Episode 1603 - WTF Origins: A Full Maron Special Presentation
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Alright, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck buddies? What the fuck nicks? How is your what the fuck miss? Or your what the fuck Anika? No? Yeah? Huh? Yeah? I hope it all went well yesterday. I hope that you're feeling some sort of gratitude or relief that it's over or gratitude for your life or some sort of holiday spirit business.

I hope you had a good season. I hope as we go into the new year, we can sort of get our brains together and figure out how to deal and get through. Those are my New Year's resolutions. This year, again, I'm going to focus on dealing and getting through. Huh? Right?

So today we're doing the thing we seem to be doing every Christmas for the last bit of time, for the last few Christmases. This is a compilation of a series that we actually did for the full Marin called WTF Origins. And this is me and Brendan, my producer and business partner for many years now. Many years. I don't even like you cross some line with the years where you're like, holy shit, it's been that long. While you're in it, you don't feel it.

But we talked about the things that were important in the creation of WTF, as well as the early days of the podcast. I want to believe on some level, not just for my ego, that we are historical figures and that WTF is a historic podcast, which it is. And on some days I wonder, did I unleash this fucking thing on the world? Or would it have happened without me? Certainly it would have.

And as things move on and move past, you know, you do reflect. And I guess sometimes when we do shows like this, it's good for me to listen to it, to

to know that we did something. You know, everything gets plowed under so quickly and it just seems to go into, not the rear view, but onto the pile of stuff available that people can find and, you know, kind of all of a sudden engage with, which is good. But it does feel like, you know, history and stuff just flies by so quickly. And we've done a lot of these fucking things and I've talked to a lot of people and a lot of those talks were kind of

and enlightening and touching and informative and, you know, creatively speaking, you know, were my, my lifeline to, to humanity in a lot of ways.

And on this episode, we talk a lot about or a bit about the Luna Lounge days where the kind of alt comedy thing took hold in New York City. We talk about the Marc Maron show, which was a show that Brendan produced with me out here in Los Angeles after we were pushed out of Air America. And then we talk a bit about Break Room Live.

which was something that we did when they pulled me back in. And then we kind of finished with a discussion about, you know, WTF and how that came out of all those things, but also out of my experience and Brendan's experience and how we kind of work together on this thing. But it is, it is nice to, to look back just to make sure because my brain is addled and fucked up from the

pace of technology and from engaging with it and from age and from, you know, just time kind of flying by. But this is a nice thing. And I hope if you haven't heard this stuff that you find it interesting.

and informative and interesting because it has been that for me and I believe for Brendan. And I would like to say this was all part of this year's bonus material on the full Marin. And people can subscribe to that feed by going to the link in the episode description. So unless you had the bonus feed, you haven't heard this stuff. But again, I hope you enjoy it. We'll see what I can remember.

And how I remember it. That's always the interesting thing about getting old is how your brain just kind of rewrites things. Yeah. Well, do you feel like you've done that with other things? Like there are other times in your life where you've come up with a narrative on them and then all of a sudden you find yourself being told that's not how it was? Yes. But I mean, usually not a full narrative. Right, right. But also some people, you know, you're at the whims of other people's memories of, you know, people have said things to me.

where they said it was me. And there's just no way. There's just no way. Right. They just put me in there. I got an email yesterday from some guys like, you know, we've been repeating this joke of yours in my family for years. And I'm like, I don't know what that is. I have no idea what you're talking about. It was literally it was a line that was like, beans are good. And I'm like, what is that? Beans? Yeah. And I'm like, what is that from? I don't know what that's from. Is there a joke? He's like, I thought I heard it on Sirius. I'm like,

You know, I don't remember some of my jokes, but I remember the impact of that line if it was part of something. It might have been something I just riffed. I don't know. Well, I think this is a good segue because the whole reason I want to talk to you today was after watching you on Dave Cross's new show. Yeah.

which is called Senses Working Overtime. And I was watching it on YouTube. You guys are very fun together, as always. But you started talking about the New York days, the Boston days, the New York days, all the stuff in your past where you guys had a lot of common ground. And I realized that in talking about Luna Lounge, it's this thing that comes up a lot on the show, especially with people in your cohort, right?

Right. And I'm not really sure that I could, if somebody asked me,

Like, what's the deal with Luna Lounge? I wouldn't be able to tell them very much because I just haven't heard enough detail. I could tell lots of people the story of the Comedy Store, which has been told on our show over and over again. I could tell lots of stories about SNL, like as a civilian, as somebody who just heard about it. But I couldn't do that with Luna Lounge. And so I thought it would be a good idea to ask you some of those questions and get the story from someone who was there. So...

What's the deal? Luna Lounge, if anybody else, if anybody's wondering what we're talking about, was a club in the Lower East Side, yes? It was on Ludlow Street. It's now a hotel. The building has been level. It's gone. It was like a few doors down from Katz's.

On Ludlow. And it was primarily a music club. I mean, you know, we could get Rob Sacker, the guy who owned the place, to chime in here. But Luna Lounge became a phenomenon because it was really the heart of what became New York's alternative comedy scene. So in my recollection of it, the comedy show...

That ended up there, started elsewhere. You know, that was sort of the final home of it. But the first attempt to do an alt show was not at Luna Lounge. And the first one I remember, maybe the first two was done at some small bar that a small showroom. It was put on. It was it was kind of created and curated and booked there.

By Michael O'Brien, the publicist, and Dave Becky, the manager. Oh, wow. Michael O'Brien. No kidding. Yeah. And he was part of it. Him and Becky. Right. And both of these guys continued to be names with top comedy people for the next several decades. Yeah. Dave Becky became really the biggest...

and comedy. Yeah. And I think kind of remains that. But I also remember like in our first, you know, five, 10 years, we were always getting guests from Michael O'Brien. Well, Michael O'Brien and Dave came up together.

You know, Michael O'Brien was just a guy. He had very few clients in the beginning running his own shop. I think he still does. And Becky, you know, locked into him. And Becky was that's how it works. That's how the business came up. I think the last time I got an email from Michael O'Brien was still from an AOL address. I'm not kidding. Wow. So they booked this this one. And on the show is me and Jeff Ross.

And maybe Todd. Wait, do you remember where it was? It was upstairs at some place. I don't even know if it was a functioning club. It was a small room. But then it moved almost immediately to a place called Rebar. And that was the show. Rebar. Was Rebar in Brooklyn? Nope. It was this weird bar. I don't know how they found it. It was on the west side. It was not conducive to what we were doing.

But that became the first alt comedy venue. It was a bar that was very weirdly kind of, you know, it was one of those places like it's just owned by the Russian mob. What kind of what is the style here? It was kind of modern, but kind of weird. And then they had a back area and eventually they put a curtain there and there was no seats. People were sitting on the fucking floor.

And there was no real stool at some weird kind of weird kind of welded modern bar stool they pulled in there. And it was just not and there was no mic. Well, so why do you think they were doing it? What was what was the impetus? Did they just recognize we have this talent and we need them to have a space to play?

I think it was a reaction to the alternative space that, that there was something happening. And like people like, you know, Becky was looking to showcase people. I'm sure. Right. And to have a place where, you know, they had some control over that. That wasn't a comedy club. And that, and this is when,

You know, this is when, like during Luna Lounge, the UCB moved to New York. Right. And set up shop before they had a theater and they were coming down there. But then when it moved to Luna, it changed hands at some point. But again, not to comics. But when you say it changed hands, what do you mean? Like who was booking it?

Yeah. I mean, at some point, you know, moved from rebar and, and then it became Luna lounge and the show got a name, uh, eating it. Okay. You had me and Jeff Ross and, you know, Louie and Silverman and Janine, Zach, uh,

Uh, you know, the full Colin Quinn, eventually, eventually people made their way because Singer made it appealing. You know, at the beginning comics like Colin and Patrice and stuff were like, you know, well, you guys just doing comedy for nothing. You know, they made it seem like it was amateur hour. It was an open mic, uh,

And I always treated it as a place to work out in a way that I could not work out in the comedy clubs. And I think eventually that became sort of a thing. I think, I don't know why, I don't know if Colin was adverse to it at the beginning, but he ended up coming around. And then like the state guys, I think arguably Stella probably started at Luna Lounge. Like it was, and some of them were doing solo standup.

