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 fuck? Assotins. Yeah, I threw a new one in there. Got a request. I got a request. As we're heading into the home stretch. How are you? This is Marc Maron. I am Marc Maron. This is my podcast. Wtf. Welcome to it. You know, I used to get lists of those things. Just full lists of ideas for the opening names. And then, like, you know, I could get preoccupied with, you know, which ones I should use. There'd be dozens of them, and then you just land on a few. How's it going? What's happening in there? Out there? In there? What's happening out there? What's up with you people? Are you okay? Is your head all right? Is everything checking out fine? Are you holding up? It's been very overwhelming, the outpouring of kind of appreciation for the show, and I'm moved and grateful. Edgy, though. A bit edgy. I was talking to my buddy Jerry last night, and I was trying to understand my feelings, and I don't know if there's such a thing as angry gratitude or aggravated gratitude. I'm still wrestling with a certain amount of my feelings that I think it takes a big person to achieve a certain amount of things in their life that are, you know, pretty great or get to a place where they finally kind of made it through the fire into their own sort of level of success or at least having a place in their world. And I think it takes a certain amount of humility to just accept that and be grateful for it and look at the work you've done and think you've done a good job at whatever you do. But there's sort of a level of. Of humility that has to occur so you don't get to that place and look back at all the people that stood in your way on purpose and just inform that gratitude with you. You can go fuck yourself. See. See what I did? Because quite honestly, I think the mature way to look at that is that at those different junctures in my life, whatever my life has been and whatever my rejections were or whatever my struggles were or however many people stood in the way of me getting to where I thought I deserved or what I wanted to believe that I was capable of, I might not have been at that time. I might not have been, you know, as good as I thought or as ready as I thought. And, you know, over time, I've definitely accepted that, and a lot of My resentments or petty aggravations about the struggle or the course of my life. The one it took, you know, was somehow unjust. Yeah. Was out of my mind. I was a being of chaos and fury that eventually had to be beaten down and humbled by the great wheel of life until I. I kind of like, relaxed into me. So I am grateful. That's what I. And I'm going to keep saying that because I should, and I should appreciate that. So I don't just kind of keep, you know, just steamrolling and plowing through life without appreciating what is happening. It's. It's kind of upsetting that I get to this point in my life where, you know, I can level off a little bit and kind of, you know, look at what I've achieved and feel pretty good about it. Just, you know, coinciding with the end of America. It's hard not to take that personally. So look, folks, Seth Meyers is on the show. He was actually on the show back in 2016. That's episode 731. He's not in Los Angeles much. So it was good. It was good to have him back. Catch up. He's still hosting Late Night with Seth Meyers. He's also got two podcasts out now, one with his brother Josh, and one with the guys from the Lonely Island. You're welcome, fellas. So. I'm kidding. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not in that zone. I don't think I invented anything. But there has been. Has been something that's been something that came up the other night that was kind of surprising. A little bit of a retreat, you know, back into mystical thinking. That was kind of. It kind of. I don't really like to go there, you know. Cause I was there. But something triggered it. But I'll talk about it in a minute. The documentary Are We Good? Is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. You can come see it this Saturday, June 14th at 5pm that's at the Ocean KX Theater on Chambers Street. I'll be doing a Q and A with Tracy Letts after the screening. That's funny, Tracy. You know, some people wonder over the course of this podcast, you know, because of the nature of my conversations, it seems like, hey, those guys should be friends. You know, how many people have I become friends with after really talking to them? Well, I have a lot more acquaintances and people that I know and know me. But Tracy actually became a friend and I was very focused on that, on becoming friends with Tracy. And he is a friend. Okay. So there's another screening as well on June 15th at 5:30. It's screening at the Village east on 2nd Avenue and 12th Street. And also stick is on TV. I'm on TV in a show with Owen Wilson, and people seem to be enjoying it. Why wouldn't they? A new episode of Stick premieres this Wednesday. I haven't seen it yet. I've only seen as many as you've seen if you've been watching. But it seems to be a fairly emotionally uplifting and satisfying show and I'm happy to be a part of it. So, yeah, a couple of things are going on in terms of the life. I'm kind of adjusting to, realizing that big changes are on the horizon in my life. But in the world, things are certainly not looking good. It's been pretty fucking awful out here in Los Angeles with this display of might and power with the new secret police, that is Ice. And it's been kind of awful, I would say horrible and disconcerting. And it's hard to know exactly what to do. So I found myself kind of trying to sort of integrate the ideas of the poem by. I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. Pastor Martin Niemoller. The poem many of you probably sort of come in contact with. First they came. And, you know, in terms of the message of that. Of that poem and what it means to be a real citizen in the fight for democracy, a couple of things are coming into my mind around this and I'll like, well, I don't know if you know the poem, but I'm going to. I've been rewriting it a little bit and I'll try to give you the sense of it. So here's the poem with my additions. First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist and I was on my phone. Then they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist and I was on my phone. Then they came for the trade unionists and. And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist and I was again on my phone. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew and I was still on my phone. And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me and they took my phone. See, I'm just kind of working with it a little bit, and I think you can Change communists to immigrants. Yeah, that's a little side project that I'm working on. Look, folks, this is an ad by BetterHelp. And if you've heard me talk about BetterHelp, you know that having regular therapy sessions is a normal part of life. But there's still a stigma around mental health issues in this country, and 6 million men in the US suffer from depression every year. A lot of times it goes undiagnosed. A lot of guys feel like there's something wrong with asking for help. I think that if you're a listener to this show, you. You already know that it's okay to struggle. Real strength comes from opening up and getting the supports you need to be your best self. 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Because many of you have heard the story of that period in my life where I was a doorman at the Comedy Store and hanging out with Kennison in that entourage and living at the house that Mitzi Shore owned up behind the Comedy Store and just living a life of. I don't even know what you would call it. It was certainly off the grid. It was certainly Comedy Store specific. It was certainly a very jacked up, dark period in a lot of ways, but mostly because of my brain, because I had coked myself into psychosis that took me quite a long time to fully shake in the late 80s. And that was the sort of beginning of my relationship with sobriety. The. That was on and off for years after that. But in my book, the Jerusalem Syndrome, I kind of spent a lot of time on that chapter, the Hollywood chapter, and what was happening in my Mind in terms of psychosis and then also my own sort of paranoid fantasies and my own sort of. It was all informed by whatever intelligence I had at that time. But, but here, but here's the thing is that during the psychotic time at the Comedy Store I started to sort of realize or believe that it was a fairly dark castle of a strange type of mystical, dark energy. And it's not something that people didn't notice back in the day. It's kind of been exercised to some degree just by proficiency. But there was just this concept I had about the role that Mitzi played in the big picture and that, you know, I had become obsessed with the building across the street, which is the Sunset Towers, which is now a pretty sweet hotel. It's an old deco structure. At the time I was at the store it was being gutted and renovated and there's this sort of altar structure on the top. And I'd become sort of obsessed and believed in these. Some sort of apocalyptic fantasies about, you know, the end of the world beginning with some sort of sacrifice that was going to take place on that altar. By who? I didn't know, but I knew there were dark forces coming and I knew that Sam was a representation Kennison of, Of those dark forces. And I believe he was. I re. Listened to some of his bits, two of which are some of my favorite comedy bits in the world. But, but many of them wrong minded. And, and he was really, he was a megalomaniacal person, not unlike Trump or other megalomaniacal people. And you know, he was a powerful force being an ex preacher and he had kind of broken my brain and the Comedy Store just un. Into this castle of. Of. Of. Of dark wizardry. And I felt that, you know, comics at that time were somehow, you know, I didn't quite understand how. But there was a good and evil thing working in that. Somehow comics played a part in the, in the oncoming apocalypse. Because I was there at the Comedy Store and this was going on in 1987 and I had this whole apocalyptic sort of mythos that was being generated by my brain and it wasn't, you know, clear all of it, but I knew that there were certain parts that the Comedy Store was going to be involved in it and that Hollywood was involved in it and that there was something about the shifting of reality and that was. I kind of documented in that book, you know, and it was a real kind of paranoid psychotic vision that I had. And you know, it eventually forced me to run away from Hollywood fairly quickly. You know, give away everything that didn't fit in my car and just get out, get out. 23 Skidoo, baby. And I was running from dark forces that I couldn't see. And I went home and I renewed my passport because I was pretty sure I was going to have to go. And, you know, and I tried to get sober the first time, which I did, and I went back to Boston. But the other day, I was thinking, well, look, you know, and I guess this is in light of the podcast ending and just kind of putting things together for myself and then, you know, realizing at some moment that there was a whole system at the store and at the Comedy Store, and we've discussed it many times on this show, that if you were in the system and you believed in the system, that's all you believed in, really, was Mitzi's system of becoming a comic and what you had to do in that building to get to that place to be a comic. All that being said, it's just interesting to me in the big picture of what's happening and what this medium has. Has unleashed is that, you know, me and Joe Rogan were both in the system. We are both products of the Comedy Store. We are both the spawn of. Of Mitzi's system. Now, however you want to frame Mitzi Shore in the big picture, you know, I have personal sort of opinions about her, but it was her decision. She was the queen. She was the decider. And at my. At my. At the time in the late 80s, when I was out of my mind on drugs, she took on a very kind of almost universal and powerful significance as a kind of a mystical presence. Now, I'm not saying any of this is true, but all I know is that in this medium, which I helped popularize, and Joe, also in that system, certainly has his place in the world, but just there's the spectrum of approach and what we have both unleashed on the world through this medium, but both of us being adepts of the Mitzi Shore system and. And lifelong members of the Comedy Store community. So there you go. Two ends of the spectrum of podcasting coming from the same source underneath the brain of the same woman in a now truly apocalyptic landscape. Hey, look, do with it what you will. I'm just kind of thinking out loud, you know what I'm saying? This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. When you run your own website like we do, life is easier thanks to Squarespace. 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Okay, so look, Seth Meyers, obviously the host of Late Night with Seth Meyers on NBC and Peacock, his podcasts are family trips with the Myers brothers and the Lonely island and Seth Meyers podcast, you can get those everywhere. And now you can get me and him, me and Seth talking right here, right now. Here we go. You were in Albuquerque?