Marc Maron Interview on Ending ‘WTF’ Podcast and What’s Next

Most mornings, Marc Maron wakes up spiraling. Each turn of the globe brings a fresh catastrophe, a crisis, real or imagined, that sends the comedian back into battle with his tenacious anxiety. This isn’t great for mental health, but it does make for good material. And today, his psyche is playing the hits.

“I got cat problems,” Maron sighs, a Zyn pouch migrating from the inside of his left cheek to the right. “I’ve got one that’s just beating the shit out of another one, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. You want your home to be a place where you can relax.”

Maybe the nicotine is helping with that. At least for the moment, Maron seems to surrender to the discord between two of his three roommates, though stand-up’s most famous cat guy is never not a little on edge. He’ll kvetch about anything to anyone. Right now, it’s in his front yard with an audience of one. He’ll find more humor in the latest war at home when he’s onstage this evening. He’ll write about it in his blog. And he’ll absolutely monologue about this on his podcast.

He launched WTF With Marc Maron in 2009, a time of personal and professional desperation, when podcasting was still a cultural vacuum mostly populated by repurposed NPR content. Many of his peers thought that Maron, who has struggled with depression and addiction, had finally lost it. But his candor and curiosity soon had comics, actors, intellectuals and eventually a sitting president trekking to a cluttered garage studio on the east side of Los Angeles to talk and listen to a self-described failure.

“Sometimes the complete artist is there — they just need to find the medium,” says Conan O’Brien, who booked his longtime friend for 42 appearances on NBC’s Late Night before WTF made Maron mainstream. “He was very funny on television, but for whatever reason, he needed to be in the wilderness for a while. The pod was the perfect place for his freak flag to fly at full mast.”

For 16 years, Maron has used his platform to do just that. But in June, he and his day one producer, Brendan McDonald, announced that they were burned out. WTF ends in October after more than 1,680 episodes and inspiring countless others to grab a mic and capitalize on the booming genre Maron helped popularize. As for this 62-year-old pioneer, he’ll focus on an accelerating acting career (see his supporting roles on the Apple TV+ comedy Stick and the upcoming Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere), his stand-up and perhaps some self-care.

“Howard Stern mentioned us stopping the show,” Maron says. “He said, ‘Well, if they’re burnt out, I must be dead.’ I don’t know if he knows the irony in that. There is something about solidifying a legacy when you stop, as opposed to just fading away.”

On more than one occasion, Maron refers to WTF‘s impending conclusion as “the change” — as if it were some biological rite of passage to endure rather than a decision he made. But for a guy with loner-ish tendencies like Maron, this could herald an existential crisis. The podcast is his primary tether to the world. His conversations — do not call them interviews — expand his social circle. And his confessional episode intros, which tackle matters as mundane as the latest cat updates and as wrenching as the death of his late partner, director Lynn Shelton, have cultivated a unique bond with many who contribute to his 55 million in annual listens. He’s anxious about how he’ll adjust to losing all of that. Still, he suggests zero reservations about leaving the medium that finally delivered the exposure he’d longed for. It’s pretty crowded out there, if you hadn’t noticed.

“Things were better before everyone had a voice,” Maron says. “Now there’s just hundreds of groups of two or three white guys, sitting behind mics, talking about the last time they shit their pants as adults. We live in a world of mediocre afternoon drive-time radio.”

***

The Maron house does not smell like cats. This feels worth acknowledging because almost every home with them, no matter how expensive the litter box, shares that unmistakable aroma. Oh, and when Maron returned from a trip to his home state of New Mexico days earlier, the youngest had defecated in almost every room. Charlie has hostility issues and anxiety-induced colitis. But when I arrive at the Glendale craftsman they all share, he lies down at my feet, belly up, as Buster and Sammy keep to themselves. Team Charlie.

This is not the property where Maron launched WTF. He sold that in 2018. When it was back on the market two years ago, the listing emphasized Maron’s time there and treated the since-remodeled garage studio like it was an architectural landmark. “Every guest had to come through that small house,” he says, coffee in hand and feet up on his wraparound porch. “If they had to use the bathroom, they had to use my bathroom and then walk out into that garage. It was an immersive experience in whatever the hell my life was at that time.”

Maron’s life was not where he wanted it to be when he started WTF. He’d been working as a stand-up since 1987, starting as a doorman at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles just after he graduated from Boston University. He briefly found himself in Sam Kinison’s cocaine-fueled orbit until the volatile comic peed on Maron’s bed. He’d spend a decade in New York before ultimately settling back in L.A. Neither coast saw his stage work bring the fame or TV opportunities that came to such contemporaries as Bob Odenkirk, Jon Stewart or Louis C.K. At this point sober for 10 years, he was still nursing the wounds inflicted by his second divorce — “the bad one” — and money was becoming a problem. Maron didn’t shy away from any of it whenever he sat down to talk in that garage.

