Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend - Anderson Cooper

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Journalist and news anchor Anderson Cooper feels kind of thrilled that he can be considered Conan O’Brien’s friend. Anderson sits down with Conan to discuss the time they were boondoggled in South France, his thoughts on the modern news anchor, becoming a father, and researching his new book Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Later, Conan responds to a listener's voicemail about his resemblance to a certain Harry Potter character. Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: [phone]. For Conan videos, tour dates and more visit TeamCoco.com.

Hi, my name is Anderson Cooper, and I feel kind of thrilled that I could be considered Conan O'Brien's friend. Hey there, and welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. We started out as a simple podcast, but now it's become really a mission for me to befriend every A-list celebrity in the history of mankind, living or dead. We should start having me talk to people that aren't even here anymore, like today's guest is Carrie Grant, 2-D, 2-D, 2-D. Do we just find someone who's good at impersonating them, or are you just talking to silence?

I think it's only Carrie Grant, and it's always me doing both voices, and it's always me doing that really hacky, Carrie Grant impression from the 1960s, 2-D, 2-D, 2-D, which apparently he never even said in a movie. I'm fascinated with bad impressions of celebrities that no one's done for 40 years. It just makes me really happy. Well, this week again, we're talking to Carrie Grant, 2-D, 2-D, 2-D, and that's all I say, and we lose all of our listeners. There's just one listener?

There's just one listener who just loves it, can't get enough. Her name's Enid Brownschnitzel, and she's 110 years old. I just love that you talk to Carrie. Well, we're back, and like celebrity guest again is the ghost of Carrie Grant. How are you? 2-D, 2-D, 2-D, 2-D. Sona's quit, Gorley's quit. Yeah, nothing would make Sona quit.

She just wouldn't show, but she would still get the paycheck. That's true. She really hasn't made it. She could do that? Trust me. If it can be done, Sona will do it. By the way, I should introduce Matt Gorley. Matt, good to see you.

Hi, how are you? I like to do b-formal. I don't like just a voice coming out of the void. I know that you're known to listeners, but I think you should be shouted out and shouted at. And also the incredible assistant to Sona Moisesian, because clearly she needed an assistant. You need a lot of help to do nothing. Mr. David Hopping, how are you, David?

Good. How are you? David, when I say 2-D, 2-D, 2-D, 2-D, did you even know that was Kerry Grant? No. Of course not. It was a bad impression. I'm one of the people who stopped listening. How about this one?

Old impressions. You dirty rat, you all the dirty rat that killed my brother, do you know who that is? See that's Jimmy Cagney, and that was the only impression that most people did for like 30 years, and no one, God forbid they don't even remember these stars anymore, but certainly no one remembers these hack impressions. But if I watched TV as a kid, like a really little kid in like 1970, and someone came out and went, you're the little dirty rat that killed my mother, or whatever, kids my age would know of that supposed to be Jimmy Cagney.

Yeah. 2-D, 2-D, 2-D, here comes Kerry Grant. And then how about this one, Pilgrim, do you know who this one is right here, Pilgrim? You know who that is? Uh-uh. Okay. John Wayne. Oh.

John Wayne. What about you, Mac? Did you track all of those? Of course you did. Oh yeah. Yeah, but I stopped recording long ago. This is for nobody? Yeah.

I wish that there was like Gorley's just uploading episodes, but it's only set for one listener, and it's just you thinking people are listening to this. You know what I love? You spoke podcast. Yeah, you know what I love is that I love the, I'm just loving this, I love bad ideas more than I love good ideas. I'm just really falling in love with the notion of announcing a new podcast where it's Conan O'Brien talking to all the great entertainers who are no longer alive, and Conan will do

all the voices. And I'm terrible at all of them, and no one knows what I'm talking about. I just think it's fantastic. I think it's the greatest idea ever, and I put a lot of promotion behind it, and there are billboards. Check out Conan's new podcast. The billboards? Yeah, billboards.

Conan talks to the great entertainers, and then it's me saying, Conan O'Brien here, and I'm very excited today. We got John Wayne here. Hello, Bill Grum. It's good to see you here on the pie. Oh, and look, Jimmy K. just up high. You're the dirty rat that killed my brother. And as always, my sidekick, Mr. Kerry, Judy, Judy, Judy.

Now come on over here, Pilgrim, you dirty rat, Judy, Judy. Well that wraps it up for today, and people would hate it. I wish that you're moving to three different chairs while you're doing it. You hear me moving physically from chair to chair, and it's making a lot of noise. The office chairs are banging and smashing. Well, anyway, Pilgrim, I think I'm going to talk today about maybe the, or I would say like, well, of course you all heard in the news that too bad there was a small earthquake in Florida, and people were talking about that.

No one was hurt, but there was an earthquake in Florida. What do you think, John Wayne? Well, Pilgrim, if the ground's at shaking, best to get in those wagons and saddle up and take off. What about you, Jimmy Cagney? You dirty rat, you had earthquake, killed my brother, had earthquake, killed my brother. Isn't that right? God, Kerry Grant.

Switch chairs. Judy, Judy, Judy. Just the worst. And the out of breath when you get there? What's that? The physicality, where you're doing Jimmy Cagney, you're kind of wagging your finger, but it looks like you're an old man doddering on a cane. Oh, and then special guests can keep popping in, you know, just like, hey, look, it's Edward

G. Robinson here. Kids really love an Edward G. Robinson impression. Ah, she, ah, she, ah, she, ah, you mugs, Judy, Judy, Judy, all right, Pilgrim, you dirty rat, you killed my brother. Well, that's it for today. Conan talks to the great entertainers. Now I'm going to, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stand in the parking lot and wait for my Peabody Award to be delivered.

I'm sure it's coming. Okay, let's do something real. Why? Why am I cursed? I swear to God, some kind of spirit cursed me when I was a child and said, you will love the awful more than, more than the beautiful. You will, you will be. You have that tattooed on you.