Some of the UCB people were doing solo performances. So it became this huge scene, and it was sort of the center of a comedy thing between performance art, sketch, and stand-up that actually got a hip kind of...

following to it. It was like, you'd go there on Mondays, there was a line out the door and I was just this cranky fuck. And I hated everybody that was coming in for some reason. And I'd get up there and do my little thing. And, but I was like, you know, why are all these people here? And I remember Will Ferrell came down, celebrities would start coming down.

And it became a thing. And they put couches in the back. It was a weird seating situation. But there was a stage back there and all these couches and people would sit on the floor and stand around the room. All the comics of my generation, most of them eventually performed there at least once or twice. Chappelle would go down there. But that was later. Early on, it was a little more raw and a little more weird. But then it got pretty mainstream-ish.

And so it just seems like that the initial show that happened at Rebar and that moves over to Luna is a really like hospitable gym for you at that time. For me, it was all I thought about. When anyone would talk about alternative comedy, like I didn't really care because I didn't come out of that. Right. You know, like, I mean, I started, I was already like, I'm older than all these fucking people now anyways.

You know, so I started even before Louis, like Nick DiPaolo is more like my generation New York comic. Dave Attell. You know, I started in comedy clubs. You know, I started in the late 80s, you know, in Boston, then came to New York and, you know, was kicking around. So by 1995, you know, I've been working as a professional comic for seven fucking years. Yeah. So for me...

It was really just a place to work out in a way that I wasn't beholden to anybody. And, you know, and the idea of it was you can you couldn't do new material. So that was the challenge. Oh, so wait, hang on. That was like a philosophical idea behind the show. Initially, you got to go up there with something new every week.

Talk about your day, whatever. Wasn't a place to do your act. Right. And I'm like, great. Yeah. That's just get up there. That's like what you're doing now. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it really wouldn't work. I mean, sometimes it was just, but it would, it did kind of train me to do this thing where you just get up there and drive and drive and drive until you find something. And if you don't find anything, it's so sad. Yeah.

Yeah, Sharpling talks about that all the time, about, you know, he was a regular. He used to go every Monday, and he talks about how it would be this amazing thing where just some nights you were just on fire, and it was like it was this inspired lunacy just coming out of you. And then some nights you were just tanking so hard, like in a way you'd never see anybody else do it. Yeah.

Yeah, it was so painful. It's terrible. But I can get right there now. I'd get up there with the wrong attitude and be mad at the audience. And yeah, there was some serious tanking sometimes. And I have to go into that front bar and just be like, I got to get out of here. Was the music scene already jumping by the time you guys started doing it? You know, dude, I missed all of it.

What do you mean by you missed it? You just didn't care? No, I spent my life in comedy. Right. You know, like I missed that. I mean, what music scene? So what is happening in 95? I mean, that weird, that amazing, you know, meet me in the bathroom thing. That was the early aughts. Right. But a lot of those bands got their start at Luna.

Right? The Strokes, Interpol, yeah, yeah, yes. The National. Yeah, they were around, I guess, but I didn't know them. It just wasn't my thing. I don't know what I was doing. Well, I think the thing at your time, like 1995, the person who became the biggest after starting at Luna was Elliot Smith. Was he around? He may have been. I don't remember him. They weren't on the shows with us. Right, right. But maybe he was around, you know?

I don't like, I really was so detached from music in general then. I just didn't, I didn't go to any of it. I don't, I missed all of it. But it wasn't like the world's crossed over. It wasn't like, you know. Well, I think probably with some of the performers it did, but not me. You know, like, I think that, like, I was always sort of an outsider. But I think around the, you know, like Cross was out in L.A. He really wasn't.

around New York yet. But like, I imagine with some of the state guys and with some of the, with Garofalo, I'm sure there was crossover in terms of hanging out and stuff, but I didn't hang out with people. Right. So I didn't see it. But you know what? At some point, you know, there was a lot going on. You had pianos down there, right? With Todd and David Cross came to New York. Yeah, Tinkle. Yeah. Tinkle at pianos. And that was a venue that had comedy, alt comedy. There's a lot of those kinds of shows coming up.

I do know it waned. I remember it kind of waned, you know? And it became less vital. Like, at the beginning, it was very vital to me. Well, but did it... Do you think it became less vital because it became more mainstream? Like, was it... Yeah, but, you know, the heat came off it. I mean, dude, it was crazy down there. Yeah. You know, like, when something pops in New York, it's like this lines around the block. And then, like, I remember at some point, it's like, nobody's...

waiting anymore. Well, that then is a place where I think you're, you're the page turned for you. And it's probably what led to ultimately radio being an option because, you know, you talk about all the things you had with the, in development that didn't wind up happening. And,

Having already done the like comedy exploration thing, you're now faced with, am I just going back to clubs? Am I just going back to being a feature somewhere? Or do I take this new gig, which is probably why at that time in your life, taking the radio gig made sense. Oh my God, dude. Like I was quite spiraling back.

By the late 90s, you know, I had not sobered up yet. I was in a marriage I was unhappy with. I was living in Queens. You know, she was thinking about having kids. And I was like, I just wanted to die. And I was doing segments on a local TV network. You remember that? The desk segments for Metro TV. And in my mind, I was like, well, maybe this will work out for me. I'll just find a local gig because everything had crapped out.

Deals crapped out. You know, I wasn't, you know, I did not build relationships on the road like you were supposed to. I wasn't doing the type of comedy or that anybody wanted. You know, I would, you know, I could work in San Francisco. I could work in Boston. There were there were and there were places I would go and headline. But, you know, I wasn't a known quantity.

And when, so, you know, then the marriage breaks up in 99. So I put all my fucking, you know, eggs into the sober basket and I'm just like working that and doing comedy, doing meetings, hanging out with Mishnah, getting a divorce, locked out of my apartment, locks changed, subletting way down on Delancey street. And I don't know, man, once that all fucking came to pass, uh,

I was able to go back to the apartment in Queens, which I kept. And then I split. And I sublet the apartment in Queens to some fucking loser guitar player who never paid me. Friends of Jody and Stoli's downstairs.

And when I got to L.A., it was like I had to start all over. I had to fight to get involved and, you know, make my, you know, pay my dues in the alt scene there. That's when I got my name on the wall at the comedy store finally, 2002, 2003. I felt like I just wasn't, if it wasn't because I was sort of some mythic guy at the comedy store, I don't know how it would have went for me really in L.A. I didn't like doing all the alt shows and stuff.

I don't know, dude. But what happened was ultimately by the time the Air America opportunity came, was presented to me and I was sitting around and, you know, I didn't have a pot to piss in really. And I couldn't, I couldn't turn it down. Like there was no way I could, you know, I had the apartment still in New York and, you know, I was political enough. So it was really, again, a sort of

I couldn't see a way around it. You know, this kind of brings us back to what we documented last year with our Morning Sedition series. And so if people are listening to this and they haven't heard that, you can go back to last year. We did a series of several episodes on the full Marin here about

Morning Sedition called Good Morning Geniuses. That was our radio show. And you can listen to that with some clips that we played from the show and from our time there, which was like basically the next two years of your life. I think all of this stuff, including Back to Luna Lounge, is stuff that were it not for these things in your life, you would not have gotten to the podcast. So they're all very important and a good part of your origin story.

Oh, my God. Even just talking about these turns. Like, you know, I don't generally put the memories together like that. Yeah. You know, to where Luna Lounge happened. And then, you know, I start fucking around with sobriety and fucking around with a woman. And, you know, I'm married, you know, two or like three years and I'm already blowing it. And then that whole marriage blows up because, you know, I make I just remember, dude, it was ninety.

Must've been 99 or 2000 where I'm like, you know, I'm just like in a room sweating and a year sober with Mishna. Like, are we doing this man? Cause I'm going to leave my wife. She goes, I guess so. I'm like, good enough. You know? And that's always, that's always a good trigger puller. I guess so. I'm in. Oh my God. Just the whole fucking thing blew up. And then, you know, conversely, she blew mine up again.