His honesty about all of it — with himself, his listeners and his guests — immediately brought people to the fledgling medium. Six months in, a frank exchange with Robin Williams that prophetically touched on his suicidal thoughts accelerated Maron’s upward trajectory. By 2015, he got an hour with then-President Barack Obama. It was a watershed moment for digital media. There were 735,063 downloads in the first 24 hours. What reservations publicists had about putting talent in a chair opposite Maron either dissipated or were merely ignored by their clients.

“Marc has one hand flipping you off and one hand reaching out to you,” says Betty Gilpin, who sat down for WTF in 2019 after acting opposite him for three seasons of the Netflix dramedy GLOW. “It’s what makes him so wonderful. His podcast is an antidote to the forced authenticity of so much press. Against all odds, two narcissistic, self-promoting people can talk to each other and really can get curious and vulnerable and connect. Of course everyone would try to copy him.”

Comedian and actor Bobby Lee counts himself among those who took Maron’s cues. “Marc became the light showing you where to go after Hollywood closed the door,” says Lee, a two-time WTF guest with two pods of his own. “Once MadTV was canceled, things weren’t clicking for me. So, I followed his footsteps. He taught me the ropes, and it reinvented my career.”

This kind of reverence and credit can be lost on Maron. “Constantly, out of a persistent insecurity or spite, I just compare myself to people that are more successful than I am — or people I’ve decided are more successful,” cops Maron, who will list off his bona fides then immediately insist his stand-up isn’t entertaining. “I don’t always understand why I’m not more successful. I’m starting to.”

Nobody, not any therapist, friend or ex, has probably heard more of this than Maron’s producer. McDonald has been with him since they worked at the short-lived liberal radio network Air America in 2004. And after putting together every episode of WTF, McDonald speaks about his collaborator with unique insight.

“He’s a very capable person despite presenting himself as just holding on by his fingernails,” says McDonald. “I keep telling him over and over again, like, ‘You won, dude. You’ve gotten to the place where a lot of people are trying to get to. You have complete financial and artistic independence to do what you wish.’ ”

Maron describes McDonald as the longest and healthiest relationship he’s had. And while neither recall any big fights, there have been disagreements. After Obama’s appearance blew their booking options wide open, Maron didn’t always bite when McDonald wanted him to. Notably, Hillary Clinton was pitched around the release of her 2017 book about her then-fresh loss to Donald Trump. It was a quick pass for Maron.

“‘You’re the guy to do this,’ ” McDonald recalls telling him. “He adamantly disagreed.”

“The success rate of getting to a candid place with politicians is very small,” says Maron, who considers his Obama episode a rare exception. “And this is somebody who’s divisive and controversial and has a history that’s somewhat sordid, not by any fault of her own, but I just didn’t see where I could go with that.”

Their unanimous decision to end WTF came in October as they entered the final year of their distribution deal with Acast, knowing that taking the podcast further with any partner would involve concessions they weren’t willing to make. More advertising and the pressure for spinoffs are among his reservations, but particularly offensive to Maron is the industry-wide expectation to put everything on camera. “A lot of yammering in makeshift studios,” he says. “It’s lowering the bar for everything.”

***

Maron is almost singular in his ability to talk shit. Unfortunately, he claims to be watching his mouth today. An innocuous comment about his former (and one-sided) rivalry with The Daily Show‘s Stewart is making the rounds, and Maron is kicking himself for stepping into clickbait. One and a half more Zyns and another cup of coffee later, he cannot help himself — especially as the conversation turns to his fellow podcasters.

I bring up a 2019 episode of actor Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert, during which Maron posed that podcasting might be becoming a cancer, and he does not wait for my question.

“That was before he sort of became me,” says Maron.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I have a model that I established,” he explains. “There are certain people that work within that model. And I think Dax is one of them. I opened up a zone within this medium just before it became really viable. That’s what I think.”

We may have Maron to blame for the ubiquitous (and exhausting) podcast preamble, but he did not invent the interview — not that he’ll ever call them that: “I needed to be in the show. And it was instinctual to insert myself into the conversations. It took some people a little time to adjust to that. They were used to interview shows, and I’ve never ever seen it as an interview show.”

Shepherd, who cites Maron as his inspiration in that episode’s description, is just a drop in the echo chamber. You can’t open Spotify without figuratively tripping over an actor, athlete, comedian or musician who has gotten into the interview game. “There’s a good chance I wouldn’t be doing this if Marc hadn’t put podcasting on the map,” says O’Brien, who sold his own podcast network, Team Coco, to SiriusXM in 2022 for a reported $150 million. “He made it legitimate.”

When I ask Maron whether he envies any of the $100 million-plus mega deals his peers have gotten for going corporate, he shakes his head.