Yes, I just do. I just do. I love the idea of putting a lot of time and money into a waste of everyone's time. All right. Speaking of that. Speaking of which, my guest today is an Emmy award-winning journalist. Let's see him do some impressions. And a best-selling author who hosts Anderson Cooper 360 weeknights on CNN.

His new book, Vanderbilt, the rise and fall of an American dynasty is available now. He's a good man. Anderson Cooper, welcome. You're a tricky cat to read. I'm just going to say that. I didn't know. Is that true? People have said that to me.

Yes. Yes. You're a little bit tricky to read because you're very reserved and you and I have hung out in our lives outside of the glare, the white-hot glare of show business and found you to be a delightful person. But also one of those people where I'm thinking, I'm just not sure, did you delete my file as you walked away? Do you know what I mean?

I will tell you what I think then. I've had delightful times, the times that we have hung out. And I've always wanted to, more, and like every, you've always said, oh, you're from New Los Angeles, let me know. And I feel like I rarely would ever do that because I don't know if you're actually, if you want me to actually contact you. I'm sure people contact you all the time for things. So Anderson, you're saying you're in LA and you don't have plans for dinner.

Correct. And you could, because you have my digits, my deets, you could send me a message that says, hey, Conan, Anderson here. Then just say Cooper, then say 360, just so I know which Anderson. And then that you think, Conan, he's at the top, he couldn't possibly be interested in having dinner. Are you insane? I would love to hang out with you.

No, that's absolutely what I'm saying. You're an incredibly, you're a style icon. No, but I also think like you're, you know, you've got a beautiful family. Oh, no. To hell with you. You'd rather hang out with them. God, no. And they'd be welcome to come.

I love kids. No, no. I love your wife. No. Anderson, please. That's over. I don't hang with them anymore. You know, that was something I did, that was put together by William Morris Endeavour.

You know, that was all Rock Hudson's marriage, you know, I did what I had to do. You had Rock Hudson's manager, the son of Rock Hudson's manager. The great grandson of Rock Hudson's manager. You know, my whole marriage to my wife and us, those pictures of us arm in arm coming out of the Stork Club, wearing tuxedos and looking so quote in love, that was all bullshit. No, you'd be, you'd be welcome because I'm remembering, it's just occurring to me right now, you and I were part of one of the craziest boondoggles I've ever been involved in. And I just have to tell you, I want to preface this by saying this kind of thing never happens

to me. It really never happens to me. But for reasons that I don't understand, I want to say seven years ago, Warner Media Turner Broadcasting said, hey, Conan, we want you to do us a favor. And I thought, well, they want me to do comedy at some event. This is going to be okay. What is it now? And I was kind of rolling my eyes and they said, we want to fly you and your wife to

Cannes in the south of France. And we'll put you up in a really nice hotel and you can stay there for three days. I was like, oh my God, this is going to be like, what are they going to ask me to do? Because to compensate for that, they must want me to dig a trench with my hands and then fight a bear. And they said, I said, what do I do? And they said, well, walk out in front of a big crowd and sit down and have a pleasant chat with Anderson Cooper.

And I said, what? And they said, yeah, that's it. And the next thing I know, I'm in the south of France and I know I sound like an incredible asshole right now and I apologize listeners. I'm telling you, this never happened to me. This didn't happen. This doesn't happen. But I said yes.

My wife and I went. We had a lovely time and you and I had our nice chat in front of an audience and then you and I were sitting at this incredible hotel, like looking at the cap, the hotel du Cap, which is like a legendary south of France hotel and full of like Russian billionaires and models and, you know, P Diddy or Puffy walks by, people walk by all the time. It's I had no business being there and you and I both did not know what we were doing there and we had just done the event and we still didn't know what the hell this friggin event was.

Right. Because when someone gives you something that nice, you think, OK, they're really going to make me pay on the other side of it. The next thing I know, it's over. And they I think they let us, we talked for like 20 minutes. And then they said, that's all we need, gentlemen. Now off to the hotel du Cap and everything's on us. And I thought, what?

Everything's on you. It was, I think it's something called the golden lion. It's some sort of advertiser award thing. Oh, I don't know what it was. I don't understand. I don't know what. And by the way, I've been there twice now with you and also Anthony Bourdain. He and I both again, had no idea what we were doing there and he could not believe the boondoggle

that this was. Yes. And all I remember is I kept thinking, I don't belong here, but this is what I do. I was sitting there with you, Anderson Cooper. I'm just reminding you who you are. I was sitting there with you, Anderson Cooper, and you looked, you know, of course, dressed to the nines. You look great.

You and I are sitting there. We're having some wine and we're having this really nice meal. We're not paying for anything. We're at one of the nicest hotels in the world. And I kept thinking, well, Anderson belongs here. I don't belong here. You know what I mean? Yes.

That's so interesting. Because I think I'm this clown. Right. What do you mean? Right. What the fuck was that? Right. No, you're supposed to go like, you're no clown.

You're an artist Conan. We'll get to that later. I can insert that digitally. But anyway, it was just so amusing to me and we had a really good talk and I remember thinking, I'm going to see a lot more of Anderson Cooper now. We're best friends. I remembered you told me at the time, I don't know if this is still the case, but at the time you were living in a firehouse in Manhattan.

I still live in a firehouse. Yes. Oh my God. You live in a firehouse. You're like Bruce Wayne. Or like the Ghostbusters. Yes. Okay.

It's not far from the Ghostbusters firehouse, actually. It's a Ghostbuster. Yeah. You lived in a firehouse and I thought, I want to go hang with Anderson. It is firehouse. I want to go down the whole, I want the whole thing. And nothing happened. None of it happened.

Well, because I never, I'm too shy to reach out to other people. Like I literally in, yeah, it's actually kind of a, it's been an issue for me. And like I can't ask people for help about, for something. I have a bit of that too. I don't like to ask a favor. Yes. I do not, I will do, I'm happy to do a favor for somebody. I do not want to ask somebody for assistance.

