Marc Maron Breaks Down Walls: The Untold Battle with Grief and Anger That Will Change How You Connect Forever

Alright, buckle up—this one’s not your average sit-down. Ever wondered what it’s like when the guy who’s spent over 16 years coaxing secrets out of everyone from comedians to presidents flips the script and becomes the one under the spotlight? Yep, we’re talking Marc Maron, the master of candid conversation, the man who turned a garage and two mics into a cultural phenomenon with over 1,600 episodes of WTF. From his kitchen in LA to a tucked-away Lebanese joint, this isn’t just an interview; it’s a raw exploration of friendship, loss, addiction, and that unshakable human urge to tell our stories—even the ugly ones. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve got your own mess to sort out, Maron’s brutally honest journey might just be the mirror—and maybe the map—you didn’t know you needed. So, ready to see the other side of the mic? Let’s dive in. LEARN MORE

ALRIGHT, LET’S DO THIS, What-the-Fucksters, What-the-Fuckbuddies, What-the-Fuckniks, What-the-Fuckaneers. We have something a little different for you today. It’s different, and I think you’ll agree it’s pretty special.

What it is: My conversation with Marc Maron. Marc the fuck Maron. It started in his kitchen in Los Angeles, and then we drove to a Lebanese restaurant he likes called Skaf’s, which becomes important later in the story.

Now: You’re probably reading this because you’ve listened to all or some of the 1,664 episodes of WTF, the massively influential podcast that Maron created, that he hosts with an improbably alluring mixture of unaffected curiosity and acerbic wit, and that gave shape, substance, and life to the entire medium of podcasting. You not only know who Maron is; you also probably consider him a friend, a good friend even, because over the past 16 years, he’s shared so many stories with you—stories about his humbling early career as a comic; stories about the sudden death of his soulmate five years ago, a midnight horror that changed him forever; stories about Boomer, his cat who ran away; about his emotionally odd parents; about his free fall into cocaine and alcohol; about all of the things he has endured to become singularly Marc Maron, which are also the things that make him all of us.

And in that long and generous act of talking to you with fearless candor and brutal honesty and sometimes uncomfortable humor about his life, he has inspired you to think more clearly about your own.

The way a good friend does.

So, yes: Today, What-the-Fuckers, Marc Maron is on the other mic. The interviewee, not the interviewer.

Even if that’s not why you’re reading this—even if you only got to know Maron this year when he played the irritable, slightly scruffy, wise caddie on the Owen Wilson Apple TV+ golf comedy Stick, or if all you know about him is that he once interviewed Barack Obama on his podcast while Obama was president—it’s going to be a worthwhile experience. This guy is a gifted talker, and the subjects we covered include friendship, love, death, grief, fate, anger, full-body workouts, perseverance, addiction, and why people tell stories.

PRESIDENT Barack Obama on WTF with Maron in his garage in L.A. on June 19, 2015

WTF was the first podcast, or one of the first, to amass millions of listeners and to become a cultural force with the power to influence the national conversation. Maron started it in 2009—before Joe Rogan, before Serial, before Armchair Expert, before any podcast you can name. He set up two microphones in his garage, and it was just him and his producer, Brendan—which it still is—and at first he talked mostly with fellow comedians who were also his friends. Then it grew. Robin Williams came on and he talked about suicide. Louis C.K. came on (before the masturbation thing) and cried. Obama came on. Clooney. Springsteen. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, who mentioned at one point that he never really understood what Inception was about.

What we have now is a treasury. You can look at what Maron has given us in the same context as what Studs Turkel gave the world, turning hours of tape into Pulitzer-winning literary chronicles of everyday Americans’ lives. Or the Federal Writers’ Project, which during the Great Depression commissioned thousands of unemployed writers to conduct oral histories of regular, remarkable people.

Look, we all wonder how much we’re supposed to tell people about ourselves. Oversharing is a word you hear. TMI. I understand that, and I also think we could all err a little more on the side of oversharing. Over the past whatever-hundred years, we—and by “we,” I mean men—have learned to undershare, to keep it to ourselves, to tamp our feelings and just kind of smile and be cool and act like we’ve got it all under control. Well, nobody has anything under control. Nobody knows anything, and we all need each other. And what Marc Maron has proved is that we need him in particular, because every so often, somebody comes along who, if we turn everything else off for an hour and listen, expands our lives. Our lives expand beyond our tiny little existence, and we begin to understand that we are part of a collective human experience. And from then on, after that fairly obvious epiphany, we realize that We. Are. Not. Alone in this. That is a comfort.

