WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1000 - Episode 1000

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

To celebrate the milestone of 1000 episodes, Marc and WTF producer Brendan McDonald reflect on how they got here, why they created the show in the first place, and what the future holds for them and WTF. They answer listener questions and divulge some never-before-heard revelations, such as the time the show almost ended and how the White House reacted to President Obama's interview in the garage. Most importantly, Marc and Brendan talk about how their working relationship evolved into a deep friendship with a profound understanding of each other. This episode is sponsored by Aspiration and Stamps.com. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you self-employed? Don't think you need business insurance? Think again. Business insurance from Zensurance is a no-brainer for every business owner because it provides peace of mind. A lot can go wrong. A fire, cyber attack, stolen equipment, or an unhappy customer suing you. That's why you need insurance. Don't let the, I'm too small for this mindset, hold you back from protecting yourself. Zensurance provides customized business insurance policies starting at just $19 per month. Visit Zensurance today to get a free quote. Zensurance. Mind your business.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis and ACAS Creative. the chopper thinking like you know i i am nervous about mark no i wasn't okay well that's good that

makes that would be a problem it would be a problem if the president was feeling stressed about coming to my garage coming to your garage do you think this this is the best work you're doing of your life right now that's kind of difficult you know because i was in the beatles why are you taking the other side of everything i say i I'm not. I'm just saying that. You are. I'm a... Why did you want me to do this interview if you don't think I know anything about what you're asking me about? I'm just telling... You're done?

We were having a good conversation. Oh, come on, Gallagher. One of the first things you said was, like, I don't know what you think you're doing down there below 14th Street. Yeah, right. But it doesn't matter. Right. I was trying to be helpful and save

you a few years. And was your husband your first love? Now that I really know what love is, I'd say yes. What was the other thing? Thanks for talking to me. It was a real honor. Really fucking amazing.

A real pleasure, man. A lot of laughs. And you smoked your first cigarette in 10 years. Yeah, with Keith Richards! Come on! All right, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies?

What the fucking ears? What the fuck nicks? What's happening? It's Mark Maron. This is my podcast wtf welcome to it this is the 1000th episode of wtf 1000 episodes a lot of talks you heard that amazing sound montage coming into this the little talk snippet reel a lot of things have gone down over these thousand episodes life-changing for me certainly probably for you almost a decade's a

long time for anybody shit happens things change for better for worse evolution maybe uh devolution all of it but i gotta be honest man i i don't know that uh i fully wrap my head around this episode because i you know i'm in it you know what i mean i i i mean the life I live right now could not be happening without this show that we started in the garage. When I started it, it was bleak. A thousand episodes later, I have to say, the effect it's had on my life, my heart, my mind, my spirit everything everything is different because of a desperate act in a way to try to to keep something going started out in the old garage with no expectations not much money very bleak disposition and slowly but surely on personal level, it opened me up to my peers. It opened up my heart to the ability to possess some sort of empathy, to engage my empathy, to laugh with other people, to get out of myself, to just move through life in a way that wasn't horrible.

You know, it's a thousand episodes. This episode is special in a lot of ways. One of the big differences, really, between this one and pretty much all the other episodes is that there's no guest. Yeah, spoiler, no guest. Not even a guest interviewing me. Me and my producer and business partner, Brendan McDonald, we tossed around a lot of big names. We even reached out to a few before we just came upon the realization and we were like, wait a minute, wait.

Wait. It's our show. wait, wait, it's our show. This podcast that you're listening to, this is our achievement. This is our passion. It's our job, our creation. So today's 1000th episode features the creators of this show, myself and Brendan McDonald. And we're going to sit here and we're going to reflect on the entire process, the experience, the changes, the challenges, the highlights, the difficulties, and the achievements

of almost a decade of work. We're going to answer some questions sent in by you folks, the listeners. And I really, I think most importantly, in terms of what happened on the podcast that you're about to hear, we actually talked to each other about our separate experiences with the show

and how we deal with each other every week and the long history of our working relationship that has evolved into a very profound and deep friendship. It's sort of interesting. This is the first time you're going to hear brendan to this extent certainly but we are two very different people uh almost uh you know opposites in some ways and we've managed to transcend all kinds of uh external bullshit and hardships through a professional partnership that has really stood the test of time. And it's really kind of evolved into, I think,

one of the most important relationships that either of us have. We've willed this thing into this amazing library of conversation. And honestly, given that, this is probably definitely the longest I've ever talked to Brendan, certainly in one sitting ever. And it's a great talk. But as I was saying before, I owe all of my success, really all of it, in my current incarnation of me, to this podcast. my current incarnation of me to this podcast. And, uh, and obviously to Brendan,

to all the people, all the guests that have come through here, you know, obviously to some of my own sort of compulsive persistence, but honestly, as I said before, nothing in my professional and, and really,

if I think about it, my personal life would have come to be, uh, without what, be without what we created here a thousand episodes ago. And that is a profound bit of business, folks. When I started this, I was bitter, a bit washed up, brokenhearted, and without a lot of prospects in the business I dedicated or committed my life to. Yeah, I could do stand-up here and there. But all the rest of it, I was like, not going to happen.

Who the fuck knows what I'm going to do now. Let's do this. And because of this, everything else happened. It's quite a story weird combination of a skill um patience insanity a little bit of cosmic timing played into it but i just i can't i just can't imagine my life without it i need to talk to people. I need to put this thing out there. I need it to think. And I don't always take a second to appreciate what I've accomplished or be grateful for where I am in my life,

but I will do that here in front of you. I truly am proud of what we've done with this show. But really, it's just been about me and Brendan, the guests in here, and the people who listen. And my brain. My neurotic, dread-filled, compulsive, engaged brain. I'm grateful for that. Could still use some tweaking. So again, thank you.

Seriously. And I hope you enjoy this thing. Again, thank you all. Thank you for all the amazing feedback. Thank you for letting me know how this show has affected your lives and thank you for listening the amazing feedback thank you for letting me know how this show has affected your lives and thank you for listening now this is me and uh my producer and uh partner in this uh undertaking brendan mcdonald uh just basically talking about everything. We talk about it all.

We go over everything from our time at Air America to when we did Break Room Live with Sam Seder to the early days of the podcast and all the way up to the present. And I also want to tell you that if you're new to the podcast or you're wondering where you can listen to all of them, you can.

You can get a Stitcher Premium subscription to hear anything older than the most recent 50 episodes, which are all free, by the way. And also all the episodes on Stitcher, that's the other 950, are ad free. We talk about a lot of past episodes in this show and you're going to be wondering you know where can i hear that but you can just click on the premium button on our site at wtfpod.com to get a subscription and you got them all i would say a very high percentage of them are evergreen other than the people i've talked to many of their lives have changed dramatically many of them have passed on. Many of their careers are different. Many of them have gone up and gone down. But the conversations hold. They hold because there's just a couple of people talking.

So how do I want to do it? Okay, here's how we'll set it up. So this is going to set the stage for everything. I'm going to play a little bit of the earliest days of me and Brendan together. This is us along with our whole morning show crew on Air America Radio back in 2004 with our show, The Legendary Morning Sedition on Air America. It was the morning show. And this is where it all started, really.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. cannabis store and ACAS Creative. coverage from Zensurance before your policy renews this year. Zensurance does all the heavy lifting to find a policy, covering only what you need, and policies start at only $19 per month. So if your policy is renewing soon, go to Zensurance and fill out a quote. Zensurance,

mind your business. In the studio today, there's two reasons to celebrate. Brendan McDonald's in the studio, and you are, who's your team? Oh, in baseball? Yeah. Well, the Mets, so I didn't really give a good goddamn about what happened last night. Oh, Lord. So let's celebrate Brendan's newfound freedom from his peanut allergy now. So you're going to go to the ballgame, and you're going to be able to proudly say, I want some peanuts.

I never realized. Every day I'm figuring out new things that I can eat. How long have you not been able to proudly say, have some peanuts. That I never realized. Every day I'm figuring out new things that I can eat. How long have you not been able to eat peanuts? All my life. Wow. No snicker bars for you in Halloween. No, just now. Today was the first snicker. That snickers you saw me eating? That was the first snickers

I ever had in my life. As I was saying to you, I had a problem with it. Oh really? The first thing I ate was a jar of honey roasted peanuts. Yeah. And I freaked out. It was so good. And then I got that Snickers bar today.

And the nuts were not, like it tasted like something was mealy about them. There were little hops and nuts in the Snickers. I was anticipating something great. And the same thing happened with the Reese's peanut butter cup. But Reese, you'll start to appreciate that just because it says peanut doesn't mean that has any relation to your peanut. Well, the chunky peanut butter, that blew my mind.

Did you get the feeling that you were cheating death at some point? Dude, I put my whole fist in it. No, and I came in before, and you guys were running out of time you had to go back to the show and I wanted to know what kind of good peanut type things I should eat I have so many options you gotta get some of those things they roast on the street

cause those are really good don't get those they roast that stuff in bacon fat can't you smell it? now I really want it we'll work out some stuff after this Roast that stuff in bacon fat, man. Can't you smell it? Now I really want it. We'll work out some stuff after this. It's 14 past the hour.

You're listening to Air America Radio. That was our show. That was where I met you. That is it. That was Morning Sedition on Air America Radio. I showed up there, radio novice, not even having no experience. Right. And you were there.

But when was that? How old were you, like 12? I was, I probably looked it. 24. I was 24, yeah, when we started, because it was 2004. Right. I was 25 later that year, yeah. And you came, you had been at WNYC. In New York, yeah.

What were you, an assistant producer over there? Actually, I was the newsroom producer. And the woman who I worked very closely with there, her name was Joanne Allen, she was the afternoon newscaster. And she got hired at Air America and brought me over with her. And then we all just kind of got dumped into,

there was no rhyme or reason really. It was just like, put this person over there and put that person over there. And we just kind of all sat into there was no rhyme or reason really it was just like put this person with over there and put that person over there and we just kind of all sat around staring at each other like for the first 10 minutes oh my god i remember it was you dan pashman larson just all these guys with haircuts and the shirts tucked in yeah and i was like what the fuck is this why i just remember walking in because we had this big first day meeting. Air America Radio was this new thing. We were going to fight the Bush administration and right-wing talk radio.

And I knew Al Franken and Janine Garofalo were involved. People behind The Daily Show were involved. It seemed very exciting. And I had no idea what my job was going to be. I just knew that I got hired. And I walk into this ballroom at some hotel. Do you remember that? We were like in a big conference or ballroom. I remember looking around the room like, oh, who do I spot here? I see, oh, there's Al Franken. There's Jeanine Garofalo. Oh, there's that Mark Maron guy. Like I knew you as a comic. I'm like, oh, I guess, is he doing a show? Huh. That's weird. And then I remember getting introduced to the various people we were working with, and

they were like, and yeah, you'll be on the morning show here with Marc Maron. Yeah. And you were like immediately in my face, like as close to my face as I am to this microphone right now. And you're like, so what do you do? What are you going to be doing? Like just right there. And I was like, oh, okay.

This guy's coming in hot. Panicked. Completely panicked. And I remember going over there. Never been on the radio before. They hired me to be the funny guy, the sidecar on this trio. Mark Reilly, Sue Ellicott, and me, the funny guy. And I remember there was this auditioning process or this process where

jonathan larson who was the the main producer yeah he had come from television he was at cnn with with one of the other executives he sat me and riley down in two chairs and he sat in a third chair and said okay you guys go ahead and talk about it yeah a test and and like within 30 seconds i'm like i'm not fucking doing this and And I walked away. From that point on, we're getting up at 2.30, 3 in the morning, getting on the air at 6. I was jacked out of my mind on Dunkin' Donuts and coffee and M&M's. And we were just in it every fucking day. Like even that clip you just played. Like I have no, honestly, barely any recollection of anything that happened in that fucking studio unless I hear it.

And then I got, you know, I got to be in the driver's seat. It was just me and Riley. And we made a big decision, a big kind of turning point for us, I think, not just in content, but also in trust of each other and the ability to gauge our instincts, was the Monday after Ronald Reagan died. Yeah. reagan died yeah that this was we were the left-wing radio network that had launched with a new hope yeah or you know progressives and yeah and we got a company-wide dictate from management that we were all to be very respectful about the death of ronald reagan yeah and we came we were the first out of the shoot yeah we were the morning the morning show. Morning show, Monday morning. Yeah. And he had died on a Saturday. Yeah.

And we were like, fuck that. Like, this, are you kidding me? Like, we're in this problem because of that. Yeah. And we did, you know, the whole show was not, we weren't like- Dead Reagan Monday. We called it Dead Reagan Monday. Yeah.

And we held hands and jumped off the cliff. Yeah. Like, all right, we're going to do this. Yeah. And we did it live. We were just relentlessly going over his record and being like, is this guy you want to celebrate? I did this, I did that.

Like, oh, okay. Oh, he was a good negotiator and communicator. Oh, got it. Yeah, yeah. Could talk good. Right. The thing that was the most exciting part of it, and that I do remember,

is that we were generating original comedy every day in the middle of the fucking night. We were assigned, you know, Liz Winstead, who was part of the creative team there originally, had hired all these comic writers. And we were assigned a writer for, I mean, what, four, five, six week chunks of time. Yeah. Just because they had to get up with us. Yeah. And we would generate full-on radio theater bits that you would produce you would do voices passion do voices riley would do voices i would

do voices you know the kind of bonds you create in the middle of the night with a group of people we were the only thing going on yeah there was a point where i remember you you were like i don't think i have ever laughed this much at at four in the morning ever in my life for a good reason. Yeah, right. It was almost that feeling that no one else is alive in the world right now, and we're doing this thing. Well, which is kind of interesting. It's not unlike this podcast to feel like from the start, well, we're just going to do this. We're going to invent this from the ground up. It's interesting because one of the things, you know, as you mentioned, we've asked people to write in over the last several weeks and ask questions and as it pertains

to the thousand episodes. And I find that like people's questions almost take us through chronologically, like how we've gotten to where we got. You know, there's this first question I have here by Ricardo says, I know you guys met at Air America, but I'm wondering what you saw in each other to start a podcast together. And that's an interesting question because it really does stem from us working together in radio. And it answers a lot of what we created with this podcast and how we got a thousand of them. Well, the funny thing was, I was just thinking about that.

