing for randy rhodes but it was like nothing you know and
Guest:But so we were able to use these people to do our old bits.
Guest:And then I just kind of like, I thought of like what the sound of the show would be.
Guest:And I started, you know, going through all this old big band music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like thinking, again, like the idea of like, this should be like almost a joke on Carson.
Guest:Like if our last show was like a sly...
Guest:elbow to the ribs of morning radio this would be the same for like late night and you know we have i thought we had a great theme song like i was very happy with what was the theme song that that's a band called real big fish and the song is called sell out and it just it's it's real like energy propulsive horns just works really well the best part of that show
Marc:Was using all the improv guys out here.
Guest:And that was your connection with people at the UCB theater at the time.
Guest:I think Seth Morris was the real door in to that.
Guest:We went and had, what was that place that's closed now?
Guest:But that diner, like right by the Hollywood sign, it's like in a hotel.
Guest:Oh yeah, yeah, the 101.
Yeah.
Guest:the 101 diner right yeah i remember having uh uh lunch or something there breakfast with seth morris yeah who uh was you know a big you know he was one of the teachers at ucb yeah i think he was he might have been running the place i think he was so he was like way into it when we had we met with him he he got it right away that we we just like feed us a pipeline of hungry improv people sure like want to do this stuff
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And James Adomian was one of them.
Guest:Paul Rust, remember that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You actually interviewed him on the show and he reminded you, hey, I used to do a thing on your old radio show.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And did we use...
Marc:Well, he used Wyatt.
Marc:Wyatt was the big one.
Marc:Wyatt Sinek.
Guest:Wyatt Sinek was the big, like, he created a character that worked the most perfectly with you.
Guest:Because it was the one that, like, understood the dynamic of, you know, call in to a radio host with a regular recurring bit that you can easily refill.
Guest:He's an army guy, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a recruiter, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and it was, you know, he's recruiting for the surge because this is 2006.
Guest:So it's like the worst time public opinion has completely turned on the Iraq war.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his thing was like, he's, he's coming around to like places you're not used to recruiting.
Guest:So like liberal talk radio, he's going to make the pitch to recruit.
Guest:Oh, Reese Barr.
Guest:She was, she would come on as a Russian prostitute.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Svetlana, the movie reviewer.
Guest:Svetlana, yeah.
Guest:Craig Anton, you used a couple of times.
Guest:He was just your buddy who would come in and do some characters.
Guest:And then we did... This was another thing I remember.
Guest:We went to the Figaro...
Guest:The other cafe.
Guest:I remember all the locations that we wound up doing these things at.
Guest:So we went to the Figaro and met with Kevin Kataoka, Ray James, and Steve Rosenfield.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:To talk about writing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, they wrote just monologue jokes for us every day.
Guest:And it was great.
Guest:It was like this.
Guest:I can't believe more people don't think to do this or didn't at the time.
Guest:Which is like, get a bunch of funny comedy writers and get them to send you jokes.
Guest:And we'd pay them $10 a joke.
Guest:And you'd have jokes every night.
Guest:But heads and tails of the show were like, you know, basically monologues.
Marc:Straight up monologue jokes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Doing them on the radio.
Marc:But it was fun.
Guest:It was a lot of fun.
Guest:It was a lot of fun to just even just to pick them.
Guest:Like you get these daily lists of jokes from these guys and then just select the ones you thought were good.
Marc:But it just became, I don't know how quickly...
Marc:It became just a fucking nightmare.
Guest:Well, it was as quickly as that meeting that we had to have, honestly.
Guest:Were we on the air yet?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:We had to prove ourselves to get on the air.
Guest:So what winds up happening is I go out there with you.
Guest:We start building this show.
Guest:Gary Krantz comes out and says, we have to go have this meeting at Clear Channel.
Guest:which was, you know, a giant radio hub out there.
Guest:It wasn't just this one station.
Guest:It was this entire clear channel portfolio of stations.
Guest:But so we go in there to meet when we think like this is, oh, okay, this is the thing where we have to apologize, right?
Guest:For the, for, um,
Marc:Shitting on Stephanie as her lead in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this goes back to when we were on Morning Sedition.
Guest:You were always making a stink over us not being live in L.A.
Guest:Or now it wasn't even that we were live.
Marc:We were live.
Marc:They used to...
Marc:We were live three to six in the morning, but then they run us again.
Marc:And they did that at the beginning.
Marc:But then they dropped Stephanie in as the live thing.
Marc:And they defended that because why wouldn't you want to have live radio in the market that the radio station is in?
Marc:I mean, I got it, but it just irked me because then there was really no presence in L.A.
Marc:unless you were up at three in the morning.
Marc:And it just bothered me.
Marc:So knowing that Stephanie was in the studio about to start her show...
Marc:I would sometimes end my show in a snide way about, you know, setting her up in LA.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it must've just pissed her off to no end.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:They were, well, I mean, I don't even think pissed off is the right word.
Guest:They were like vengeful.
Guest:and we didn't we didn't know it we thought it was oh they got slightly pissed off at that so we go in there and this dude and he's a big he's a big strapping a football player dude exactly he he's guys he's biting his lip comes over to his like stiff lip like reaches out shakes your hand how are you shakes your hand goes back and sits down and this guy this this giant ham hock
Guest:that we just met is the one in charge.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we have to like figure this out within this moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was all a hope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was no prep to it.
Guest:There was nothing, there was no, no groundwork had been laid.
Marc:Like, but we were presented that it was sort of a guarantee.
Marc:We're a shoe in.
Guest:i was why i was out there yeah i wouldn't have been out there if they said well we don't know if this is going to happen basically it comes down to can you un-piss off this giant texan which we wound up doing amazingly but at that moment like he he you know finally like after staring daggers at us he's like you know you offended me greatly and you know it's like it was like what you would do to like a drug dealer
Guest:yeah this ends now like yeah guns on the table and he made us go downstairs like in at that moment stephanie miller was like coming off the air yeah i couldn't believe like how awful the whole situation was and how how little how minimally we were prepped for how bad it was that's that was the thing i couldn't believe
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't remember what our feeling was.