Yeah, but those trauma points of chaos, relationship chaos, and yeah, sobriety, all that stuff. Yeah, it does haze things a bit. So I told you to tap into whatever trauma you had around this topic. And the topic is the Marc Maron Show. Did you do any tapping? Yeah, well, I'm doing it now. I mean, I did it today. You told me this morning, you know, to get in the zone. Yeah.

And KTLK, I remember KTLK. I remember you moving out here, you know, and you just had a baby and you were living in those. No, no, I didn't have the baby yet. I had just gotten married. Oh, that was it. Just got married. Literally just got married. And you just bolt and you're living in these furnished apartments.

Those were kind of cool. Yeah. I found that charming. What were they called? Were you in the Oakwoods? No, it was just called like Burbank Community Living or something like that. Burbank Long-Term Living. It was like you would live there if you had like a three-month stint on a Disney show or something. Right. Yeah. It's like those other ones. I think they're called the Oakwoods that some people lived in. Yeah.

I just remember that, you know, coming out of the morning show, coming out of morning sedition, this weird panic on the executive level when the shakeup at Air America happened. And we had some clandestine group of consultants and marginal characters from the brass who wanted to keep us in the fold as the new CEO failed. Right.

And the idea was that, you know, Scott Elberg, I don't even remember his position, president. He was a vice president. There were like a couple of vice presidents. And then Scott Krantz. Gary Krantz. Gary Krantz.

I know his brother. They had some sort of, you know, finagled something out here in L.A. because we got fired off the morning show and we wanted to keep in the game. And they finagled something with KTLK. Stephanie Miller had the morning show there. So that was part of the condition of us getting anything was that I had to make nice with Stephanie Miller. But the one thing we did have by that point were chops.

And fans and fans. There was a devoted hardcore. And I mean, that's, that I think is the reason why we wound up doing the show in LA because people like there was, there were petitions back when that mattered, you know? And, and, and the, the petitions, you know, kept coming into the Air America offices, keep Mark and Mark on the air, blah, blah, blah, morning sedition. And that, that meant something. And that's what, I guess my question is, I'm wondering if,

because I remember it all kind of going down, but I was outside of it. You being in it, like, what were you hearing? Were you hearing from those people who were doing those like back channel deals to try to get you on an LA? Basically, I remember, and I don't know where it came within the arc of things, but I remember, you know, I packed up, I went back to Los Angeles and, and Elberg came out there and took me to Dantanas and said, look,

This is just a placeholder. You know, we're going to get you back on the air in the mornings. But, you know, this will keep you in the mix to do this morning show or this whatever that show was. I don't even know what you call that show we did. A late night show? I envisioned it as a late night talk show, variety show, a la what was on the networks but just on the radio. That was my goal for it. Right. Right.

So, you know, that was encouraging. But by this point, though, like, I don't know how you felt, but I'm like, there was enough fuck you and me to be like, I can just go back to my life here, whatever the fuck this is. I do remember that. I remember that it was weird that it was like there was a moment. No, no, dude, you know what I remember? What? I remember that once you had moved everything back out there, they were like...

There's a chance to keep the morning show. Do you remember that? Yes. They suddenly were like... They realized the error of their ways. Everyone had browbeat Danny Goldberg and was like, he'll change his mind now if you want him to. And you were like, you already moved me back home. I'm already out of here. There's a lot of fucking around going on. Yeah. Just sort of like...

But it wasn't a guarantee. That's right. I do remember that. And I do remember saying it didn't sound like a sure deal, though. Well, and why would you feel confident about anything they were doing at that time? Yeah, because I didn't even understand, you know, what these different groups were.

Yeah, like there was trouble in at the castle, whatever. I mean, like, what was what were Elberg and Krantz doing? What were all those suits doing? I mean, I know I think all those guys thought they were going to finally they were going to take they're going to arrest Air America away from the progressive activism movement.

uh, ecosphere and really just make it radio. Right. Which was right. Scott Elberg's background was Gary Krantz's background where these were clear channel radio guys. And they, you know, to Scott's credit, he saw you as a good person to bet on as a radio host. Yeah. Yeah.

In any event, you wind up coming back to L.A. We know that this thing is going to get set up. I you you asked me directly, will you come out here and produce this for me? Because, you know, I got to get this off the ground like Morning Sedition. And I agreed that I would come out until the end of March.

that if we could do it for like a ramp up of like three months, which winds up biting us because the time got crunched. But I said, yes, even though I just got married, I'm trying to start a life here in Brooklyn, I will come out. Well, for me, I wasn't going to do it without you. I'm not like, I wasn't that kind of radio guy. I didn't care enough about...

you know, working in radio to be set up with some producer I didn't trust or some lackey or some, you know, tired old timer. Yeah.

Yeah, well, that meant a lot to me. Like, that was a key motivator to doing it was you did exactly say that. You said, I won't do this if you don't want to come out and do it. And I was like, this guy's known me for less than two years. You know, we've worked together for whatever it's been, 18 months or so. And if he trusts me with this, and, you know, I'm 24.

six at that point. Like that, I felt like that was enough of a sign that I should go do this. Yeah. And so we just had to build this thing from scratch. I came out there. And it was a two hour show, right? It was supposed to be two hours late night, starting at 10 PM on the West coast. So if you're trying to listen on a live stream on the East coast, it was one in the morning. And the promise was this is going to be syndicated.

So, you know, we would wind up doing it at, you know, so that people in New York could wind up listening to it maybe the next day or the next morning or whatever.

And that was a lie. Well, that becomes the, that becomes the key lie that ends the whole thing ultimately. But we went out there with this idea. I remember going over to your house in Highland park and just sitting at your kitchen table and basically going through everything we did on morning's edition to see what kind of thing would still work. My thought about it was, um,

Well, let's just do like what fucking Conan does. We'll do Conan, but for radio, like, you know, you be the Conan and like, this is late night, but with, but on the radio with Mark and, you know, we then incorporated some of the characters. That was the other thing. The guys who were used to be writing for us at Air America, who still had their jobs at Air America, they now had no work.

They were like writing for Randy Rhodes, but it was like nothing, you know? But so we were able to use these people to do our old bits. And then I just kind of like...

I thought of like what the sound of the show would be. And I started, you know, going through all this old big band music and like thinking like, again, like the idea of like, this should be like almost a joke on Carson. Like if our last show was like a sly elbow to the ribs of morning radio, this would be the same for like late night. And you know, it's,

I thought we had a great theme song. I was very happy with everything. What was the theme song? That's a band called Real Big Fish, and the song is called Sell Out. And it's real energy, propulsive, horns. It just works really well. The best part of that show...

Was using all the improv guys out here. And that was your connection with people at the UCB theater at the time. I think Seth Morris was the real door in to that. We went and had, what was that place is closed now, but that diner, like right by the Hollywood sign.

It's like in a hotel, like you go out- Oh, yeah, yeah, the 101. The 101 Diner, right. Yeah. I remember having lunch or something there, breakfast with Seth Morris, who was a big-

You know, he was one of the teachers at UCB. Yeah, I think he was. He might have been running the place. I think he was. So he was like way into it when we had we met with him. He got it right away that we just like feed us a pipeline of hungry improv people. Sure. Like want to do this stuff.

Yeah. And James Adomian was one of them. Paul Rust, remember that guy? Yeah. You actually interviewed him on the show and he reminded you, hey, I used to do a thing on your old radio show. Yeah. And did we use, well, we used Wyatt. Wyatt was the big one. Wyatt Cenac. Wyatt Cenac was the big, like he created a character that worked the most perfectly with you.

Because it was the one that understood the dynamic of call in to a radio host with a regular recurring bit that you can easily fill. He's an army guy, right? He was a recruiter, right? Yeah. And he's recruiting for the surge. Yeah.