Maron is ending his podcast. This is awful news, of course, because for a lot of us, his Monday-and-Thursday WTF cadence of shows has been like vitamins. It keeps us mentally healthy. By telling us relentlessly about himself, and by asking famous people how they slayed every obstacle between insecurity and success, Maron has—guest by guest, question by question, episode by episode—given us tools to navigate our shit, to know how much to share…and, at the end of each day, to be okay.

So let’s do this.

Men’s Health: Where did these guys get their names?

Marc Maron: You just gotta figure out names. Like the black cat, Buster, who’s hiding upstairs. He showed up on the porch of my old house, eating from the food that I would feed the feral cats. And he was a kitten, like three months old. He had been out in the wild for a bit because he’s kind of…intense. But I trapped him and me and my girlfriend at the time got him fixed up, and he became my cat.

Buster is Buster Kitten, like Buster Keaton.

And then this guy, I had options. I didn’t know if I wanted to call him Roscoe or Beans. And then I just ended up on Charlie, but his full name is Charlie Beans Roscoe.

Then Sammy. I don’t know, just—I like old-school names. Sam.

Boomer, the original cat, came with that name. I got him at a shelter. I got all these cats at that shelter. That was right when I got to L.A. I’d come out here with a cat, Butch, who died pretty young from congenital heart problems, and we got Boomer to be Butch’s companion. I got him at a shelter, and he was the sketchiest cat. Like he was just nuts. He eventually ended up living outside and he disappeared. Butch died. And then there was Monkey and LaFonda, who came from Queens.

Talking about those cats kind of enabled me to find my voice on radio, when I was on Air America, on the morning show.

Maron at home in Glendale, California, on July 9 with one of his beloved cats.

MH: Did you have cats growing up?

MM: Yeah, there was a couple around. I grew up with Old English sheepdogs. My dad was into showing them at one point. This was in New Mexico. There was a large wild cat that my mom called Garfield. Not very original, but he was around. And then there was another cat with a limp called Gimper. And then there was another one that my mom got that she liked. I don’t remember that cat’s name. Enchilada or something.

MH: What happened between growing up in Albuquerque and becoming a comic?

MM: I went to Boston for college, five years undergrad. After college, I went to L.A. for the first time. I guess that was in ’87. I wanted to be a comic. I ended up being a doorman at the Comedy Store and just kind of locked in and did my graduate work in cocaine with Sam Kinison. I was getting out of control on drugs.

MH: When drugs became a problem for you, was it because suddenly you’re living the all-night lifestyle of a comic?

MM: I don’t know, I think drugs are drugs, and if you’re a drug person, you’re a drug person. I mean, the lifestyle is drugs. It took me a while to get sober and stay sober.

MH: Is that a journey you started on your own, or did somebody sit down and say, “Marc, you’re…”

MM: Yeah. A woman. I had never really locked into recovery. I would just white-knuckle it, and then it would drift. But in 1999, when I was pretty bitter and I didn’t see a future in being a comic, I surrendered. I was married, and that was not great. I was still doing comedy in a high-profile way, Conan and stuff, but I was also breaking down. And then the clouds opened and this woman came up to me and said, “You’re Marc Maron.”

I’m like, “Yeah.”

She goes, “What happened to you?”

I’m like, “What?” And I’m all sweaty and pudgy, drunk, cokey.

She said, “I can help you get sober.”

I was like, “Sure, I’ll do anything to hang out with you.”

I followed her around to meetings and learned how to put sobriety before anything else. And as a comic, I had a lot of free time on my hands. I’d go to two, three meetings a day. It’s gonna be, what is it, 20, 25? Holy shit. It’s gonna be 26 years this month. She won’t talk to me anymore, but I did get sober.

MH: Where did you get the confidence to stand onstage and try to make strangers laugh?