I began to trust you a lot because you were running that show in the last form. It was established early on because I was, you know, like an assistant producer and the majority of my job was to provide support to the elements of the show. Oh, we need a comedy bit produced. I'll do that. Oh, we need research done. I'll do that. And I think you just started to get to observe and respect my efficiency with that stuff yeah and know like well i can work with this guy like we're not gonna butt heads

we're not gonna we're just and and on the flip side like i was a i'm a kid who came from comedy my whole life like loving comedy right i respected what you did before i even knew you right so i'm like well i want to like this guy this is like my chance to like work with a comedian and right you seemed so unmolded at that time even though you're in your 40s and you had been doing comedy for like 20 years it was still like oh this guy's new he's new at this in a weird way that's how it felt this it felt fresh for both of us what to radio to everything oh yeah like it felt like you were like a fresh thing in this one element that, like, oh, he's, he's start, this is his start. Like, this is your rookie year of doing this.

Even though you'd been doing comedy, you were like, oh, okay, this is how you can use your voice. And I think people were telling you that at the time when you took the job. Like, your peers were like, oh, well, yeah, you could be on the radio. You're great at talking. Yeah, and I never really thought about that at the time. But also the thing about me and you was sort of like, it got to the point where, you know, just in terms of building trust and efficiency or whatever,

where, you know, we'd be presented with things that either we had to write comedy bits or, you know, I had to talk about something. And I'd be like, so could you frame this entire topic for me? Could you just, could you just tell me exactly what this is that I'm talking about, what it means, how it connects to other things and when, and what is the full arc of, of, you know, what, what needs to be, to be said and thought here. And then I'd have to, you'd break it down for me. You know, sometimes it would be you and Pashman, you just sit there and coach me. And then I'd have to, you'd break it down for me. Sometimes it would be you

and Pashman, you just sit there and coach me. And then I'd have to integrate it into my own sensibility and then kind of present it. So that producer talent thing, no matter how smart I was, I didn't have the contextualization skills. So there was this sort of a mind melding going on. And I think I was also learning about myself for the first time that i was good at that that that's actually what my strengths were when my skill set moved was the actual job of producing talent right and working with people to help them shape the things that they want to do and do it in a medium that i yeah worked in before. So we established that kind of trust. And that show, unfortunately, did not go past two years due to internal decisions there. And we had wanted a

continuation of it somehow. We got canceled right at the time that Stern was leaving the air and that we were shut down by the new CEO at Air America, Danny Goldberg, who was, you know, just short sighted on some level in terms of us. And, you know, he remains a villain in my history of me. You know, we were sidelined. But then there was a faction within Air America that wanted to keep me, you know, in place. Yeah. For when Danny got pushed out, there was all this politics going on within the thing, and then they said I could do an evening show at KTLK out here. I wanted you to produce because you were the only guy I could trust to produce it,

and you were into it to the point where you moved out here, you left your family, your wife at the time. Yeah, I was just married.'d have been married for two months and you moved out here into that weird furnished apartments place yeah in burbank and we were doing a live show at 10 at night on ktlk the general manager hated my guts because i had pissed off stephanie miller and we were stuck there and they had an existing contract with the clippers so we sometimes would have to wait until games were over to start our show in the middle but we were producing a live show and you were out here doing that yeah i think that really solidified our creative partnership

yeah that time where you were just out here doing that i was here again a time we were doing we were left to completely to our own devices right sat at your kitchen table and just built that show. Yep. Like, how we were going to, what's the sound going to be like? What, where are the jokes? Yeah. Where are the bits?

You know. And we had to figure out how to create a payroll because Jim needed health coverage. Yeah, yeah. We just made it from scratch. That was experience that led to the skills

and the, you know, wherewithal we needed to actually do the podcast. Also, that's when we started working with local improvisers. Yesatt senac seth morris uh who else do we have on that show paul rust remember he just unrecently reminded us about that uh yeah we would tap into the ucb crew yeah to do these fake characters on what was that show called was it just a mark maron show yeah on ktlk after that ktlk show i was then

working at like serious radio and uh you know making good money you were on the you were on like sort of the managerial tract almost yeah they offer me like stock options and stuff to get me around there working with rosie uh yeah first i was working with uh with ron silver rest his soul yeah and uh and then, yeah, I was working with Rosie and I kept trying to sell you. Yeah. Like I kept trying to say like, I can do a show here with this guy.

We'll be like the daily show that you guys don't have. Yeah. You know, and because we can be funny, we can do politics, whatever. And they're just, they would not bite. Yeah. We tried the same with like some of the local affiliates out here. Yeah. So many times. Couldn't even get it on Pacifica. We tried the same with some of the local affiliates out here.

Yeah. So many times- Couldn't even get it on Pacifica. We couldn't get it on Free Radiant. So many times I was told that the Air America documentary that aired on HBO was a hindrance, that people were like, I've seen that documentary and Marc Maron, he's difficult.

He's a live wire, that guy. Yeah, right. I don't even remember. What did I do? I just think you were you, but it seemed like you were hard to work with right i don't even remember what did i do i i just think you were you but it it seemed like you were hard to work with i don't i don't know oh god yeah left of the dial that's right that was a documentary that aired on hbo that was the uh chronicling the first year of air america wasn't the fall of air america no they were they were positioning that doc as like the

rise of air america oh boy yeah. Yeah. I know there's one scene in there that caused some problems, but so yeah. So you're at Sirius and then again, Air America rises from the ashes with a new CEO with new dumb money and a guy from within the organization who I think we should credit, Carl Ginsberg. Well, he reaches out to me and he's like, look, we got a new guy here new money we should do a new show we should do a streaming video show i was like in the middle of a divorce i was broke i was shattered i was a fucking disaster and i'm like well i i'll do it if you can get them to give me enough money up front to stop this divorce to pay her so i can

get out of this that's the only way i'm going to do it and i need to make as much money as i made on the original air america give or take which was too much money and he worked it out man yeah and so i get that job i you know i pay off my ex-wife and then i'm like we got to get brendan in here and you got to bring sam in and to enter this fucking world of streaming video which didn't even exist really yeah i mean i'm going to say a word out there there will be some people who know what it is but it has largely been lost to time there was a thing called rocket boom which was this this woman i cannot remember her name someone will look it up and yeah or someone's yelling it right now she was doing this like streaming video news show

that was selling huge numbers. She was going to be a big star. And everyone was like, we got to have our own rocket boom. And that was what Air America was thinking here was they were going to have this streaming video show that all of a sudden was going to become the industry standard for this emerging market.

An emerging medium. Yeah. So we jump in there, and I'm like completely emotionally incapacitated. There was no way I was going to be able to talk about politics. I bring you in, and you see that I'm a mess. So we bring in Sam. And you guys were at each other from minute one. Sam in a more gleeful way than you.

But you were just in full resistance mode. I was in raw. But he was like, Sam is Sam, but boy, did we have some laughs, man. Oh, yeah. And we did, I thought, some funny stuff that I still from time to time send to you and go like, look at this. Do you remember this? Break Room Live.

This was funny. It's all up there. You can go look at it. And Sam, as much as we thought like he's so funny they wanted to build a studio for us but we're like no we're gonna do it in the break room the actual break room i thought it was a fucking i thought it was gonna kill yeah when you live streamed you know never they never buffered properly there was only maybe 1200 people at most ever watching it yeah in real time we busted our ass our ass to do it live.

And this is the one thing I know about you and me, and it's a consistent thing. It's like we go fucking all in. I think we really had high hopes, even when Sam was like, this isn't going to work. No one cares about this. I mean, I always held on to the idea, and we always worked so fucking hard

to do those video pieces, to do the live stuff, to do the interviews, to respect the conceit. We had those cameras set up. Well, that's the thing. We were working really hard based on an idea that nobody cared about, even the people who set it up. Because Carl wanted to be able to do this streaming video show with you to essentially sell it as a pilot that would get a television show. Yeah. Right?

Right. And to Carl's credit, basically, like, his thought of you as the driver, personality-wise, for some type of show like that was the correct impulse. Right. It's essentially what got us to start a podcast and say, yes, we can do this. The flaw was in what the delivery system would be yeah and thinking like we're going to do this live show every day which is a ridiculous proposition with a staff the size of ours and money the amount that we had video it was video that is a ridiculous proposition what

was it was on at a weird time yeah three in the afternoon yeah when everyone's at home watching their computer yeah well they thought like it was a be a thing people could put on like a work break and da da da but you know that that is there there was just a total fundamental misunderstanding of the medium yeah and what where it was going what it was and everybody was misunderstanding this was still youtube was only three years old at this point you know so i give everybody their own set of credit for thinking what might work but what was clear was the thing we were working so hard on was never going to work i just couldn't accept that but i was also going through my own shit but so the money was gone they weren't going to pass for another year yeah so they ran out of money and they fired us they kind

of fired us they said show's over yeah but we had two months or something on the contract we still had an office for some reason yeah we had an office they didn't make us leave yeah and you and i talked to each other about doing a podcast from the perspective of you had just started to go on quite a few of them like is that true keith and the girl you went on out in queens but i didn't see like, that's weird with Keith and the Girl because I didn't really know, I didn't frame that as a podcast. I don't think I really, I knew they were doing some version of radio out of their own place. Right.

And that it was popular somehow. Right. I didn't know how people were getting it. I think they had a video element. Right. But when I went out there, I went all the way out to wherever it was in Queens somewhere. Yeah. And they had the whole setup going and they explained to me what they were doing i'm like fucking we got to be doing

this yeah and and it was also you had just done jesse thorne's podcast or radio show slash podcast at the time sound of young america again i didn't know that was a podcast but what i think you another thing just like keith and the girl made you say to yourself, like, oh, this guy's doing this? Like, this was a kid I talked to in his underwear one day in Santa Cruz. On the phone, yeah. They did a phoner with me for some event for the radio show when he was, yeah, when he was in college. Yeah. I don't know why I knew he was in his underwear.

Well, that revelation I had when I was listening to MBR late at night in my Queens apartment, that it was Jesse, what was the name of the show back then? Sound of Young America back sound of young america sound of young america i don't remember associating it with the podcast medium until i really started to see well that's what carola was doing yeah that's what kevin smith was doing yeah that's what uh jimmy pardo and jimmy door were doing yes yeah those are all people that were doing it before we were they were the the guys and i think you said to me do you think we could do a podcast yeah and i said absolutely yes because i was now at this point like a two-year avid listener of podcasts really yeah i think i had gotten my first ipod in like 2007 video ipod yeah and i was initially just listening to all the radio shows that i liked

this american life fresh air and the first time i saw a podcast that i didn't know existed And I was initially just listening to all the radio shows that I liked, This American Life and Fresh Air. And the first time I saw a podcast that I didn't know existed before was Bill Simmons. Right. So he had been doing it since, I think, right around that time, 2007. Yeah. And I had been reading his column forever. Yeah. And I thought, oh, wow, I've never seen this guy.

I've never seen what he looks like, let alone heard heard his voice as I've only ever been reading his column. Yeah. So, oh, cool. Let me, let me check into this. And, you know, coming from what we were coming from, I'm a guy, I worked in radio since college. Yeah. So going back to like 1998, 99, I started working in radio, went to public radio, very austere New York public radio, N npr affiliate even working at air america

we had a lot of programming directors who came through there who worked in radio coming out here dealing with the programming directors out here in la like it had been hammered into my brain what radio is supposed to sound like and what it's supposed to be and how you're supposed to do it and i listened to bill sim Simmons for about 30 seconds. And I was like, oof, now I know why this isn't anywhere else. This is not a radio show. This is just a guy talking into a laptop or something. And I listened for another five minutes, 10 minutes.

And by the end of that 10 minutes, I was like, this is awesome. This is exactly what I want it to be. He's talking to like hench or joe house or some guy that's he's written about in his column for 10 years that i've been reading him and this this is exactly what i wanted it to be when i saw that bill simmons had a podcast like it should be the essence of the person and this niche a niche of an audience oh yeah i read this guy's columns well of course why wouldn't i want to hear what this sounds like yeah so a big boost for me and my feeling of being

able to the confidence of being able to do it was that tom sharpling's best show yeah which i was a listener from way back on the radio at wfmu yeah was a podcast now and I developed a much more connected relationship with it as a podcast than I ever had just kind of talking about it with my friends as a radio show. Like, I didn't necessarily always get to listen to it because it was on at a particular night, Tuesday nights. Late, right? Yeah. 11. It was late. It would go until about 11 or 12, depending on what hour he was airing it in.

And now that it was a podcast, this kind of on-demand medium, I had structured a schedule around listening to Tom on the podcast. Yeah. I knew, all right, it's going to be available on this morning. Yeah. I'm going to listen to that on the way in from work

and the way home from work, and then I'll have enough to get me through to tomorrow as well. Right. Or sometimes I'd get overexcited and listen to it all at once and then have to wait to the next week or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I built a structure around it. You had a relationship with the medium.

Yes. Those two things were huge in my mind to be like, oh, yeah, well, we know this. Yeah. Like we did morning radio. We know how to develop a relationship with listeners. And we also, you know, from that Bill Simmons standpoint standpoint it's like i know what i like about mark mark knows what's funny you know most of the time we know what we can do yeah to our strengths let's do that yeah can you i said i remembered can you figure out how to upload it yeah could we get support

right you know for this thing and also we didn't have a studio other than we knew we could still get into the one we were at because they hadn't kicked us out of the office right and that's sort of the you know known mythology of the of the show is that you know we knew the night tech guy and we would go in and record you know this hodgepodge of a show and you talk to apple and they were like yeah great, great. We like Mark. And they were looking for people that could do it. There was a fan over there, a guy named Scott Simpson. He was running the Apple podcast at the time on iTunes. Yeah. And they were willing to give us a banner to give us a little support.

And then I remember like, well, what are we going to do? And I had this idea that WTF was a great kind of blanket. It's just like know what the fuck is the great philosophical question of of now and we just kind of use that as an umbrella for a series of segments that we tried yeah we we thought of it more like radio right we were I actually remember the first four or five episodes were compiled from one recording session. We went into those studios at Air America that we were not supposed to be in. And we just sat. And I think we had maybe three people that we were going to call on the phone.