I couldn't even ask to apply for a TV job. I, I was a fact checker at a thing called Channel One, which was shown in high schools. And I realized I wanted, I thought, okay, being on air would be better and, and, and I want to be a foreign correspondent. And they didn't really have reporters. They had, it was sort of like a, the idea initially was like a today's show for classrooms and was in half the high schools and middle schools in America in the early nineties. And I was the fact checker.

And after six months, I was like, you know what, I want to be on air. I couldn't get entry level jobs at any of the networks or anything. And I said, I realize if I say to them, I want to be on air, they're going to say no, because I'm in their mind, the fact checker. And I also, you know, slightly stumble and I, I just didn't think I was meant to be on TV. And so I quit my job rather than asking them or even letting them know I have this idea of I'd like to be on camera.

I quit my job. I asked the director of the show to make a fake press pass for me. I borrowed a camera that they weren't using, like a small VHS or some, it was smaller camera. And I told them, I'm leaving. I'm going to go to wars for the next few months. I'm going to shoot stories. And if you want to see them, you can take a look at them. And if you like them, you could maybe put them on air.

So it was a very passive aggressive way of getting. Right. But what you essentially did is you went to war zones on spec, you said, I'm going to go. That is absolutely correct. I'm going to go. When people build a spec home or write a spec script, you went to war zones and reported on missiles falling all around you on spec on spec.

Yes. That was completely. Tell me more about this forged press pass. That is really pushing it, Anderson. I know. I mean, that's actually on my wall over. Yeah. It's yeah.

I mean, it was, you know, I was, I was working for this. Well, actually I wasn't. I was doing a spec, but it was a thing. It said channel one on it and it had my photo and it was laminated. It sounds like something when it, when I was a kid, I used to love to pretend to be a reporter if there was a home movie camera going. And I literally would put a card in my, an old hat that I found, my grandfather's hat that would say press and I would jam it in the hat band and go like, all right, I'm here

and I'm from the press. This sounds like the same bullshit only you're Anderson Cooper and you were pulling it to go to a war zone. Sorry. Oh, I just, I love this. You actually producing, I want to describe now to the audience, you just produced all of your Ford's documents. This is the, this is the Ford's.

Oh my God. It looks legit though. Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. Once I had that, then I got this, which is a UN press pass. And once you have a UN press pass, you're golden. That's fantastic.

And it looks to me very easy to duplicate and that's what I'm going to do. This gives, I just, now I want to tell you my idea. I came up with this deal a while ago and I keep thinking about it. If there's any kind of crime scene or any kind of disturbance going on and there's a lot of police standing around. I want to push my way to the front and hold up a card and, and just say, celebrity, what's going on? What's the deal?

Talk it down with me. And people would be so mad. I also want a siren that I can put on the top of my car that goes, celebrity, celebrity. And I just drive out in front of traffic and weave around and then jump out of my car and go to a crime scene and go, Hey, be list celebrity. What's going on? And then act really authoritative and people would be so mad. I'd love to film their reactions.

I like the siren that says celebrity, celebrity, celebrity. Yeah, I think I, I was always cognizant. When are we starting? Is this started? Yeah. The podcast? Yeah. No, no, this is just you and me.

Cause I didn't, there was no like intro. No, no, we're, no, no, this is all, no, this is all podcast. This is, this is what the podcast is. This is content. Content. You son of a bitch. What the hell is, what do you mean? This is content.

This is people seeing the real seeing and hearing the real Anderson. They're hearing you, you know, I want to ask you a question. And this is something I think about a lot because I see how much late night television has changed. I was wondering what you think of the news anchor because what do you think the role of an anchor is? I mean, clearly I sometimes contrast it with when Walter Cronkite famously gets the news live that, you know, everyone knows that John F. Kennedy has been shot and I've watched

this many times. His reaction is to take off his glasses and say a word now official, President Kennedy died at, you know, 1230, 120, 120, whatever, 130 central standard time and Lyndon Johnson will be the new president. And his, he chokes up for just half a second and then sold, puts his glasses back on and soldiers on. And I thought anchors today would have to emote. They would have to really emote or people would think something was wrong.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I don't, I mean, I got a couple of thoughts. I obviously the, you know, when I started my intro, I grew up watching just like you, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, there were three broadcast networks. And you know, people look back to that time and think, oh, that was sort of the golden age of news and things were authoritative then and they were the most trusted people in America, which in many cases they were, especially with Walter Cronkite. But in reality, when you actually look back at, you know, I think the initial newscast

at CBS was 18 minutes long. It might have, it might have, I think it was 18 minutes, but it eventually grew longer. You know, newsrooms were made up of middle-aged white guys like me, and except, you know, not gay, or at least not openly gay. And you know, they were not diverse. Walter Cronkite at the end said, you know, that's, that's, what was the famous sign off? That's the way it is. I mean, there was only a very thin slice of the world that we were actually seeing on

any given newscast. And because we didn't know anything about Walter Cronkite, because he didn't really know about his private life, he didn't really know about his, you know, were any of the folks on TV back then to the degree you do now, it was easier to kind of project whatever you wanted to onto these people. And so I think we have more information now at our fingertips, obviously. We get a, you know, a more diverse view of what is actually going on in this country and in the world.

It probably is at times too much information. Yes, I was going to say, I was going to say that there's the yin-yang of yes, we're getting more information, but we're, God, we're getting so much information. And of course, as you know, the algorithm tends to select for the negative. Yeah. It's not even so much, I mean, it's, negativity is what, you know, we have a, there's a thing called negativity bias, which is we are all prone to gravitate to things which are negative, as opposed to those are positive.