Marc:How did it end up?
Marc:But I do.
Marc:Cause like years later I did Stephanie's podcast and she, she seemed like she didn't even remember it.
Guest:No, I think, I think she, I think she, you know, felt like you did the right thing and you apologized and it was coming from a genuine place.
Guest:And you said the whole time you're like, I was, you're, this was, I think an honest reaction.
Guest:You weren't just making an excuse.
Guest:You were like,
Guest:I was new to radio and I was told one of the best things you could do is create rivalries, create like make make your audience think you're better than the others.
Guest:Yeah, because that was true.
Guest:That was like a lesson people had imparted to you.
Guest:like, oh, John Manzo or some guy like that.
Guest:It's like, yeah, you got to get your, and Randy Rhodes, who was on Air America, would do that stuff all the time.
Guest:Pid herself against Franken, you know, like people on our air.
Guest:So, and you said that to her, and I think she believed you, which was true.
Guest:You weren't lying.
Marc:I was also mad though.
Marc:I was, I mean, the reality of it is whether I thought that or not, it was really about how we had no viable presence in Los Angeles.
Guest:Right, right, exactly.
Marc:And it wasn't even her fault.
Marc:But I, yeah, you know, look, man, I, you know, I was, my mouth gets me in trouble.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Well, so we get the show.
Guest:We're finally on.
Guest:We're finally building to get on the air.
Guest:We've got these comics in place.
Guest:We've got, you know, people doing bits for us.
Guest:We're lining up guests and we're ready to launch on February 27th, 2006.
Guest:And then we find out we will not be launching on that day because there is a LA Clippers game.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:And that becomes the persistent story of the entire run of the Marc Maron show.
Marc:The station, before it was a progressive station, had a contract with the Clippers to run live game coverage.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:And those games, I guess they probably started at 8 or something.
Marc:And all we could do was hope that they'd be over because we had a 10 o'clock start time live.
Marc:And then during fucking basketball season, it would go to 1020, 1030, 1045.
Marc:And we were just sitting there waiting to launch our – waiting to do our show.
Yeah.
Guest:And initially what we would do is... So we launched the next day, which was February 28th.
Guest:That was a Tuesday.
Guest:And then I think immediately the next day was another Clippers game, the Wednesday.
Guest:And we had... The reason they would be late is that if the Clippers were in L.A.,
Guest:or on the West coast, they would almost always preempt us because yeah, the games would start at seven or eight o'clock and, and then they'd even, they'd had to take a post game.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so if they were on the East coast or central or something, we'd get lucky.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or they had no game that night, we'd be fine.
Guest:But because, you know, an East coast game is starting at, you know, four o'clock LA time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they'd be in the clear by then.
Guest:But then after basketball season, they also had an arena football contract that we'd get preempted for and UCLA basketball as well.
Guest:So it was a major sports clusterfuck that we would, you know, rarely avoid.
Guest:and at first what they had us doing was start whenever the clippers game ends and go for two hours and we so that could have meant the clippers game ends at 11 15 yeah and we would go till you know 1 15 in the morning or whatever it was we put our foot down on that we're like we're not gonna keep going that late who was paying us air america in new york that was good
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so eventually they made us, we said, well, what we'll do is we're just going to start whenever the Clippers game ends and we end at 12.
Guest:But the problem with that became we'd lose guests.
Guest:We'd get crunched down to 45 minutes of a show.
Guest:It was just all a total mess right away.
Guest:And seething.
Marc:It was like a nightmare.
Marc:Oh yeah.
Marc:And you were furious.
Marc:Sitting up there.
Marc:Waiting, it was a real lesson.
Marc:You know, God knows I'd done comedy long enough, but just to not have any way to protect your job or to have a say in your future in a way and just have to...
Guest:play by these rules but i will say i there were a couple of nights i can remember like so now once we launched you know i only had about a month there until i was set to go back to new york and so we were really trying to make this work and i do remember like several shows like at the end of that show i i remember i had the instant replay machine like which i wound up leaving out there with you and
Guest:And I would take it in and out of the studio so that it didn't stay there and get stolen by anybody.
Guest:I still have it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I remember walking to my car after the show one night and looking down at... Remember how you used to have a little overlay where you could write?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:what was there yeah and i'm just like walking with this thing and it's like fart dick cheney shit or whatever on each button and i was just like man this is fun like i know this is stressful and i know like we go through a lot to do this but like i like that this is my job i like that this is my life
Guest:And it was, yeah, it was like very typical for us that it would be like that next to like some soundbite of Bush, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Guest:And so, you know, I was definitely committed, even though I was going back to New York, I was committed to like, I want this to work.
Guest:I want there to be an outlet where like I can be working in radio and it's funny.
Guest:We're doing comedy.
Marc:And you wanted to build it so it would stay.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, well, and it didn't it didn't last that long.
Guest:So February 28 was our first show.
Guest:And then July 14.
Guest:That was your last day, I believe, if I'm looking at the info I had and matching everything up.
Guest:I think on the show, on the air on like July 5th, you announced that you couldn't come to an agreement with them about syndicating.
Guest:You had an escape clause in your contract.
Guest:I don't know if that was true, but that was how you announced it on the show that said if they couldn't syndicate the show, you didn't have to do it.
Marc:Well, that's probably a nicer way of putting it, but they were sort of like, do whatever you want.
Marc:It's over.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Marc:I can't believe we owed anybody anything.
Guest:yeah and so july 14th 2006 that was your last show it also uh coincidentally was janine garofalo's last day at air america uh she quit at that same on that same exact day unrelated uh from the majority report show in new york uh and that was it that was the short four and a half month run of the mark maron show right march not even legendary not even appreciated by anybody
Guest:It's not underappreciated.
Guest:It's non-appreciated.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It happened in a vacuum and no one was the wiser.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But it does lead to, I mean, it's going to lead to other things we'll talk about on future episodes, how, you know, we did Break Room Live stemming from, you know, a lot of this stuff.