Because this is 2006. So it's like the worst time... Public opinion has completely turned on the Iraq war. Yeah. And his thing was like... He's coming around to places you're not used to recruiting. So like liberal talk radio. He's going to make the pitch to...

to recruit. Oh, Reese Barr. She would come on as a Russian prostitute. That's right. Svetlana, the movie reviewer. Svetlana, yeah. Craig Anton, you used a couple of times. He was just your buddy who would come in and do some characters. And then we did, this was another thing I remember. We went to the Figaro event

The other cafe. I remember all the locations that we wound up doing these things at. So we went to the Figaro and met with Kevin Kataoka.

uh ray james and steve rosenfield that's right to talk about writing yeah they wrote just monologue jokes for us every day and it was great it was like this i can't believe more people don't think to do this or didn't at the time which is like get a bunch of funny comedy writers yeah and get them to send you jokes and we'd pay them ten dollars a joke and

And you'd have jokes every night. But heads and tails of the show were basically monologues. Straight up monologue jokes, yeah. Doing them on the radio. But it was fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun even just to pick them. You'd get these daily lists of jokes from these guys and then just select the ones you thought were good. But it just became... I don't know how quickly...

It became just a fucking nightmare. Well, it was as quickly as that meeting that we had to have, honestly. Were we on the air yet? No, no. We had to prove ourselves to get on the air. So what winds up happening is I go out there with you. We start building this show. Gary Krantz comes out and says, we have to go have this meeting at Clear Channel.

Which was, you know, a giant radio hub out there. It wasn't just this one station. It was this entire clear channel portfolio of stations. But so we go in there to meet when we think like this is OK, this is the thing where we have to apologize. Right. For the for this.

shitting on Stephanie as her lead in. Yeah. And this goes back to when we were on morning's edition, you were always making a stink over us not being live in LA or now it wasn't even that we were live. We were live. They used to, they used to, we were live three to six in the morning, but then they run us again. And it was, and they did that at the beginning, but then they dropped Stephanie in as the live thing. And they defended that and,

Because why wouldn't you want to have live radio in the market that the radio station is in? I mean, I got it, but it just irked me because then there was really no presence in L.A. unless you were up at three in the morning. Right. And it just bothered me. So knowing that Stephanie was in the studio about to start her show.

I would sometimes end my show in a snide way about, you know, setting her up in L.A. Yeah. And it must have just pissed her off to no end. Oh, yeah. They were. Well, I mean, I don't even think pissed off is the right word. They were like vengeful. And we didn't we didn't know it. We thought it was. Oh, they got slightly pissed off at that.

So we go in there and this dude, and he's a big, he's a big strapping Texas dude. Football player dude. Exactly. He, he's guys, he's biting his lip, comes over to his stiff lip, like reaches out, shakes your hand. How are you? Shakes your hand, goes back and sits down. And this guy, this, this giant ham hock that we just met is the one in charge. Right. And we have to like figure this out within this moment. Yeah.

It was all a hope. Yeah. There was no prep to it. There was nothing. There was no, no groundwork had been laid. Like, but we represented that it was sort of a guarantee. We're a shoe in. I was why I was out there. Like I wouldn't have been out there if they said, well, we don't know if this is going to happen. Basically it comes down to, can you un-piss off this giant Texan? Yeah.

Which we wound up doing amazingly. But at that moment, like he, you know, finally, like after staring daggers at us, he's like, you know, you offended me greatly. And, you know, it was like what you would do to like a drug dealer. Yeah. This ends now. Yeah, guns on the table. Yeah.

And he made us go downstairs. Like in, at that moment, Stephanie Miller was like coming off the air. I couldn't believe like how awful the whole situation was and how, how little, how minimally we were prepped for how bad it was. That's the thing. I couldn't believe. Yeah. I don't remember what our feeling was. How did it end up? But I do. Cause like years later I did Stephanie's podcast and she, she seemed like she didn't even remember it. No,

No, I think she felt like you did the right thing and you apologized and it was coming from a genuine place. And you said the whole time, you're like, this was, I think, an honest reaction. You weren't just making an excuse. You were like...

I was new to radio and I was told one of the best things you could do is create rivalries, create like make, make your audience think you're better than the others. And because that was true, that was a, like a lesson people had imparted to you. Like, Oh, John Manzo or some guy like that. I was like, yeah, you got to get your, and Randy Rhodes who was on air America would do that stuff all the time. Yeah. Pit herself against Franken, you know, like people on our air.

So, and you said that to her and I think she believed you, which was true. You weren't lying. I was also mad though. I was, I mean, the, the reality of it is whether I thought that or not, it was, it was really about how we had no viable presence in Los Angeles. Right, right. Exactly. And it wasn't even her fault, but I, yeah, you know, look, man, I, you know, I was, my mouth gets me in trouble.

All right. Well, so we get the show. We're finally on. We're finally building to get on the air. We've got these comics in place. We've got people doing bits for us. We're lining up guests. And we're ready to launch on February 27th, 2006. And then we find out we will not be launching on that day because there is a LA Clippers game. Yeah. And that becomes the persistent story of the entire run of the Marc Maron Show.

The station, before it was a progressive station, had a contract with the Clippers to run live game coverage. And those games, I guess they probably started at 8 or something. And all we could do was hope that they'd be over because we had a 10 o'clock start time live. And then during fucking basketball season—

Uh, it would go to 10, 20, 10, 30, 10, 45. And we were just sitting there. Yeah. Waiting to launch our, waiting to do our show. And initially what we would do is we, so we launched the next day, which was February 28th. That was a Tuesday. Uh, and, and then I think immediately the next day was another Clippers game, the Wednesday. And we had, we had a, the re the reason they would be late is that like, if, if the Clippers were in LA, uh,

or on the West Coast, they would almost always preempt us because, yeah, the games would start at 7 or 8 o'clock. Yeah. And then they'd even... They'd have to take a post game, right? And so...

If they were on the East Coast or Central or something, we'd get lucky, right? Or they had no game that night, we'd be fine. But because, you know, an East Coast game is starting at, you know, four o'clock LA time. Right. So they'd be in the clear by then. But then after basketball season, they also had an arena football contract with

that we'd get preempted for and UCLA basketball as well so it was a major sports clusterfuck that we would you know rarely avoid and at first what they had us doing was start whenever the Clippers game ends and go for two hours and

And we, so that could have meant the Clippers game ends at 1115. Yeah. And we would go till, you know, one 15 in the morning or whatever it was. We put our foot down on that. We're like, we're not going to keep going that late. Who was paying us? Air America in New York. That was good. Yeah. Yeah.

And so eventually they made us, we said, well, what we'll do is we're just going to start whenever the Clippers game ends and we end at 12th.

But the problem with that became we'd lose guests. We'd get crunched down to 45 minutes of a show. It was just all a total mess right away. And seething. It was like a nightmare. Oh, yeah. And you were furious. Sitting up there, waiting. It was a real lesson. God knows I'd done comedy long enough, but just to not have any way to...

protect your job or to have a say in your future in a way and just have to, you know, play by these rules. But I will say I, there were a couple of nights I can remember. Like, so now once we launched, you know, I only had about a month there until I was set to go back to New York. And so we were really trying to make this work. And,

And I do remember like several shows, like at the end of that show, I remember I had the instant replay machine, like which I wound up leaving out there with you. Yeah. And I would take it in and out of the studio so that it didn't stay there and get stolen by anybody or whatever. I still have it. Yeah. Yeah.

And I remember like walking to my car after the show one night and like looking down at like, you know, remember how you used to have like a little overlay where you could write what was there. And I'm just like walking with this thing. And it's like, fuck.

fart Dick Cheney shit or whatever on each button and I was just like man this is fun like I know this is stressful and I know like we go through a lot to do this but like I like that this is my job I like that this is my life

And it was, yeah, it was like very typical for us that it would be like, like that next to like some soundbite of Bush. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, I was definitely committed, even though I was going back to New York, I was committed to like, well,

I want this to work. I want there to be an outlet where like I can be working in radio and it's funny. We're doing comedy. And you wanted to build it so it would stay. Yeah. Well, and it didn't last that long. So February 28th was our first show. And then July 14th.

that was your last day. I believe if I'm looking at the info I had and matching everything up, I think on the show, the on the air on like July 5th, you announced that you couldn't come to an agreement with them about syndicating. You had an escape clause in your contract. I don't know if that was true, but that was how you announced it on the show that said if they couldn't syndicate the show, you didn't have to do it.