Yeah. We had Matthew Weiss, who we worked with on Break Room Live. You with Matthew? He would come in and do a couple of minutes. And we had a time. We would call your dad. We'd call your mom. And we just did did recorded all these

things at once yeah a couple monologues of yours things that you were working into bits that you were going to use on stage yeah and then i just took all this material maybe three or four hours of material and then turned it into like five shows right and that was how we did that was just how we had proven to ourselves proof of concept oh this can work and also like i still needed the security of other people around yes like i hadn't quite i would jump on the mic right that's right yeah like i need a booth audience i need to see you in the booth right because i had sort of mastered manning a mic or owning a mic on my own for a few hours. Yeah. But it was still a nerve wracking experience for me.

Right. The first guests we called. Jeff Ross. Was Jeff Ross and David Feldman. David Feldman. Jim Earl. Yeah. Patton.

Yeah. And John Oliver. Right. Those all in that one day. That was all on the phone with those? All on the phone with all of those guys. And those are the first five episodes. Wild. Yeah. And and they weren't we didn't think of them as like oh here's we're gonna build these episodes around these guests we didn't know we just like some of them

might not have even worked we didn't know we just did them we were thought we were thinking in terms of segments yeah right because that we created this in our minds an umbrella to do anything right by that point you had a certain amount of faith in my ability to talk about things. Yes. But also, it seemed like the only real commitment we made was this weird, and it comes from what you recognized and how you listened, was we had to figure out how many we were going to do and when we were going to do them. And the idea was Monday and Thursday. Because that was a good space. Right.

That was like my thought about Tom, about the best show, was like, oh, well, if you start listening to this show on Monday, maybe you don't get it done until Tuesday or Wednesday, and then boom, another episode is out. It could fill the week. Yes. And at the beginning, we had to build an audience. There was never kind of like, well, we'll throw one up and see what happens. Right.

Right from the get-go, it was like, we're going to do this and we're in it. Yes. And that commitment was insane because as time went on, just what we went through to get those shows up. Oh, yeah. It was for both of us. Yeah. It's not just for you. I want to make that clear.

Yeah. It was in my pathology as well that this was like do or die. Right. We do not come to a monday or a thursday without an episode going yeah no slacking yeah once we started in new york there was no stopping there's never we've never stopped there's never been a week since we started where there wasn't a new show on monday and thursday yeah so like i had to somehow get home figure out how to set up the shit in the garage in a matter of days obviously yeah you know in order for me to get the show to you yeah that's the only

the only difference i should add is that there were some weeks over the course of doing this for 10 years where we did three in a week so it was like monday wednesday and friday we did yeah and it was just because of like either promotional commitments or something where we were overloaded with guests and we needed to get them out. And we would do three in a week, which is why we find ourselves in this position where we've hit 1,000 episodes at a time frame that is shorter than what we would if we just did two episodes a week. Right. We're here in March, and it's our 1's our thousandth episode even though we started in September. That's, you know- Oh, I get it.

If you do the math, there's something off there and it's because we have had occasions where we did three a week. But the level of panic if something was going wrong was like, we got to get it up.

And by the way, the level of panic off of a show we were not making money on had no real prospects for until we were maybe a year and a half two years in so like all of that urgency was driven by i think both of our essential understanding that this was the truest form of what we were doing like and we had complete control yes so you still had to do your other job yeah producing i was yeah i was working

at msnbc yeah the whole time because you didn't come on full-time to wtf to what 2000 and 2013 was when i basically you know said this this is what i'm gonna do with my life like full-time and i remember i was like are you sure dude because like i don't want to if this goes south and you got a family i don't want and you're well goes south and you got a family, I don't want you. Well, the thing was, you were a little nervous about that, but I actually knew that I was at least a year late in making that decision. Just looking at the numbers and everything. The show had been self-sufficient and sustainable by 2012.

So I could have actually made that choice sooner and didn't. And it was killing me. It was killing me to do basically because you time job but the fact that we had complete creative control early on and that you know it was all on us was exciting but also daunting what happened was I moved back to LA I had my garage it just had a bunch of shit in it I set up a table in there I had my my Apple notebook the big one and I had this little mixer that I still have that I think we stole from Air America yep is this the same that was the one that was in the break room the Samson MDR6 they don't make

anymore it's a dumb little analog mixer and so I set that up and I and Jesse Thorne told me which mics to get I misunderstood at first I got a Shure 57 instead of a Shure SM7 which wasn't the right mic I bought these mics, which are hanging mics. They're boom mics. And I had them stuck on little fucking mic stands, the desktop mic stands, these giant mics. And I'd sit there in the middle of all my garbage, just boxes of storage with guests at a table. And it was like that for a long time. I remember when I got the booms, it was like a big day when I started moving the boxes.

But that's how the early episodes in la started well let's because we're talking about how you know most of this is just you and i going back and forth on these decisions and questions and that to go back to the questions that our listeners sent in this one comes from derek and he wanted to know is it just you and brendan that run the entire wtf empire are there no minions beyond the cats is wtf diy and the answer to this is like yes with a but right like that the thing that we have maintained since day one is that this thing is ours yeah we control it we own it there's no overseer like yeah it's just our thing yeah but we have absolutely had not just help from lots of people but we're in strategic partnerships sure now that helped

the thing get done yeah right and probably the other person who works on the show the most is frank capello who's your assistant yeah here in la yeah i mean he's he assists us both yeah um but but he's able to you know be here if you need him. You need him here for guests. And that role has been filled over the years by several other people, Ashley Barnhill, Sam Varela. There's another one for a minute. Well, Sachi Azura, who's in New York, helped out on my end with that kind of stuff. Who's that one, though?

Ashley Grashaw. Oh, yeah, Ashley Grashaw. And Brian Fernandez was your like first assistant who was doing stuff for you. So they've all been people who've worked on the show or emailed guests or done things of that nature. But also early on, Anastasia Kousaki, Stosh, she was a woman that worked in the same building

as Air America who was moving back when i got back to la i didn't have that much money when i started doing the show at home so she was my roommate for a long time right and so she was there during all this stuff where i took the you know the bath with the with the jeans on yeah she helped me like collate all the names of the donors because we were on a donor model. And that's like, that's such a perfect example of how we were operating. It was just like, we know it had to be done. And can you help me do this to someone who was a well-wisher, a friend? You know, nowadays it's a little more routinized in that, like I said, we have partnerships.

Like we're partners with Stitcher for our archives. All our archives are at Stitcher Premium. But primarily our relationship with them is with their ad division, mid-roll. I was selling the ads myself for three, four years. And it just got to be too overwhelming. My plate was full. So every time our plate has gotten full, we've said like said like well how do we move this to someone else but also that's an example of how the business of podcasting grew at you know simultaneously to our

being in it because you and i did not have cash incentive we just didn't know what we were doing other than providing doing this thing we love doing without really a clear business model because at the beginning we were taking donations and it wasn't until just a couple years ago where we like realized that there were still people that were doing a monthly thing and we had a few years ago yeah we're like we don't we're good yeah some of them are like no no we'll still give you give you ten dollars a month yeah uh yeah that that's absolutely true i mean the the the first annual ad that we got annual meaning they bought for a whole year, was stamps.com. They gave us a number of what the cost would be,

and we looked at that per episode that comes out to X. All right, great. And I said, you want to do this? He said, yeah, let's go for it. Let's do it. Let's try it out. And we were making no money beyond like the donations that you're talking about that we were asking people to use to support the show and then i

was doing the bankroll and i didn't know how to do it and we had to like you know list all the things that were coming oh yeah separate the merch from the right my dumb spreadsheets we had i had to do that every month i remember loading those envelopes with stickers and schwag it's so good to be done with that stuff. But I just remember that the business, when you talk about mid-roll, when you talk about that time, you know, like Rogan comes on the scene, Nerdist comes on the scene, you know, within a couple of years of when we started, the podcasting landscape started to get bigger with people I knew and people were experimenting with, you know, do we make it a premium? Do we not make it a premium? How do you grow an audience if it's a premium?

Right. So, like, and mid-roll was something that came years later that somebody finally got the idea to create. Jeff Ulrich. Ulrich, who was the. Founder and co-creator of the Earwolf Network. Right. With Scott Aukerman. Yeah.

And, you know, with somebody who wanted to work with us on, you know, basically since the moment he started doing that, he was always talking with us. And we just developed a kind of collegial relationship with him because he was another guy in our space. That's a thing that gets forgotten is that, like, all of us who were in that era starting out doing this, we all communicated. We all, everybody did each other's shows. Yeah, I talked to everybody. You could call, you know, you could talk to Doug Benson or Corolla. Is this working out for you? How's this?

Yeah, that was a big part of it. And I developed a relationship with Jeff because of that type of back and forth. He would call me for advice. I would call him for advice. And then he would say, how are we going to work together on this? Well, we don't really need X, Y, and Z. him for advice. And then he would say, how are we going to work together on this? Well, we don't really need X, Y, and Z. And it became very obvious the type of thing that we needed was help with our ad sales. Because I was just doing it all myself,

basically through old connections. Terrestrial stuff. Terrestrial style ad selling. Yeah. But that was a good example of the business growing around us. But ultimately, to answer that guy's question, yeah, we've had a lot of support and I've had, you know, part-time assistants that have helped out and, and, and managers that, you know, and people in the man, Kelly Van Valkenburg is on your team now helps us all the time. David Martin as well. And, uh, um, Rob Murio, who was like, you're one, you know, one of the original accountants and he now just manages our books, you know? Yeah. Well. Well, now we have books. But the bottom line is, the actual thing that you hear on the air is always me and Brendan. Really.

You know, whatever the support is, but it's always me and you. Like, it really is the way it works. It's like, I do the raw thing. I send it to you. You do your thing. And, like, we've had opportunities and we've had discussions about, do we want to start a network? Do we want to produce other shows? Do we want to produce other shows? Do we want to be part of a network?

We knew early on we did not want to be part of a network. We had our own thing. We were a big podcast and we were doing fine. I don't think either one of us are really sort of entrepreneurial in spirit where we thought it would be nice to make money not doing anything and just to have something we could sell. But we're also workers. Right. be nice to make money not doing anything and just to have something we could sell, but we're also workers. So I don't know that people really realize just how much work goes into this in terms of talking to people, getting ready to talk to people, scheduling things, and then your job where you sit with an episode for two, three hours, four hours, however long it takes you to meticulously do the production of the episode and post it. But we were busy. And it really comes

down to that. It's like, that's the difference. We are very meticulous about how we were busy and it really comes down to that it's like that's the difference like we we are very meticulous about how and we do this and and what we do and it's very time consuming and it's a lot of work right but it never changed it's been the same i mean like things get easier for us and things become more routine yeah but we essentially are still doing the same process we've done since the minute we started making this. And it's a lot of work and it's the work we can manage and it's the work we can handle. That's the other thing when you're slightly sort of perfectionist and sort of like driven is I don't think you and I are great at delegating. The way we do what we do is how we do it.

Like I sit here by myself, you sit by yourself, and we do our thing. It's not so easy to go like, will you take of this it's like i'll take i i will say it is easy for me to to ask if i'm in a situation it's easy for me to say all right i don't want to handle this anymore like our bookings yeah and to to shift that to an agency yeah's going to do that, that we pay money to, to handle it. Yeah, I ran out of friends. Basically. I ran out of knowing somebody who knows somebody. Right.

I don't have a Rolodex full of people. I don't do well with hunting down folks. So it only makes sense for me at that point to work with someone. And we work with Central Booking. Central Talent Booking, which is Joanna Jordan, who was a letterman booker and she runs her own shop now books kimmel yeah which is a big help to us because we get a lot of the people who come through the circuit they know of our show and they have contact with them already and abigail parsons who's our our lead booker is always on those connected routes right so now we now we get pitch people. Yeah, absolutely.

There's a question here from Doug. He said, I'm curious if there are some episodes you can point to that really jumped the number of listeners to your podcast over the years. You know, it's funny because this happens all the time that you can actually see new people coming in because of a particular guest. It just happened recently. Like with Yardley smith and

the simpsons in general i think having you on the simpsons we saw an influx of people coming that had not been there before and you can chart that yeah uh mandy moore is a good example of someone who people were probably coming in because they're fans of hers and had not heard the show before or they had read the ryan adams piece in the the New York Times and wanted to hear her talk about that. But we noticed the numbers go up. And I would just say that that happens consistently. Every month or so, there's a guest or two, and you can probably figure out who they are. You just look at the list and you go, oh, I know that person very well from pop culture.

And those are usually the ones that make the numbers spike. However, we have a relatively stable foundation at this point where it doesn't dip below. Right. I would say that over the history of the show, there's really basically two names that jumped the show immediately from one level to another. And that was Robin Williams. Yeah. that jumped the show immediately from one level to another. And that was Robin Williams, which was a huge thing for the show and just the idea of what we were doing and how it could work. And then obviously Obama, which was like a 3 million download episode. It just changed overnight, changed our business.

In terms of the increase to audience, it's still ongoing. And, you know, you have audience that drops off. You have new audience that comes in. And part of that is the reason you hear

a variety of guests on the show. Yeah. And also, like, it's still, like, despite what anyone thinks and no matter how big podcasting is,

it's still a limited slice of the media diet. Right. It's bigger than it used to be. But also, like, this show is still very discoverable i mean there were people that watched the simpsons that were like i didn't even know this it was a

real show right right my father's not clear how to listen to it still that might be a different case i know i know that'd be somewhat but that goes into a good point though it's like beyond just guests spiking the audience numbers yeah it's like there's visibility out there that winds up spiking it you being on Glow brought more listeners in. The thing that changed the game for us probably more than anything was that New York Times article by Dan Saltzstein in 2011. We were told by other people doing podcasts at the time, this just changed it for us. For them, for their podcast. Yeah, for the medium in itself. That was a big piece in the art section. But it really us like for for them for their podcast yeah for the medium in

itself that was a big piece in the art section but it really changed our lives oh yeah like there's those three things robin williams that times piece and and obama yeah like changed our lives yeah like when when robin williams died yeah my biggest regret was that i never personally met him yeah to thank him for changing my like he made my life better by agreeing to do this show yeah and it was so and also that i was so happy that it existed for when he died because there was so little uh of that type of conversation with him right if any right yeah well you know we should also thank your old manager olivia wingate yeah who was you know i think you know responsible for uh a lot of the early kind of press around the show and you know

getting you out there for things to associate you with the podcast and she was a believer like that was the thing like you joined with her right when we were starting the podcast right after we started i'm like just after yeah exactly because you had brought initial episodes of the podcast to your old manager and he didn't get it. Yeah. And so you were like, fuck this. I'm out.

