Comedy Deep Dive: Marc Maron, WTF and the Podcast That Changed Comedy

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Featured: Marc Maron, Barack Obama, Brendan McDonald

What’s in This Episode

• WTF with Marc Maron podcast ends after 16 years and 1,686 episodes
• Marc Maron’s final episode recorded in Barack Obama’s office
• Obama’s 2015 appearance in Maron’s garage as pivotal moment for podcasting credibility
• Marc Maron’s career trajectory from Air America to podcast success
• Burnout and decision to end WTF on their own terms

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Has it been a year already? Hi, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News on Saturdays with Doing Deep Dives. And on October 13th, 2025, Marc Maron got in a car, drove to Washington, D.C. Walked into the office of Barack Obama and recorded the final episode of WTF with Marc Maron, episode 1686.

The first episode had gone up on September 1st, 2009, from the garage of Marc Maron’s house in L.A. Recorded on equipment that cost a few hundred dollars with an audience of basically nobody. Sixteen years later, the last episode was recorded in the office of a former president of the U.S. Who had appeared on the show once before in 2015, sitting in the same garage in L.A. Which was the moment that definitely answered the question of whether podcasts were a real medium or a niche hobby for people who couldn’t get on the radio.

We’ve known this was going to happen for a little while, and we thought it would be a fun idea. A great thing, an honor to have the president stop by on this trip to Los Angeles. I’m a little nervous because he’s the president and I’ve got to have a person in here. But that on top of the fact that they just swept my house with a dog. I had to hide my cats in the bedroom.

They had to sweep that separately. There was a lot of panic. I was in, as you know, in Hawaii. While a lot of this was going on, my producer, Brendan McDonald, was dealing with a lot of pre-prep. But today, they’ve tented my entire driveway.

I’m told there’ll be a sniper on the roof. There’s something in here that looks like an armed yoga mat I didn’t ask too many questions about. There are Secret Service everywhere. There’s people, three or four people, maybe five or six people out there with headphones on listening to this. Again, the entire walk from the street, that section of the street where the The motorcade’s going to come up.

It’s tented. Oh, see? Look at that. I should turn that off. I put a lot of pressure on myself about this kind of thing.

I want to connect, but I don’t want to do a policy discussion. I don’t want to do an interview that’s been done before. I’d like to connect with him as a person. I got to hope that happens. When I teach the subject to college students, I always share that as the definitive episode of podcasting.

If you listen to it, when Obama first gets there, he’s the president of the United States. He’s very serious.

And then along the way, he drops the president stuff.

And it’s just Barack hanging out in the garage with Marc Maron. You can hear him get comfortable. And it just it’s two guys talking now towards the end. I think Obama’s brain kicked back in and he became the president of the United States again and talked about issues. But for a while there in the middle, it’s just two guys in the garage.

What do you do to have fun? I mean, I can’t imagine what it’s like to raise a family in the situation that you’re in as president. It must feel sort of insulated. You know, the biggest fun I’ve had is watching my girls grow up. And they are magnificent.

Look, hopefully every parent feels the way they do. I do about my daughters. Yeah. But I think they are spectacular. And when Michelle and I came into office, the biggest worry we had was, is this going to be some weird thing for them?

And are they going to grow up with an attitude or are they going to think that everybody eats off of China? Right. Right. And are they? And, you know, it turns out that they’ve just become.

They’re kind, they’re thoughtful. They treat everybody with respect. They, uh, don’t have any kind of errors. Uh, they’re confident, but without being cocky, um, they’ve got great friends. They’ve been able to, uh, you know, they’re not stuck in the bubble the same way I am.

Uh, you know, they go to the mall, they have sleepovers, they go to prom, Malia’s started to drive. Um, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re doing great. So, My biggest fun has been watching them grow up. Now, unfortunately, they’re now hitting the age where they still love me, but they think I’m completely boring. And so they’ll come in, pat me on the head, talk to me for 10 minutes, and then they’re gone all weekend, right?

And they break my heart. And so now I’ve got to start thinking, well, what’s going to replace that fun? Right. But the one thing you don’t have to worry about is like, well, I hope they don’t get lost. That never happens.