Guest:But, you know, a lot of the things we were doing,
Guest:were helpful in setting up this podcast, right?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:First of all, stuff we don't do anymore, like using improv comics to do kind of comedy bang bang style things that, you know, that was kind of an early version of that on this show.
Guest:That was basically the next two years for me.
Guest:was trying and failing to make this happen somewhere else.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And were you at Sirius yet?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:I was trying to get it on there.
Guest:And it just wasn't, I don't know, probably many reasons, but it wasn't anything anyone was willing to spend money on.
Marc:You were sending them tapes.
Guest:We're sending them lots of reels, like different kinds, different kinds to different places.
Guest:I'd go to, I'd have meetings with people at places where I was doing work so that I could be like, Hey, you know what I do?
Guest:And I can bring this here.
Guest:And there were always reasons.
Guest:Nah, we can't do that.
Guest:It's not saleable, whatever.
Marc:Non-appreciated.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was the beginning of the fucking end in terms of my hope for having a career in show business, really.
Marc:Because then, you know, my wife leaves me not long after that and I'm thrown into the sort of chaos of, you know, a divorce and, you know, just spending hours and days, you know, photocopying bank receipts and like, you know, disclosure stuff, just being beaten down.
Yeah.
Marc:It was, it was a lot.
Marc:So, yeah, it was just a spiraling shit show where I was going broke.
Marc:You know, no one could really lend me money.
Marc:My dad wouldn't lend me money.
Marc:I think my mom gave me a little money to keep me afloat, but I was spiraling the fucking drain, dude.
Guest:Well, what was your you had?
Guest:Did you mentally have any like career prospects or like career goals or ambitions at this point?
Guest:Or were you totally swamped?
Marc:No, I just knew that, like, you know, I was doing what I could.
Marc:I was doing what I always did.
Marc:You know, again, I mean, this was not a time where I could sell tickets.
Marc:So whatever club work I was taking was just, you know, that kind of like, you know, kind of unknown headliner club work.
Marc:I was probably doing a few TV appearances here or there.
Marc:I don't think you were.
Marc:To be honest with you.
Guest:Like I looked up your, like maybe a Conan here or there when you'd be in New York because Conan was still in New York.
Guest:So you're out in LA.
Guest:I don't know what TV appearances you could have done in LA at that time.
Marc:So I was journaling and I was talking to friends every day.
Marc:I was very depressed and I was just, you know, trying to keep it together.
Guest:Yeah, and I do remember you taking a lot of fill-in gigs anytime there was a gap with a host on Air America.
Guest:You would do a fill-in if they lost somebody and they didn't have them.
Guest:I remember you would do guest spots for Randy Rhoads, and then they fired Randy Rhoads.
Guest:So there was a period of time where you and Sam and Ron Cooby, you were all filling in.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Yeah, I kind of remember that.
Marc:Was I doing it out here?
Guest:Yeah, you would do it out there, and then anytime you were in New York, you would go into the studio, you'd do fill-in spots for Rachel Maddow, you would do fill-ins.
Guest:You were trying to, I think, stay in the mix there because you essentially had no other real prospects.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Other than the stand up.
Guest:And, but I think they must've been trying to keep me in, you know, I think it was always Scott Elberg who was there at air America thought, you know, Mark Marin is a good guy to keep around and we'll, you know, try to do something with him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Also you and Sam on your own started doing a video thing, very primitive kind of like Skype interface and
Guest:that you guys called Maren V. Cedar, and you would do it every Friday.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I think he was utilizing his Air America email list to have a group of fans who still wanted to watch him.
Guest:And you guys would do this video chat, essentially, where you talked about things.
Guest:I think you probably...
Guest:you know, were there just to go back and forth with Sam.
Guest:He was doing like politics on and you were just kind of reacting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's the dynamic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I vaguely remember that.
Marc:And I remember, I don't remember when we got that.
Marc:Merrin v. Cedar was actually, I think that kind of bled over and was the initial, um,
Guest:title for break room live i think that's exactly right not only the initial title it was what we did for the first four months uh because so so from from my records here what wound up happening was carl ginsburg who had been at air america from the start he left then he came back and he uh got in touch with you because there was new money right there's new money there at um uh charlie
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Charlie Carriker was a wealthy guy who he was a businessman.
Guest:He had some money and he was a lefty and he wanted to get into progressive politics.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Carl, not unlike me, and I've given Carl the credit for this before, that it's like he got what your appeal was and how you could be like a viable host of something, presenter of something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, that was his goal was to get the money to basically set Marc Maron up on the path to getting a TV deal somewhere.
Marc:Right.
Marc:He thought we could do the Daily Show over there.
Guest:Basically.
Guest:And I think but I think his end goal was, yes, we would use the Air America infrastructure to do a Daily Show type thing.
Guest:But ultimately, this would be getting Marc Maron a gig as the new Jon Stewart somewhere.
Guest:And, you know, he would be the producer of it or whatever.
Guest:It was not a bad idea in terms of what could work.
Guest:It was a bad idea in terms of the infrastructure at Air America was totally not suitable for doing this.
Guest:Nor was the kind of presence online at the time for streaming video.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And across the board, it didn't exist.
Marc:Across the board, not just us.
Marc:Right, exactly.
Marc:And despite Carl's, you know, very passionate resistance to having Sam on, you know, he complied and we got the money for Sam too.
Marc:And that turned out to be kind of a monster that we couldn't really hold back.
Marc:And it created the tension that kind of was...
Guest:was what break room was because sam had a very specific agenda i just needed somebody to talk to but there was no way i wasn't going to get steamrolled by him well ultimately you guys came into it with two different styles of presenting his style of presenting was much more akin to what he's been doing ever since on his show the majority report right like it's and then so he wasn't wrong in his idea of what he thought worked and
Guest:And you weren't wrong in what you thought you were good at and what you weren't going to be able to do in terms of the, you know, the lift of a daily politics show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He just didn't want to be funny.
Guest:And I mean, it's I'm whether he wanted to or not.
