Transcript
Marc Maron (0:00)
Lock the gate. All right, let's do this. How are you? What the fuckers. What the fuck, buddies? What the fucksters? What's happening? I'm Marc Maron. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. How you doing? What's going on? Where you at? How's the stress level? How's the despair level? How's the anxiety level? What about joy? Huh? Where's the joy? Are you finding joy in your heart? In your heart? Are you taking it easy? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's what's happening. Today is interesting because today I talked to Chris Fleming. He's a comedian. You know, he's. He does a pretty big act. There's music involved. There's. Sometimes there's a lot of musicians on stage, but no, but mostly he's a standup. And the odd thing about Chris is that I'd seen clips of him here and there. And I know there's a generation or two younger than me that, you know, he's sort of in this scene with, you know, like, Kate Berlant, Hannah Einbinder, these comics that are. Yeah, I guess you would have called them alt. But for me, a lot of times, if somebody is doing the job, they're a comedian. But I didn't know who he was. He's got an interesting look, and I'd seen his reels, and I didn't know what to make of him. And I just booked him because I'm like, I know this guy's gonna be interesting. You know, I don't know where he's coming from or where he's at, but I hadn't really watched his stuff yet. And I booked him because I knew he would be interesting. There was no way he wasn't going to be interesting. But the surprise for me, and I. And I told him this. So I'm not. Not just, you know, I'm not just saying something negative. So I watch his special. He's got a YouTube series that I didn't know about. Cause it was, you know, I'm old. Called Gale, which got pretty popular. He plays basically his mom's friend. And his comedy special, there's a couple, but the one called Hell is streaming on Peacock. So I. I watch some Gale, and then I watch his other special, and then I watch Hell. And what. What I kept seeing in the midst of, you know, his kind of frenetic way of delivering what he does, is that he had real fucking standup chops. And not just chops. I mean, like, he could riff, man. And that's a rare thing. I'm not talking about audience work. I'm not talking about crowd work. I'm talking about real freedom of mind, stream of consciousness, riffing with confidence. Because, you know, he's got standup chops. And I, I never thought that I was right. When I started watching it and I saw how he was going at it with the audience, I was like, holy fuck. What this guy is hiding is that he knows how to do this because he doesn't do straight standup. It's not like club work. But, you know, I find out from talking to him that he, when he was a kid, he was doing open mics like he knows how to do standup. And it was such a treat and a relief in some ways that, you know, I could find this commonality that, you know, he loves standup, but he does stand up in a way that is rare where, you know, just legit stream of consciousness. I mean, you can see a lot of people, you know, have a certain pace, but, you know, believe me, a lot of times they're just doing an act over and over again. But I could tell this guy can go off and do it with references that are interesting and way of thinking. That is interesting. So I was, I know it's odd to say I was surprised and excited that he was the real deal. And you'll hear me talk to him in a minute. Tomorrow I'm in Durham, North Carolina, at the Carolina Theater of Durham, Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm at the Knight Theater this Saturday. And I'll be in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Charleston Music hall on Sunday night. Next week, I'm at Largo here in LA on Tuesday night, March 25th. Then Skokie, Illinois. I'm coming to the North Shore center for the Performing arts on Friday, March 28th. I believe that sold out. And Joliet, Illinois, I'm at the Rialto Square Theater on Saturday, March 29th. I'm then coming to Michigan, Toronto, Vermont and New Hampshire. Also, tickets are now available for my HBO special taping in Brooklyn at the BAM Harvey Theater on May 10th. And those are going. So get them. You can go to wtfpod.com tour for all my dates and links to tickets. Please go there for the proper link. Don't just google Marc Maron tour and then put your city, because then you'll go to a scalper site. But as I told you, I think last week that my anxiety had gotten to a point where it was like overwhelming. And look, granted, we're living through what we live through. There's plenty of anxiety to go around. I've always been prone to catastrophic thinking, and I've always been prone to. When I've got some free time in my mind to just. I don't know, my brain just picks up on things that I should worry about and I may not need to worry about. And I just create scenarios and I create situations and I create, you know, stuff that just causes me extreme panic to the point of paralysis. And I've always done it and I've always lived with it. And I've had some realizations around it recently as I get older that, you know, that one of them happened after this psych eval. I guess my assumption has always been on some level that everybody deals with this and they just don't. So I took it upon myself to make an appointment with a real shrink, a real psychiatrist. I know shrink's an old timey word to actually get a psych evaluation, which I'd never really had an hour and a half sort of psych evaluation to try to focus in. And look, I've done all the things, I don't know that I've done them consistently, but I've certainly done some of them for long enough to try. I've done the sort of recovery element in terms of trying to get into the present. I've talked a lot about how a lot of what you're reacting to in terms of panic is something your brain is doing. It's something your brain is making up, either on purpose or it's just what your brain does, which is mine, and separating that from things you really have to be anxious about. But even those things in terms of fear and panic, you do have choices around those. If it's not directly or immediately in the present affecting your life, some of us choose to just keep hammering away at our brains with stuff that is just terrifying either on your phone or on your computer. And you just feed it and feed it and feed it until you get yourself into a pretty, you know, a pretty electric panic. And the name of my new band. But. But, you know, it gets to a point where it has been lately where. Especially like if I'm about to travel or if I'm on the way where I can't get any peace from it, even if I do something that I enjoy, you know, that gets me out of myself and, you know, I'm expressing myself, whether it's standup or music or conversations right after, I'm like, right back to it, just like you. I can't even. I'LL think about what I thought I did wrong or what I could have done better. Or I'll just think about, like, are my cats okay? Or I'll think about what if the car gets, you know, a flat tire. I'll think like, it's crazy, man. You know, anything I'm heading into, like, even, you know, today when I'm traveling, I'm like, oh, man, am I going to be, you know, what boots should I wear? Do I want to deal with taking them off? Is it worth it to wear them? It's just like, it's, it's. It's non stop, dude. And it's gotten worse. And I think a lot of that is because, like, there's something about living in a world where there's actual things to be afraid of on the daily and, you know. Yeah, it's. I think some part of my brain, in order to find peace, wants to overwhelm that with my own fears. I want to own it. You know, I want to. I want to. I want to sort of tamp down the actual things that should be making me frightened and just generate things in my immediate mind in life that I can make more frightening. Maybe, I don't know. Now I'm psychoanalyzing myself. The point of this was I went to a psychiatrist and, you know, we did the evaluation, you know, and it was very interesting because it's been a long time and I've never really been one for medication. You know, I did a little bit back in the day to, you know, get. Get out of my own way to process some other stuff.