Well, that's probably a nicer way of putting it, but they were sort of like, do whatever you want. It's over. Right, right, right. I can't believe we owed anybody anything. Yeah. And so July 14th, 2006, that was your last show. It also, coincidentally, was Janine Garofalo's last day at Air America. She quit on that same exact day, unrelated, from the majority report show in New York. And that was it. That was the short...

Four and a half month run of the Marc Maron show, right? Not even legendary. Not even appreciated by anybody. It's not underappreciated. It's non-appreciated. Yeah. It happened in a vacuum and no one was the wiser.

Right. But it does lead to, I mean, it's going to lead to other things we'll talk about on future episodes, how, you know, we did break room live stemming from, you know, a lot of this stuff, but, you know, a lot of the things we were doing.

Yeah. We're helpful in setting up this podcast. Right. Sure. First of all, stuff we don't do anymore, like using improv comics to do kind of comedy, bang, bang style things that, you know, that was kind of an early version of that on this show. That was basically the next two years for me.

was trying and failing to make this happen somewhere else. Right. And were you at Sirius yet? That's right. I was trying to get it on there. And it just wasn't, I don't know, probably many reasons, but it wasn't anything anyone was willing to spend money on.

You were sending them tapes? I was sending them lots of reels, like different kinds, different kinds to different places. I'd go to, I'd have meetings with people at places where I was doing work so that I could be like, hey, you know what I do? And I can bring this here. And there were always reasons. Nah, we can't do that. It's not saleable, whatever. Non-appreciated. Yeah. That was the beginning of the fucking end in terms of my...

hope for having a career in show business, really, because then, you know, my wife leaves me not long after that and I'm thrown into the sort of chaos of, you know, a divorce and, you know, just spending hours and days, you know, photocopying bank receipts and like, you know, disclosure stuff, just being beaten down. It was a lot. ♪

So, yeah, it was just a spiraling shit show where I was going broke. You know, no one could really lend me money. My dad wouldn't lend me money. I think my mom gave me a little money to keep me afloat, but...

I was spiraling the fucking drain, dude. Well, what was your, you, you had, did you mentally have any like career prospects or like career, um, uh, goals or ambitions at this point? Or were you totally swamped? No, I just knew that like, you know, I was doing what I could, I was doing what I always did. You know, again, I mean, this was not a time where I could sell tickets. So whatever club work I was taking was just, you know, that kind of like, uh, uh,

you know, kind of unknown headliner club work. I was probably doing a few TV appearances here or there, but despite when anybody thinks. To be honest with you, like I looked up your, like maybe a Conan here or there when you'd be in New York, because Conan was still in New York. So you're out in LA. I don't know what TV appearances you could have done in LA at that time. So I was journaling and I was talking to friends every day. I was very depressed and I was just, you know, trying to keep it together.

Yeah, and I do remember you taking a lot of fill-in gigs anytime there was a gap with a host on Air America. You would do a fill-in for if they lost somebody and they didn't have them for... I remember you would do guest spots for Randy Rhoades, and then they fired Randy Rhoades. So there was a period of time where you and Sam and Ron Kuby, you were all filling in.

Right, right. Yeah, I kind of remember that. Was I doing it out here? I must have. I do remember. You would do it out there. And then anytime you were in New York, you would go into the studio, you'd do fill in spots for Rachel Maddow. You would do fill ins. You would just do you were you were like trying to, I think, stay in the mix there because you essentially had no other real prospects.

Right. Other than the standup. And, but I think they must've been trying to keep me in, you know, I think it was always Scott Elberg who was there at air America thought, you know, Mark Marin is a good guy to keep around and we'll, you know, try to do something with him. Right. Also you and Sam on your own started doing a video thing, very primitive kind of like Skype interface, uh,

That you guys called Marin V. Cedar and you would do it like every Friday. Right. You know, and I think he was utilizing like his Air America email list to have a group of fans who still wanted to watch him. And you guys would do this video chat, essentially, where you talked about things. I think you probably saw.

you know, were there just to go back and forth with Sam. He was doing like politics on and you were just kind of reacting. Yeah. Well, that's the dynamic. Yeah. I vaguely remember that. And I remember, I don't remember when we got that. Maren v. Cedar was actually, I think that kind of bled over and was the initial title for Break Room Live, I think. That's exactly right. Not only the initial title, it was what we did for the first four months.

So from my records here, what wound up happening was Carl Ginsberg, who had been at Air America from the start, he left, then he came back, and he got in touch with you because there was new money, right? There was new money there at...

Charlie. Yeah. Charlie Carriker was a wealthy guy who he was a businessman. He had some money and he was a lefty and he wanted to get into progressive politics. Right. And Carl, not unlike me, and I've given Carl the credit for this before, that it's like he got what your appeal was and how you could be like a viable candidate.

host of something, presenter of something. And that was his goal, was to get the money to basically set Marc Maron up on the path to getting a TV deal somewhere. Right, he thought we could do the Daily Show over there.

Basically, and I think but I think his end goal was, yes, we would use the Air America infrastructure to do a daily show type thing. But ultimately, this would be getting Marc Maron a gig as the new Jon Stewart somewhere. And, you know, he would be the producer of it or whatever.

It was not a bad idea in terms of what could work. It was a bad idea in terms of the infrastructure at Air America was totally not suitable for doing this, nor was the kind of presence online at the time for streaming video. And across the board, it didn't exist. Across the board, not just us. Right, exactly. And despite Carl's very passionate work

to having Sam on, you know, he complied and we got the money for Sam too. And that turned out to be kind of a monster that we couldn't really hold back. And it created the tension that kind of was...

was what break room was because Sam had a very specific agenda. I just needed somebody to talk to, but there was no way I wasn't going to get steamrolled by him. Well, ultimately you guys came into it with two different styles of presenting. His style of presenting was much more akin to what he's been doing ever since on his show, the majority report, right? Like it's, and then, so he wasn't wrong in his idea of what he thought worked.

And you weren't wrong in what you thought you were good at and what you weren't going to be able to do in terms of the, you know, the lift of a daily politics show. Right. He just didn't want to be funny. And I mean, it's I'm whether he wanted to or not. I think he thought this is the audience I can engage, which to his credit is the audience he's engaged ever since that on his own gig.

But like, it's so weird. I've never even the original Air America. I've never been a part of something other than this other than break room live, where it was doomed to failure from the start. Like it was ill conceived from the get go.

Because the technology wasn't there. The technology wasn't there. The personnel were, was a problem. It was a problem. Like, you know, Carl should have said, absolutely not. No, Sam. Right. Like if he, if he wanted the thing that he ultimately wanted, which basically you and I then went and made as a podcast, it would have been better. But the, the dichotomy between you and Sam never allowed for the thing to gel ever. Right.

You know, I guess I felt bad about that, but I also didn't have confidence enough in myself because, you know, we had no writing staff and there was no, there was no set and there was no, like there was no context that, you know, he, Carl had no idea about nothing. And by the time you got in, I mean, we could have, we ended up building segments that would serve both Sam and I, but the bottom line was, is we were working with, you know, very new technology that wasn't,

Really effective. They spent like $100,000 on a website to do everything we wanted to do. But there was nothing going on. There was no streaming.

Yeah, no, and it was this idea that it would come in the middle of the day. You know, a lot of websites at around that time, mid 2000s, they had, you know, verticals on their site that would support like a tech window. That was the idea here was you'd have a this would help build Air America as a digital media brand that it would rival like the Huffington Post. That was the that was the goal.

And if this is the type of show we're doing, this live streaming thing, it's either got to be like absolutely nothing, like just production wise, two people talking and set up an agenda and then go back and forth. And that wasn't working because of you and Sam. Or we need to put some personality into this thing. We need to make it a show with characters, with like a vibe, right? And that was where the idea of doing it in the break room started. Yeah.

The idea for break room, I don't know.