Guest:I think he thought this is the audience I can engage, which to his credit is the audience he's engaged ever since that on his own gig.
Yeah.
Guest:But it's so weird.
Guest:I've never, even the original Air America, I've never been a part of something other than this, other than Break Room Live, where it was doomed to failure from the start.
Guest:It was ill-conceived from the get-go.
Guest:Because the technology wasn't there.
Guest:The technology wasn't there.
Guest:The personnel were, was a problem.
Guest:It was a problem.
Guest:Like, you know, Carl should have said, absolutely not.
Guest:No, Sam.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like if he, if he wanted the thing that he ultimately wanted, which basically you and I then went and made as a podcast, it would have been better.
Guest:But the, the dichotomy between you and Sam never allowed for the thing to gel ever.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I guess I felt bad about that, but I also didn't have confidence enough in myself because we had no writing staff, and there was no set, and there was no context.
Marc:Carl had no idea about nothing, and by the time you got in, we ended up building segments that would serve both Sam and I, but the bottom line was we were working with very new technology that wasn't
Marc:really effective.
Marc:They spent like $100,000 on a website, you know, to do everything we wanted to do, but there was nothing going on.
Marc:There was no streaming.
Guest:Yeah, no, and it was this idea that it would come in the middle of the day.
Guest:You know, a lot of websites...
Guest:At around that time, the mid 2000s, they had, you know, verticals on their site that would support like a tech window.
Guest:That was the idea here was you'd have a this would help build Air America as a digital media brand that it would rival like the Huffington Post.
Guest:That was the that was the goal.
Guest:And if this is the type of show we're doing, this live streaming thing, it's either got to be like absolutely nothing, like just production-wise, two people talking and set up an agenda and then go back and forth.
Guest:And that wasn't working because of you and Sam.
Guest:Or we need to put some personality into this thing.
Guest:We need to make it a show with characters, with like a vibe, right?
Guest:And that was where the idea of doing it in the break room started.
Guest:Right.
Guest:the idea for break room.
Guest:I don't know who came up with, I know exactly how it happened.
Guest:We, we had a day where we couldn't use that studio.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we said, well, let's just shoot today's show in the kitchen.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Let's go in there.
Guest:And that one day was better than any of the other days we had done because you were interacting with staff members as they came in to make their lunch.
Guest:And, and, and so we just, we knew it when the day was done.
Guest:We're like, that's the show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like the dynamic that went on in there today, that's the show.
Guest:So we went and pitched that.
Guest:We should do this in the break room.
Guest:And it required a complete overhaul.
Guest:We had to redo the website.
Guest:We had to change everything that we had structured promotionally for this thing being called Marin V. Cedar.
Guest:Now it's called Break Room Live.
Guest:But it was actually probably easier as a technical undertaking because all they had to do was run some cables from next door to the break room.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:We picked up and packed out every day.
Marc:Yeah, I thought it was a brilliant idea.
Marc:And the funny thing is, is that this show would be just par for the course now.
Marc:We could do it in the middle of the day and it would do fine.
Marc:It would get good numbers.
Guest:Nowadays, lots of people do these things on YouTube every single day.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And and like with me and Sam, some of the stuff like that we really worked on kind of worked well when he would sort of like let me play a part in stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, you know, like we get in the weeds so much and I just could never understand, like, you know, why are we talking about this for the third day in a row, this fucking bullshit episode?
Guest:Abramoff tape it was just always that stuff you know you'd pick these narratives that ultimately were nothing yeah but they were something but who gives a fuck right no to me the only things that actually had any kind of stickiness and and longevity were the the pre-tapes we did we did with Matthew we would do a lot of pre-tapes with well Matthew did some but the real MVP of the show period was this guy named Bill Buckendorf the editor and
Guest:And he came to us through John Benjamin.
Guest:John Benjamin recommended him because he had done like some comedy videos for John.
Guest:And this guy, Bill, he could whip anything up that we asked him.
Guest:Like if we went to him and we're like, we have this idea for a thing.
Guest:We'll give you some footage.
Guest:And can you make it?
Guest:He would make it in a day.
Marc:I'm still pretty proud of the McCain commercial.
Guest:Yeah, like that, John McCain, like, you know, anytime we had a little germ of an idea based on the news and then we could construct something around it, like that guy could execute it.
Guest:And he just sat there in his little cubicle.
Guest:He did it every day.
Guest:He never really talked much.
Guest:I think he was then also wound up being the one in the break room filming.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:Like those things are all the things that are still up on YouTube from Break Room Live and Maren V. Cedar.
Guest:And some of them are really great.
Guest:Like, you know, you would go on field pieces to shoot things.
Guest:You did stuff at your house.
Guest:The Angry Chef.
Guest:Those were the things that got popular.
Guest:Like if there was anything in the show that was popular.
Guest:But that's the stuff that people would talk about.
Guest:Oh, I loved your Angry Chef videos.
Guest:Those things.
Marc:which was always our instinct you and me we always thought the things that people connect with like bullshit like regular things that people do on a daily basis yeah yeah and and and then you know that stuff was was fun to do you know but ultimately it just like the tension between sam and i was real and and it just got worse and
Marc:And we always had a pretty good time in the office before we go on the air because that's when he would let himself be funny.
Marc:But then he just started, you know, stuttering some esoteric lefty garbage and would go on for hours.
Marc:It felt like.
Guest:Yeah, well, you guys were, like, you were sitting there live on camera with opposite agendas.
Guest:Like, you had diametrically opposed agendas of how to get through that hour.
Guest:And I just kept poking at him.
Guest:Well, we did a thing where we split it.
Guest:We decided to, you'd make the first half hour would be...
Guest:the show structurally that we wanted.
Guest:And then the second half hour would be like a live chat with people who are live on the stream.
Guest:And so that was our idea of trying to separate it with like, okay, so this first half hour will be like Marin heavy, where we do a lot of these produced pieces, field pieces, desk pieces.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then the second half will let Sam just do his thing where he wants to talk about
Guest:extemporaneously and take you know instant messages from listeners and things like that the live chat right and i think that just made it it made you angry that you would then have to sit there through that half hour and you'd just be like oh god
Guest:Like just sighing and shaking your head.