Again, go back to that idea of like, yes, you and I do this on our own, but like there have been, there has been help along the way. Olivia was huge in that. Judd Apatow was huge in that.

In, if you talk about an aha moment yeah like that for me as a producer what that he listened not just that he listened that he well he was a fan he loved the show yeah and he came on the show and he brought you the digital recordings that he made when he was a kid yeah with like jay leno and jerry seinfeld and he said take them and do whatever you want with these. Yeah. And that was a coup for, like, I just remember sitting there thinking, like, we beat, like, fresh air to the punch on this. Or, like, This American Life.

Like, this is something they would do. They would be like, listen to, like, this is, like, the king of comedy right now. Yeah. King of Hollywood comedy. Yeah. And here is him as a little kid. Yeah. Like, basically breaking it open yeah and he found

the connection between that and what you were doing yeah and felt simpatico to that and was like well here you use these things yeah and that episode was huge for us and so you know similarly like for me from a personal standpoint having ira glass be a champion of the show early on when he was. That was a big deal. Big deal. He helped put us on to NPR Affiliates through PRX. Yeah. Oh, I remember that. And he and Jesse Thorne were, you know, and Jesse, we've mentioned his name already. We did like 10 episodes that we made available for- Yeah, with beeps and stuff in it so we could air them on NPR.

Yeah, on NPR Affiliates. Yeah. That was exciting. Yeah. And we mentioned Jesse a few times, but he's another person who just kind of gave of himself and uh terry gross that's another one it's like to have that happen with terry gross that was huge man we're talking about respect in the industry in a way yeah like i i think that you know when i interviewed ira it was all very nerve-wracking you know me you know going through the streets of new York to interview Ira Glass, who was, you know, this huge, you know, he's huge in radio. He's the you know, he is NPR. And the weird thing is, is like, and this has always been the secret to my success as an interviewer is I, you know, of course, I've listened to this American life, right? Of course, I've watched a few Simpsons, but there's very few things that I compulsively follow. So I always have a little bit of distance. I don't have the proper context for everybody. I knew that I wanted-

So you're not overly reverent. To different degrees. Yes. But I knew that I wanted to be validated by these people. Yes. And the fact that they did, I was sort of like, well, that's something. Right. But with Ira, I remember getting to his studio where we were going to record. It just made sense. But I wouldn't let him sit in his chair. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I sat in his chair and he sat in the guest chair. You did the same to David Remnick a little while ago, I remember. David, the New Yorker. Yeah, like he walked in and you were already in his chair you're like yep that's how it's going you got to yeah we did so much experimenting early on we were i was in cars with people i love those episodes with uh with eddie peppertone and or you went to zach galifianakis on the set of that movie he was making with todd phill Yeah. The date. Due date. Due date. Yeah. Yeah.

That was the Zach interview. And then that same time, see, that was what I loved is like, you could do that. And we had like Zach Galifianakis, but then the same episode where it was actually a two parter, you talked to an old buddy of yours, Dean Hines, who was like an astrophysicist, right? Yeah. My buddy Dean from, uh, from junior high. Yeah.

Yeah. He's a, he was a drummer in like a little band that I had in junior high. And he's got CP. And he's always a very bright guy. And now he worked on the Hubble telescope. Like, yeah, I mean, I would get so geared up for that stuff. Like, I'd have the fucking equipment in the car turned on driving down the highway in New Mexico. Or I was driving in a car with Maria Bamford coming back from this thing

we went to to do that interview. You were doing the Max Funcom? Yeah, Jesse Thornton. I was out in the streets of Houston with Lucas Melandez. That's a good one.

The Texan. You went and found out about Kunhunto music. Kunhunto music, yeah, just by a fluke. The Creation Museum. Oh, yeah, the Creation Museum

with Ryan Singer and Jeff Tate. Yeah. Yeah, we snuck in the gear. I think we had it. Didn't I have lavalier mics or something? I don't remember how we ended up doing it. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, because we had to do it under wraps. Yeah. There was an excitement in sort of defining and figuring out, you know, what the show was and the beauty of it was it didn't matter. Right, right. We could do whatever the fuck we wanted. Well, when you talk about validation and to have the validation of these type of people like Ira Glass and Terry Gross, by doing those, getting to where we're at today with a thousand episodes and to have the foundation of that be a show that you and I could agree on, this is our sensibility and we're going to make this the way we want and not compromise in

that. Yeah. To get those people to buy into it and be like, yeah, that's good. Like that's all the validation I need. And I know that's weird because they're just people too, but like I fundamentally respect everything they do. Like when I got into doing radio in college,

like my thought was, like if I could have the ideal scenario with my life and career, I want to create something that's like a combination of This American Life and The Howard Stern Show. Yeah. Like I want to put that together. Yeah.

And like in a weird way, it's like kind of what this is, I think. Yeah. Like on a personal note, what's very cool about that is I've had a few times now. Well, one, like Ira and Terry have both been very nice to us personally. Yeah. now well one like ira ira and terry have both been very nice to us personally and i like have tremendous still tremendous respect for them but also now like can look at like oh my god i got this totally nice email from terry gross like with her talking to me like a person who respects what i do is that wild it's really great yeah yeah yeah but then there's two things that happen on the air

as very very validating to me one is when you were on Bill Simmons' podcast, you were talking to him about our setup and what we do. And you were telling him what my role is. And he was like, God, I got to get a Brendan McDonald. I'm like, yeah, that guy. I started this because of that guy. And he needs you. And then on Stern, after you had Springsteen on,

some momo calls Stern up and is like, hey, did you hear that Mark Maron had Bruce Springsteen? What's Gary doing over there? You got to fire him. He didn't get Bruce Springsteen. Mark Maron got Bruce Springsteen.

And Howard's like, yeah, what is that, Gary? Maybe I should have Mark Maron's producer. I was like, yeah, that's number two. I didn't even know that one. Oh, yeah. That made my life. That's fucking great.

Yeah. But the Terry Grossing was really like, whatever I do has evolved from an organic beginning in how I do what I do yeah it is it is mine you know like obviously we didn't invent interviewing but I don't know that I essentially interview people but when she was asked to do that live radio event to be interviewed she said she wouldn't do it unless I interviewed her yeah she requested me and I'd done her show a few times but I'd never really met her I don't think no I don't think you were in the studio yeah you know and don't do that

but the fact that she wanted me I was like oh my god this is like you know this is a big deal the the best interviewer in the world so much happened for me that night really in terms of my skill set you know as in terms of me realizing it. Because like, you know, people just come over here, you know, like, I'm going to do what I do. I'm going to, you know, fidget around. I'm going to turn the thing on before they get here. I'm going to like not look at them when they come in. Like, you know, I have things that I do naturally just so they get comfortable and they don't feel it happening. Right. You know, I do have a way of doing that and it works. But, you know, I do have a way of doing that. And it works.

But, you know, I don't always acknowledge that I necessarily have a skill set. I just sort of can hear things. And I wait. And I can feel when conversations shift. But with Terry, you know, it was a big deal because nobody knows anything about that woman. And nobody sees her. You know, usually if you're on her show, you're on an ISDN hookup. And you're not in a studio with her.

It's very unclear what her life was. And I realized that that's really true. And it's not a normal thing. Usually with people who are that public, there's information about them. But like I did what I usually do. Like I was like, how am I going to really find out about her? What is she willing to do? And also I knew that she's not a live performer.

We're going to be in front of almost 2000 people. You know i can do that yeah can she is she okay but then i started to really understand that like she trusted me with this right and it was like it was it was wasn't a big responsibility but i really wanted it to go well for her i wanted her to you know be comfortable and i wanted it to go well there are times in the thing where you can hear you you're like reassuring her you're like don't worry Terry we're okay but like it was and then like to do the research it was just it was interesting because I do have a way of researching I'm not completely unprepared and with her I you know I saw her like you know what was available as a bio. And then I just saw these

gaps. What was going on those six years? Where was she here? So I had to be very deliberate in finding these gaps that would reveal something about who she was. But I also knew that it was live. And my instinct in a live situation is to go for the laugh but I knew in that situation you know it was obviously her audience and my audience who were decent people they weren't yahoos and they knew how to be you know present and behave like an audience but there were definitely moments there where I saw a place to get a laugh and I was like I was like you know don't do it let her have the space let it sit for a minute. It's okay. Even if it was live.

And it's hard as a comic in a live situation not to jump on that beat. But I was like, this isn't about you. It's about Terry. Just let it sit. And sacrifice that moment for a real moment. And then it made the ones that you did jump in on even better. Right. But I was very aware of respecting

her, of making sure she was comfortable in that environment and sort of, you know, carrying the thing as a gracious host, but also keeping it going. Like there was a lot of things that I was very aware that I was doing and it made me feel like a real professional. Yeah. It was one of the best nights of my life, really, that it came off so beautifully. Yeah. There's a list of questions I have here that are things that come up

over and over again. We should probably just, like, get these out of the way because, you know, I figure people are going to ask over and over again. Let's just answer them now. Specifically,

this one came from Brian, but lots of people ask this. It says, was that Horatio Sands who did those weird chupacabra bits with you in the super early episodes of wtf and some people might not know what what he's talking about there but we do get asked quite a bit about in the early episodes usually like these are within the first

100 yeah we were doing as mark and i talked about earlier we were doing a lot of segments and part of those segments were like sketches with improv comics and other actors. But we would try to play them off like they were real. It's real Kaufman-esque kind of like, and we never let on for some of them. Right. Well, the idea was this was part of the WTF moment, right? It was also like it was really a legitimate third segment for a long time. It was the only thing that remained.

We didn't do comedy bits, but we'd do a monologue, an interview, and then we'd have a second guest that may or may not be real. Be real. Right. And this kind of stemmed from us doing this on Morning Sedition. In fact, in the early episodes, we used some of our old Morning Sedition people to do their characters. Kent Jones did this character Lawton Smalls, Jim Earl. We do the guy who reads the obits,

Mort Mortensen. And we just treated them like the characters. We didn't say this is Jim Earl doing Mort Mortensen. Uh, Chupacabra was not Horatio Sands. That was Nick Kroll, which is actually a bit he brought to other shows, his own show,

the Kroll show and comedy bang bang. But here I'll just go through finally for once and for all so if anybody's asking out there who was this one who was that one could you still get emails when people listen we wouldn't let on yeah we we you know people go is that real and wasn't where but it was policy never to say right so so uh come on now the uh the nightclub comic from uh from the 70s john daly john daly uh the very first one of those questionable uh is it real or is it not was a guy named troy conrad and he went by his real name yeah but he presented himself as a libertarian firefighter remember that yeah that that a lot of people

wrote in then they were like that guy's ridiculous you can't you can't operate a fire company that way. Then we had a fantastically funny guy who we used to work with on the radio, too, Dave Waterman, who did a few voices. One guy was Kevin LaValle, who was a motivational speaker, but it turned out he was a white supremacist. Yeah. Probably not as funny today, actually. supremacist yeah probably not as funny today actually uh uh daryl loomis who was a high school drug counselor uh and it turned out that his way of getting the kids to not do the drugs was just to do them himself and he did salvia yeah he'd just do it and freak out yeah uh and he was also uh troy the 12th member of the state yeah uh this was after we had david wayne on and then we had a follow-up with a guest who was a guy who was supposedly kicked out of the state right by david and the other people you're right uh then

there was a bad drug dealer bad as in he was not good at it named frog yeah that was jerry minor oh yeah uh matt walsh did a thing mark and i were just listening to earlier a guy named michael garvey who was uh homebound assistance the elderly. And he would do it over the phone. Yeah. And it turned out he just liked talking to them about feces. Yeah, about poop. Matt Walsh also did a thing with June Diane Rayfield and James Pumphrey where they were a married couple that had like a perfect marriage. But it turned out that really what they were doing was horribly abusing their son.

Right. Making him like. Did they write a book or something? Yes, right. And the thing was like you write a book or something? Yes, right. And the thing was like, you make your child pay rent. Yeah, right, yeah. And Toby Huss did a thing called Rudy Cassoni,

a guy named Rudy Cassoni. The lounge singer? He's a lounge singer, yeah. Other questions that have come up a lot. Well, Boomer Lives, you just addressed that on a recent show, and obviously that's your cat that left and never came back, Boomer.

Yeah, Boomer Lives, he was a cat that left and never came back boomer yeah boomer lives like he he was a cat that i had for years and he was an outdoor cat and he disappeared it was like right at the beginning of when i was making marin so i don't know what year that was and it was just like one of those 2012 yeah it was one of those things where they disappear and you don't know what happened to him you can expect the worst but he just didn't come back and it just became it just became the mythologizing of that cat well and the this guy chris said i would like to hear the snippet of the episode when boomer meows on the mic and so here it is right now that was boomer which is also now

your logo that you used at the end of marin yeah for the boomer lives productions yeah yeah uh lock the gates a lot Productions. You used that meow. Lock the Gates, a lot of people still want to know what that is. People always discover that, and they're like, why didn't I? Yeah, and you want to tell them what it is? Sure. I had a very powerful minute or two of movie screen time in Almost Famous. I'm the angry promoter in Almost Famous, and it's from that scene where Sweetwater bails on their set

because Billy Crudup's character gets electrocuted and I'm the promoter who runs up to the bus as they're leaving. And I get into a fight with Noah Taylor and I'm like, fuck you, fuck these guys. And the bus takes off and I go, lock the gates. Lock the gates on these assholes. And then they buy the gate.

Yeah, they drive through the gate and I chase them in the little golf cart. Well, that is the actual origin of that, although we did get this very heartfelt email about Lock the Gates that I should read right now

if you like this. Hi, Mark. My name is Gabriel from Portland. With embarrassment, I write to you. Have spent countless hours accumulated in the past listening to your podcast.

Turned one of my friends to your podcast a while back. Was talking to him the other day and told him I keep waiting for Mark to address the line of the opening of the WTF podcast. Fuck the gays, I said. He laughed at me and said, lock the gates. That's what it says. he laughed at me and said, lock the gates. That's what it says.

