A conversation with Marc Maron

Whenever anyone mentions the word podcast three names instantly work their way into the conversation, Adam Carolla, Marc Maron and most recently Kevin Smith. Whether it’s among listeners, comedy fans or other pod casters these names come up and ‘WTF with Marc Maron’ is not only referenced but highly praised. Not bad for a podcast “born out of desperation” as Maron revealed during a recent phone conversation.

It was Friday and Maron was on the road and was set to perform standup in Sunnyvale that evening. When he called, he was in his hotel room eagerly awaiting his visit to the Google headquarters, “it’s a big day…going to see the Google campus, you can go to the Google headquarters and at lunch they have the most amazing food from all over the world,” he said excitedly.

We got off the topic of Google and dug into some of the history behind his podcast, ‘WTF with Marc Maron.’ It was 2009 and Maron had just been let go yet again from a company he described, had fired him “a couple of times cause of money issues.” He explained, “I was working in an internet-TV-radio capacity, and at the time I started [the podcast], my original producer and I had both been let go because the company was going bankrupt.” Maron came up with the idea of putting something together while they still had access to the studio, “we had our security cards, and they hadn’t taken it away from us,” he explained.

“We did the first 6 to 10 podcast out of that studio in New York, not knowing what to expect or what the shape of the show was going to be other than we loved doing that medium. I had no expectations I just had nowhere else to go with my career or life at that time,” he said.

His conversations with his guests are very candid something he attributes to being a TMI type of person. “[I’m] virtually boundary less when it comes to sharing,” he said. “When you’re like that usually whoever you’re talking to will either try to move away [from you] or try to rise up to that level [of openness] as well. Given that we’re sort of stuck on the mike they’re not going to move away. They don’t always want to talk about [some] things and that’s OK I can adapt.”

Things that don’t make it onto the podcast aren’t always a bad thing, as Maron explained, “It usually revolves around being in the middle of a conversation, and you reference somebody and maybe [your comment] may be a little inappropriate.” He continued, “It’s not usually things like ‘I shouldn’t have talked about that [topic] at all ‘cause, I’m not comfortable with it. It’s for other reasons. Like Andy Dick told a story about doing something, and he was concerned about the legalities of it, so we took it out. A couple of people have mentioned other people and thought maybe we shouldn’t bring them into it, and we take that sort of stuff out but that doesn’t happen too often.”

In the span of a couple of months podcasts have grown in popularity it seems like everyone has a podcast nowadays. When asked whether he feels the need to keep an eye out on what other folks are doing in order to stay ahead of the curve Maron responded, “I don’t listen to anybody else’s podcast, I don’t listen to anything other than NPR, I tend to be too busy for it.

“I see that there are a lot of [podcasts] coming out, people are doing their thing but I don’t see it as a competition. I’m more concerned with evolving the show and figuring out where to go with my own show. There’s always competition in any sort of creative field but I do what I do and I just want to keep doing it well.”

As for what’s next for the comedian and podcaster, well a comedy album releasing August 9^th titled, ‘This Has To Be Funny.’ “It’s my fourth CD of all new material, there are some of the topics I’ve talked about [in the past] which people will recognize and some stuff on there that people haven’t heard yet.”  He described it as the next step for him and his comedy.

For more on Marc Maron and WTF visit www.wtfpod.com