Marc:Waiting for him to stop talking.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:But yeah, but then I remember there was a big sort of like, when Just Coffee got on board, boy, that was a big day.
Marc:All we thought was like, we're getting free coffee.
Marc:I remember we went to town.
Marc:We couldn't get any advertisers.
Marc:Why would we?
Marc:Mike Moon at Just Coffee in Madison, Wisconsin was an Air America fan, I think a Cedar fan, but he liked the whole thing.
Marc:And we said we'd let them advertise for free coffee.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then we posted, we like had this bulletin board.
Marc:The bulletin board, that was a big, I thought that was a great idea that every day show, whatever we were going to be talking about, we kind of put on the bulletin board.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It was a real bulletin board.
Marc:And then at some point just became covered with just coffee stuff.
Marc:And we were pitching the just coffee, getting free coffee for everybody.
Marc:Boy, that was good times.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was our only sponsor.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was everywhere.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then we brought them along to the podcast.
Marc:And they didn't love, Moon was like, we don't love the catchphrase, but it's doing something.
Marc:Podcast.
Marc:I just shit my pants.
Marc:Just coffee.coop.
Marc:He's like, we're not thrilled about it.
Marc:We had a coffee mug made of it.
Marc:We had all kinds of shit going.
Marc:I don't know, man.
Marc:It's so weird how much that anxiety that caused me because I could never like I could never be interested enough.
Marc:in politics to make it my life.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that was the thing.
Guest:It's so funny because you were hung up on that as a, you know, almost like a barrier for you to get this done.
Guest:And I was the one being like, no, get rid of that stuff.
Guest:Like,
Marc:The thing that's going to work is you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:We finally did that with WTF.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That finally really landed that I had this weird, you know, kind of like I had this pressure I put on myself from the inside, from the very beginning of Air America.
Marc:Like I didn't.
Marc:I didn't really realize what my specific talent was.
Marc:So I just kept trying to keep up with all this stuff.
Marc:And there were times where I was on it.
Marc:There were certain narratives that I could wrap my brain around.
Marc:Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, you know, the 9-11 stuff.
Marc:I mean, there were things...
Marc:That would give me a kind of narrative.
Marc:But the day-to-day stuff used to drive me fucking nuts.
Guest:But it was a thing that really took an effort for you to shake.
Guest:Because if you go back to even the first episode of this podcast...
Guest:The very first thing you do after introducing the show and saying hi to the audience is a rant about Whole Foods, which I think a lot of people remember that rant.
Guest:They remember that shit forever.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it went into your book.
Guest:You put it in Attempting Normal and that...
Guest:But that was predicated on you reading an article about health care.
Guest:Like so you were still in the mindset of like, if I have something I'm going to talk about, I have to hinge it to this kind of political context because you thought that's what the audience was.
Guest:You thought like the only reason they stick around is because I'm doing politics for them.
Guest:And it took some time for you to shake that.
Guest:But it was like 1,500 people.
Guest:We knew 400 of them.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:Well, and that was the goal when we started WTF was, okay, we knew that at any given time we had like maybe 400, 500 people watching Break Room Live.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We knew that based on the YouTube views and everything, we could get a regular audience maybe up into the 1,000 range, 1,500.
Guest:And that was our goal with WTF was that number, circle that, that's what we should have.
Guest:And it was by episode three, and I've told this before, by episode three, we had 30,000 downloads for WTF.
Guest:And that was what made us make the decision of like, okay, we can't paywall this.
Guest:We can't, you know, make this exclusive just for that niche audience.
Guest:This somehow, you know, broke free.
Guest:We jailbraked this idea that we had thought was going to be for a mailing list.
Guest:And now it's out in the world.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the people are discovering it, mostly thanks to, you know, the placement on iTunes at the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the artwork.
Guest:But it had an audience.
Guest:So that was why we kept that.
Guest:But the definite goal was just to, you know, basically deliver the show for the break room live people.
Marc:But also we got to talk about...
Marc:You know, we all knew that Break Room Live was not going to be renewed.
Marc:We had a year long contract and it was just sort of counting the days at some point.
Marc:And then it was that that was the great thing.
Marc:They fired us and didn't make us leave.
Yeah.
Marc:That was the best thing that ever happened to us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, technically you were still under contract.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So, but, but I mean, any other media outlet would have been like, pack your bags, get away from the mics.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're out.
Marc:They'll send checks to your house, but you're not coming by the building anymore.
Marc:I just remember sitting in that office and we're, you know, we, you know, I don't remember how soon it was after we got fired, but it was like, what are we going to do?
Guest:You definitely brought it up to me before everything was done.
Guest:Like you were saying, the writing was on the wall.
Guest:So we knew that things were coming to a head.
Guest:And so, yeah, we had to like, you know, make decisions.
Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And we were like, well, I know guys that are doing this thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It seems doable.
Marc:And then we worked out a way we like Apple was excited about anybody with a name to to get behind it.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Yeah, so we were doing those shows in the old studios at Air America, and that was all because of Break Room.
Marc:Jesus Christ, if they had kicked us out of the building, who the fuck knows?
Guest:I do think that we, you know, in doing Break Room Live in the compromised way that we did for a year, almost a year—
Guest:It gave us the ability to know that like something like doing a podcast, you know, we had already been through the ringer.
Guest:We already knew like everything we did that in that year of break room live was all like our own thing.
Guest:And we had to just, you know, scrap it together.
Guest:And so the podcast seemed much easier.
Guest:And then we knew the production stuff that could go into it.
Guest:You had radio chops.
Guest:So all these things that we've been talking about over the last several episodes of this, they always,
Guest:all made sense and led up to the right moment.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:You know, we've been doing this origin series here and talking about the things that led up to doing WTF, and it almost seems like we were done because the last thing we talked about was, you know, getting fired from Break Room Live, and that was where we started the podcast.
Guest:But...
