Farewell to WTF with Marc Maron - 19.10.25
WTF With Marc Maron: Episode 1686 - Barack Obama
After sixteen years, two episodes a week, and 1,686 in total, Marc Maron’s WTF podcast has come to an end. Not much more needs to be said about how Maron, along with producer Brendan McDonald, helped establish podcasting as a serious medium. When then-sitting president Barack Obama sat down with Maron in his garage in 2015 for a wide-ranging, unguarded, and completely candid conversation, it was a genuinely unprecedented cultural moment. So it makes perfect sense for Obama to return as the final guest.
It’s a predictably interesting conversation that allows both men to reflect on the monumental changes each of them has been through since they last sat down, but it isn’t quite as powerful or as emotionally satisfying an ending as you might hope. For that, you’ll want to listen to a few of the episodes leading up to the finale: the one with John Mulaney, where Maron reveals he’s decided to call it a day; a retrospective of his best moments curated by Judd Apatow; and the emotional penultimate episode, which captures Maron at his very best - open and unflinching, and delivered with an intimacy that listeners have come to cherish as he reflects on the person he was when he started and who he is now.
After all, the magic of WTF has always been Maron himself. He was always more than the archetype of white male comedian with a podcast. The stories about his coterie of cats, the unflinching self-examinations of his flaws, and, of course, the fearless and often deeply vulnerable interviews he conducted with some of the biggest cultural figures on the planet were much more than that. Robin Williams’s 2010 episode, in which he spoke candidly about depression and suicidal thoughts, became profoundly moving when Maron re-aired it after Williams’s death. His two-part reconciliation with Louis C.K. that same year was a painful but ultimately cathartic listen - two ex–best friends admitting how they’d hurt each other (although, perhaps understandably, the pair no longer speak). And in 2020, following the sudden death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, Maron re-released their first conversation together, introducing it with a devastating monologue that laid bare his grief. Across sixteen years, moments like these charted an emotional evolution for Maron - from defensiveness and self-laceration to empathy, openness, and connection.
Maron ending WTF also coincides with a turning point in the industry. It is everything ‘podcast experts’ will tell you a podcast cannot be: defiantly audio-only, unplanned and unstructured, and with extended monologues that meander between the mundane and the elegiac. As it comes to an end, I can’t help but feel it’s a loss for those who were there at the beginning of podcasting. Before everyone had to have one, working with brands and building content to please the algorithm, podcasting was filled with fiercely independent voices who were outside the mainstream. WTF wasn’t perfect, but that was the point.
WTF With Marc Maron is produced by Brendan McDonald
