WTF with Marc Maron and the End of the First Age of Podcasting

While I was away on holiday last week, news broke of an end to Marc Maron’s fabled old podcast, WTF. The show, which is approaching its 16th anniversary, will wrap up at some time in the autumn. Like a kid squeezing into an over-large black suit for their grandpa’s funeral, the world of podcast enthusiasts went into a period of mourning. Childhood, it seems, is over.

“When we first started, there were no podcasts,” Maron told listeners, as he announced the show’s final months. “Now there’s nothing but podcasts.” And so it has come to pass that the lifespan of WTF – the average life expectancy of a Papillon dog – has transpired alongside the growth of the medium, from fickle childishness to surly adolescence. Launched in 2009 with producer Brendan McDonald, who had worked with Maron during his stint on Air America, the show was a sleeper hit. Maron, after all, was more famous amongst his peers than he was amongst the American populace. A staple on the stand-up circuit and late night shows, Maron had plenty of cult appeal, but nothing like the profile required, now, to turbo-boost a podcast to the top of the charts. Instead, he had something that, back in 2009, was as valuable a commodity as fame: time.

Time allowed Maron to, by his own admission, start the show with no clear sense of direction. He and McDonald agreed to publish twice a week, but, beyond that, they were winging it. If and how the show would ever become financially viable seemed like a problem for the future. At the time, just 15 years ago, there was no obvious route to commercialise a podcast, even if plenty of people were recognising the potential. And so Maron – relocating to Los Angeles in the early months of the show – began a commitment that would last a Papillon’s entire eternity, and which would demonstrate both the enormous potential of the medium, and the ways in which it has changed.

Talking about the show’s end, Maron was keen to stress that the series had always been a two-man operation. Maron in his recording garage in LA (the idea of podcasts being recorded in garages owes much to him), and McDonald producing (and, presumably, editing) from Brooklyn. Of course, this is a take that obscures the show’s relationship with Swedish hosting and advertising platform Acast, which began in 2022. “This collaboration presents a real step forward for us in the North American market, adding millions of listens and strengthening our brand even further in the region,” Acast’s CEO, Ross Adams, said in a statement. “At the same time we will also be working with the show to increase the number of Marc Maron fans across the globe.” And yet, for all that this partnership ought to have secured the long term viability of the show, its conclusion was announced within 3 years of the deal being inked. A step forward, and then a step back.

The thing is, WTF with Marc Maron has always been a proper, old school podcast. It was a show conceived and sustained through a period when it was not at all clear that podcasts could cut through to the mainstream, or disburse significant pay cheques to creators. It grew into a popular – and, more importantly, influential – show in spite of the absence of a corporate infrastructure propelling it forward. Modernity, when it arrived in 2022, was inevitable. After all, who wouldn’t want to cash-in on a product forged in the unprofitable past? It was like Ferruccio Lamborghini discovering that there was a market for sports cars, as well as the tractors he’d been so doggedly flogging. As podcasts became aggressively commercialised, nobody could leave WTF alone.

And yet, there was never a sense that the show was sculpted around this lust for lucre. This goes back, I think, to its original ethos. To publish “rain, shine, death” (in Maron’s words), twice a week. Once you have committed to that, allowed the momentum to sweep you up, it is hard to start caring about things like tailoring your broadcast schedule to the demands of advertisers, or working with a data analytics team to optimise performance windows. This is old school podcasting in its truest sense: putting your content out into the world, to like it or lump it. And the world has always liked WTF.

In a sense, every trend we currently see in podcasting could be dated back to the show’s genesis in 2009. The dominance of the interview format? Check. Comedian hosts? Check. Celebrities interviewing other celebrities? Check. Indeed, the whole public perception of the ‘tone’ of podcasting owes much to Maron and WTF. It was the loquacity of American talk radio stretched to an extreme, opening with an intimate, ruminative monologue (learnt, surely, from evenings spent on the late night couches) and then transitioning into an interview that luxuriated in its potential for discursion. The show launched in September 2009. In December of that year, another comedian, Joe Rogan, would launch his own show, The Joe Rogan Experience, which would go on to become the most powerful podcast in the world. Both men saw the potential of the format, possibly even influencing one another. “[We are] two ends of the spectrum of podcasting, coming from the same source,” Maron wrote recently, of his fellow podcaster. “On some level, we unleashed a format that can be used for dubious means, propaganda and pure evil. But hey, it’s not the atomic bomb.”