If you get, if there's 100 tweets and you read 99, you know, you read 100 tweets and 99 of them are nice and there's the one person who sends a mean tweet, that's the one that's going to register with you. That's the one you're going to think about and respond to likely. So it's, I think people say they want to see good news. The truth is there are actually a lot of good stories that are put out and I can tell you the numbers usually, the ratings usually drop on those kind of stories. People don't actually really respond to those stories, even though they say that that is

what they want. It's fascinating. So people are saying, and this is common, can't we just have more good news? And the truth is when you put it out there, people really don't want to see it or they're not as interested if, as they are, if you tell them there's a category five storm headed up the coast and it could be disaster. Yeah. I mean, just if, if the metric by which you're being judged is a rating point, then the ratings

will tell you that. I mean, I think there's obviously other reasons to tell stories and far more important reasons to tell stories. And so I think it's important to have a mix, but, but the role of the anchor, you know, the idea of this kind of all seeing, all knowing anchor who was the definitive voice, that was possible in a time when you really only saw them for a third, you know, 18 minutes or 30 minutes on the screen. You didn't know much about their lives and you really didn't have a sense of what else

was going on and what stories weren't being told or you didn't care about what stories weren't being told. So, you know, I think that it's easy to kind of look back and think, oh, that's, that was this, you know, really a remarkable time. But, but I think on the emoting thing, I'm not interested in sort of wearing my opinion on my sleeve, you know, until this last administration, I would, I don't think I ever refer to anybody as a liar. Um, I, you know, I was very, I tried very much to be in the middle of the road on things.

I don't have a strong political ideology on, in any side, and I try to, you know, ask tough questions of people who are Democrats and Republicans and, and, um, No, I was actually, I was actually going to single you out as one of the people. And there are a few who I think don't project your emotions all the time. I just think it's false. Yes. If you're, if you're emoting all the time and project and, you know, tearing your hair out and crying on camera, you know, and, or outraged all the time, which is the more

common thing to me. That's just phony. And it just comes off as it's a shtick and you do it. They do it every night and it's their shtick and the times I have ended up, you know, like tearing up on air and being unable to talk, you know, I, it's not something I plan ever. And, you know, I'm a wasp. I was taught to push all my emotions deep down inside and that's generally how I go through my day. And that's to your credit.

Uh, I believe everyone should, I tell my children all the time, whatever you're feeling, push it further down. There's a great Simpsons episode where Marge Simpson is counseling Lisa to just push all those feelings deep inside and put a smile on her face. Yeah. And then it bubbles up later on as creativity and incredible amounts of resentment, uh, and you know, often alcoholism. It's interesting that you don't give into this, but if today or tomorrow you started

on your show just saying, I'm sorry, I, I can't take this anymore. It's bullshit. I'm so mad at this aspect of American politics and you started using four letter words and tweeting raw emotions and saying, this is just who I am. Deal with it. There'd be so many people to be like, yes, this is fantastic. Uh, this is, yeah, go Anderson, go. And you stopped wearing a suit and tie and you looked disheveled and you just were muttering

and angry. Uh, it's a little bit of like that movie network where there's a visceral response in our culture now to if you're not melting down, people don't think you're being real, which I think is kind of strange a little bit because is that really our only choice? Yes. Melt down or be a phony, that's, that's it. I also think it's the people who are, are encouraging that, you know, it's people who are on Twitter and the people who do that end up reading on, you know, they're on Twitter

and they, they, they're very engaged with Twitter and you start to believe that that is actually a representation of human beings, uh, in this country or on this planet and it's really not. It's just like a Twitter is its own sort of universe of it's the same people over and over again, kind of having the same arguments. Yes. I stop, I mean, I don't, I don't engage with it really at all anymore. Um, I mean, I'm not still technically on there, but I rarely ever tweet anything.

And I'm not, I used to be on Twitter and I used to feel this, I would, somebody would say something against me and I felt like, Oh, I've got to respond to this. And the truth is actually, no, you don't like this. Okay. This is somebody's opinion. Maybe somebody else has a different opinion or 30 seconds or will be and, um, you know, I just, it has nothing to do with real life. I feel like my life got much better when I stopped looking at Twitter.

Yeah. You've gone through a huge life change not too long ago when your son was born. Why it? I think that this would have, because it's, it's interesting when I first got to know you and all the times I would see you, I always thought, man, Anderson Cooper has got like this, this perfect life in so many ways, uh, and, and, and you have all this freedom and it's such a massive change when a child shows up. And I'm curious how you feel like that has affected you.

You know, um, I've wanted to have a child for like most of my life. I mean, when I was a little kid, I wanted to have a family I dreamed about. I, I really, uh, my dad was a great dad. You know, I think because he died when I was 10 years old and he was 50, uh, the idea of half building my own family was, you know, became really important to me as a kid. And I didn't think as a gay person, it just didn't, that, that was one of the reasons I was kind of initially disappointed that I was gay or unhappy about realizing I was gay when I was a, you know, nine or 10 years old, because I thought, Oh, well, this means

I can't have a family. So the, suddenly to realize, you know, to be in a place where I'm stable enough and, and, you know, in financially and mentally and, uh, able to actually do that and, and actually bring somebody into the world. And it's, um, it's fantastic. How the hell do you babyproof a firehouse? Oh Jesus. Oh my God.

I'm, you know what? I, that's a good question. I do not know the answer to that. Right now I will tell you there's a spiral steel staircase, which is very difficult. I bought basically deer fencing right now. This is, I don't know how to do, I, I'm going to have to hire some people that do this Anderson. I know, but it's like a ripoff. It's a complete ripoff.

I'm sure. I know, but, and as soon as they hear it's me and a firehouse, they're going to like just charge. Yeah. Okay. But here's the problem. I got deer fencing around most of the, it doesn't look great. I give you that, but right now he's isolated to the fourth floor and that floor, that sounds

emotionally healthy. I've isolated him. He's just naturally pale. So no one will know he's never seen this. I love that you're saying like, I won't be brought up in this crazy strange environments that the Vanderbilt's were brought up in. Where do you live? A firehouse.

But don't worry. My son is strapped to the fourth floor. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's actually also, it's on all the haunted house tours of New York because the fireman before I was there made up a story that it was haunted. And so yeah.