Yeah. The other episode, Obama in his own office for the finale, was an acknowledgement from one of the most significant figures in American public life that WTF with Marc Maron had mattered, enough to warrant that kind of closure. Maron announced the show was ending in June of 2025. He and his producer, Brendan, who’d been running the operation together since the beginning, described themselves as burnt out and satisfied with the work. 16 years. 1,600 episodes. 55 million listens a year by the end, reportedly. 600 million total downloads by 2022. This started.

You know, the old garage, the, you know, just no one knew what a podcast was. I was coming out of a horrendous divorce. I was wanting to figure out how to continue living my life. Things were not looking good for me. Brendan McDonald, my producer who I’d worked with for years on other things, radio and streaming related.

And when Brendan and I started this thing, All we knew is we were going to do it every Monday and Thursday and there was no way to make money. There was no way that we knew how to build an audience or anything. And it was, it was crazy. We were doing it in a garage at the beginning. That was just a garage.

It was filled with junk and it, it slowly evolved into the show that became what you listen to twice a week, 16 years. We’ve been doing this and, uh, We’ve decided that we had a great run. They said they started it on their own terms. They grew it on their own terms and they were ending it on their own terms. Interesting to me, Marin got out right before the video boom or just as the video boom was starting.

And again, I can tell you when the camera is on, you behave differently. And I wonder if there had been cameras filming Barack Obama in the garage, would you have gotten the president of the United States to drop it and just be Barack? I’m not sure. Marc Maron, born in Jersey City in 1963, grew up partly in Alaska and partly in New Mexico. He went to Boston University, dropped out, drifted into stand-up in the mid-80s in San Francisco and then New York, and spent most of the 90s and early 2000s in a position that’s arguably the worst position to have in comedy.

Talented enough that the industry kept putting him in proximity to opportunities, not quite commercially viable enough that any of those opportunities converted into career stability. He was on Morning Sedition on Air America, remember that? The radio station for the left? He was on in the mornings. I’m gonna go out there and give them the best damn final show they’ve ever heard.

I’m going to embrace all my insecurities. I’m going to talk about candy and cats and iPods and my parents. I’m going to talk about the issues. And if all goes as planned, I’ll have a major meltdown, just like my bosses want. Yeah, everyone goes home happy.

And I get to do my final show. Ladies and gentlemen, for the last time on Morning Sedition, Mark Maron. Go. And writing geniuses, philosopher kings and queens, working class heroes, progressive utopians with no sense of humor, lurking conservatives. This is it, Mark Reilly.

This is the final show. We’re going to do it. We’re going to reflect. We’re going to get some closure. We’re going to talk to our friends.

We’re going to make it a nice time. We’re going to have a party. Is that all right with you? I’m fine with it. All right, Reilly.

How are you feeling, man? Are you sad? He had conversations about TV that didn’t go anywhere. This will shock you. He had a reputation inside the comedy world as someone who’s both genuinely brilliant and genuinely difficult, who could be his own worst enemy in rooms that required a certain kind of professional smoothness that Marc Maron didn’t consistently possess.

His stand-up from that era is good in ways that reward attention. It’s neurotic, confessional, self-lacerating in a way that felt specific rather than performed. Anxiety and anger and self-awareness folded together into material that the comedy community appreciated even when broader audiences weren’t getting it. You have a father, right? No, I was cloned.

I don’t know. You know, your popular TV personality, it could just, all right. Right, they may be in a lab, of course. I just have some advice. If you have a father and you’re a guy, what you gotta do is at some point, you just sit down with him over coffee, lunch, look him right in the eye and say, OK, is there any way I can avoid becoming you?

Is there any way? Because it’s happening and I want out. Did you keep a diary? Is there a map? Don’t look at me like that.

He was a comics comic in the sense that his peers recognized something real in the work, even when the commercial machinery was not amplifying it. Marin was, by his own account and by the account of most people who knew him during that period, not easy. He had relationships that ended badly, professional situations that ended badly. He carried things loudly and in public, which is what made him interesting as a comedian and what made him harder to work with as a professional. The podcast started in 2009, partly out of necessity and partly out of impulse.

He needed something to do. He had a garage, he had a microphone, a computer. He called comedians he knew and asked them to come on. Then he posted the conversations for free on the internet. An audience found it and then a bigger audience found it and a bigger audience found it and it kept growing in the way that things that are genuinely good keep growing when the mechanism for distribution is available.