Who came up with... No, I know exactly how it happened. We had a day where we couldn't use that studio. Right. And we said, well, let's just shoot today's show in the kitchen, right? Yeah. Let's go in there. And that one day was better than any of the other days we had done because you were interacting with staff members as they came in to make their lunch. Yeah. And so we just... We knew it when the day was done. We were like, that's the show. Right. Like, the...

The dynamic that went on in there today, that's the show. So we went and pitched that.

we should do this in the break room and it required a complete overhaul we had to redo the website we had to you know change everything that we had structured promotionally for this thing being called marin v cedar now is called break room live and uh but but it was actually probably easier as a technical undertaking because all they had to do was run some cables from next door to the break room that was it we we picked up and packed out every day

Yeah, I thought it was like I thought it was a brilliant idea. And the funny thing is, is that this show would be just par for the course now. You could do it in the middle of the day and would do fine. It would get good numbers. Yeah. Nowadays, lots of people do these things on YouTube every single day. Yeah. And and like with me and Sam, some of the stuff like that we really worked on kind of worked well when he would sort of like let me play a part in stuff.

Yeah. But, you know, like we get in the weeds so much and I just could never understand, like, you know, why are we talking about this for the third day in a row? This fucking bullshit Abramoff. It was just always that stuff. You know, you pick these narratives that ultimately were nothing. Yeah. Well, they were something. But who gives a fuck?

Right. No, to me, the only things that actually had any kind of stickiness and longevity were the pre-tapes we did. With Matthew. We would do our pre-tapes with, well, Matthew did some, but the real MVP of the show, period, was this guy named Bill Buckendorf, the editor. Yeah.

Oh yeah. And he came to us through John Benjamin. John Benjamin recommended him cause he had done like some video, you know, comedy videos for, for John. Yeah. And this guy, Bill could do, he, he could whip anything up that we asked him. Like if we went to him and we're like, we have this idea for a thing, we'll give you some footage and can you make it? He would make it in a day. And I'm still pretty proud of the McCain commercial. Yeah. That like that, the John McCain, like, you know, the,

any, anytime we had a little germ of an idea based on the news and then we could construct something around it, like that guy could execute it. And he did, he just sat there in his old cubicle. He did it every day. He never really talked much. I think he was then also wound up being the one in the break room filming. Yeah. And, and, and,

Like those things are all the things that are still up on YouTube from Break Room Live and Marin V. Cedar. And some of them are really great. Like, you know, you would go on field pieces to shoot things. You did stuff at your house, the Angry Chef. Those were the things that got popular. Like if there was anything in the show that was popular. But that's the stuff that people would talk about. Oh, I love your Angry Chef videos. Those things.

which was always our instinct, you and me. We always thought the things that people connect with are like bullshit, like regular things that people do on a daily basis. Yeah. Yeah. And, and then, you know, that stuff was, was fun to do, you know, but ultimately it just like the tension between Sam and I was real and, and it just got worse. And, and,

We always had a pretty good time in the office before we go on the air because that's when he would let himself be funny. But then he'd just start stuttering some esoteric lefty garbage and would go on for hours, it felt like. Yeah.

Yeah, well, you guys were like, you were sitting there live on camera with opposite agendas. Like you had diametrically opposed agendas of how to get through that hour. And I just kept poking at him. Well, we did it. We did a thing where we split it. We decided to, you'd make the first half hour would be

the show structurally that we wanted. And then the second half hour would be like a live chat with people who are live on the stream. And so that was our idea of trying to separate it with like, okay, so this first half hour will be like Marin heavy, where we do a lot of these produced pieces, field pieces, desk pieces. Yeah. And then the second half, we'll let Sam just do his thing where he wants to talk to

extemporaneously and take you know instant messages from listeners and things like that the live chat right and i think that just made it it made you angry that you would then have to sit there through that half hour and you'd just be like god like just sighing and shaking your head and like these things were just waiting for him to stop talking exactly

But yeah, but then I remember there was a big sort of like when Just Coffee got on board, boy, that was a big day. All we thought was like, we're getting free coffee. I remember we went to town. We couldn't get any advertisers. Why would we? Mike Moon at Just Coffee in Madison, Wisconsin was an Air America fan, I think a Cedar fan, but he liked the whole thing. And we said we'd let them advertise for free coffee.

Yeah. And then we posted, we like had this bulletin board, the bulletin board. That was a big, I thought that was a great idea that every day show, whatever we were going to be talking about, we kind of put on the bulletin board.

Behind us. It was a real bulletin board. And then at some point it just became covered with Just Coffee stuff. And we were pitching the Just Coffee, getting free coffee for everybody. Boy, that was good times. Yeah. That was our only sponsor. Yeah. And it was everywhere. Yeah. And then we brought them along to the podcast. And they didn't love... Moon was like, we don't love the catchphrase, but...

It's doing something. Pow! I just shit my pants. Just coffee.coop. He's like, we're not thrilled about it. We had a coffee mug made of it. We had all kinds of shit going. I don't know, man. It's so weird how much that anxiety that caused me because I could never, like, I could never be interested enough in politics to make it my life. Yeah, but that was the thing. So out of...

it's so funny because you were hung up on that as a, you know, almost like a barrier for you to get this done. And I was the one being like, no, get rid of that stuff. Like the thing that's going to work is you. Right. We finally did that with WTF. That finally really landed that I had this weird, you know, kind of like I had this pressure I put on myself from the inside, from the very beginning of Air America. Like I, I didn't,

I didn't really realize what my specific talent was. So I just kept trying to keep up with all this stuff. And there were times where I was on it. There were certain narratives that I could wrap my brain around. Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, you know, the 9-11 stuff. I mean, there were things that...

That would, you know, give me a kind of narrative. But I just, the day-to-day stuff used to drive me fucking nuts. Well, but it was a thing that it really took an effort for you to shake. Because if you go back to even the first episode of this podcast,

The very first thing you do after introducing the show and saying hi to the audience is a rant about Whole Foods, which I think a lot of people remember that rant. They remember that shit forever. Right. And it went into your book. You put it in Attempting Normal and that. But that was predicated on you reading an article about health care.

Like, so you were still in the mindset of like, if I have something I'm going to talk about, I have to hinge it to this kind of political context because you thought that's what the audience was. You thought like, oh, the only reason they stick around is because I'm doing politics for them. And it took some time for you to shake that. But it was like 1500 people. We knew 400 of them. Right.

That's right. Well, and that was the goal when we started WTF was, okay, we knew that at any given time we had like maybe 400, 500 people watching Break Room Live. We knew that based on the like YouTube views and everything, we could get a regular audience maybe

up into like the 1000 range, 1500. And that was our goal with WTF was that was that like that number circle that that's what we should have. And it was by episode three, and I've told this before, by episode three, we had 30,000 downloads for WTF. And that was what made us make the decision of like, okay, we can't paywall this. We can't

you know, make this exclusive just for that niche audience. This somehow, you know, broke free. We jailbreak this idea that we had thought was going to be for a mailing list. And now it's out in the world and the people are discovering it mostly thanks to, you know, the placement on iTunes at the time and the artwork and

Um, but it had an audience. So that was why we kept that. But the definite goal was just to, you know, basically deliver the show for the break room live people. But also we got to talk about, you know, we all knew that break room live was not going to be renewed. We had a year long contract and it was just sort of counting the days at some point. And then it was the, that was the great thing. They fired us and didn't make us leave. Yeah.

That was the best thing that ever happened to us. Yeah. Well, I mean, technically, you were still under contract. Right. So, but, I mean, any other media outlet would have been like, pack your bags, get away from the mics. Yeah. You're out. They'll send checks to your house, but you're not coming by the building anymore. I just remember sitting in that office and we're, you know, we...