Guest:One of the things we kind of pass over in those first, I'd say, six months to a year, we didn't really know what the heck this was going to be.
Guest:And so we were thinking, and I know you were probably thinking, what's my next move?
Guest:Like, okay, great.
Guest:I've got this podcast.
Guest:We're rolling this out.
Guest:But what is that going to turn into?
Guest:And there were like projects and there were ideas and things that would be monetized or the idea of this.
Guest:We could try to monetize this somehow and make this something other than a thing we're doing on the side.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And just to promote me.
Guest:You're trying to then get yourself out there as a draw.
Guest:I'm also wondering, where were you standing personally on doing TV, movies?
Guest:Were you in your mind being like, I got to start getting more gigs.
Guest:I got to start being in more things.
Marc:Well, I think I was, you know, that part of me has always been the same.
Marc:And it became clear, I think, to me that the podcast wasn't going to get me acting roles or anything.
Marc:So I just, you know, I kind of surrendered to that.
Marc:But I had to sort of, like, I had to reckon with the idea that they knew me better than me having the mystique of just a guy who does stand-up.
Marc:Many of them knew my life because of how I do the podcast.
Marc:So I really had to straddle that.
Marc:But...
Marc:But ultimately, because of that, it afforded me a comfort level that I don't know if it did if it's the best thing for me in terms of being a comedic act.
Marc:But it certainly facilitated over time my ability to just sort of expand on, you know, myself and.
Marc:And do comedy in a pretty true way to me.
Marc:You know, I have complete freedom of mind up there now.
Marc:And I'm pretty fearless.
Marc:And I'm still writing good shit.
Marc:But I think that the evolution of...
Marc:Having these crowds who knew too much about me created an intimacy and a connection with them that I think is probably a little different than what would have happened just as a comic.
Marc:And I think that's, you know, with all podcasting people, even the ones that do big draws.
Marc:But a lot of guys...
Marc:who do this are not showing themselves the way I am.
Marc:A lot of guys have a persona.
Marc:And I think I do have one, but it's pretty close to who I am.
Marc:And because of that, it's at once exciting, but also exhausting, because I have to show up.
Marc:I can't autopilot any of this shit.
Marc:And I think professional entertainers, most of them can autopilot.
Marc:I mean, I can do the same jokes over and over again, but that's a comic thing.
Guest:So do you remember any time where you wound up feeling like the way you were able to be on stage was really peaking for you?
Guest:Like, did you have any sense, like, you know, especially if you could kind of draw some circles around the type of specials you were doing, right?
Guest:So in 2011, that's when you did the This Has to be Funny at the Union Hall in Brooklyn.
Guest:That was your Comedy Central record taping.
Marc:That was the weekend we did the interview with Saltzine.
Marc:Dan Saltzine for the New York Times.
Marc:That's the thing that made us in a lot of ways.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was a big deal for podcasting.
Marc:It was a big deal for us.
Marc:It was a huge cover spread in the art section of the Sunday Times.
Marc:With pictures, it was, you know, looking back on it, one of the biggest things that ever happened to me and to us, I think.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I don't even remember if you were able to be mentioned then.
Guest:I was, yes, I was quoted in it as, you know, nobody, they didn't talk about me contemporaneously.
Guest:They talked about me as the person who helped start it up with you.
Guest:yeah what and that always upset me always upset me that like i had to have this mysterious producer that i couldn't mention because you had well i mean but that that's the funny thing is that like yeah meanwhile i'm i'm in the midst of you know producing your comedy album as well as the podcast like it was we were doing a full we had a full-fledged operation i know but didn't that bother you no
Marc:No, I was like, I'm like, I just, I got to give Brendan all this credit, which I always do, you know, because we're partners in this, but I just couldn't say it for years.
Marc:It was like, yeah, no, I mean, like I appreciate the input.
Marc:The Wizard of Oz is producing my podcast.
Guest:Look, I mean, here's the other thing.
Guest:It's like, it's part, it comes with the territory of doing this.
Guest:It's like, I can do my best work.
Guest:I can do them.
Guest:And in those days I needed to do, everything needed to be the best, right?
Guest:You need to get the, be optimized in what we were doing, you know, in order to succeed because we were, we were going from the bottom up, right?
Guest:Everything was ground floor.
Guest:And so to do that, it was best if I had no interference, uh,
Guest:I didn't want to be handling anything from a public facing point of view with the show.
Guest:And I also knew that a large element of the success of the show was that the show just sounded like a thing you accidentally turned the microphones on for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You alone.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So and all of this, you know.
Guest:none of us having any kind of reflection or discussion about it was ever important until, you know, we got a thousand episodes in or whatever, or when we had the president on, right?
Guest:Like this was not the show.
Marc:Well, this has to be funny.
Marc:I knew like, it was probably around then where I knew like, well, okay, I've got an audience.
Marc:They know me.
Guest:That's where I was going with this is that I remember, I felt that like, I remember being at that show, you know, you, and the funny thing about that is union hall fits what?
Guest:200 people maybe yeah yeah and uh we you know you you had two shows there over it was december 9th and 10th of uh 2010 yeah and um it was you know i remember being there and being like oh good he's fine this mark finally has the audience that i thought for the last you know six years of working with him yeah that he could have and it wasn't a huge audience no but it was your audience like that's like
Guest:They came to be part of your CD taping and they were like there for it to the point where that's where the title of the album comes from, which is that like you made that comment, this comment you've made many times since about your mom saying she didn't know how to love you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a woman in the crowd went, oh, like a concerned sound.
Guest:And I go, no, this has to be funny.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It was actually Ira Glass, who was in attendance, said that should be the title of the album.
Guest:And he was absolutely right.
Guest:Because that was the best moment.
Guest:But it was also the most indicative of what it took to go from the guy who just was scrambling in terms of leaving a manager, taking a new manager, thought, OK, the way to capitalize on this is go do a pilot presentation for Comedy Central or whatever.
Guest:to go from that to know the way to capitalize on this and have something that makes it viable going forward is to just connect with the audience.
Guest:And it was at that point where I remember sitting there going like, he's got them, he's got these people.