“We did all right,” he says, meaning himself and McDonald, “definitely well enough for us to live the rest of our lives, but those kind of deals come with extreme responsibility. Why would I start scrambling now?”

He’ll mock the podcast industrial complex that sprang up around him, but Maron’s also happy to play the mayor. Between our July meeting and a phone call two weeks later, he’ll guest on no fewer than nine pods to plug his HBO comedy special Panicked and begin WTF‘s goodbye tour. But there are a few that can probably rule him out as a future booking. Days before the 2024 presidential election, on his blog and WTF, Maron took aim at the male comic podcasters he deemed complicit in normalizing America’s far- right swing by cozying up to “self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists.” He didn’t name names, and even today he only calls them “those guys,” but there is little doubt he’s nodding to Joe Rogen, Andrew Schulz and Theo Von. Each hosted Trump for softball interviews during the campaign, and all three cling to the “you can’t say anything anymore” argument.

“How they became the arbiters of what comedy should or shouldn’t be is a fucking nightmare,” says Maron. “This anti-woke idea around free speech with comedians is bullshit. Whether they knew it or not, they were being used by the right to push this anti-woke agenda, which is now disassembling every progressive policy. They’re responsible. I can’t let them off the hook for that, even if some of them are kind of backpedaling now.”

In Panicked, Maron makes a crack about how a Von-Hitler interview might go. It’s part of the protracted arc where the comic again stews in his own political anxieties, and he just as eagerly blames liberals for “annoying the average American into fascism.” As many comics skirt or completely ignore the vitriolic landscape, Maron has no intention of doing anything but lean in further. And while he admits he’s concerned about the small group of corporations who greenlight these projects being spooked by voices critical of the MAGA administration — we’re speaking within days of CBS’ Stephen Colbert cancellation — he has not heard a peep from HBO about his own content.

Maron’s previous special, 2023’s From Bleak to Dark, stands apart from his body of work. It’s an exploration of grief in the wake of Shelton’s sudden 2020 death from undiagnosed leukemia, a blow that came after a few days of illness they passed off as strep throat. The filmmaker still looms large in Maron’s work and life. He first met her during a recording of his podcast in 2015 before striking up a friendship, a collaboration and eventually a romance. He’s processed it very publicly, first within days of her May 2020 death when he recorded a raw WTF intro before replaying their 2015 conversation. A small piece of this is included in Are We Good?, an upcoming documentary about Maron framed by Shelton’s death, but he’s never been able to listen back to that episode in its entirety.

“There’s no cultural apparatus to deal with grief,” says Maron. “It is something you have to sit with, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. And sharing it, even in its rawest form like that moment, feels like the right thing.”

That’s not to say Maron’s handling of grief, or anything, ever gets too serious. Recounting his visit with Shelton’s body after she’d been taken off of life support in From Bleak to Dark, Maron punctures the somber scene with a joke about taking a selfie. “Of course he does,” says Sarah Silverman, who’s known Maron for more than 30 years. “I think life is a little bit like torture for him, yet he’s still consistently, brilliantly funny about it.”

***

There is little Maron won’t share, including some fresh psychoanalysis from his girlfriend, Kit. The two started dating in late 2020 after she cold-emailed him a condolence letter. They met for a hike and bonded over mutual anxieties.

“She just texted me something this morning,” he says, pulling out his phone. “Here it is: ‘I believe you can get on the other side of the mountain in your head. You can do it. You’re very powerful when you want to be, but you give that power away a lot because sometimes you want to feel taken care of instead of in charge.’ Oh boy. … So, that came out of nowhere.”

Maron does take charge. He’ll put Charlie on Prozac in hopes he stops assaulting Buster, and a probiotic has already taken care of that other issue. He recently took his first lead role in a film for In Memoriam, a comedy from writer-director Rob Burnett about a dying actor trying to secure his postmortem slot in the Oscar montage. He’ll make the call on who’ll be there for his final WTF episode, even if it’s just him, alone at the mic, being sad. (He wouldn’t say no to a return from Obama, though.)

“Marc adapts to change fairly well, even if it’s done through gritted teeth,” says McDonald. “There’s also an inevitability to all of this.”

The variables that are out of Maron’s hands are the ones that give him pause. When we speak again in early August, he’s still grappling with the ticking clock on the lifeline he’s chosen to sever. “My social life has really been the podcast, mostly, and comedy clubs,” he says. “I’ll probably go back to [AA] meetings for a bit of support — to not spiral out with the isms, as they call it. But I don’t do dinner parties. No one invites me anywhere. I don’t vacation with friends. I need to nourish more relationships.”

Does that mean Marc Maron wants to be invited out more?

“Yeah,” he says. “I won’t want to do it, but once I’m there, I’ll be good. I think that some people like to have me around… But maybe this is all of the change talking. Maybe I am just an old man yelling at the burning sky.”

This story appeared in the Aug. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.