Now it's in there. So every. Well, I will tell you, once I went on a getaway when our daughter was very, like our daughter was six months old, I think. And my wife and I were invited to a wedding in Hawaii and we decided to go and it was during my week off, flew to Hawaii and we got there and we had rented this little house. All the furniture was modern with sharp edges. And my daughter was just learning to walk and toddling around with her giant light bulb

head that hadn't, and the skull hadn't finished forming yet. I freaked out and I spent the entire week. There was a Home Depot that was, I think, 45 minutes away by car. And I would drive there and by foam, drive back, strap it around everything I could find, realize I needed more foam. And so I spent a week in Hawaii. I drove through like nine time zones just to cover the entire house in foam. That was an absolutely miserable experience and I will do the same for you any time at

your firehouse. Thank you. I appreciate it. I have put safety guards on the, I installed covers over the poles, because of course I live in a firehouse so there's poles on every floor to slide down. Oh, Anderson, so what you're saying is, congratulations, good for you. You're a hero. You covered up the hole in the floor, your firehouse, to protect your newborns.

Son, you know, I'm a really good dad. Oh, is that? Well, we live in a missile silo, but I covered the warhead with foam. So I'd like a dad of the year award, please. But then, you know, I grew up in a very, in a house that was not baby-proofed at all. Right. And look at us. We did fine.

Yeah, you're right. It's not a good example. Look at me, Anderson. I'm fine. I see both sides of it. My parents were, well, yeah, they were relatively old for the time when my mom was 43 when she had me. And that was in 1967.

And then at the time, that was pretty, pretty rare. I actually, I only recently discovered my mom had, was having, had to have fertility treatments in order to have me. And she, the stuff that she was supposed, that her doctor said would be good for her to use was not yet legal in America. So she flew to Switzerland and stayed at Charlie Chaplin's house and his wife, Una, who was my mom's best friend. As one does, when one wants to have a baby.

They had a friend who bought these drugs, these fertility drugs in Rome, flew to Veve, Switzerland, and Charlie Chaplin and Una Chaplin helped strap these illegal fertility drugs around my mom's stomach. And she smuggled them back into the United States in order to have me. This is unbelievable because I'm, this opens up, I was going to get to this, but you've opened this box and now we will go there because you can't just drop in conversation, yes, my mother in 1967 wanted to have a child. So she flew to stay with Charlie Chaplin in Europe and he helped her and I'm picturing

him with the little mustache in the cane as the little tramp helped her. It looks like a, he silently, he silently, and with, with great, exclamation marks and stuff. And then the screen goes black. Now sit still while I strap, while I strap the fertility drugs to your waist. This is Vanderbilt. Well, this, this brings up, of course, the second area that I wanted to talk about, which is, you have come out with this book, which I really enjoyed Vanderbilt and it's the rise

and fall of an American dynasty. You worked on this with Catherine Howe and it's really such a fascinating story, man, this book is fantastic. And of course you're writing this story because you are a direct descendant of the great Vanderbilt. Is it Cornelius? No, that's not Cornelius. Yeah, yeah. Cornelius, yeah.

Cornelius, they call him the Commodore. Yeah, the Commodore. Right. Who's just an insane story of a kid. Insane. A kid who, I mean. Yeah, so he's born in like the late 1700s, you know, years after the revolution. He grows up in Staten Island.

At 11, he drops out of school. He can barely read or write for the rest of his life. At 11, he starts working on a small little boat that his dad has ferrying supplies from Staten Island to Manhattan. And it's a shallow bottom boat that you use a pole to actually push in the shallow parts of the water. And then it's got to sail, you can sail it in the deeper parts of the water. And he, at age 16, his dad, you know, never makes a lot of money.

The grown up on a subsistence farm is Staten Island. But this 11-year-old kid, Cornelius Vanderbilt, has a mania for money. He has a pathological desire to amass money from the time he's very little. He gets a loan from his mom. He does some work in order to get a loan from his mom. He buys him a small boat, like a very small boat, two ferry supplies. Within two years, he runs his dad out of business. And he then, ultimately, over several decades, builds a steamship empire.

Steamships were the cutting-edge technology of the day, running supplies and passengers to Manhattan, but also all up and down the seaboard. He builds a ship route through Nicaragua to get to the West Coast. He was a ruthless, money-obsessed, power-hungry guy. And it's all he cared about. He didn't care about the children he had, mostly, he didn't care about the daughters he had because they wouldn't carry the Vanderbilt name. He sent his own wife to a lunatic asylum, as they called them then, so he could strip

the babysitter. He sent his own son to a lunatic asylum twice, had him committed. And then late in life, he dies in 1877, late in life, he starts a second fortune. He starts buying small railroads, which was the new technology at the time. And a masses builds a company out of all these little small, disparate railroads that basically controls all travel on the eastern seaboard, as far west as Chicago. And dies in 1877 with more money than anybody in the world ever had a mass. It was $100 million, which may not sound like a lot today, but it was one out of every $20

in circulation. It was more money than it was in the U.S. Treasury. It was, you're a great, great, great, great, great grandson. Is that correct? Yes. It was, they were five jobs. I made sure to say it five times. I'm precise about everything.

And what this book chronicles, which it's a tale as old as time, is just how much misery all this money brought. And the pathology of it. Yes. To me, that was what was, see, I grew up not knowing anything about the Vanderbilt. I knew my mom's last name was Vanderbilt, but my dad was a cooper. He grew up poor on a farm, Mississippi. And I knew the Vanderbilt's had been really rich and that there were some houses that

were now museums. And I knew my mom had a kind of tortured childhood experience with that family. And so there weren't any cousins that I knew or anything, because she really had a fractured relationship. And so as a kid, I sensed early on, no good can come of aligning myself with the Vanderbilt side, thinking of myself in that way. What I know about them is they didn't really work a lot, and they spent all this money, and then they didn't have any more money.

But it's really a tale of how the sort of pathology over money that the Commodore had infected the subsequent generation. Well, there's so much misery, there's so much fighting over the money that just destroys generations and creates all this misery and bad feeling and inflated expectation. And then what's fascinating to me is that there was an assumption when your mom passed away that, oh, Anderson now is going to be getting this huge inheritance. And I remember seeing speculation online, you know, that- I read $200 million.

