Blank Check with Griffin & David · Blank Check Productions

A Serious Man with Marc Maron

October 12, 2025·1 hr 52 min·5 clips

Marc Maron asked Paul McCartney if he's doing his best work now, and McCartney's response stunned him.

Griffin Newman opens the episode with his usual stream-of-consciousness intro, noting that he has just soiled himself from Dunkin Donuts raspberry coffee, that his dryer drum is broken and his clothes are clean but wet, and that he still does not have cats. These are set pieces that longtime Blank Check listeners recognize as the show's own borrowed vocabulary from Mark Maron's WTF podcast, which the hosts openly acknowledge when Maron appears in the conversation. The hosts explain that several Maron-isms were embedded in the Blank Check lexicon from the beginning of the show when it was consciously lifting from other podcasts, including just shit my pants as an expression of shock, the phrase who are your guys, and the rhetorical habit of naming things in quick lists. The conversation with Maron begins with a meta-discussion about how many podcasters have copped from his style, with Maron seeming genuinely surprised by the scale of his influence. The film discussion covers A Serious Man as the Coen Brothers' most personal and specifically Jewish work, set in 1967 suburban Minneapolis in a Jewish community very similar to the one the brothers grew up in. The protagonist Larry Gopnik is a physics professor whose wife announces she is leaving him for his friend Sy Abelman, whose tenure case becomes politically complicated, whose brother Arthur is living on the couch working on a manuscript that may be a gambling system, and whose children are absorbed in their own adolescent crises. The more Larry tries to understand why these things are happening and to find moral guidance from his community's rabbis, the more opaque the universe becomes. The film is structured around the Book of Job, with Larry in Job's position, and the three rabbis he consults representing a range of theological response to undeserved suffering from avoidance to platitude to genuine mystical insight. Maron brings his own comedic-existential lens to the film's central question of what you do when the universe provides no legible response to your sincere moral inquiry.

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