Conan O’Brien opened up on Dax Shepard’s podcast

Conan O’Brien showed a different side of himself when he sat down for Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert.

Podcasts are quickly becoming the place to go if you want an unfiltered and uncommon view of celebrities or just about anyone with an interesting story to tell. Right now, the best place to find that is on Armchair Expert hosted by actor Dax Shepard. He turned in one of his best episodes when Conan O’Brien visited.

Rather than just have a buddy-buddy chat that makes the listeners jealous they’re not famous, Shepard focuses on much heavier and “real” topics. This isn’t to say the podcast isn’t funny. It is due in large part to Shepard’s sense of humor and the dynamic he has with co-host Monica Padman.

However, Shepard makes a point that he wants to find out about guests’ shortcomings, insecurities, and struggles. They then go over what it took, and still takes, to overcome all that. There are few places online having such an open and frank talk about mental health than on Armchair Expert. Shepard talking about these issues with likeable celebrities only reinforces the notion that nobody is alone in these struggles or immune from the effects.

When Conan O’Brien was featured on Armchair Expert, it wasn’t certain that he would open up like past guests had. Just days before, his own podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend dropped an episode with Shepard’s wife Kristen Bell. That podcast touched on some serious issues like self-care and parenting but not to the extent of things on Armchair Expert.

There really is something for everyone here in this podcast. If you’re curious about Conan’s career, then he discusses developing his skills as a writer at Harvard before moving on to Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. It would have been interesting to hear him cover the whole Tonight Show debacle but he’s probably been over that enough times it doesn’t warrant revisiting.

If you want to know more about his sense of humor and approach to comedy, then you’ll find that stuff here too. He mentions how he needs to act ideas out rather than simply write them down. There is a nice segment where he explains the idea behind a Saturday Night Live sketch for Tom Hanks.

But the biggest takeaway from the podcast is how open Conan is about his mental health. From the outside it could seem like he has everything he’s wanted: a show in which he is the center and everything is in his “voice.” But obviously nobody is just how they look from the outside.

This episode of Armchair Expert cannot be recommended enough. Conan really does cover a lot, from the concerns he had about admitting he needed help to how growing up Irish Catholic has a long-lasting influence. Kudos to him for opening up and to Dax Shepard for providing some help through the podcast.