Right. That's what I read. Right. That's around the time I started asking you for a loan. I wanted to buy my own ferry boat and start moving goods across Staten Island. But yeah, people were hearing that, oh, yes, well, you must now be getting hundreds of millions of dollars, which was not the case at all. Right, yeah.

Both my mom and dad sat me down early on when I was like, you know, eight or something, and explained, you know, you're probably going to hear people who think that you have a huge, you know, pot of money, and, you know, we want you to know that, you know, your mom came from this family, and, you know, and she's worked hard, and she has, you know, we're able to pay for your- well, you'll be able to pay for your college, but after college, that's it. There's not going to be any kind of inheritance. There's no trust fund for you.

There's nothing for you and your brother. And I was like, fine. Well, I mean, I didn't even really know what that was at the time. I was just like, you know, okay, well, that seems pretty normal, and that's cool. But it was always interesting to me because throughout my life, people kind of made this assumption that there was some sort of like- Right. There was an Oprah Winfrey show one time, the first time I wrote a book, and the first time

I was on that show. And, you know, and she said, well, you know, it's so fascinating because you really don't have to work. And I was like, really? That's news to me. Yeah. I mean, A, I love work, but also- I think in that case, Oprah was talking about herself because Oprah really doesn't have

to work. I happen to know that as of one year ago, she had enough to retire. And my mom thought it was funny. You know, my mom was the last- I write in the book about- sort of, my mom was the last Vanderbilt. I mean, there's others who still have the name, and there are members of the family who are out there, and they're very nice people, and they're doing good things with their lives.

But my mom was the last to really have been born into that other world. When I was a kid, I always viewed my mom as this creature from like a distant star from a galaxy that had burned out long ago. And her spaceship had stranded here on Earth in this time. And my job- it was like E.T. My job was to like take care of her, like have her help her pay rent, and learn how to breathe oxygen and communicate. You were also very late in her life.

You know, you were helping to support her when she was, you know, needed help, needed, you know, people to- you were using your income to help support your mom, which flips the script on what probably a lot of people would expect, which is, well, she's got maids and servants taking care of her, and well, you were paying for nurses, you were paying for all of that. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I was happy to be in a position to be able to help her. You know, my entire life, I viewed my job.

I was very sympathetic to my mom from the time I was little. She was an extraordinary, amazing person, and you know, obviously, I loved her. But she really was sort of from this other world, and she was incredibly modern and engaged with current times, of course. But she really was like the most trusting person she got screwed over by so many people in her life. You know, a psychiatrist defrauded her, her lawyer defrauded her, and you know, I, from the time I was a little kid, I was sort of advising her on like, this person doesn't

seem trustworthy, or, you know, this doesn't seem like a good idea. And I viewed that as my role, you know, throughout her life, to, you know, to try to protect her from her own impulses as well as, you know, other people. You know, that's one of the things that does come across is that in the book, Vanderbilt, you see so many people in your family tree whose lives were ruined because they made it all about the money. And I really got the sense that your mom, she didn't worship money for its own sake. She wasn't that interested in it.

She enjoyed things, but I think she, I got the sense she really enjoyed people. She really enjoyed experiences. There were times when I think money could provide or help her have those experiences, but I didn't get the sense that she cared about it in that way. She wasn't avaricious about it. No. She never, I mean, she never talked about it. It wasn't even like, she, it just was not in, you know, she hadn't been able to live

a life through much of her life where it wasn't an issue, it was, it was, there was money there and some accountant was, you know, losing sleep at night seeing that it was dwindling, but my mom wasn't. I mean, my mom just was living her life and I think we probably both knows, you know, some people who are extremely, you know, bizarrely wealthy, who talk about nothing else other than how wealthy they are and the painting that they just bought and how much they got it for. And then they sold it back to somebody for, you know, far more and then that person went

broke and then they bought it back, you know, and by the way, that's my dream. My dream is to be that guy. I want to sell, I want to bankrupt gorelly and then buy a painting back from him that I sold him and then I want to, I want to level your house gorelly and build another house on it that I just keep one sneaker in. That's what I want to do because I've got a Vanderbilt streak in me a mile wide. I want to squat in that sneaker house and just live in an old shoe. But I have to say there's, there's a part of this book which just because it's part

of the book that I wanted to quote from because you come from such an interesting family and your mom came from such this, this fascinating lineage. There's almost a citizen Kane moment because at the end of citizen Kane, you see everything he collected through his life and your mom held on to everything. She held on to every scrap and then at one point in the book, you realize you start going through your mom's stuff and you said, it's fascinating because you never know what you're going to get. You open one box and it's a chandelier.

You open another box and it's Rice Krispies from 1953. And then you open another box and it's letters from Gordon Parks or Roald Dahl. Just extraordinary history. So the only thing that grabbed me is, did you find a box of Rice Krispies from 1993? Oh, absolutely. Yes. I think it might have been Corn Flakes actually. Good.

That was a good year for Corn Flakes. That's a fine vintage. Yeah. No, my mom, my mom moved constantly because she always like, she was never, she was very restless and she couldn't sit still and she was always sort of decorating homes and then selling them and then finding something else and the new place would solve all the problems that she felt and she would move into the new place and of course realize that's not where the problem lay and so the process would repeat.

But things were constantly being packed up and sent out to this storage unit that I'd never heard. Like when I was a kid, all I heard about was this storage unit and I really, I did. When I saw Citizen Kane, that became in my mind what the storage unit was like and that there was this furnace that was just burning money the entire time. And every night when I was like 11 years old, I used to sit in my bed, I would try to stay up to watch, it was Letterman, the original Letterman show back then and I would try to stay up to watch that and I would stay up just full of anxiety about the money that

was just being burned in the storage unit and how much I would have to make in my life in order to take care of my mom and take care of the people in my life and make sure if a friend of mine got sick, I could take care of them. That's what I spent my childhood thinking about. I was obsessed with how people made a living and I started working from the time I was like 13 in order to start saving money because I knew my mom was just chucking stuff in that furnace and it was just burning away. It's fascinating to me that you're describing worrying about your mom as a kid and obviously

you and your mom went through the trauma of losing your brother tragically and this all kind of, I think weighing on you to this degree that you, I don't know, it gave you a rocket fuel in some way. Yeah, yeah, I mean 100%. It was the rage of my dad dying when I was a kid and the situation I was in of not having any control over, my mom was great but it was extraordinary and I had a very privileged upbringing but when you're 11, you shouldn't feel like you're the one in needing to write the ship and steer the boat or at least have a hand on the rudder.

