Marc Maron will wind down his ‘WTF' podcast after a pioneering run of nearly 16 years
'We're tired, people. Burnt out,' he wrote on his website, explaining that he and producer Brendan McDonald had an agreement that they would end the pod's run when either or both of them were 'ready to stop.' Both are now ready, he said.
'As of September we will have been doing the show for 16 years. Wow. That's a long time to do anything,' Maron wrote. 'We have put a new show out twice a week for 16 years and we've put everything we have into those shows. That's just the way we work. We have since the beginning and it's always been just us. Obviously, we had help along the way, but in terms of creating the show Brendan does his job, I do mine. No networks, no boss. Just us and hundreds of guests and you.'
'WTF' was named best comedy podcast by the Academy of Podcasters in 2016 and was nominated for the iHeart Radio Podcast Awards in 2019. The operation began in September 2009, and while it wasn't the first podcast ever, Maron said that 'in terms of making it a viable medium, we were certainly one of the OGs.' There was no way to make money from it at first, he said on Monday's pod. He and McDonald just knew they were going to do two shows a week.
'We changed the world, literally. ... We helped unleash an exciting type of delivery system for pure self-expression,' Maron wrote on his website.
Maron told The Times in 2017 that he prepares for interviews by, for example, watching a director's film or listening to a musician's records but without much outside research.
'How do you get around someone's public narrative?' Maron asked The Times. 'People who live public lives have a public narrative. And they'll go to it, because it's easy. Sometimes you can get a little more within those narratives, but to get around it is really the trick.'
That year, he and McDonald published 'Waiting for the Punch: Words to Live By From the WTF Podcast,' a collection of excerpts from interviews with guestsincluding former President Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Louis CK and Will Ferrell, to name a few. Maron credited the selections in the book to McDonald's 'steel trap memory' of who had said what and when.
'What winds up in the book are many of the unexpected or revealing conversational nuggets that could be discovered only after the familiar territory had been crossed,' then-Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg wrote.
Moving forward from this fall — Maron didn't give a specific end date for 'WTF' on either the podcast or his website — the 61-year-old said that post-podcast he will be doing stand-up, more acting and 'hopefully enjoying life a bit.'
'There's probably going to be some ups and downs with me, emotionally, around the reality of this,' he said on the podcast. 'But ... this is a full-hearted decision, it's the right decision for Brendan, it's the right decision for me. It's OK for things to end. It's just time, folks.'
Then he launched into an interview with comic John Mulaney.
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