I don't remember how soon it was after we got fired, but it was like, what are we going to do? You definitely brought it up to me before everything was done. Like you were saying, the writing was on the wall. So we knew that things were coming to a head. And so, yeah, we had to make decisions. Right. And we were like, well, I know guys that are doing this thing. It seems doable. And then we worked out...

a way we like Apple was excited about anybody with a name to, uh, to get behind it. Oh my God. Yeah. So we were doing those shows in the old studios at air America. And that was all because of break room. Jesus Christ. If they had kicked us out of the building, who the fuck knows? I do think that we, you know, in doing break room live in the compromised way that we did for a year, almost a year, uh,

It gave us the ability to know that like something like doing a podcast is

you know, we had already been through the ringer. We already knew like everything we did that in that year of break room live was all like our own thing. And we had to just, you know, scrap it together. And so the podcast seemed much easier. And then we knew the production stuff that could go into it. You had radio chops. So all these things that we've been talking about over the last several episodes of this, they all met made sense and led up to the right moment.

Oh my God. You know, we've been doing this, um, origin series here and talking about the things that led up to doing WTF. And it almost seems like we were done because the last thing we talked about was, you know, getting fired from break room live. And that was where we started the podcast. But, uh,

One of the things we kind of pass over in those first, I'd say, six months to a year, we didn't really know what the heck this was going to be. And so we were thinking, and I know you were probably thinking, what's my next move? Like, okay, great. I've got this podcast. We're rolling this out. But what is that going to turn into?

And there were like projects and there were ideas and things that would be monetized or the idea of this. We could try to monetize this somehow and make this something other than a thing we're doing on the side. Right. And just to promote me, you're trying to then get yourself out there as a draw. I,

I'm also wondering where were you standing personally on like doing TV movies? Like, were you, were you in your mind being like, I got to start getting more gigs. I started, I got to start being in more things. Well, I think I was, you know, it's that part of me has always been the same. And I, and I, it became clear, I think to me that the podcast was, wasn't going to get me acting roles or anything. So that I just, you know, I kind of surrendered to that.

But I had to sort of like, I had to reckon with the idea that they knew me better than me having the mystique of just a guy who does stand up. Many of them knew my life because of how I do the podcast. So I really had to straddle that. But ultimately because of that, it afforded me a comfort level that I don't know if it did, if it's the best thing for me in terms of, you know, being a comedic actor.

But it certainly facilitated over time my ability to just sort of expand on, you know, myself and do comedy in a pretty true way to me. You know, I have complete freedom of mind up there now.

And I'm pretty fearless and I'm still writing good shit. But I think that the evolution of having these crowds who knew too much about me created an intimacy and a connection with them that I think is probably a little different than what would have happened just as a comic. And I think that's, you know, with all podcasting people, even the ones that do big, you know, big draws. But a lot of guys who do this are not showing themselves the way I am.

You know, a lot of guys have a persona and I think I do have one, but it's pretty close to, you know, who I am. So, and because of that, it's, it's at once, you know, exciting, but also exhausting because I have to show up. I can't autopilot any of this shit. And I think, you know, professional entertainers, most of them can autopilot. I mean, I can do the same jokes over and over again, but that's a comic thing.

So do you remember any time where you wound up feeling like the way you were able to be on stage was really...

for you? Like, did you have any sense? Like, you know, especially if you could kind of draw some circles around the type of specials you were doing, right? So in 2011, that's when you did the This Has to Be Funny at the Union Hall in Brooklyn. That was your Comedy Central record taping. That was the weekend we did the interview with Saltzstein. Dan Saltzstein for the New York Times. That's the thing that made us...

In a lot of ways. Yeah. And it was a big deal for podcasting. It was a big deal for us. It was a huge cover spread in the art section of the Sunday Times with pictures. It was, you know, looking back on it, one of the biggest things that ever happened to me and to us, I think. Yeah. But I don't even remember if you were able to be mentioned then.

I was, yes, I was quoted in it as, you know, nobody, they didn't talk about me contemporaneously. They talked about me as the person who helped start it up with you. Yeah. And that always upset me. Always upset me that like I had to have this mysterious producer that I couldn't mention.

Because you had to milk him. But that's the funny thing. Meanwhile, I'm in the midst of producing your comedy album as well as the podcast. We had a full-fledged operation at that point. I know, but didn't that bother you? No. What?

No, I... I'm like, I gotta give Brendan all this credit, which I always do, you know, because we're partners in this, but I just couldn't say it for years. It was like... Yeah, no, I mean, like, I appreciate the impulse. The Wizard of Oz is producing my podcast. Look, I mean, here's the other thing. It's like, it comes with the territory of doing this. It's like, I...

I can do my best work. I can do them. And in those days I needed to do everything need to be the best, right? You need to get the, the, the BB optimized in what we were doing, uh, you know, in order to succeed because we were, we were going from the bottom up, right? Everything was ground floor. And so to do that, it was best if I had no interference, uh,

I didn't want to be handling anything from a public-facing point of view with the show. And I also knew that a large element of the success of the show was that the show just sounded like a thing you accidentally turn the microphones on for. Yeah. You alone. Right. Right? So, and all of this, you know, no...

none of us having any kind of reflection or discussion about it was ever important until, you know, we got a thousand episodes in or whatever, or when we had the president on, right? Like this was not the show. Well, this has to be funny. I knew like it was probably around then where I knew like, well, okay, I've got an audience.

They know me. That's where I was going with this is that I remember I felt that. Like, I remember being at that show, you know, and the funny thing about that is Union Hall fits what? 200 people? Maybe, yeah. And we, you know, you had two shows there over, it was December 9th and 10th of 2010. Yeah. And it's,

it was, you know, I remember being there and being like, oh good. He's fine. This Mark finally has the audience that I thought for the last, you know, six years of working with him that he could have. Yeah.

And it wasn't a huge audience, but it was your audience. Like they came to, to be part of your CD taping and they were like there for it to the point where that's where the title of the album comes from, which is that like you made that comment, this comment you've made many times since about your mom saying she didn't know how to love you. Yeah. And,

a woman in the crowd went, Oh, like a concerned sound. And I go, no, this has to be funny. Exactly. That was it. It was actually Ira Glass who was in attendance said that should be the title of the album. And he was absolutely right. Cause that was the, that was the best moment, but it was also the most indicative of what,

It took to go from the guy who, you know, just was scrambling in terms of leaving a manager, taking a new manager thought, okay, the way to capitalize on this, it's go, go do a pilot presentation for comedy central or whatever to go from that to know the way to capitalize on this and have something that makes it viable going forward is to just connect with the audience.

And it was at that point where I remember sitting there going like, he's got them. He's got these people. And it was like, yeah, it was 200 a night for two nights. That's not a ton, but that felt big to me. Well, I mean, I still do that. I still know that I am a, on stage now I say I'm an artisanal act. And I say, I am the farm, you are the table. And...

In relation to, you know, my appeal. And I say that a lot when I go on the road, like if I'm at in Detroit and I've sold whatever, 850 tickets, you know, I just barely fill up the place. I'm like, this is the ceiling. This is everyone in Michigan who likes me. They're here. This is all of you. And that's good. But it is. Yeah, this is it.

Yeah. And that's OK. You know, I've wrestled with that being OK. You know, I don't know what I expect or what I want. And I also know that when I see my audience before a show or in the town and they're walking up to me, I'm like, you're coming like these decent looking couples and stuff like how did this happen? Because, you know, from my gritty beginnings, I never saw myself as attracting, you know, reasonable, grown up, decent people.

Yeah. You know, I didn't know who I would attract, but, but, you know, something in that thing, I always say that I have a, I don't have a demographic. I have a disposition, which I think is true. But yeah, I think when, with this has to be funny, but that was also the thing is like, I'm in the fucking New York times building talking to Salstein in, in, in, he's writing the article that's going to change everything.

our lives forever and i'm getting texts from a woman i just broke up with who is hiding under the deck in my house and she's like i you know when can i go back in the house i'm like you can't she's like i'm under the deck right now and i had to call her dad and the police were there it was a fucking i i always got a lot of plates in there brendan some of them not good

Yeah. Well, that's the that's the funny thing is that it's like I think this that probably impedes a lot of your ability to really see the trajectory of this and how it was, you know, it was it did not come without, you know, tremendous diligence and and the right moves being made. Like somehow I think.

A lot of your thought on this, I think, just thinks of it as a wave that you got swept up in as doing the podcast. It led to all this stuff because you have these moments. This is a pivotal moment in your career doing this show at Union Hall and having this New York Times interview. And yet it's still all tied up in whatever was going on with you personally. That felt just as intense as all those other things.