I felt very stupid because you would think after being in this country for so many years, I would speak and understand perfect English. I'm Mexican. Love and thank you for what you do

for all mankind. So, yeah, he's... He stuck with it despite the fact that... That's what I was thinking. Despite the fact that he said, fuck the gates at the beginning of the show.

He's been a fan forever. Just a weird glitch. Or no, maybe he thought you were talking about it in a holistic way. Like something that we should all do. We should, yes, have sex with everyone. Why is there this weird thing that Marin does about the gays? Music. People ask us about the music on the show a lot the opening theme is created by a guy named

John Montagna who is my neighbor now coincidentally we wound up moving to the same neighborhood and he you see him around all the time where he's like we're kids in the same school so PTA stuff yeah John is awesome John did some bumpers for us too back in the day originally it was acdc's uh down payment blues yes and we we about 30 episodes in we realized we are cruising for a bruising by doing that boy i love that opening though yeah but i love john's john's is ours yes and we we uh we did a solicitation just uh hey do you want to do an intro for uh the show we got submissions submissions yeah that one just we just hit right away and then uh someone wrote this asking do you want to do an intro for the show? And we got submissions. Submissions, yeah. That one would just hit right away. And then someone wrote this asking,

do you play, you Mark, play all the musical intros to the interviews or are they canned or bought? Do you just improv them? I must commend your playing. It's really come along over the last 10 years. So keep on rocking and keep on talking. So that's a nice compliment.

The answer is yes as of as of around like episode 500 um they're all yours they are yeah that's all the stuff that you do at the end of the show um you know prior to that we were using john's bumpers and then uh anytime you would if you hear something on the show from the early years and it's a bumper done by a particular submission or something, we identify it on that show. Like you would say, uh, this was from so-and-so who sent this in and,

uh, you know, we would, we would air it that way. But recently we've moved to them being just your bumpers that are based on the things that you do at the end. I appreciate the compliment. I do.

I have worked hard at becoming better at guitar, and I'm glad that I got the confidence to keep doing that. That was one of those weird things that just became a thing. I did it a couple of times, and then I'm like, now I do it all the time. I don't know why it became a thing. In my mind, not unlike the intro, my monologues, I just assume that not everybody listens to my monologues or my guitar playing at the end.

There's something I do for me. And then sometimes at the end, I'm sort of like, this is for those of you who are still listening. But yeah, I do practice. And as some of you know who have listened to this show for a long time, I've played out a few times with Jimmy Vivino and Yes Slash. I do my own thing. I don't know that I hold my own. I do. Actually, I do hold my own.

I'm all right. One last thing that was in here as like a recurring question, and it's really been a recurring question since we solicited emails for the thousandth episode, was people just very simply writing in and saying how is Todd Hanson because on an earlier episode of this show Todd

who's the former head writer of The Onion and a you know very funny good writer in many other projects

the episode that featured him on this show involved him discussing for really the first time he ever talked about it publicly

a very real very intense attempted suicide I had no idea on this show involved him discussing, for really the first time he ever talked about it publicly, a very real, very intense attempted suicide. I had no idea. That was, like, it just so happened that I was staying at the hotel where he tried to do it. Yeah. And I didn't know when he came over. Right, the way that this used to work a lot was when you would spend time in New York for shows shows or whatever reason you would just talk to the people the way you used to you

know generally book the show which would be like talk to people you know and say hey do you want to do this and so then when you would go to new york you would just say hey you want to do an interview and you'd go to either where they live or they'd come to your hotel and you just do it that way and you happen to be staying at this hotel it's like the holiday and express yeah i think in brooklyn and he came over and he said i've been here before he got there he said i've been here before i tried and he told me he tried to kill himself at that hotel and i said are we going to talk about that he says i don't know but i did tell my therapist that i was going to be talking to you which i i always think is hilarious that that's what made it okay oh mark maron's gonna be there sure? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Go ahead. Yeah, you'll be all right over there. And we didn't end up talking about it, but we sat on that in case he wanted to talk about it. And ultimately I went back to his home and we did talk through that whole day of him doing that. It was like that was all one episode. I should let people know, you know,

before we go on to answer that question, how is Todd Hanson, that, you know before we go on to answer that question how is Todd Hansen that um you know one of the more moving and intense things that have to do with this show is the reaction to that episode particularly that we still to this day uh get responses from clinicians and educators saying that they use that episode with students, patients, family members to help talk about how to speak to a loved one. And also what the thinking is behind the decision. Right, right. And also like a lot of emails from people who were depressed or in the same position.

Right. Yeah, it was heavy and it remains one of the great episodes. And I'm happy to report that I had not talked to Todd in a while. And I reached out to him. And we spoke on the phone. And he's doing pretty well. He's still managing his mental issues. But he's managing it responsibly.

He's still with the same therapist. He's doing very well with the therapist. He still has the same girlfriend that he had for years, and they're okay. And I guess the big turn of events for Todd is that, you know, he'd never gotten a college degree. He dropped out of high school, I believe, and started writing for The Onion. And, like, Bard has up these these programs in some cities where you know certain people of a certain uh economic standing or or who haven't gotten a

college education can apply to go to college and he's going to college that's awesome for a general humanities degree he's uh he's still writing uh he wrote a piece of short fiction that got some attention from the new york times he does some workshops uh with another guy from the onion uh in comedy writing and uh and he's thrilled to be going to college and he sounded great and uh he's doing pretty well uh and he was happy to talk to me and i was happy to talk to him that's great. Yeah. That's another thing I think people want to know. That squeak, it's the boom, not the chair.

Oh, people think it's the chair. Sometimes. Oh. They're like, fix your chair. I'm like, not. I'll fix the boom, maybe. It's got springs on it. Yeah.

What, that's not fun to listen to? That and eating. The eating is horrible, and I hate you for it whenever you do it but the uh but the the noise of the room i don't mind i i'm i'm okay with the squeak yeah i am too i just i the like like the rosanna interview with the cantaloupe oh man there's just times where like you'll send me a file with someone who's eating or yourself or you're doing something that you're and you there's times where you've even acknowledged it. You've said like, I probably shouldn't be doing this, but I'm going to chew this gum. Yeah.

I shouldn't have done this, but I just threw 12 Tootsie Rolls in my mouth. There's some people that are so sensitive to it, they're literally like, dude. I get these emails like, what the fuck are you doing yeah now i think i've texted you at times like i i will get revenge on you for doing this this episode well it's a good time to talk about this stuff because like there's a lot of people who are interested in what our process is how we do what we do yeah this question came from another person named Brendan. It's not me. I did not send my own question. But Brendan here asks, how much on average, if any, is edited from your conversations? Does Brendan do all the edits himself or do you suggest things to cut? Thanks again. Here's to another thousand.

Well, obviously you do all this stuff on your own, but there are times like I always will say something after I talk to somebody. We talk after pretty much every interview unless there's time, time constraints prevent us from being. And not that you would notice, but sometimes I say like, there's a moment there that like resonated with me. You'll probably feel it. Or I think that the, the core of this interview is around that. That's been a big help for you to, you to learn within yourself what the arcs of these

things are. Because when we first started, my instruction to you was just basically record. Just go do as much as you possibly can. Then I would take the thing and shape it. And what that really meant was a lot of times moving entire chunks around or cutting a lot of material. But I just wanted to kind of give you the freedom to talk and go on tangents and go in any direction that you wanted. Right. And the secret was to get it

so that it did seem like a completely uninterrupted, seamless conversation despite the amount of production that we put behind it. Now, like I said, you've done a thousand of these and you're pretty good at identifying that within the conversation now. You self-redirect a lot. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah, definitely. Oh, that's good. Well, I know when I'm talking to somebody, there's a moment where it turns. And I've talked about that before, I think, about a third of the way through or 20, 25 minutes in, the tone, something will relax. And then usually shortly thereafter,

there'll be this thing where I feel like, oh, this is the hinge of this conversation or who this person is or what they're struggling with or what shifted or there's a moment. And what I am listening for when I'm sitting there with these is obviously trying to identify that spot and then making sure that the conversation as a whole supports that. Yeah. Because if you have that spot, but then there's been an hour of bullshit before that.

Right. That detracts from it. Yeah. Then that stuff's got to get cut down. Right. And that's got to be thinned out so that it's a smoother ride to that point that you're talking about that turn. And I think this is a real sort of like pulling back the curtain thing for a lot of people is that, you know, there is an organic nature to to this show. But the fact is, is that you can work upwards of three hours on these things.

Oh, yeah. An average the average length of me working on one is three hours. Right. To sort of mold a narrative and find an arc and sort of trim the fat and really kind of make these things have this flow to them. The funniest thing to me is when we have guests say like, God, I was really on top of it that day. I'm like, you don't know what Brendan went through. Oh, like when they've heard it afterwards? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, God, it's very clear. Oh, yeah. No, there have been times where I've texted you in the middle and i'm like

this is major surgery major surgery and i don't have to throw any human being under the bus for that because that is not not it's not to say it's any person's specific fault right in fact i can identify one person by name because she brought it up uh fiona apple like sent you a message afterwards that was like your editor did wonders to that because i thought i was all over the place that day yeah and you you are correct fiona that was tough one but i do think it was very obvious what the through line was in that conversation and so it might have been hard just or time consuming to edit that but the heart of it the core of it was there yeah well i i always i always say that my inspiration in terms of editing this show is generally like a movie editor you don't you're not aware of the edits in a film unless they're like you know really in the

forefront trying to make you aware of it like a scorsese montage or something but most of the time you watch a movie and you're just being taken from scene to scene right where the most important work on that film was probably done in the editing sure in most films and another thing that always jumps into my head is the muppet show yeah you know they always had a special guest star and i remember reading somewhere in like a thing about the muppets people who are guest stars have fans come up to them all the time and be like oh i remember you from when i was a kid you were on the muppet show did you do that live like they thought it was like saturday night live right like and like every shot of the muppet show is a special effects shot

every single shot yeah there's some kind of rig set up or a ramp or something that probably required several hours worth of time sure for them to get that to look good but you know you were a kid you just watched the muppet show and it seemed like people were there talking with muppets hanging out with muppets and that was always my intention with this even back when we were doing it with multi-segments where you know it wasn't highlighted around one interview right i just wanted this to sound like you're hanging out with Marc Maron. This is just, you turn this on and this is Marc Maron's life and his brain that you're hearing. Right. I'm glad we're being transparent about it because I think

it is one of the reasons that we work so well together, but also one of the reasons that the quality of the podcast remains so consistent is that when you listen to a lot of podcasts, a lot of people just think like, well, just turn on the mics. Right. But if you're not doing live, there's no real reason not to edit. Of course. And also, the point I was trying to make is you happen to be exceptionally meticulous and good at it and inspired with it, and it's almost an art unto itself.

That's just the fortunate thing that we have in our pairing yeah but there's a lot of times like people are like well they're just turning the mics on i can do that it's like we're not really just doing the same thing as like people not understanding that like talk show late night talk show hosts have writing staffs yeah well that was the weirdest thing when the writer strike happened and people are like i don't get it i thought he was just doing that those jokes but these are smart people that don't it's a blind spot right it's because the thing that you're actually watching is good right and it is allows that illusion it encourages that illusion right that's what we're doing like we're not lying to people in the way we present the show we are creating the best possible product right of two people talking to each other we're not

adding things right we're taking things out to help them out a little. To help everybody out. We could take out more, but I think it actually, from day one, one of my things was, I want to preserve the, what do you call it inside of a diamond?

Imperfections. Yeah. Like I wanted to preserve those things. Yeah. There was something you did in like one of the very first episodes where you, I turned your mic on. We were in the booth together in America and i turned your mic on we were in the booth together in america and

i turned your mic on and you had just shoveled a handful of pretzels in your mouth yeah and you started talking but you were stuck because you had pretzels in your mouth and then you said uh leave this i want this to be on the podcast and you did i left it and i remember that was a moment for me where i was like oh these these things should be in there you should leave these things all the time yeah so like anna ferris goes to take a pee like that should be in the show you know uh but some of this guy jack asked uh i've been doing an oral history and recording and transcribing interviews i edit out a lot of like and you knows does brendan edit those sorts of

words out of interviews are all the guests pretty well spoken? I don't edit a lot of those out to be honest with you. In fact, I hear them and I deliberately leave them in. Sometimes if a person has a tick that causes them to say like a lot, you know, as a punctuation, I will trim those just because they get an, it gets irritating. Not for any fault of that person. It's just a, it's a thing they probably don't even realize right i used to do it with your nose oh i used to cut them out yeah like there were points where you were you knowing or yang a lot over the end of sentences yeah and i was like let's just ease those back but i do editing for other things and have done editing for other things in my life where i have cut out almost all the you knows and likes because the situation called for it like if you're if i'm editing a news interview right or i edit

this podcast for chris hayes yeah the information is paramount you want that stuff to come across and if a person is saying you know or like or um they're often doing that as they search for information in their head search for the next point one of the great ummers is sam cedar oh boy is he ever him and obama could have an um off well my side of it is uh my my process is usually to somehow trick people into feeling comfortable pretty quickly because i know like i don't know if it's an empathetic thing about walking into a strange environment, but usually when they come in, in the new setup, you know, we kind of walk around like this, this garage actually looks a lot like my, the original garage before I made it into a studio. Other than I have a very sort of like very specific setup here to where it's clear. We're going to do the work. And it's a nicer room. It's not, it's not old and ramshackle.

Right. But there, all the boxes are unpacked on the floor i haven't really got set up because we're gonna have to do some work in here but my like i do and people know this about me i do turn the thing on before we get started and i just have natural conversations i just find that if you you kind of sort of get situated and you're sort of like where'd you come in from or what'd you eat or whatever the hell it is to get into the present. And then just kind of noodle around until they're like, are we doing it? Yeah. It's good because you've already laid all the groundwork and there's no official start.

That's right. Official starts always, I think, begin the thing stilted. Yes. Right? Because you're like, okay, you ready? Hey, I'm here with, like, just even if you're not doing it that way, that's the tone that happens. Yeah. And the person thinks they have to meet that at some level of professionalism. Right.

