Episode 1362 - Whitney Cummings

**Marc Maron** (0:09)
All right, let's do this. How are you, WTFers, WTF buddies, WTFadelics? What's happening? I'm Marc Maron, this is my podcast. Obviously, I am broadcasting from somewhere other than my garage studio in Los Angeles. I'm out in the world. I'm out in the Canadian world. I'm in Canada having a vacation. Is that okay? I don't take many vacations. I travel a lot, but I don't do the vacating much. So, right, is that a word? Vacationing, I think. Vacating, that would mean something different. That would mean I'm leaving, right? It doesn't matter. I don't need to look anything up. Vacationing is the word I'm looking for. So I'm away for a bit, but I did want to continue to do my podcast while I'm away, as I am want to do. Is that how you say that? As I am want to do, as I do?
First of all, before I even talk about who the guest is, it was exactly 13 years ago today, we released the very first episode of WTF. That was September 1st, 2009
Is that crazy? Is that crazy?
I mean, do you remember? I barely remember, but I kind of remember the panic.
I remember the panic of probably the first eight years of doing this show, this constant fucking panic of making sure that we honored our responsibility and our promise we made to ourselves to put up a new show every Monday and every Thursday, no matter what, since September 1st, 2009 And there have been some crazy times. I mean, the show has evolved. Initially, there was like nine podcasts in the world that people listened to. They were around. I'm not saying that we invented it, and I won't say that.
I think we kind of helped to define what the new world of podcasting is, the business and whatnot. But at the beginning, we were doing it in the middle of the night, not even the middle of the night, but after hours at a radio studio.
And it evolved into what it is now. But from the very beginning, we got to do the two shows. And there's been different varieties of panic. And then there was also the panic about social media platforms, getting it out there. How does it all work? It was the fascinating thing about the whole thing, especially given where podcasting is currently, is what it was like at the beginning and what it all became.
It's kind of unreal to me to think that we started by stealing time in a radio studio with random segments, some guests. It evolved more when I moved back to LA and I put it in the garage. The garage was not set up as a studio. It was full of just junk that didn't fit in my house. And then it became more of an interview show with a third act that was usually some sort of fake guest act, a comedy piece.
And then as it evolved into an interview show and things built up around it, that we saw the whole business kind of evolve and grow around us. You know, we were at the ground level with a lot of different fights that we had to fight, you know, patent troll fights, you know, figuring out how to get advertising and watching that business grow alongside the, you know, networks growing alongside. And everyone kind of rose at the same time, those of us who stayed in it. And we saw it literally become a business. I mean, at the beginning, we had two advertisers. We had maybe three. We had Adam and Eve, which was basically sex toys. We had Audible, which was, you know, Audible. And then we had Just Coffee, which was something we carried over from a streaming video show. We did Break Room Live back in the day when people couldn't even stream it. It was, we did streaming video before anyone was really able to stream. I actually did an internet podcast type of show before anybody was able to do it. This is not a test I did for Microsoft on Broadway Videos Dime. Geez, I don't even remember what year it was, but I think it was, it was a live sort of audio show with visual components that would happen simultaneously. This is before any kind of video technology. And it turned out, you know, we put a lot of work into it. A lot of big guests were part of it. Phil Hartman, I interviewed on that. Conan, it was because of the Broadway video poll. A lot of guest segments. And I don't think anybody was able to listen to that that wasn't in the Microsoft building or on the Microsoft campus. But moving from where it became, where it came from, which was, I remember when we first started doing this, in order to make it a job, we offered tiers of membership, like donations, like NPR kind of thing. And you'd get swag if you gave a certain amount of money, a monthly donation thing that would kind of recur. And I just remember my entire house being filled with envelopes, some with t-shirts, some with stickers, some with postcards, just sorting that stuff out with just these Excel spreadsheets of all of the subscribers. And oh my God, running a bit.