MM: For the first however long it takes—could be 10, 20 years—a lot of your energy is put into pretending you’re not afraid. That becomes the muscle you learn until one day it gives way and you’re not. I was doing one-nighters, dude. And I was going to places like Ogunquit, Maine, to do a show at a seafood place. It has to do with that obsessive singleness of focus of I’m gonna do this. You just live a life wandering around, writing things down, getting onstage, hammering it out.

MH: Did you ever wonder if the rest of your life would be spent driving all night to seafood restaurants for one-nighters?

MM: I think the most dramatic moment of wondering what my future was was when I started the podcast—and that was after I’d been at it for years. I was in my mid-40s, but I still hadn’t caught on. Even with 50 Conans, four Lettermans, specials on Comedy Central, I just wasn’t selling tickets.

MH: Did you ever have to work other jobs?

MM: You get to a point where you’re like, Well, I could always… And then you’re like, Oh shit, I could always what? The plan B gets pretty foggy.

So just by cosmic coincidence, but not without chops, the podcast became successful. Another Hail Mary, in the same way I’d taken a radio job at Air America in 2004—I was pretty down on my luck then too. I’d just moved out here and married that woman who got me sober, and I got this opportunity to do a radio show for a lot of money. I’d never done radio in that way, but ultimately, I found that I could do it.

Who knows why somebody can come through those mics? It seems like anybody can do it—and anybody does now, with podcasts—but what is it that makes it compelling to a listener? I don’t know what that is, but I have it.

The structure of the early episodes was primarily me talking to other comics about how I might have been a dick to them. The podcast is really about me. That was an instinctual choice, and it was annoying to some people at first, but I was never doing an interview show. It was a conversation show.

MH: But as it turns out, you’re a hell of a good interviewer.

MM: Yeah, in my way. I do have an approach to it, which I think has now been a model for other people, where it isn’t a journalistic interview. The drive is to connect and to have a real conversation. You want to go to the restaurant?

[He drives us to Skaf’s, a family-run Lebanese place in Glendale that he loves. It’s a place he’s talked about on the air.]

MH: Are you getting tired of talking about ending the podcast and everyone asking why?

MM: No, we can talk about that. It’s not a big conversation. We did an amazing thing, and people can’t understand when you stop something. We were never in the business of “content” or “monetization.” We were doing something out of the passion and the uniqueness of how we did it. When you stop something like this, you don’t want it to fade away. You don’t want the quality to diminish. You don’t want it to become a chore.

MH: There will always be more people to talk to.

MM: Yeah, but you just don’t want to do something just because you can. You don’t want to be the guy that people are like, Oh, shit, he’s still doing that? So, fuck it.

Maron often plays the guitar to the intro and outro of his podcast.

MH: Aside from defining the medium, another contribution you’ve made with WTF is to help make it okay for men to talk about ourselves as a form of mental health. To talk about our problems. Because telling stories about ourselves is something humans have always done, maybe as a tool of survival.

MM: I think that’s true. I think face-to-face human interaction, on a one-on-one level or on a community level or on a stage level, is the spirit of humanity. When you think about the elevation of theater, going back to early civilizations—I don’t like the word storytelling as this hook, but there is something to it. The humanity of it.

MH: Has WTF been therapy for you? Do you also talk to a therapist?

MM: I haven’t in years. I just started again recently. I’ll go if I need help with a particular obstacle or issue I’m having. On and off throughout my life, usually for specific things—I find that helpful.

I do think doing the podcast helped me build and expand an empathy and expand my ability to listen and to feel other people’s stories. And yes, certainly it helped me as a person. It’s been my primary social life in a lot of ways.

MH: You recorded a podcast just two days after you lost your partner, Lynn Shelton, in 2020, in which you were crying while talking to us, essentially eulogizing her in a raw, beautiful way.

MM: Those kinds of choices are interesting choices that could have only happened in relation to what I do. Brendan and I had promised ourselves that we would keep our commitment to always doing a new show every Monday and Thursday, no matter what. And we did that. We did it for 16 years. And when Lynn died, I was alone and it was the middle of the pandemic, and he was like, “We don’t have to do it today. We don’t ever have to do it again.” And I thought, Well, this is what I do: show myself in all these different ways, through all these different things. And maybe it’ll be helpful to me and to others. So, yeah, I did. I got on the mics, and it’s pretty brutal.