Guest:And it was like, yeah, it was 200 a night for two nights.
Guest:You know, that's not a ton, but that felt big to me.
Marc:Well, I mean, I still do that.
Marc:I still know that I am a, on stage now I say I'm an artisanal act.
Yeah.
Marc:And I say, I am the farm, you are the table.
Marc:And in relation to, you know, my appeal, and I say that a lot when I go on the road, like if I'm in Detroit and I've sold, whatever, 850 tickets, you know, I just barely fill up the place.
Marc:I'm like, this is the ceiling.
Marc:This is everyone in Michigan who likes me.
Marc:They're here.
Marc:This is all of you.
Marc:And that's good, but it is, you know, this is it.
Marc:And that's okay.
Marc:I've wrestled with that being okay.
Marc:I don't know what I expect or what I want.
Marc:And I also know that when I see my audience before a show or I'm in the town and they're walking up to me, I'm like, you're coming?
Marc:Like these decent looking couples and stuff.
Marc:Like how did this happen?
Marc:Because from my gritty beginnings, I never saw myself as attracting reasonable, grown up, decent people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, I didn't know who I would attract.
Marc:But but, you know, something in that thing, I always say that I have a I don't have a demographic.
Marc:I have a disposition, which I think is true.
Marc:But yeah, I think when with this has to be funny.
Marc:But that was also the thing is like I'm in the fucking New York Times building talking to Saltzine in and he's writing the article that's going to change.
Marc:our lives forever, and I'm getting texts from a woman I just broke up with who was hiding under the deck in my house.
Marc:And she's like, you know, when can I go back in the house?
Marc:I'm like, you can't.
Marc:She's like, I'm under the deck right now, and I had to call her dad, and the police were there.
Marc:It was a fucking...
Marc:I always got a lot of plates in there, Brendan.
Marc:Some of them, not good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's the funny thing is that it's like, I think that probably impedes a lot of your ability to really see the trajectory of this and how it was, you know, it did not come without, you know, tremendous diligence and the right moves being made.
Guest:Somehow.
Yeah.
Guest:You know, a lot of your thought on this, I think, just thinks of it as like a wave that you got swept up in as doing the podcast.
Guest:It led to all this stuff because you have these moments like this is a pivotal moment in your career doing this show at Union Hall and having this New York Times interview.
Guest:And yet it's still all tied up in whatever was going on with you personally.
Guest:That felt just as intense as all those other things.
Right.
Marc:But I always knew that we worked and I always think that, you know, certainly with your sort of work ethic and your practicality, that the balance of our personalities works because it's symbiotic.
Marc:But I rely, you know, I'm going to follow your lead.
Marc:And I think ultimately from knowing you since, you know, Air America that, you know, I think I learned how to put that stuff aside, even if it was, you know,
Marc:You know, like if it was, you know, on fire in my brain, you know, we always worked.
Marc:And, you know, you don't you know, I don't get into your personal life too much and you get into mine as much as, you know, I talk about on the podcast.
Marc:And sometimes if I'm in real trouble, I'll call you.
Marc:But the idea was because of our work ethic is that this is the job, dude.
Marc:We can do the job.
Marc:So I was always aware of.
Marc:that we were working.
Marc:I mean, look, man, I was in my house, you know, surrounded by 1500 envelopes, putting stickers in them and sometimes t-shirts.
Guest:So I think that going back to the beginning of what you were saying about, you know, the life or death stakes of getting intros recorded.
Guest:It's like you're, you're,
Guest:But part of the kind of almost like monomaniacal way you focus on something was to the benefit of this show when we were starting, even if in the back of your head or in management's head or in anyone else's head, there was some thought that like, oh, it's going to lead to something else.
Guest:Like, sure, maybe so.
Guest:But what mattered was this became the thing you focused on.
Guest:And then therefore, that allowed it to be the most successful it could be.
Marc:Well, that was and it's been that way forever.
Marc:You know, even with the standup, you know, the standup sort of began to evolve, you know, alongside of it in a way where I'm like, well, both of these things are working.
Marc:Like, you know, I'm doing this show, you know, I'm good at it.
Marc:I'm respected for it.
Marc:And the comedy is right there on the same level.
Marc:You know, they're both they're they're both relative.
Marc:And I think they're relative in their appeal.
Marc:Like I got what you know, I got what I worked for and any sort of when you get frustrated with me and talking or comparing myself to others who are huge or this or that.
Marc:I think sometimes it frustrates you that, you know, my gratitude is not in place.
Marc:And I don't always acknowledge that, you know, we did it.
Marc:Because I still have that part of my brain, whether it's an addict or something's missing, that I'm always like, well, what about that guy?
Marc:How come I'm not?
Marc:And I know it's pathological.
Marc:So now the effort is to balance out, to stifle those voices, not unlike exercise or anything else.
Marc:I don't like to exercise.
Marc:But over time, when I wake up and I don't want to do it, some other part of me is walking to the gym.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So it was learning how to override my own insecurity and self-sabotaging ways to sort of do the job.
Marc:But I think, looking back on it, we were both operating at that same level.
Marc:It was of utmost importance.
Marc:When I was recording those intros,
Marc:You know, back then when I was like, I think I can get a I'm going to rent a conference room in the in the American lounge.
Marc:You weren't saying like, no, dude, don't don't.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:No, because I think for the both of us, we saw this as a thing that we were, you know, we were plowing this field and the other people who were plowing the same field.
Guest:They had no they had no edge on us.
Guest:We were all doing it at best an equal level.
Guest:And in some cases, I felt we were edging ahead.
Guest:And that's an interesting thing.
Guest:I have never thought about this until just now.
Guest:But you're saying, you know, it's like so much of your brain gets wrapped up in the comparison to other people.
Guest:There were that we were winning.
Guest:Like we were the ones that we were getting.
Guest:People were comparing to us, right?
Guest:You were in some ways doing a benchmark thing with this show.
Marc:Well, it took a while to learn that I was doing it differently.