Oh, okay. We're broadcasting right now. Right. So just for me to start it, it helps both of us. Cause then I'm just like, I got it on. I'm not worried about anything. And we're just kind of rambling until we get somewhere. I'll point out too, that you often start it with a foible of your own or a hang up or something, you know, those things have always allowed the guests to feel more comfortable. They're like, well, this guy doesn't have everything together. Oh, he's got problems. And he's telling me about the cat shit on his floor. Okay. Then it just sort of goes from there. You know, that's really the only consistent thing I do,

which is like, just make sure the thing is rolling. Sometimes I'll get it rolling, you know, before they even get in here. Right. In general, your, your thinking is I'm going to get an hour and if we can get to an hour and I can close that up, I'll close it up. And if not, we'll just keep going until we're done. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've, there's definitely, and as you know, there's been people that are difficult and I know that instinctively now, definitely and as you know there's been people that are difficult and i know that instinctively now which i might not have known before but i do try i'm like it's almost it's more than a therapist but i'm like i need this to it needs to go somewhere and sometimes the waiting pays off because there have been times where it doesn't happen for an hour right well that's the funny

thing it's like it's a good thing we talk after every one because you send me a file and I'll look at it immediately. And like, if that file is 90 minutes, that could go either way. That could be that it was just a rip roaring good time. Alfred Molina the other day, like I edited that and I was shocked at how little I cut out of it. It was a very thorough conversation at like 82 minutes or something. And yet you'll send me ones that's like 90 minutes and then we'll talk. And you're like, that doesn't come around until like an hour and 10 minutes in, you know,

like, so I know like, okay, good. We're going to have like a good final 20 minutes, but that first part is going to be, you have to figure out how to build around that. Right.

Well, yeah, I, I mean, that's a nice way of saying it sort of like, uh, yeah, I,

I, you know, I just, I had to keep them in there. You have said those words. I had to keep them in like it's like like a prison, like an interrogation. All right. Here's some more questions about the process, particularly as it relates to guests. And this is a good question. But this guy said some nice things. First, I think you should hear them. You deserve a break and a few moments to reflect on your innovations and contributions to the podcast genre. One, a full uninterrupted hour with each guest. No commercial breaks.

That was intentional. We knew that the breaks within the conversation. Yeah, we chose to do that. Like there was a period where I'm like, at the beginning, I'm like, we're not doing ads, man. Yeah. We knew no pre-recorded ads for sure, but there was some remnants of like, you know, it's like we have the freedom, and then whatever I was about to say changed, to make a living.

Yeah. You know, like to reframe whatever bullshit punk rock integrity you have into like, we deserve to be paid for this, and this is how it's going to happen. Yes. Yes. do you have into like we deserve to be paid for this and this is gonna this is how it's gonna happen yes yes uh number two the conversation is one-on-one no sidekick or publicists uh i will say that terry gross does not allow publicists to sit in the studio with the guests although those publicists often sit in an ante room and listen yeah we we don't have that here it's so fun that's one of the great pleasures of doing this is where I'm like,

when they show up with publicists and I'm like, yeah, generally, you know how this goes. We're going to go in the garage. You can sit here in the living room if you want. And they're like,

but are you sure I can't? I'm like, yeah, no, I don't really. Oh, I'm sure. And then they always ask the artist who half the time doesn't even know the publicist is coming

because usually it's either, you know, the productions publicist or the movies publicist or studio publicist. So they like are you going to be all right and they're like yeah yeah and then i get in here they're like i don't know who that is well i'll tell you a great one was uh and and i this is uh she was just doing her job or reacting in the way she should in that job but when you did springsteen at his house he left that was how we knew the interview was over i was sitting outside with the publicist and we weren't listening to it the interview. But when you did Springsteen at his house, he left. That was how we knew the interview was over. I was sitting outside

with the publicist and we weren't listening to it. The interview was over when you guys came out and he said goodbye. He went back up to his house and then we went back into where you were recording.

Yeah. Pack everything up. And I was asking you, how'd it go? Like, you know, what did he, was it good? And you were like,

yeah, it was really good. He talked a lot about his childhood and his dad. And we talked some about Trump. And the publicist goes, oh. Now she's standing there. She has no idea what extent he talked about it. That was a good moment.

To her credit, she's a total professional and set up but i think it's interesting to point out to hear that we do leave a certain freedom on behalf of the artist or whoever i'm interviewing if they want something taken out and it makes sense we do it yes uh but you know we have pushed back on things and it's it's oddly almost always it's about somebody else yes like a lot of times right i need to say that about so and so yeah those kind of things i my my rule of thumb with that and i'll get back to uh jay's email in a second my rule of thumb as a producer and an editor and someone who comes from like a news background and has to think about these things ethically is you know know, we're not doing a live show. So if the person in the moment said to you,

hang on, can I, I said that thing about my dad. I, can you make sure you take that out? I don't want to say that about him. You would. Yeah. Because a person is allowed to have a second thought about something. Right. And if you got to the very end of an interview and someone said to you hey you know that whole thing i talked about that stretch in my career can you take that out you in here in this room would be like really that's the crux of the show like why don't you sit with that for a second because i don't think we should take that out like if you can have that conversation face-to-face with a person, I should be able to make that same decision as an editor and as a producer

to say, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. You're asking me to take out the crux of the show, and I can't do that. Right. But the bottom line is that this is not the type of show. We're not out to sandbag people. And, you know, I think you have done this as well. Like, people have said things that they didn't notice that they've said, sandbag exactly and in and you know i think on you has done have done this as well like people have said things that they didn't notice that they've said and you've decided like that's just

going to cause problems yeah usually i think about it from a legal standpoint like they just say something that if the person they're saying that about took issue with they could have a legal case around it you know yeah andy dick yeah he he admitted to a felony yeah first of all that was number one and then the other thing was i think he outed a person by name yeah all right so jay's email let me just go back to this uh so again full under uninterrupted hour with each guest uh conversations one-on-one no shameless plugging of the latest project often the guest is so involved in the conversation he or she barely mentions the reason they're there at that point in time that's happened a lot yeah we that's the best we can hope for yeah uh not just a-list actors and musicians directors

comedians authors uh get a much needed turn in the spotlight um that's also just kind of based on who we can get i think yeah I think that's another thing people need to know is that we reach out to a lot of people. I'm not a miracle worker. People just assume like Marilyn can get anybody. It's not true. There are three people we tried to get for this show. We couldn't get them.

Didn't have the power. Didn't have the reach. But we tried to make this an eclectic show. We tried to get a lot of voices on the show but you know it's all it's all subject to people's availability people's desire to do the show those two things primarily right uh the last thing jay says here is uh the obama interview in my opinion this should be mandatory listening in every high school civics class there probably should be a lot more engagement in high school civics class, period.

There should be more civics classes, apparently. Most of them have been cut. And Jay's question was about editing. And he said, you've mentioned that a guest can ask you to delete parts of the conversation. Can you estimate how often this happens and the approximate percentage of material that's typically cut out?

All the things we've just been talking about, I'd say it happens at a very low percentage amount. Like there's the estimate of how often it happens. I would say maybe one out of every 30. Yeah. Does that sound about right to you? That sounds high.

High as in like? It doesn't seem like that many. Maybe. I don't know. You know better than me. Oh, so you're saying it sounds, yeah, it sounds maybe like one out of every 50. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Like that maybe it's maybe it's happened sometimes it's like nothing it's like yeah i need to say that thing about my dad right right here's something that's a question about

your monologues yeah are the opening monologues single take do you plan a topic or theme ahead of time and prepare anything like an outline or are they more free form that's from ally well usually they're free form you know i'll sometimes wander around the house and write down things i want to cover or things that i did or where uh you know like primarily things that were on my mind or things i watched to remind myself of what i want to talk about but usually they're they're pretty free form and uh like a lot of times i'll call brendan a lot and i'll be like what the fuck what the fuck am i gonna talk about i mean it's like i talked about it i haven't done anything in the last three days god damn it i fucking hate this shit because like honestly no matter what

brendan says to me about like don't worry about it it's like i got two ad chunks i don't want to be on top of each other and i want them there to be space in between them. And I like talking, but today's not the fucking day, man. And he'll be like, don't worry about it. but I've also like literally sent to you like an outline.

I'd be like, talk about this, then add, then talk about this, then add, then introduce the guest. Yeah. And when I do that,

you give me an intro. That's like 35 minutes long. Because I honestly think, and maybe you can disagree with this, but it might be subconscious or what. I think that when you're confronted with those moments, you push yourself to talk even more,

like to make sure your self has not gone away. Like I almost feel like you're defiantly saying like, no, I am not a nobody. I am not a guy with nothing going on. I will make sure

I have something to say. I also think what it is is that like when I'm up against it like that, not unlike in standup, is like I'll start talking and then all of a sudden it's like, wow,

you know, I'm thinking out loud. It sparks. Yeah, and it just keeps going. So, but I would say 98% of it is not outlined. It's not bullet pointed, really, and it's improvised. Well, I have to say, though, I'm glad we're talking about this at this moment

because it really does speak to what I consider to be my philosophy of the show and why this might be even like a secret to why it's still going after a thousand episodes and why it has the kind of consistency it does yeah is that i always consider this show in my head i have since we started doing it a one-man audio journal that you know happens to have some famous people and other people coming in and out of it. Yeah. But that it's primarily about you. Yeah.

And I mean, that was what I wanted to do in the first place was like, ever since we started working together in 2004, I was like, oh, this guy's great. He could be like the next Howard Stern. Like, let's do a radio show. And then the radio show went away. And I was like, well, let's try to figure that out somewhere else. Yeah. And then that went away.

And then we did the streaming video. And it was like, well, this is good to figure that out somewhere else. And then that went away. And then we did the streaming video and it was like, well, this is good. We could do this. And that went away. And then finally we had this podcast. But the unifying thing through all that was like, this guy's personality is what works. It's what connects with people. And it's like, whether it's him talking about his cats or talking about making lentils or what he's talking about politics or he's talking about movies or interviews or whatever.

There's something about the way this guy can connect with people. And so I still, a thousand episodes in, think of it that way. Yeah. And so the idea that people are like, I fast forward through the monologues or like, oh, when is this guy going to get to the guest? That's fine. You guys listen for a different reason. Right. That's not why I made the show.

Yeah. Like to me, me sitting down making the show, it's like, what is chapter 999 in the Mark Maron story? Oh, yeah. That's the way I think of it. Oh, I guess he had Josh Brolin over. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know if I ever knew that consciously, but certainly it makes sense. And I also think it's just my instinct because of what you said earlier that from the very beginning, like, I don't know that I wanted to interview people. Right. You were resentful, quite frankly. Yeah. Like, there was a point in the early goings when you were like, I'm a comedian. Like, I should be the one being interviewed by people.

Like, I'm not just the schmuck who does interviews. Yeah. I'm not the guy just asking questions right so that was always at the core of who i was sort of like well this is working but i'm i'm definitely going to meet this person halfway yeah right because it's it wasn't so much it's my show but it's sort of like i'm not just gonna sit here oh man my show though that that talk about things i cut out all the time what whenever it it's gotten less but it used to be that whenever you did an ad at the top of the show yeah for a another show like something on tv or another podcast or something you'd read that ad and then you go, okay, now let's do my show. There was so much stink on it.

Yeah. There was somebody in it who I knew. Yeah. That was always, yeah, the ad buys by people I was resentful of. Yeah. There aren't that many anymore. All right. Here's some general questions because we did ask our listeners to just send things they might want to know about you, about life in general. So here's some general stuff. Back in 2016 on an episode with Adam

Goldberg and Paul Dano, you mentioned that if Donald Trump became president, you would make him a guest on your show. I'm aware how you feel about the sitting president, but I would love for you to make this happen, Christopher. You know, I don't think it was that you said you would make him a guest on the show. I think it's that we have always maintained that... If a sitting president wants to come on, he can come on. If they agree to do the show in the way that we do it,

which was what President Obama agreed to. Yes, it will be one hour uninterrupted. We have final cut in the garage. That wasn't even a requirement. They just wanted to do that. Yeah. And that it's not going to be about policy. It's not going to be about any specific agenda.

It's about this person's life. And you get to direct that. If Donald Trump agreed to that, yeah, you do that. Yeah. He won't agree to that, but we do. It'd be a hell of an hour. I tell you, man, if there's anyone in life that I think is equipped to deal with that guy, I really do think it's you. I really do. Just the way you are able to talk to your dad yeah i just feel like you have training yeah i understand his particular type of charm right you know what i mean but but what i but he does but you know i think he has a lot of like come on like there's there's some part of him that

like you can push and you can push and it would be be interesting because I do think I can cut through a lot of that charm. Yeah. And I imagine some people are mad I'm even calling it that, but it is that. It's a malignant. Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah. This made me laugh just because this guy's angry about this, but still, I should just say, this made me laugh. Why are you so obsessed with who's friends in Hollywood?

Not many people are worried about this. They're human beings too. Who are you friends with? Jeez. Please talk about this on your 1,000th episode. Thanks, your fan, Aaron. I don't think, you know what though? I know what he's responding you

to what is that when you have people on yeah like especially when they're in the same movie why are you friends exactly right and I think it speaks more to your fundamental desire for this to be a kind of small town business like you like it's a community of people like you know when you see people in movies, like, don't you want to believe that Robert Redford and Paul Newman were buddies forever? Yeah, right. Like you see people work in movies,

but now that I've done the work, and even with like me and Mark Reilly back in the day, my on-air partner on Air America, we did not socialize. You're not hanging out with glow people. No, and it makes complete sense yeah but but i think it's just a kid in me it's like to think that like everybody in that movie they probably have the best time yeah because they did a good job making you think that they were

they're all friends and they probably have a great time off the when they're not in the movie people still do this i we just spent a week with the country believing that lady gaga and bradley cooper are in love with each other like because they did a song on a show that was about the awards they were nominated for where they played lovers yeah like they're good at that yeah but people were still insistent oh no no they love each other sure yeah sure have you ever been sitting across from someone and thought this person is completely full of shit like they're lying to me right now and i know that's not how it went down i was wondering how you handled it brit no i i've never felt like that someone was completely uh lying to me but i i do know that p i i can generally tell a bullshit artist and you can

sense a uh narrative crafting and myth making sure i mean i know when someone's you know following their script of themselves and i know when somebody's uh embellishing right but sometimes those are great yeah like you know bob zamuda i pretty clearly remember going come on yeah no he talked to you for like two and a half hours and i don't think there was you know 10 of truth in the whole thing yeah some of it started with truth but that's what he does yes but then entertaining the one time that someone genuinely lied to my face for an hour uh that came out years later was steve rennazisi in the 9-11 story yeah and that was a complete lie that he had survived 9-11 no one really knows i'm not even sure he knows why he fabricated the thing.