I do think it helped normalize grief. It’s something everybody experiences, but they’re isolated in it because they don’t want to burden other people. There’s really nothing unusual about loss. It’s guaranteed. But it’s so terrifying to everybody because of their own sense of mortality. A lot of times, you don’t need to do much if somebody’s in grief. You just have to sit there. That’s why Jews sit shiva for a week. You sit around, do nothing, eat, and everybody sits there with you. That’s the best. I knew early on that I wasn’t the victim. Lynn was. And I was dealing with something—loss—that’s not unusual. But it’s hard and it’s painful and it feels like it’s never going to go away. No one’s going to fix it for you. Whatever you’re expecting, it’s not going to come from other people.

MH: There are things we do, like an open casket. That’s an ancient thing that some people find creepy, but it was born of “Well, we’re going to have one last…”

MM: Right. Closure.

MH: Closure, yes. Though I don’t think closure exists, or that it’s even the goal.

MM: No, but definitely to some part of your brain, these acts deliver the message. Jews don’t do an open casket, but I did go down and spend time—after she died, I went to the ICU, and the doctors let me see her.

MH: You got to touch her face.

MM: Yeah. And I think I understand why that’s important. I didn’t want to do it.

MH: But you’re glad you did.

MM: Yeah. I mean, seeing her like that is not as haunting as thinking about the two or three days before she died. Not knowing she was going to die. That’s haunting. Taking her away in the ambulance.

MH: You knew something was wrong but didn’t think she was going to die.

MM: No. Nope. [Long pause.] What are you thinking?

Maron with his partner, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, who died in 2020 from a form of leukemia.

MH: Well, now I’m thinking about my own stuff.

MM [softer voice]: Yeah.

MH: Because everyone has their stuff.

MM: Right. The foundation of it is one alcoholic talking to another. The idea is that if you want to drink, and you talk to another alcoholic, you get out of yourself, and you listen to them, and the moment will pass. And it will help both of you. And that’s profound. Talking to somebody else in a balanced way gets you out of yourself because you have the experience of connection and common struggle. These moments pass, and you sometimes can save a life just by taking that phone call.

MH: You figure out who you can call, and who…maybe not.

MM: Yeah. And I think that can alter a friendship. I used to do a joke about these people who say they have a lot of friends. They don’t. You only need two. You need the main guy, and you need the guy you go to when you drain the main guy.

I’m not really a navel-gazer, but it’s taken me a lot to put together some way of seeing my own problems, some way of making sense of my past. Everything is already written—whether it be spiritual literature, psychology literature, philosophy literature—to address these questions. And that’s a hell of a big bunch of books. So eventually, you can cobble together something that will enable you to see yourself and to make different choices and to understand yourself.

Look, you don’t have that much time on earth. There’s a saying in the recovery game: progress, not perfection. You’re probably not going to fix everything, but you can figure out how to live with it in a healthier way where you’re not hurting yourself or others.

MH: And for you, what did that look like?

MM: After Lynn died, I was exercising five days a week. I was out on my porch with a trainer with weights. I was doing yoga. Even before she died, I was trying to stay physical during Covid. I have a mild body dysmorphia or eating disorder. Not mild, actually. Fairly profound, because my mom was kind of an anorexic. So I was like, Dude, you’ve got to lean into these patterns that keep you fit mentally and physically.

There were a couple of guys, after Lynn died, who were showing up. We’d go hike up that mountain over there two or three times a week. It’s a hard hike. Fifty minutes up, like 20 down. I also do full-body workouts two or three times a week with a trainer. And I do it always. Even when I wake up and I don’t want to do it, the next thing I know, I’m watching myself put my shorts on. We live through these things.

MH: It helps your body, and that helps your mind.

MM: Yeah. And then trying meditation and doing that kind of stuff saved me too, in terms of spiraling. Meditation does make you feel better. It does change your brain chemistry. It’s all connected.

Exercising regularly helps Maron slay stress and stay strong.

MH: Do you like meditation?

MM: No. I see the benefits of it. I don’t have the patience for it. My expectations out of things are that I want a bigger bang, but with meditation, you’re sort of working for the opposite of a bigger bang.

