Marc Maron Resents Everyone Having Podcasts Now
Marc Maron has hosted WTF with Marc Maron since 2009. In that time, the comedian has produced more than 1,680 episodes with countless celebrity guests. Maron opened up about ending the show in October in a new profile from The Hollywood Reporter. It gets into the origin of the podcast, how he turned down an interview with Hillary Clinton after she lost the 2016 election and how the medium was a bit of a refuge while he struggled with addiction and depression.
“Sometimes the complete artist is there — they just need to find the medium,” Conan O’Brien told THR. “(Maron) was very funny on television, but for whatever reason, he needed to be in the wilderness for a while. The pod was the perfect place for his freak flag to fly at full mast.”
But since 2009, what was once the wild west of the entertainment industry has become oversaturated. Now, anyone who has ever done anything remotely popular has a chatty podcast. There are the big hitters like Amy Poehler and Conan O’Brien, the right-wingers like Andrew Schulz and Joe Rogan and then everyone else. Did you get big on TikTok during COVID? You get a podcast. Do you tour small comedy clubs across the country? You get a podcast. Did you appear on one season of a prime-time reality TV show? You get a podcast.
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The crazy thing is, there’s practically no limit to the number of podcasts out there, because people are filling their ears with the background noise of other people talking 24/7. Endless listeners mean endless engagement stats, which means a veritable fuck ton of advertising revenue. If you can score 100,000 monthly downloads on your podcast, you can earn enough to cover rent. Get one million monthly downloads? You’re set. In fact, put it on camera and double your revenue after you post it on YouTube.
Maron might have paved the path for this with WTF, but he doesn’t consider this boom in the industry to be a good thing. “A lot of yammering in makeshift studios,” Maron said to THR. “It’s lowering the bar for everything.”
That lower bar is in part because the barrier to entry to making a talk-show podcast is relatively low. You don’t need the buy-in of a big podcast network (though it helps) or a huge recording space (though that helps too). If you’ve got some sort of existing following as an actor or comedian, you can pretty easily leverage that into podcast listeners. It’s fairly democratic compared to getting a movie made or a comedy special put on to a major streaming platform. But again, the big downside, according to Maron, is that the barrier to entry is perhaps getting too low.
“Things were better before everyone had a voice,” Maron told THR. “Now there’s just hundreds of groups of two or three white guys, sitting behind mics, talking about the last time they shit their pants as adults. We live in a world of mediocre afternoon drive-time radio.”
One person he isn’t afraid to take direct issue with is Dax Shepard. Shepard’s Armchair Expert is inspired by WTF, but in the THR interview, Maron said that Shepard “became” Maron. He clarifies: “I have a model that I established. There are certain people that work within that model. And I think Dax is one of them. I opened up a zone within this medium just before it became really viable. That’s what I think.”
I imagine that Maron probably opens the podcast landing page on Spotify some days and clutches his head like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer when he realizes that what he has created has gone beyond the bounds of his control and will irrevocably change the world for the worse.
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Maron mutters, as he scrolls past The Viall Files.