But I wasn't about to go like, no, you didn't fucking. Bullshit. Can you imagine if you actually did that? Like a guy's telling you he got out of 9-11 and you're like, no, come on. I mean, he's paying the price for that. Next time he should just tell people he did 9-11. Oh, yeah. Maybe that'll help.

Maybe that'll get him out of it now. What is something you never would have expected you would get the opportunity to do or experience that the podcast made possible? Almost everything. Everything since starting it. That's literally true. On both of our casts. No doubt.

No, like, you know. There's a picture right there of you and the President of the united states in my house in my garage yeah i mean but like you know to to you know actually have be able to sell tickets as a comedian to you know do a tv show to do my own tv show to write a second and a third book the one that you and i put together work with uh deniro yeah work with deniro play guitar with slash be on a popular television show. Keith Richards called you a fun one. A fun one. Yeah, talk to Keith Richards, talk to my heroes.

You know, know people I never thought I would know. You know, have friends I never thought I would have. I mean, everything, you have to understand that when I started this, you know, people knew me, but it was not really a great thing. You know, it was not a great story. And people knew me, but it was not really a great thing. It was not a great story. I was an intense, angry, sort of struggling guy that had been around a long time with not a lot of opportunities and not that hopeful. And so everything I've done since then to buy this house.

Yeah, same with me. You know what I mean? Yeah. Buying a house was huge, and that would not have happened without the podcast. I was so proud of you. I you i was so happy yeah it's so funny because i don't have a wife i don't have kids so like you have a kid and anything you do i'm like ah look at that brendan did he bought a house it's so nice and very invested yeah that's the house that obama bought and not because of any taxes or anything we bought it yes well speaking of Obama, there's this question. What feedback, if any, did you receive from Obama after he did your podcast? That's from Jeff.

Hold on. I'll text him. Oh, do you still have those wires in your room? Can you still use those? I got rid of those. They came and picked them up finally at the old house. We didn't get any feedback from him directly, but indirectly, people at the White House did tell us that he really enjoyed it. In fact, I got this email from a White House staffer named Liz Allen.

She said, I was going to email you this week to let you know. This was a while ago. I was going to email you this week to let you know that a giant photo of Mark and the president in the garage is hanging in the halls of the West Wing. The photo office hangs photos on a regular rotation from recent events. It's fun to walk past that one and recollect their conversation. You know, we were also told by the people in the White House that they, in 2016, when he was leaving office, that they considered the WTF interview as one of the best of his presidency, which is very flattering. And Pete Sou souza his photographer i was in email

communication and he said i know the president enjoyed doing the podcast very much oh that's nice and didn't axelrod say something oh axelrod started his podcast because he was inspired by the one you did with the president yeah i loved it yeah that was something yes and if anyone wants to hear us talk about that you know you might think we're giving short shrift to that specific moment on this episode, but we did a whole episode about that. It's episode 614, and it's available still for free in our feed. You can go listen to that. It's the one right after the Obama episode. Called The President Was Here?

Yes. Was there ever a point during these almost last decade of episodes when you seriously, seriously considered ending the podcast. And every damn episode listener, Andy. Also, Val asked the same thing, and she said that if there was a time when that happened, thank you for not doing it. I don't think we ever really had that time. I mean, I think we...

Well, we had the patent troll, and that was a serious case of thinking that the podcast might end if we didn't go right. Oh, yeah. We also thought we'd get fucked. Yeah. That was- If you're not aware of that-

But it wasn't our decision. It was just that we were being- Well, I think, though, that if they had said, we're going to sue you, we would have decided to- Well, we just got to end this so that we don't get killed with money. That was horrible. How long did that go on for? Well, we first started getting letters from this if you don't know what a patent troll

is it's somebody who says you know i have a patent on this idea and you're in violation of it and this guy was sending them around to uh podcasters saying he held the patent for podcasting that was in february of 2013 and it scared the shit out of us immediately first we were like what are these yeah like sam cedar was the one who told us like yeah this is real i had no idea what a patent troll was or how they did things or what so basically this these letters were like you know we you know please contact us to discuss a licensing fee right right right you know not how much it would be or whatever it was a shakedown shakedown yeah but the thing was is that they could if they could prove that their patent was

legit they could sue us for the money you know for back money for every it would have changed the game for everybody right and you know once we started to realize what was happening it became just a panic and uh you know there was a few other podcasters that got them well adam carolla was being sued already when we started getting by that troll by this troll adam carolla and i believe how stuff works and a couple of like the big uh networks like cbs and they were already being sued yeah so i said we got to figure out what's going on here. Like, get in touch with Adam. What is, what's their strategy? Yeah. And I can remember just totally in a panic over this because it would have shut us down.

Would have shut everybody down eventually, maybe. A lot of people, right. Or would have like set a precedent for them to- There would have been a totally different way of making podcasts. And so this is where, you know, the kind of political strategy had to kick in. Well, that was when we started contacting the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And like, I just needed information. Like, you know, what is patent trolling? How does it work? Who are these people? And it got to the point where we were calling them so often. I was calling that

woman. What was her name? Julie Samuels. She was my contact at the EFF, who I just reached out to about this. And I was calling her so much asking her questions. She says, well, look, I'm not your attorney. We're not representing you, but here's some information. You should contact an attorney. But it was just, I was in such a panic over this because then another letter came and then another letter. And I knew that it had to be within their parameters of what they fought for. What is the basic dictate of that foundation? You know, they're a nonprofit that deals with like digital rights, you know, basically like they've been champions of like, you know, keeping the internet free and making sure

that it's open source and, and then, you know, fighting back against any political movement that would restrict that. It's a lot of net neutrality stuff and that they've been big proponents of. Right. But patents are a big deal to the software community, developers. Right. And that's what we learned from them and from doing research at the patent trolling business is huge.

People who amass patents. Right. Because there's this shady district in Texas where they can file these, they could set up phony offices. They have sympathetic judiciary down there. Yes. Yes. And this is

basically like a town that's funded by like the patent troll lawsuit yeah and what they would do is they get old patents and then revive them somehow and then like the patent that we were dealing with was it was about an indexing system yeah it was a very specific part of the technology that had to do that he said he did it with cassettes or like, I don't remember, but it was an older patent that was kind of then reconfigured to apply to podcasting. But I kept pestering and pestering her and we, we sort of built a relationship with them. And then we finally like directed people to them.

Yeah. But they wanted help in fundraising for something. Yeah. They definitely considered us an ally as a proper platform to work with that helped get their mission out. And if that meant that they should take up the cause of fighting this patent assertion entity and trying to reexamine the patent, that might be a good cause for them as well. Like, put that into their- That was the pitch. Yeah.

It's like, how is this not in your periphery how is this you have this problem with the podcasting medium which is a technological medium yeah how is this not exactly what you guys do yeah and then you know i think it was that broad yes and then they chose you know to take on the case yeah you know as part of their trip yep and they they have a lot of um pro bono lawyers at harvard like they they they did something that we could never pull together but during that time we had to learn about prior art in order to disprove a patent you had to prove that that something existed like it before it i i just want to make it clear to people listening that of the you know thousand episodes that we've done this show in nearly 10 years we probably worked harder on this one thing than all the other individual things we did on the

show just in terms of like really sitting down learning something we never knew before figuring it out and figuring out a strategy that was the best possible way to publicly move forward with this thing we were so panicked because i remember there we would have been done then it still took a couple years but it was in uh 2015 when their examination of prior art meaning prior art is is evidence that this idea existed before the patent that this this guy was claiming yeah and they found it and and they said this is proof that the patent is invalid and uh that was introduced in 2015 and it wasn't until may of last year may 14th 2018 that everything was final yeah because they tried to appeal it and tried to appeal several times right and they and that doesn't generally work with these and i don't it was just it was a beautiful thing all of

it the way that you know we all work together like, you know, it became a bigger cause and a bigger and part of a bigger issue. And that, you know, it was a fight that's rarely won. But, and I don't think a lot of. I was on the phone with congressmen. I was on the, I cannot stress how much work we put into. Because the fear was that like these guys could put a valve on it. Yes. They could put a toll booth on it.

Yeah. It was heavy, man. Yeah. So I guess, yeah, we thought, not only did we think we were going to lose the podcast, but there was that moment, it's sort of like, can they just take everything we've built? Right. Man. Yeah.

Well, I will also admit to you, I've never told you this before, but there was a time where I thought this is probably it. Let's end this. And it was when all the Louis shit went down. Really? Yep. Yep. I was really torn about continuing the show in the light of how much Louis was representative of like the history of our show like you know we had that slate yeah thing that named it like the best podcast episode ever yeah you and louis the

two-parter yep we've got a large chunk of that episode in our book and yeah there's just so much history of the show was around like you and him and the kind of humanity behind your conversation and uh it was just one of those moments where I was like, yeah, what the fuck do you know about people? And this was in the fall myth-making around, like, cults of personality? Humanizing. Yeah. And it's not just this one individual. Like, it could be lots of individuals. And I sat there and had this conversation with my wife,

and I thought, I said, like, I love this show too much and have put too much of myself into it it's such a fabric of who i am and what our whole lot what our whole lives are my my whole family yeah that i wasn't going to be able to handle it if it started to get like broken down right like as a bad thing yeah like this show is actually doing a disservice by having this narrative out there about people and then it's wrong. Oh, right, right, right. You don't want to be like The Cosby Show.

You know what I mean? How'd you reconcile that? My wife Dawn told me to sleep on it and think about it and she said, I think it'll hurt you a lot more to get rid of the show. But I will say I went to bed the night I had that conversation. I said, I think I was leaning like 60-40 to calling you the next day

and saying, we should wrap this up. Oh my God. Yeah. It's something I've, if I have a big piece of advice to give people of like my short time

on this earth, it's like, sleeping on things works. It has worked every time I've ever done it yeah like to just be like hang on let me put a pin in this and think about it again tomorrow well i'm trying to understand exactly so you you like it made you wonder whether or not well like there's so much stuff coming at like the tarantinos of the world for like what did you know about harvey weinstein oh right right right and

they've had to answer for like their culpability in that right and i i you know really put that on myself like i i i think i elevated a lot of the people we've put on this show in my mind to a certain amount of like nobility like they come on they share this stuff and this is who they are yeah and you don't ever know who anybody is people are fucking incomprehensible yeah right no i i but i think that's true but i but but that's also and i appreciate you telling me that we don't have a lie detector sitting here no that's true and we're also not asking those kind of questions but but the nature of the culture right you you didn't want to be you know kind of plowed under with someone else's garbage yeah and and and right outside of my control and that's i mean

as a type of person the type of person i am i i and and one of the whole reasons we do the show the way we do is because we control it it's you and me we make all the decisions and that was getting to a point where i felt like suddenly these decisions were being taken out of our hands because of what we'd done in the past with other people and i think maybe if it wasn't louis i wouldn't have had those thoughts but because louis had been so entwined in the fabric of like the mythology of our show and also my my life. Yeah, yeah. You know, and we handled that in the most, you know, empathetic, responsible, honest way we could when it happened.

Right. And that was that. That's how I felt about it walking away. Like, because that was immediate. Like, that was in the heat of it. Yeah. I think I just, in the days following that response i thought you know is

that good enough what about our entire archive you know what about how we've you know and then part of it was like thinking about just being more sensitive to how we present people and their stories like is this person's experience being represented also by someone else's experience that's the opposite of that you know but that that speaks to my point in that the hour we have with people is not an interrogation of their sexual history right you know even with ryan adams and the mandy moore thing i didn't even talk to ryan adams about being married to mandy moore because like why would i talk about that right you know what would it you know it had nothing to do with the but that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about is that

like I don't know that two years ago even we would have thought to have Mandy Moore on that both of us as like two middle-aged guys that did not listen to Mandy Moore music and did not really have her in the foreground of our thinking. Like it just might not have been because we wouldn't have thought anything about her experience would speak to us or the audience that we present to. And I think that if anything has happened, it's been a shift for me in being like, her experience is probably just as worthy as anybody else yeah that's the movement

working yes in the sense that you know there's always been sort of a a call for diversity a call for uh you know equality and we i think we do you know the best we can in in booking the show and getting people that you know we we ask a lot of people to be on it yeah and uh a lot of different kinds of people and there's some people that i just don't know and there's some people but but certainly mandy moore then that we had her on before this story broke that's right because she was pitched to us yeah we didn't have her on in response to the ryan adams no and and also because like well you know she and i watched a bit of the show and i thought she was good you know you found the sort of crux of know, where she came up in music and what she was up against then and that struggle.

And it turned out to be a great conversation. But I think that just by virtue of being more sensitive to other stories and other, you know, lives and, you know, working against that sort of white entitlement or male entitlement or just the rationalization of sort of like, I don't know them. Yeah. Well, sometimes that's no reason not to know them. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. You know, and I think that is a fundamental indication of a change we've made in the show out of necessity, but also out of desire. And, you know, I think that by doing the way we book it now and by trying to balance things out and trying to, to hear stories that might not be part of our lives, we, you know, they turn out to be great. I think that it's, it's really, it's,

it's been apparent to me that a lot of times I will present you with people who I know you don't know. And I'll give you a, like, I'll just give you like a small, short little summary version of like why this person might be interesting to you. Right. Even if you haven't seen, you didn't see Jane the Virgin, you know, like that. But I was like, no, I think this is good. I think Gina would be good, you know. And I can't watch everything and I don't. And I don't know a lot about a lot of the people I talk to, but they're people.

Right. So I just need a way in. Right. Like if I, if I really, like my instincts about not having people on is usually like, do they have a story? Yeah. You know, can they tell it?

Right. You know, what we should emphasize is that the general rule of thumb in booking prior to that was always like, are you already interested in that story? Right. Like, is there already something about this person you're interested in? Right. And I feel like that's where the bigger shift has had to come is to say like

that doesn't have to be the primary reason we book a guest yeah it could be this person you know nothing about but there's a story there to uncover you know i'm i'm kind of a softy as i get older and and i'm i'm much more open and willing to take things in. You just have to get me there. Yeah. You can lead me there and I'll drink. And you can teach an old dog new tricks. Yeah.