MH: You know, you always say you’re the cranky guy. You seem happy.

MM: I think because of my intensity, and I’m kind of lit up—people kind of call it that. I don’t see myself like that at the core. I think I’m just intense and a little neurotic and I get worked up about things. I can be cynical, but I’m open-minded and I’m kind of openhearted.

MH: Not everyone knows how to connect with people or understands the importance of it, and that’s become your life’s work.

MM: It’s interesting because in my personal life, I’m not great at relationships. I’ve had to learn a lot and make a lot of mistakes. All I’m saying about the podcast is that humans have a lot to share with each other. Every one of those conversations are one-offs. These people walk away and I don’t see them again. Some people, I do. There were a lot of those episodes where I thought we should be friends. We’re not. But whenever I run into them at events, sometimes it feels like I’m seeing an old friend. I love when that happens.

There is something about a shared experience. That’s where it’s at. Building relationships, maintaining relationships—that’s a crapshoot. But engaging with others to share the experience one way or the other, whether it’s a podcast or comedy or music—whatever it is. Because everyone’s very isolated on their phone.

I think that’s what happens: A lot of people get shut down. They’re afraid of grief. And stories that bring that up are, like, the best. Because they humanize us. That’s another thing about being in AA meetings: You hear the same structure of story every time. And that moment where people find AA and get sober after what they’ve been through always chokes me up. Every fucking time. But anyone’s story is like that. That third act is, you know, the transition from the second to third act—it’s going to be a killer.

MH: Speaking of: What are you going to do next?

MM: I never stop being busy. There is a weight on me in terms of my listeners who rely on how I see the world to manage their own ways.

MH: You feel pressure from that?

MM: I do. Because I know a lot of them are like me. Some of them are fragile, angry, scared. And somehow or another, what I do is calming, and I understand that.

MH: What makes you angry?

MM: When I was angry—angrier—a lot of it was directed at myself. I think a lot of it had to do with that journey-to-self that I was talking about. I never felt like I fit in. I was never comfortable in myself. I wasn’t unpopular when I was a kid, but I was not a standout. In college I got a little more defined, but a lot of it was built on this swagger—not so much anger at authority, but wanting to hold a place in the world. I’d see other people and I’m like, Why is it easy for them? A lot of anger is just entitlement, you know: Why did I get fucked? I think it all comes from a very fundamental base insecurity, the rage. It’s taken a long time to harness it. I really had to shut that tap off. I was a pretty toxic fuck for a long time.

MH: What pisses you off these days?

MM: That there are so many people that are allowing their minds to be fucked. And fascism and violence and inhumanity and the inability for people to connect to what’s happening in a human way. And all this us-and-them shit. The violence is angering, and it’s scary. But I really—like you say I understand people? I don’t. I don’t understand how people can believe in something that is so callous and inhumane and justify it. I don’t understand that. But it turns out people’s brains are pretty easily fucked with. All it takes is a phone and an algorithm and you might not never come back.

THERE IT IS, FOLKS—the best parts of my conversation with Marc Maron. It was a little intimidating at first, because here’s a guy who is a master at having deep and revealing conversations, a master at asking great questions in real time that draw answers we care about. But as he said after he interviewed President Obama: I think I did okay. I asked what I wanted to ask. I didn’t ask what it was like to interview Obama or any of his other almost 1,700 podcast guests, because I wanted this to be about him. You can go listen to every single episode, if you haven’t already, and he always does a coda at the end in which he talks about what it was like.

As for our conversation, he went long and he went deep on the importance of talking to people in the first place. I know it ended on kind of a dark note, but then something happened as we were walking out of the restaurant that was funny and wonderful. There was a guy sitting at a table by the door with a few other people, and as we walked out, he said, “Marc?” And Maron smiled with grace and said, “Hey, yeah, hi”—fans say hi to him all the time.

Then the man said, “Marc, you’re the reason I’m here today.”

Maron said, “You mean here at this restaurant, or alive?”

It was a genuine question, and the answer could have been either one.

This story appears in the September 2025 issue of Men’s Health.

Ryan D’Agostino is Editorial Director, Projects at Hearst, and previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Popular Mechanics and Articles Editor at Esquire.