What WTF was doing that no one else was quite doing in 2009 is more than just saying he invented the long form comedy podcast. It’s true. It gets the job done. But Marin was doing something specific with the interview that was different from what podcast interviews had been doing and different from what radio interviews did. He wasn’t asking comedians about their projects.

He wasn’t doing a press junket. He was asking comedians about their lives, specifically the part of their lives that shaped the work, the early years, the difficult years, the family stuff, the failure stuff. And he was doing it in a way you could tell he was actually invested in it rather than just professionally curious. He cared about the answers. You could hear it.

When he was talking to a comedian who had been through something specific, he was drawing on his own specific things, and the result was a conversation rather than an interview, which is a different kind of listen. The Robin Williams episode was entered into the National Recording Registry as the first one-on-one podcast episode to receive that designation, which is to say the Library of Congress identified that episode as a document of cultural significance worth preserving. You know, in the old days, yeah, there was that whole thing about just going from club to club to club. It’s one of my, yeah. Yeah.

There are a lot of people that was like, you would say like, there were styles and you’re like, but he’s doing him. I go, yeah, it’s, and a bird hurts doing Taylor Negron. Yes. You know, you go like at that point, you’re going, look at the blending. Well, that behind every genius, there’s a guy going, he stole my soul.

But it’s that whole thing of what’s the bitterness versus do you want to hang out? Do you engage it? And you say, what’s the truth of it? Yeah, I know the truth of the old days, but now it’s like, I don’t hang, so I don’t know. Well, that’s the weirdest thing is that there’s this idea that when you have show business, which is just a community of bitter people aspiring to something, and they’re children because what they’re aspiring to is ridiculous.

I mean, you’ve had a tremendous career for a lot of reasons. But there’s a lot of people that, you know, that they just they go to Hollywood. I used to do a line where I said it took me years to realize Hollywood wasn’t my parents. Wow. Looking for approval.

Well, yeah, just like I’m here. Where’s my where’s my trailer? And I think that the bitterness that when when people dismiss somebody who’s had a career, you know, as big and huge as yours, that the idea that like, you know, if he didn’t take that one joke, he wouldn’t be Robin Williams. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I mean, you look at even you look at someone like Pryor, who literally did Cosby for the first time.

Two years of his life. Before the auteur theory of comedy happened in the late 50s, where comics actually owned their point of view, I mean, it was what people did. I mean, you know, the Warshaw guys were like, are you doing that bit about the uncle tonight? Can I do it? All right.

And it was interchangeable. It’s also the idea of.. You know common ground when you say when there’s certain subjects you go you talk about you talking about the president i talk. About the president well yeah the obama garage episode from 2015 was the moment that made undeniable something that the podcast audience had understood for years which is that wtf had become a place where serious things happen where people said things they hadn’t said elsewhere and the format produced honesty that other formats didn’t produce. It’s kind of hard to say okay i okay look you know we had the fight like 10 years ago and I, I, I have held that against you for 10 years and that’s, that’s hard to even say because, okay.

I mean, from my point of view, it’s always been that you did something really, really wrong to me. And he, and then you just refused that. I mean, that’s the way that I looked, I looked at it, you know? And, uh, so the other day I was thinking about it again. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it for a long time, not in detail.

And I really went over in my head. I don’t, you know, I don’t know why. And, I realized that. It was my fault. Completely.

And it’s like, I was. A total asshole to you and I stopped being your friend. And I’m shocked now when I think of it. That I would ever. Have thought it was anything that you did.

You did nothing. And I know that now. And I don’t know how to look back at, you know, you look back at your actions and. Man I don’t know I don’t know if this has any meaning or worth to you and I don’t maybe this is just more of me being selfish but I just want to say Mark that I’m sorry and I wish that. I don’t know what else to say.

Okay is that it or. Yeah I guess so. All right. Well, I appreciate that, but I guess you don’t remember, but you came over here five years ago and said the exact same thing. I did.

Other great guests, Louis C.K. 2017, Lorne Michaels. That was a great episode. Robin Williams, Keith Richards, Carol Burnett, Conan, Jerry, Chappelle. It’s a document of the comedy world across 16 years. The interviews are durable in a way that junkets aren’t.

