Episode 1685 - Marc Maron

**Marc Maron** (0:09)
All right, let's do this. How are you, WTFers, WTF buddies, WTFniks? What's happening? I am Marc Maron, and this is my podcast WTF. Welcome to it for almost the last time. This will be the penultimate, is that how you say it? Penultimate episode of this show. We have one more show to do. That will be on Monday. That will not be recorded here in the garage. This one, I just wanted it to be us. I wanted it to be in the garage with just me and all of you. Me and you, we've had a relationship for a long time. A long time, 16 years. That's the longest relationship I've ever had with you. And if it hasn't been that long for some of you, you'll get the feeling. Get up to speed. Go spend 16 years with me. You can do it online. But in some levels, I understand that this is like a breakup, I guess. I don't feel it in that way. I know that some of you are sad. I'm sad. It's a big change for me, but sometimes you have to move on. And I know you don't have a say in this, and I apologize, but that's sometimes how these breakups go. But the truth is, is that we've certainly all come a long way together. I got an email today or someone reached out on me. She'd been listening to me for 16 years, and she started when she was five, because her parents used to make her listen to me in the car, and she hated me, because I was just this annoying kind of grumpy grown up. And somehow or another, now that she's in her twenties, she's come around to understanding the grumpiness. But that's crazy that people have grown up with me, that people have started with me in their teens and their twenties, even in their thirties, and they're now in their forties now, and their entire lives have changed, and I've been there, I've been talking to you. I appreciate the gravity of that. People are coming up to me a lot right now and saying, I'm going to miss you. I don't know what I'm going to do without the show. You were always with me. I get people emailing that they've taken me all over the world with them. And I, again, I appreciate the weight of that, and I'm grateful to have been part of your lives. I really am. You know, I have to make sure that I say that because I don't always think that way. I don't, I'm just sitting here in this garage by myself. And I'm surrounded with kind of homemade sound panels that a kid made for me. I've got some tchotchkes and bullshit on the desk here. And I walk out here from my house, and I do this, and I don't, I'm just talking out. I'm talking out. I don't know where it all lands, but over the years and certainly in the last few months, it's been very moving for me to hear how much of what I do and what we did here, the conversations, the stories, my life has had an impact. It's profound and humbling, because I rarely think about that. I mean, it's been a long time since I thought about how many people are listening or it's been a long time since I've listened to a whole podcast. So my experience with this is I'm just sitting out here. I'm just sitting out here in the garage talking, but I know I'm talking to you. And I do that as full heartedly as I possibly can. And I guess that comes through. I want to reflect a little bit, I think, because I've been thinking about me in relation to this show and relation to my life and how it kind of began. But also before that, before that, and some words come up to me. You know, look, I've been called self-centered, I've been called narcissistic, I've been called, you know, a naval gazer. You know, these are the bad things. And in reflection about who I am and what my creativity is, I came upon a few words. A lot of times when I talk about starting this podcast, there's a sense that it was desperation. And that word has connotations that are negative, that, you know, that guy's desperate. And I think if you remove the judgment tone from desperation and you apply it to your life, the definition of desperation is a state of despair, typically one which results in a rash or extreme behavior. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it. At the beginning of this show, I was in a very bad place. My career was in the toilet and there was really nowhere to go from where I was. I'd been through a lot of shit. I'd been through two divorces. One that was dramatically and traumatically heartbreaking and costly. I didn't have a way forward really with comedy that made sense. I'd already been at it a long time. I was in my 40s. And rash or extreme behavior, the extreme behavior. See, even that definition has the connotation of something that could be negative. But the rash or extreme behavior that I took part in, in my desperation at the time, was to do something totally different. Look, I knew I could be on these mics, but the extreme behavior was like, we're going to do this thing because we have access to this technology to put it out there. And there's, we don't know where it goes from there. There's no money involved. There's no guarantee of anything, listeners, anything. No one even knows what these podcasts are. But I needed to put myself out there. And the extreme behavior was taking that chance. The rash behavior was really just believing in it. So I think that framing desperation in that way, it becomes proactive. The other word I was thinking about was urgency. I live in an urgent state. I think that when you're self-employed and you do a lot of things, you're always chasing something. And if you're not organized, you have to do something right when it comes into your head or you might not do it. But the definition of urgency is importance requiring swift action and also an earnest and persistent quality insistence. I am at the core an urgent person. Everything happens urgently. When I talk, all of what I put out into the world requires me talking, and it's always urgent. It's very rarely passive. So when you mix the sort of desperate extreme action with urgency, that is a large component of why I connect, I think. And it doesn't go away. The urgency is annoying because some things can wait, but I'm not great at the waiting. And the great thing about doing this podcast and talking to you is that in my urgency, no matter where I am in my heart and mind, I have to put it out there for myself and then for you. It becomes that. The other word that I thought of was connection. Connection, a relationship in which a person, thing or ideas is linked or associated with something else. I live for connection. I live for it because I need it to know that I exist. Need, that's the other word. Need, require something because it is essential and very important. I have no ability to compartmentalize. It's always drenched in need. The need for connection with urgency coming out of, at the beginning, desperation. And this is how I live my life. And this is, it's all very immediate. And it's all very important to me. Neediness, that implies that's a negative. But everyone has needs. So when you take like neediness, desperation, urgency, it all seems negative, but it is not. It is the only way that I can live in the world. And it's the way that my brain and my heart works. And it just happens to sort of fit, you know, what I do, which is talk in the moment, unscripted, like now, both in comedy and this podcast, which are my, that's what I do. I'm a stand up comedian by trade. I'm a podcaster by trade. But also this is my creativity. And then the other word I looked up was selfish.