For me, Maron exemplifies the First Age of Podcasting, one which grew organically from the traditions of talk radio (both the deranged sermonising of conservative talk radio, and the smug pontification of its liberal sibling). The name of the game was freedom. Freedom to express yourself, safe from the long arm of the FCC. Freedom to work without the constraints of an editor or publisher, who might enforce certain demands. And freedom to be commissioned, even if the world didn’t want to commission you. Talk radio had always attracted zealots in need of a secular pulpit, but the limitation had been baked into the format. Only a tiny elite would ever get their voices heard. Podcasts smashed that separation into smithereens.

Maron became the prototype for a whispering intimacy. Funny and confessional, his show dissolved the barriers usually placed between comic and audience. There was no stage, no proscenium, no judgmental fellow audience members to make sure you laughed at the right things. This was the comedy that was administered by charismatic soaks at pubs across the nation; a first-person comedy of the people, for the people. It came to define the early tone of podcasts, and was imitated so frequently it’s easy to forget that it was never bettered.

Now, in 2025, the podcast charts are dominated by comedians. Theo Von, Amy Poehler, Shane Gillis, Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, Will Arnett, Tim Dillon, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah; all have podcasts in the current US Top 100. This is no longer an organic process, born out of a comedian’s ambition to be heard (and the availability of excess time). This is now a deliberate process of corporate development. A production company finds a broadcaster and pitches them a comedian to lead a show. What the show itself is doesn’t really matter (after all, WTF is a hard-to-define, general interview show), but what the networks want is a name (or names). It is now hard to pitch an interview show if it does not have a comedian already attached. The pipeline for comics doesn’t go from talk radio to podcasts these days, it goes from stand-up special or sitcoms to podcasts. The inefficiency of the finishing school disappears. There is no need to wait 13 years before entering a commercial partnership; these projects have been selling adverts since day minus-one. Indeed, some of them are really adverts themselves: the SmartLess podcast has just launched a low-cost mobile network, further blurring the line between content and advertiser.

These shows are the Second Age of Podcasting, an age where the format has become self-aware, and cynically harvests the successful elements of its glory years. Maron hasn’t said that he’s ending WTF because of any particular industrial frustrations, nor do I think the project (which is clearly still lucrative) has money issues. But existing within an endlessly regurgitative cycle of pale imitators must be tiring. Podcasting is not a medium where shows grow exponentially. In the past few years, WTF has been faced down by more and more competitors, many of whom are far better resourced to attract and retain audiences. And so the cycle of trying to produce two shows a week, indefinitely, just to tread water, becomes exhausting. If you aren’t growing – aren’t materially reaching new audiences – what incentive is there to go on?

Unlike Maron, Rogan was happy to sell out. He sold The Joe Rogan Experience to Spotify for $200m in 2020, and hasn’t looked back. As the world burns, Rogan speeds on in his gold-plated Lamborghini (non-tractor). But Maron never seemed comfortable with the idea of selling out. Even the 2022 deal with Acast – a necessity as the market evolved – seemed half-hearted. The show continued to carry the same sort of adverts we were hearing a decade ago (do any WTF listeners not know what Squarespace is, at this point?). And so, this autumn, the show will go out on its own terms.

I don’t doubt that Maron will be back, in the future, with another podcast. He will have more offers than he knows what to do with, and somehow I think that an 8 or 9 figure cheque from Spotify might lure him back in. After all, he might not have received Rogan’s enormous one-off (or two-off) payday, but he has remained part of the comedic mainstream. The podcast has led, directly, to the commissioning of his own sitcom, Maron, as well as big roles in shows like Netflix’s GLOW and AppleTV+’s Stick. His filmography has a clear before and after: before 2009 he was a jobbing character actor, making cameo appearances, largely in indie films, and after 2009 he was an in-demand publicity asset for any production. That’s how you survive, longterm, in the mercurial world of podcasting.

With the end of WTF comes the end of an era in which regular people (ok, regular semi-famous people) could get rich and famous off the medium. In the future, few shows will be recorded in garages. Few shows will be self-engineered by the talent. Few shows will choose their date of departure, rather than being axed following disappointing focus grouping with the coveted 11-13 demographic. This is organic podcasting – life emerging from the primordial soup, with beauty but without design – that is dying out. Now, in this mature phase of podcasting, everything feels designed and executed by committee, and it’s hard not to miss the rough edges of a format driven by purpose rather than ambition.

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