That's all the boat analogies I can make but yeah, it was definitely fuel, it propelled me forward and both my mom and I had this sort of ability to propel ourselves forward through things. My mom through her childhood, I did the same thing. My mom just never had a plan and I learned from that and I realized from a very young age like I need to make a plan and being a reporter wasn't the objective. The objective was to learn how to survive and to go to places where survival was an issue for people in war zones and to teach myself that I could survive in any circumstance

and that I would be able to propel myself. What's fascinating now is you have obviously this boy Wyatt and what do you want for him? You want the opposite for him. You don't want him to have that anxiety. You don't want him staying up late worrying how am I going to take care of dad and help him to make better decisions. You don't want him to feel that and yet at the same time you can recognize how those things were fuel for you.

That's so true. It's really interesting you say that. I think about that a lot. On the one hand, my lesson, one of the takeaways for me in just doing this research on this book Vanderbilt is not wanting to... I think my parents were right to say to me at a young age, look, your college will be paid for, but after that you're going to have to figure out your own way and will emotionally help you and we're there and whatever. I think had they said, oh yeah, there's a pot of gold waiting for you when you hit age

25, I think it would have changed the way I thought about myself and changed the drive. I don't know that I would have had that kind of a drive or maybe I would have had the same kind of rage, but it would have been funneled in a self-destructive direction as opposed to I need to work really hard and propel myself forward. Yet on the same hand, you're right. I don't want my son to have that anxiety or that fear or that sense of catastrophe that is what has propelled me. I want to figure out some way with him and break this cycle and for me writing the book

was really, I dedicated it to him because it's really, I want him to read it and kind of understand what the options are and what the best and worst case scenarios. The book is terrific, congratulations Vanderbilt and I did get the sense that reading it, it's a great historical account, but it's also, I would think therapeutic because I know that you spent the majority of your life not wanting to face this side of your family tree and wanting to make it as Anderson Cooper and I think it's very healthy on some level to acknowledge all this, especially now that you have a son, so I think it's great to close that circle. This is me giving you, I am not a certified therapist.

In fact, most of my advice is bad, but I'm happy for you and I really would like it if you, when you get to LA and I know exactly what you're talking about because I don't contact anybody when I get to New York. I never think anyone wants to break bread with me, but I would really like it. It would up my street cred inordinately if you drop me a line the next time you're in town and you could come to our house and watch my wife make fun of me. That sounds like an ideal evening. I promise I will do that because you've now convinced me enough that I at least have the

courage to at least send a text and say, hey, I'm here, but look, I know you're busy, don't worry about it. And I'm just going to say this right now, when I send you the text, don't worry about it. If you can't do anything, that's fine. Oh, I'm going to blow you off. I'm going to blow you off. Okay, good.

This whole point of this podcast is to convince people, really convince them that they should get closer to me, and then that's my chance to totally screw them over and ghost them. Ghost them for a long, long time. Well played, O'Brien. In my own way, I'm a lot like Cornelius Vanderbilt. Yes. Only I've made. Ruthless.

Ruthless at Conan and Hitler. Mania for money. Mania for money, and a desire to destroy all those around him. Hey, Anderson, this was a delight. It really was. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. I'm so glad you're doing it.

Thank you. You know, it's been a while since we've done some voicemails where the listeners call in and ask you a question. You guys want to do one? Well, why should I care what the listener thinks? This is the voice of the people you serve. Yeah, but I think I'm a Roman emperor gone mad. I'm your Nero or Caligula.

I do, too. I have no concern for what the people want. I just want to play my fiddle, make a horse a senator, and go completely insane from syphilis and really bad wine while Rome burns around me. But maybe you can listen to them and just taunt them in there and you can be away to brush them off. All right, here's what I'm picturing myself now as one of the Caesars, and I've got my little laurel crown, and I'm sitting, and I'm here with David, who's a scribe.

You're one of the scribes that sits at the. David is fanning you in the palace right now, and feeding you grapes. Yeah, feeding me figs and grapes, and out of a feeling of generosity once a year, once every 10 years, I let one or two citizens come in and tell me something. And so you are now just a very lowly, lowly worker in the palace, Matt. Who me? Yeah. I'm the triumphant warrior, Mark Anthony, come back from Egypt to deliver the Vox Populi.

You guys ready for that? Oh, wow. You were ready to go. Okay, so you are Mark Anthony, fresh from the battlefield, one of the highest ranking Romans of all times, beloved by the people, and your job is to play a voicemail for me. Go ahead. Wow. Okay.

Mark Anthony. Fresh from Cleopatra's Boudoir. Here we go. Hi, Conan, hi, Sona, and Matt, I'm a huge fan of the show. I have a question. I am recently rereading the Harry Potter series, and I was reading the description of Ron Weasley. He's a tall redhead who's in the middle of several children, and he's awkward, he's funny, kind of comic relief.

He's always sort of just part of all the stories. He's hilarious. Conan, I couldn't help but think of you, as I was reading this, after having listened to the podcast and watching all of your just old clips on YouTube recently, so I'm wondering, have you, when you've ever read the Harry Potter series or watched the movies identified with Ron Weasley, I hope to hear back from you all soon, but bye. All right, I have an immediate response to this. First of all, I'm glad you brought this up because this is a longstanding lawsuit I have

with the Harry Potter people because I think I was ripped off. I immediately identified this. I immediately identified this. I didn't read the books when the books came out. I didn't read the books, but when the movies came out and I saw that Ron, first of all, I said, when did they, how did they shoot me as a child? I was confused. How did they digitally put me into a movie?

