Marc Maron thinks things were better in podcasting "before everyone had a voice"

Maron has made no secret of his disdain for the comedians who have thrown their lot in with President Donald Trump and the conservative right. He’s called many of them out for being part of the rise of fascism in America; his latest special Panicked even includes a bit where he imagines Theo Von interviewing Hitler. “How they became the arbiters of what comedy should or shouldn’t be is a fucking nightmare,” he now says to THR. “This anti-woke idea around free speech with comedians is bullshit. Whether they knew it or not, they were being used by the right to push this anti-woke agenda, which is now disassembling every progressive policy. They’re responsible. I can’t let them off the hook for that, even if some of them are kind of backpedaling now.” 

The longtime stand-up comic acknowledges he may be “just an old man yelling at the burning sky.” He also knows he has a “model that I established” in the podcasting world that paved the way for where we are today. “There are certain people that work within that model. And I think Dax [Shepard] is one of them,” Maron says. (Shepard has cited Maron as an inspiration, as has Bobby Lee and even Conan O’Brien, who tells THR that Maron”put podcasting on the map”). “I opened up a zone within this medium just before it became really viable. That’s what I think.”

Unfortunately, the zone that Maron opened up has become what some might call a toxic cesspool of uninformed thought and political propaganda. On top of that, THR notes Maron’s distaste for increased advertising, pressure to make spin-offs, and especially the new trend towards filmed podcasts that have soured him on the medium. The whole ecosystem is “[a] lot of yammering in makeshift studios,” he says. “It’s lowering the bar for everything.”