But I always knew that we worked. And I always think that, you know, certainly with your sort of work ethic and your practicality, that the balance of our personalities works because it's symbiotic. But I rely, you know, I'm going to follow your lead. And I think ultimately from knowing you since, you know, Air America that, you know, I think I learned how to put that stuff aside, even if it was simple.

you know, like if it was, you know, on fire in my brain, you know, we always worked and, you know, you don't, you know, I don't get into your personal life too much and you get into mine as much as, you know, I talk about on the podcast. And sometimes if I'm in real trouble, I'll call you. But the idea was because of our work ethic is that this is the job, dude, we can do the job. So I was always aware of,

That we were working. I mean, look, man, I was in my house, you know, surrounded by 1500 envelopes, putting stickers in them and sometimes t-shirts. So I think that going back to the beginning of what you were saying about, you know, the life or death stakes of getting intros recorded. Sure. It's like you're, you're,

but part of the, the, the kind of almost like monomaniacal way you focus on something was to the benefit of this show. When we were starting, even if in the back of your head or in management's head or in anyone else's head, there was some thought that like, Oh, it's going to lead to something else. Like, sure. Maybe so. But what mattered was this became the thing you focused on. And then therefore that allowed it to be the most successful it

could be. Well, that was, and it's been that way forever. You know, even with the standup, you know, the standup sort of began to evolve, you know, alongside of it in, in a way where I'm like, well, both of these things are working. Like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm doing this show, you know, I'm good at it. I'm respected for it. And the comedy is, is right there on the same level. You know, they're both, they're, they're both relative. And I think they're relative in their appeal. Like I got what, you know, I got what I worked for.

And any sort of, when you get frustrated with me and talking or comparing myself to others who are huge or this or that, I think sometimes it frustrates you that, you know, my gratitude is not in place. And I don't always acknowledge that, you know, we did it because I still have that part of my brain, whether it's an addict or, or what something's missing that, you know, I'm always like, well, what about that guy? How come I'm not in? And that's, you know, I know that's a path. It's pathological. So like now, like the effort is to balance out to,

To stifle those voices, not unlike exercise or anything else. I don't like to exercise. But over time, when I wake up and I don't want to do it, you know, some other part of me is walking to the gym. So, you know, it was learning how to override my own insecurity and, you know, self-sabotaging habits.

to sort of do the job. But I think, you know, looking back on it, we were both operating at that same level. It was of utmost importance. Like when I was doing, you know, recording those intros, you know, back then when I was like, I think I can get a, I'm going to rent a conference room in the American lounge. You weren't saying like, no, dude, don't, don't. Right, right. No, because I think for the both of us, we saw this as,

a thing that we were, we, you know, we were plowing this field and the other people who were plowing the same field, they had no, they had no edge on us. We were all doing it at, at best an equal level. And in some cases I felt we were edging ahead. And that's an interesting thing. I have never thought about this until just now, but you're saying, you know, it's like so much of your brain gets wrapped up in the comparison to other people and

that we were winning. Like we were the ones that we were getting, people were comparing to us, right? You were in some ways doing a benchmark thing with this show. Well, it took a while to learn that I was doing it differently. And,

And yeah, but then like in this part of like, you know, in sort of dealing with where we're at now, you know, we are, you know, once everybody made the jump to video and once, you know, the thing opened up and contracted and opened up again, it was like we do this. So like so now, you know, we've we've done what we do and we do what we do.

But we don't feel the desperation to adapt in another way because you have a sense of how the business works. And it's also not how we do the show. And I agree with that because the product we do is so tight and it's specific. But it's hard to be a pioneer and then to watch the world move on without you.

Well, I guess so. But then you also have to think that very few things stay the way they are forever. No, I get that. Yeah. And so you, you, you know, to me in any sense, I think of it, it's like,

This is a legacy podcast. There are a bunch of legacy podcasts. We're not alone in that level. And in a way, to me, it's comforting that we just get to exist in this space and we don't have the kind of pressures on us that, you know, somebody who maybe started three years ago and had a really popular show three years ago is now having a hard time getting

keeping up with the content demands. Like, we don't have those pressures because we built this thing that's just now a 15-year-old machine. Yeah, and it's audio. Yeah. But, yeah, well, that was always the thing with us and with me, you know, and I think we both knew that if we started to...

you know, kind of lose our audience or something that we, you know, bow out before it got sad, but it just never happened. Yeah. Yeah. We always said that we, you know, if we, you know, we saw it going South, we would stop and we, we'd never had to do that. Well, we, we, we do have control over is deciding when we've done enough of this, this,

looking back at the history of the show. And I think we've, I mean, obviously there's plenty of stuff that we can, um, unearth from time to time. But I think over the course of doing these origin shows, we've pretty much gotten the trajectory of how we got from there to here. And, uh, I, I think the interesting thing about all of it is, uh,

every step of the way, like we were, whether it was me with you or even before we met and you were, you know, doing the alternative comedy rooms in New York and that we were driving towards this.

Like this is not a mistake or an off ramp or something different. Like it actually, that is the satisfying part of it that at least in my participation in it, which now goes back 20 years with you. And then, you know, obviously the stuff you were doing on your own before that, like,

We were making the right call. Like the impulses were correct and it landed in a place that makes sense for those impulses. Right, but that was mostly you because, I mean, for whatever reason, you identified as a radio guy, you know, my talent in the medium early on. And I think the real turning point was when, you know, we got you enough money to leave Sirius because you believed in what we could do.

And even if that show didn't pan out, I think that was the beginning of... Break room. Break room, yeah. Of you knowing that we had something that I might not have known we had as much as you did. Chris Lopresto asked me that on the Friday show. We were talking about that Break Room Live stuff. And he was like...

so wait, you're at this serious and that's a stable company, you know, that, and they were paying you well, what in the world would make you think to go back to air America, which you knew was a disaster. Yeah. And I was honestly like, Oh, I was pretty sure it would be a disaster, but I,

this was the way back in to doing the thing you and I could do. Right. Right. Like if, if no one, if, if nothing was going to come of it for us to play around and figure out exactly the way to do this. And we didn't even know it would be a podcast, but like just some way for us to get that thing going. And that made sense to me. That was the best investment I could make. I wasn't staying at serious. Yeah. Well, the shift from a sort of upper management to, you know,

independent, uh, uh, you know, kind of, uh, creative business owner. That was a big shift for you. That was good. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's still kind of weird that we, that we do it this way, but you know, honestly, like obviously it's, it's, it's like the kind of, uh,

culmination of my work and it has you know provided me a living and a you know life that that that i like but you know for you where you have all these other things you could go off and make a tv show now you have your stand-up and you have um you know a a vast uh body of work yeah in your life that you've been building i've been on the simpsons

Yeah, right. But like all of this stuff, like the the the idea that like the podcast was still the thing that, you know, going back to what you were saying about you didn't have to pay a man. You didn't have to give a manager a percentage of this podcast. It was yours. Yeah. And that I think is the probably the going to wind up ultimately being the biggest legacy of it for you. Oh, yeah. Like the thing that I made. Yeah, that's the important thing.

Yeah, but also that, you know, how it's changed me as a person and how it is an essential part of my creativity and my humanity. And, you know, in terms of being with other people, it really does function well.

Or nostalgic.

Yeah, navels are interesting. You want to look at them. They're either weird and gross or, you know, it's pretty fascinating. You do have to remember to clean them. That's true, yes, which I think we've done. We just did it. We've been pretty spick and span with this operation. All right, man. ♪♪♪

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This whole show came from the full Marin feed on WTF+. We put out two bonus episodes every week, and you get every episode of WTF ad-free. To sign up, go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFpod.com and click on WTF+. We'll be back on Monday with actor Ron Livingston. And that was fun. I like that guy. And now, Brendan, if you could find...

Christmas music I might have riffed at some point or just end with something from the vault because I'm exhausted from doing the guitar from the last episode. Boomer lives. Monkey in the Fonda. Cat angels everywhere, man.

Cat angels. Happy holidays.