Well, good. I'm glad that I did not decide to stop working on the show. God damn it. I had no idea. Well, I would never have told you that because you would have freaked the fuck out. You think? Yeah. I don't even know what version I would have thought.

I would have had to understand where you were coming from from i think i was afraid that you wouldn't i don't know that you would have understood that from my perspective right i i don't know if i would have in that moment for you know for those reasons at that time yeah but no i understand it now well i think this is a good question for like for personal reflection here it's a very good um kind of summary question and it it really goes to your kind of personal evolution which is what we've been talking about over the course of a thousand episodes really is is you know that that one man audio journal that i talked about yeah and uh this is from adam and he says given where it all began just one question

is being mark maron getting easier yes being mark maron is getting easier because when you've been as desperate and as angry and as insecure and as destructive as i've been in my life you know personally and you realize that you you know, all you, all you've been doing your whole life is working towards this one thing. By the time I started to the podcast, you know, I, I believe that I had failed, you know, at, at the one thing in that there was no more things. And this was, this was it. But what started to happen, which happened, you know, in my forties and, you know, it had, and it happened in a very specific way in a unique way, which was that, you know, I was doing something that really showed my most authentic self and, uh, and really engaged all parts of my

heart and mind and, and, uh, creativity. And that it began to resonate like something relaxed in me. There was a pride. There was a self-esteem that comes from accomplishment of working your whole life. And somehow in the last half or the second half or God forbid, the last quarter, you make it. There was a big part of my struggle that was relieved. And a certain amount of fear went away around doing stand-up and around being who I am and about owning myself because now everybody owned it. Everybody who listened to me, you know, it was part of me. Well, I think, you know, it's interesting.

You're articulating something that people who listen, I know they feel the same way. Like these two emails, I'll read them back to back, and it's, I think, a very, you know, it's just two people, two guys, but I just, I think a lot of people receive your growth as a positive and as a thing that not only is good for you, but good for them.

Yeah. Mark, I write to you as a fan of the early days of the podcast and honestly well before. I was a devoted to you as a fan of the early days of the podcast and honestly well before i was a devoted conan kid as a teen slash pre-teen and i used to love how weird you would make stuff and how you would win the audience back i looked into your stand-up after that and followed you since and once wtf took off i was so excited and proud of you i'm roughly 30 years younger than you but have always related to the sadness and anger and thoughtfulness you've put out in the world. The care you've recently grown into,

the ability to recognize yourself and your limitations, but not in a self-pitying way, rather in a way that offers a possibility to grow and learn despite your positions of privilege, has been very illuminating. Your growth from, am angry at the world to I am angry at myself to I am learning to reconcile my anger with a way in which I am capable of improving the world is very inspirational to me. Thank you for that. That's from Joel.

Yeah. And there's a similar message here from Ryan. As someone who followed you since my frustrated days sitting in a cubicle listening to Tickets Still Available and thinking, Shit, I hope this guy is okay, I'm glad to see your success. I didn't realize that I cared about your career back then. I guess seeing someone who shared similar frustrations see some reward because of them gave me hope in a fairness that I didn't believe in. Your success directly contradicts the cynicism and frustration that brought it.

believe in. Your success directly contradicts the cynicism and frustration that brought it. Your success felt like our success when us is the people who have been rooting for you. I'm glad you didn't kill yourself and I hope you get Dylan or Tom Waits at some point. I think that's the only way to top the Obama interview. Congratulations, Ryan. I mean, I feel the same way as that guy. I feel personally linked to your progress in this. Like I was, it's more than I was just rooting for you. I invested my own sense of self in making sure you were doing okay. You know?

Yeah. And so I understand why people can connect to that and that it means something. Your personal progress means something to people. Yeah. It's like, it It gets me choked up. But the weird thing I realized about me is that my struggle primarily, and I think people who know me or who are deeply connected because we're kindred spirits know that all I've ever tried to be was myself. I'm pretty much, you know, all in all the time. Yeah. Everything's riding on even the littlest things I do. But, but, but on the other side of that, I got to be honest with you in that. And with the people in general is that, you know, having known you for so long and however our relationship is involved, like it's weird because like, um, we've been doing

stuff together for a long time. And even with break Room when we had to go on the road for The Guardian and we're trying to make recording things and shooting things at campaign events and uploading them. Like, you know, we've been, you know, in the trenches together around creating what became this show when you moved out here away from your wife and did all that stuff. away from your wife and did all that stuff. But like from the day that you said you were coming on full time with this, you know, my concern was sort of like that moment where you tell me that. And I'm like, are you sure, man? Because like, you know, I don't want to, if I tank this crap, this out, like, and you're like, no, no, I, you know, believe me, I, I, I know what I'm doing.

And I'm like, oh, of course you do. But my point is, is that like at all these different points in your life even though we don't share uh uh you know a personal relationship like most personal relationships like you know after you got married that was one thing but like when you had a kid yeah i got you know i was crying for yeah you and then like you know when when you you you got the house i was so proud and i was like, hey, Brendan got his first house and we made it. And then, you know, when Owen had the health issue briefly, I was like, I was so worried. Like, I'm very invested in our relationship.

Yeah. And I don't know that I could have done any of this without you, man. I think about it all the time. Anyways. Well, I appreciate every second of it, honestly. And also, I hate when I, if I, I know when you're mad at me. What do you mean? Like, there's some times where I bring shit up and you're like, you know, I can just tell,

like, just even when I'm talking to you, like when you're talking to like someone who knows you really well, that like, like, like in the middle of it, I'll be like, oh, I know. Okay. You're right. And you don't even say anything. You know, if I lapse into a defensive mode about something or I stand for something that, you know, is innately not correct. And I know like, I'm not honoring my, my, my, uh, higher self.

And you're just, you know, you have to point it out to me. Like there is an element of like, you know, I have to live up to your standards as well. You know what I mean? Which are high. But I just think, you know, I think our desire to live up to each other's

standards and expectations has gotten, you know, somehow or another it matches. Yeah. And in a weird way because the intensity levels are different. Yeah. I think the focus is the same. And I just think the innate trust we have in each other

in terms of making this work really. But yeah, man, I love you and I think we've done a great thing here. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously I feel the same way. I owe you my life like I do. I mean, it's feel the same way. I, I, I owe you my life. Like I do. It's, it's, uh, I mean, it's one thing for me to be like, I'm going to gamble on this guy.

Like he's, I want to attach my wagon to him and I want to do with him what other people have done with other, you know, high level talent. That's a pipe dream if the other person doesn't give a shit. And I just, there's a lot of things that people give each other throughout life. You know, we've talked about it during this recording that like we owe a lot to a lot of people, you know,

that help elevate this, what we do. And, and, and a lot of the generosity has been extremely valuable to us. Yeah. But nothing is, just nothing ever is more valuable than your trust in me. If you didn't trust me, it'd be over.

How would we even? No, right. And I mean, like I said, I feel the same with you. Like I just, I trusted from the start. Like, okay, yeah, that guy, he's going to be the guy. Yeah. But your ability to like buy into what I was selling and to be okay with it and to, you know, trust me implicitly to the point where you said when we started this, you know, how are we going to do this? And, you know, in terms of ownership.

And I said, whatever you think, man, I'm here to do it. And you said, we're going to make this and uh you know in terms of uh ownership and i said whatever you think man i i'm i'm here to do it and you said we're gonna make this 50 50 and i thought it was crazy at the time i mean i don't think it's crazy now i think it's fair but i mean that's just uh that's just a hell of a thing it's a hell of a thing for me like that was 10 years ago yeah and we've talked about like how you've evolved as a person and you're you know but you don't have to evolve that much if you thought back then i'm gonna take this thing and i'm gonna give half of it to this guy because uh i believe in him that's a that's a big thing yeah yeah and and and you know in terms of the stuff we've been able to get from it,

obviously, like, we've made a good living. We're just doing a show that we want to do. We're doing a job that we want to do. It's a job. How many people do jobs they love? Well, that's what you said to me the other day. It wasn't that long ago where I'm like, you know. Yeah, you were getting kind of down on yourself.

And, you know, you were feeling like maybe your best work was behind you and whatnot. You're like, we get to do this. Yeah, you said, how do you feel? I said, I feel great. I said, are you kidding me? Life is a nightmare. It's a nightmare out there.

Have you looked lately? And most people's jobs suck. That's not in any fault of their own. That's just the fault of what the system is. And we get to do this. Yeah. And we're our own boss. Yeah.

I mean, that's an amazing thing. Yeah. But then we solicited these requests for questions for this episode. And we got a lot of them. Thank you, everybody who emailed in. And if we didn't get your questions, there were literally thousands of them. So apologies for not getting to them. And I know how you feel

because I remember writing into Roger Ebert when he had a website and they never answered my question and I was crushed by it. So please don't take it personally. Don't be me and Roger Ebert. We had so many. But the thing that was very obvious

as I read them, some of them like intensely personal and heartfelt uh is that it really really matters yeah what we're doing yeah and that's as much a gift to us as anything oh it's the best like i cry when i read emails almost every time i get new emails almost every time yeah. I have one here that I wanted to read. It says, Dear Mark, I first started listening way back in the mid-90s. Episodes, not decade, obviously. As I'm sure many fans, listeners have told you over the years,

your podcast has helped me through some seriously rough patches of rock bottom and feeling helpless and alone. I'm glad the podcast was there for me. After surviving a suicide attempt and wondering why I was alive and if I deserved to be, the first thing I did was listen to your show. It was a hard road back to getting my life on track, making amends to those I hurt, and finding a reason to keep getting up and trying. But you were there when I felt too ashamed to talk to anyone in my life, even those who I knew loved me. Your show has meant a lot to me, and I'm not saying it's the

only reason I'm alive today, because that would sell short so many important people, most of all my wonderful wife, but your show was there while I was finding the courage I needed to put it all back together. Thank you for everything, and at his request, I'll withhold his name. Yeah. thank you for everything and at his request i'll withhold his name yeah um i mean we get a lot of messages like that i mean that's a very specific and um amazing one yeah and i just the that overwhelms me to a degree that i can't even express and what i started to think about after seeing this kind of time and again in these emails that came in you know specifically around this thousandth episode is that's really what people do

for each other like the ultimate goal of this whole game is like can you make it better for other people you know is your can your happiness be equal to those around you and there's so much goddamn suffering and there's so much that's not good but people can help other people and it really is i i i honestly believe that the collective good is the whole reason that we're here we have a civilization And, you know, it's just like, it doesn't just have to be a podcast. It could be like you talk to some guy at the library or you, you know, help somebody out at a grocery store.

And it's a really, truly humbling thing to have people out there in the world that put a point on it and say, it's you. Yeah. It's you, you, your show, this thing that you put out in the world. And, you know, I can't think of a better reason to keep doing it. Yeah, I agree with you.

It was like this is, I think, for both of us. We certainly didn't expect almost any of what happened to have happened. But just these, this sort of connection to have the comfort of of people having a pretty real conversation yeah you know when you're feeling lost or in a dark place or or you know like you you have no hope you know just a couple of people talking yeah is enough to sort of like oh it's okay you know to ease the loneliness to to sort of get you out of your head long enough to reconfigure enough to keep moving forward. It's amazing. It's really what it's all about.

But you and I were never greedy. We were never really about the money except we wanted to make enough money to earn a living and get paid for the work we do. We've gotten more than that. That's a great thing. make enough money to earn a living and get paid for the work we do. And, you know, and we've gotten more than that. And that's a great thing. But the sort of the other kind of result of doing this is just to make people feel less alone in the most horrible places in their minds, in their lives, you know, in their situations, you know, of all kinds, you know, whether it's depression, they're in the hospital, they lost somebody. It's just, just to be able to sort of like, well, these people are having a serious conversation about heavy stuff and it's okay. Yeah. It's okay. Well, we, we used to joke

with ourselves like years ago, like, oh, how many more of these can we do? I don't know. Let's get to a thousand. Like that was always kind of like the the the far off number yeah and it's here now and it's funny like uh lynn shelton who who is uh you know someone you work with a lot she's friends with both of us uh i was having coffee with her and uh she said so so what do you think you how much longer you think you're gonna do the show and i was like i'll do it as long as mark will do it and she's like oh that's funny he said the same thing about you uh and that's what i say to everybody yeah but that got me thinking there's actually two ways that you could take that that response yeah that if you're saying

i'll do it as long as the other guy will do it. It could mean, well, I feel like I'm done, but I want the other guy to feel satisfied and I'll keep going. Or it could be like, look, I'll go on indefinitely, but if the other guy says, let's wrap it up, I'll wrap it up. And I know which one I am, but I'm interested to know from you, which one are you? No, of course not. I'm not ready to wrap it up. Sometimes I wonder, is there always going to be people to talk to and and i and i think that

like my assumption was like you know how long could this last and not not because of us sort of like just because of the way culture works do you know what i mean like well we did the one thing that they say you got to do and it's you hold your audience yeah so like i'm good i'm not good you know i what else am i gonna do but uh but no but like it it is so nourishing and and uh exciting for me no matter how much dread or anxiety i go through no i'm not the guy that's gonna i'm not waiting to quit the fuck am i gonna do like look i still do stand-up right well this this and stand-up are the two things you control you could do if you As long as you have a microphone in some context, you can do one of those two things. I've never said that I'm going to quit the podcast.

I've many times said, like, I'm done with this stand-up shit. All right. Well, so let's keep going then. Okay. I'm in. All right. Let's do it. All right.

That's it, folks. Thank you for listening. I'll play a little guitar. All right? All right. Thank you. Boomer lives! Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means.

I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Discover the timeless elegance of cozy, where furniture meets innovation. Designed in Canada, the Sofa Collections are not just elegant, they're modular, designed to adapt and evolve with your life. Reconfigure them anytime for a fresh look or a new space. Experience the cozy difference with furniture that grows with you, delivered to your door quickly and for free. Assembly is a breeze,

setting you up for years of comfort and style. Don't break the bank. Cozy's Direct2 model ensures that quality and value go hand in hand. Transform your living space today with Cozy. Visit cozy.ca that's C-O-Z-E-Y and start customizing your furniture.