They’re real conversations. They don’t expire. Go back and listen to any of them. Along the way, Marin got sober. He started talking about that on the show.

And the audience started to include people who were listening for the sobriety material, the anxiety material, for the honest account of what it’s like to be a middle-aged man trying to figure out how to live without the things he’d been using to not live. There was a crossover audience, comedy fans and people in recovery, people with anxiety, people who just want to hear someone talk honestly about being a mess. Mark fell in love with Lynn Shelton. Who died unexpectedly in May of 2020. He talked about that on the show eventually after months of silence and grief that were documented in real time.

His special From Bleak to Dark, released in 2023, dealt with that grief directly and was the special that most clearly shows what WTF had always been doing, taking the material of a specific life and making something honest out of it. Not really therapy, not really entertainment for entertainment’s sake, something in between where the laugh and the real thing exist at the same time without canceling each other out. There was the documentary in 2025, Are We Good? Which tracked Mark’s return to comedy after Shelton’s death, the HBO special, and the process of figuring out what comes next. Since then, Mark has been on Stick on Apple TV Plus with Owen Wilson.

I also skipped over, what was the wrestling show? Glow on Netflix. Mark Maron, the actor. We will see what Mark Maron does as his career continues to evolve. On September 1st, 2026, Mark Maron posted briefly, just to check in, just to say hello and let the audience know he was still out there.

No announcement, no project to promote. Just a guy who would talk to an audience for 16 years, touching base, because that’s what you do with people you have a relationship with. WTF showed that you could have long-form conversations about comedy. Radio won’t do it. TV won’t do it.

Seven Minutes on The Tonight Show doesn’t do it. Promotional interviews don’t do it. WTF proved if you gave people access to those conversations in a format that had no time limit, no advertiser notes, and no producer in an earpiece telling you move on, people would listen. 55 million times a year by the end. The thing is, you can’t just do what Marc Maron did. There’s so much to the show that is unique to Maron.

The garage was specific to Marin. The cats, specific to Marin. The anxiety, specific to Marin. The anger, specific to Marin. You can take parts of that.

You can try, but it’s never quite going to be what WTF with Marc Maron was. The show worked because those specifics were real rather than performed. And an audience that’s been trained by years of media recognized the difference between real and performed and recognized it immediately. Mark Maron ended the podcast on his own terms almost a year ago. Barack Obama flew him to Washington to help close it out.

The National Recording Registry has the Robin Williams episode, 600 million downloads, and cat angels everywhere. That’s the show. It’s a show about them. And comedy is not therapy, just because it’s the truth. Wait a minute.

But if you’re talking about a show about them, if you’re saying that a person that talks about themselves on stage is not a comedian, then you’re dismissing a great many great comics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They did it wrong.

No, they didn’t do it wrong. Okay, you walk into a doctor’s office and he talks about his problems instead of one. Well, that’s an old joke. If a comedian talks about himself, and that is funny. If a comedian is a storyteller.

See, by your rubric, you’re dismissing people. He can’t work at State Fair. Who wants to work at State Fair, necessarily? Everybody. Really?

Yeah. So in order to work a state fair, you have to take the Gallagher class. You have to work faster and more general. There are families out there and they’re not interested in your long, subtle story. Okay, that’s fine.

That’s a state fair circuit. But the comedy club circuit, the cabaret circuit. Can indulge it differently. Why can’t you just see it as all being part of show business? Why are you angry?

Because there’s no show involved. There are a bunch of slovenly, they hunch over, they turn their back on the audience, they take a drink of water. That’s their style. It’s show business. Why are you drawing lines?

Why are you taking the other side of everything I say? I’m not. You are. 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.

You’re done? You’re just arguing. It’s Howard Stern. I’m not. I was just having a conversation.

I have more respect for comedy. You’re trying to be controversial. I am not. Yes, you are. You’re just arguing with me.

I have 30 years of experience. Well, then tell me about comedy. I just think that show business is show business. Well, then just why don’t. You do the interview and tell people your opinion?

We were having a good conversation. Oh, come on, Gallagher. All right. Well, that didn’t. Well, maybe it really went well.

I don’t know. I’m certainly not going to chase after him. That’s your comedy news for today.

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