Marc:And yeah, but then like in this part of like, you know, in, in sort of dealing with where we're at now, you know, we are, um,
Marc:You know, once everybody made the jump to video and once, you know, the thing opened up and contracted and opened up again, it was like, we do this.
Marc:So now, you know, we've done what we do and we do what we do, but we don't feel the desperation to adapt in another way because you have a sense of how the business works and it's also not how we do the show.
Marc:And I agree with that.
Marc:Because the product we do is so tight and it's specific.
Marc:But it's hard to be a pioneer and then to watch the world move on without you.
Guest:Well, I guess so.
Guest:But then you also have to think that very few things stay the way they are forever.
Marc:No, I get that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you – to me, in any sense, I think of it as like –
Guest:This is a legacy podcast.
Guest:There are a bunch of legacy podcasts.
Guest:We're not alone in that level.
Guest:And in a way, to me, it's comforting that we just get to exist in this space and we don't have the kind of pressures on us that, you know, somebody who maybe started three years ago and had a really popular show three years ago...
Guest:but is now having a hard time keeping up with the content demands.
Guest:Like, we don't have those pressures because we built this thing that's just now a 15-year-old machine.
Marc:Yeah, and it's audio.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, yeah, well, that was always the thing with us and with me, you know, and I think we both knew that if we started to...
Marc:you know, kind of lose our audience or something that we, you know, bow out before it got sad, but it just never happened.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We always said that we, you know, if we, you know, we saw it going South, we would stop and we'd, we'd never had to do that.
Guest:Uh, well, we, uh, we, we do have control over is deciding when we've done enough of, uh, this looking back at the history of the show.
Guest:And I think we've, I mean, obviously there's plenty of stuff that we can, um, unearth, uh,
Guest:from time to time.
Guest:But I think over the course of doing these origin shows, we've pretty much gotten the trajectory of how we got from there to here.
Guest:And I think the interesting thing about all of it is every step of the way, whether it was me with you or even before we met and you were doing the alternative comedy rooms in New York and that...
Guest:we were driving toward this.
Guest:Like, this is not a mistake or an off-ramp or something different.
Guest:Like, it actually, that is the satisfying part of it, that at least in my participation in it, which now goes back 20 years with you, and then, you know, obviously the stuff you were doing on your own before that, like, we were making the right call.
Guest:Like, the impulses were correct, and it landed in a place that makes sense for those impulses.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But that was mostly you because, I mean, for whatever reason, you identified as a radio guy, you know, my talent in the medium early on.
Marc:And I think the real turning point was when, you know, we got you enough money to leave Sirius because you believed in what we could do.
Marc:And even if that show didn't pan out, I think that was the beginning of... Break Room.
Marc:Break Room, yeah.
Marc:Of you knowing that we had something that I might not have known we had as much as you did.
Guest:Chris Lopresto asked me that on the Friday show.
Guest:We were talking about that Break Room Live stuff.
Guest:And he was like...
Guest:So wait, you were at this serious and that's a stable company, you know, and they were paying you well.
Guest:What in the world would make you think to go back to Air America, which you knew was a disaster?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was honestly like, oh, I was pretty sure it would be a disaster.
Guest:But this was the way back in to doing the thing you and I could do.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like if, if no one, if, if nothing was going to come of it for us to play around and figure out exactly the way to do this.
Guest:And we didn't even know it would be a podcast, but like just some way for us to get that thing going.
Guest:And that made sense to me.
Guest:That was the best investment I could make.
Guest:I wasn't staying at serious.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, the shift from sort of upper management to, you know, independent, you know, kind of creative business owner, that was a big shift for you.
Marc:That was good.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's still kind of weird that we do it this way.
Guest:But, you know, honestly, like, obviously, it's like the kind of...
Guest:culmination of my work and it has you know provided me a living and a you know life that that that i like but you know for you where you have all these other things you can go off and make a tv show now you have your stand-up and you have um you know a a vast uh body of work yeah in your life that you've been building i've been on the simpsons
Guest:Right.
Guest:But like all of this stuff, like the, the, the idea that like the podcast was still the thing that, you know, going back to what you were saying about, you didn't have to pay a man.
Guest:You didn't have to give a manager a percentage of this podcast.
Guest:It was yours.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that I think is the, probably the going to wind up ultimately being the biggest legacy of it for you.
Guest:It's like the thing that I made.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the important thing.
Marc:Yeah, but also that, you know, how it's changed me as a person and how it is an essential part of my creativity and my humanity.
Marc:And, you know, in terms of being with other people, it really does function in a lot of ways that are much deeper than, you know, just creating the podcast, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I think we can always have some room to look back on stuff like this.
Guest:We won't do this straight up series anymore.
Guest:And, you know, but I don't know.
Guest:I never liked the idea that this is this kind of stuff is navel gazing or whatever.
Guest:Mostly mostly nostalgic.
Guest:Yeah, navels are interesting.
Guest:You want to look at them.
Guest:They're either weird and gross or, you know, it's pretty fascinating.
Marc:You have to remember to clean them.
Guest:That's true, yes, which I think we've done.
Guest:We just did it.
Guest:We've been pretty spick and span with this operation.
Guest:All right, man.
All right.
Marc:So that was interesting, right?
Marc:It was to me, because I forget almost everything.
Marc:Uh-oh.
Marc:Is it happening?
Marc:This whole show came from the full Marin feed on WTF+.
Marc:We put out two bonus episodes every week, and you get every episode of WTF ad-free.
Marc:To sign up, go to the link in the episode description or go to wtfpod.com and click on WTF+.
Marc:We'll be back on Monday with actor Ron Livingston.
Marc:And that was fun.
Marc:I like that guy.
Marc:And now, Brendan, if you could find some Christmas music I might have riffed at some point, or just end with something from The Vault, because I'm exhausted from doing the guitar from the last episode.
¶¶
Guest:guitar solo
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Boomer lives.
Guest:Monkey in the Fonda.
Guest:Cat angels everywhere, man.
Guest:Cat angels.
Happy holidays.
Happy holidays.
Bye.