But yes, Ron Weasley is taking all of my moves. The middle child, the red hair, the freckles, the awkwardness, but that indelible charm that endures year after year, yeah, I was enraged and so I lawyer it up. We got into it and it has not gone anywhere. The lawsuit's been going on, well, at least on my end, they don't even pick up my calls anymore, but I've put tens of thousands of dollars into this and yeah, Ron Weasley's going down. You can't do that.

You can't steal a beloved American icon and just jam him into a fantasy world without something. I agree with you and I think that it gets even deeper and I think there's a big conspiracy because I'm about to share a picture with you that somebody pointed out when you really look at the whole Harry Potter universe at large, that's you, me and Sona. That is. That is. That's Sona.

That's you. And also, I love that Sona is brazen, you know, you have that defiant cross your arms. I've got a very nice arts and crafts house in Pasadena and then look at me. I'm just the sweet goofball holding it all together, not a mean bone in my body. You know what else? I'll tell you something. I did, before I figured out my hair situation, cut to everyone listening to this, did you ever figure out your hair situation, Conan?

But up until I was about 16, 17 years old, I parted my hair in the middle, a la Ron Weasley. So they ripped that off too. They clearly got pictures of me from the Driscoll Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts in the 70s and exactly copied my look. Yeah, you did nothing a la Ron Weasley. No, no. Ron Weasley did everything a la Conan did. Yeah.

Well, there's actually, and this is something I found through the lawsuit, my lawyers found footage of the actor who eventually got the part of Ron Weasley and there's pictures of him auditioning and he's like, oh, which way you want me to go with this? And they're like, Ron, sorry, we're going to call you Ron because of the purposes of this audition. Ron, could you please, I'd like you to give it a little bit of a, what we're thinking Conan O'Brien, the American chat show host, Conan O'Brien, not familiar with him and don't have NBC over in the UK.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I understand. But let's tell you, his hair part in the middle, very red. You're awkward, but you're also beloved. You're not the one that gets the girl, but you're really anybody, but that's more the idea of it. You don't draw focus from Harry Potter, but you're quite the star on your run, right? You understand?

All right, I'll be this Conan O'Brien if you want me. Ron Weasley's in the Sex Pistols? Well, he comes from a very, very rough neighborhood in Manchester and yes, he did play bass in a band called the fucking Skulls for a while when he was four and five years old. And so yeah, whatever. And so I would like some compensation and I've looked into it and I think there's some profit there. I think between the books and the movies and the theme parks, there's some profit.

And as a child, I played Quidditch. Oh, like on an entrepreneur and everything? We didn't call it Quidditch. What'd you call it? What'd you call it? We called it Crotch Broome Fun. Oh, wait, that's a different game. Oh, forget it.

Yeah. You're right, I'm thinking about it now. That was a different thing. I used to look at dirty magazines and rub a broom between my legs. Okay. Oh, no, Ron, this is good to see you. Sorry, did I go too far? I think you had crossed the line with the area.

I don't think I did cross the line. Okay, it's your podcast. That's something a lot of young kids did back then in the Boston area. Just to ask any one of my vintage. It was different times. We didn't have an internet. She had to grab a broom and get a little friction going there and look at a National Geographic or anyway, let's get back to the important thing and you can edit as you will.

You always do. No, I think that stays in for the record. All right. That's more of a confession than anything else. Yeah, that's another thing too. One of the reasons I wanted to sue the actor who played Ron Weasley is that his name is Rupert Grint. The lawsuit is O'Brien V. Grint.

Isn't that great? That's like, yeah. Yeah, O'Brien V. Grint. What I do is I like to sue people just to see how it looks in court and on the court documents, O'Brien V. Grint and I'm coming hard for this guy. So you're suing the actor, not Harry Potter, the J.K. Rowling. No, no. I'm not going to go after Warner Brothers or Universal or one of those giant companies.

I'm not going to go after them and I'm not going to go after J.K. Rowling. She has an army of golden robots that protect her. That's not going to happen. No, go after Rupert Grint. He's the one who probably doesn't have, I mean, I'm sure he did fine. You know, I'm sure he's got a nice fish and chip shop somewhere. You know, oh, come on in. Get yourself some fish and chips if you like.

The accent. Oh, it's the Porsche, Porsche. Travelling north to traveling north for me. First cab and cab to court as real company. Pull up, starboard on, portal the cab to P-O-S-H. I was Ron Weasley. That's how he ends all his songs. I come after him and then what happens is he's the one that squeals and then I get his fish

and chip shop. Mmm. Yeah. And that boy said you wanted one. Yeah. And then I make it gluten free and we don't fry the fish and there's no chips. It's super healthy. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just asparagus. Asparagus stalks wrapped in a newspaper. I hope that part of your lawsuit is they have to redo all of his scenes with you doing that. Yes. That's fantastic. Trust me, I've been practicing at home.

Oh, you've got powers, Harry. See, he's cleaned up his accent a little bit from what he really talks like. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. Harry, whoa, you got a thunderbolt on your forehead. That's daft it is. What? A flying car?

I'll get in it with you. We missed the train. We can take the flying car. Ah, look at Hagrid. He's a larger than us, Harry. I know you like that girl, but maybe in later episodes, I'll be the one that ends up with her. Isn't that what happened?

I think so. Yeah. Who saw that coming? See, Hermione eventually ends up with Rupert Grint, a.k.a., say it. Ron Weasley. Exactly. I'm going to make you participate. A.k.a.

Conan O'Brien. Yeah. I think that's another thing to point out. Another similarity is that although I'm kind of the joke in the earlier episodes of my life, later on Hermione chooses me. And you're the sleeper leading man. Exactly. That's my point.

My point is when a Conan O'Brien sticks around long enough, and that's called pulling a Conan O'Brien. You stick around long enough, and then at the end, the heroine chooses you. Because you're literally the only person left in the room. Is that what you mean? Why do I? Why? Why do you do this?

I'm asking. Then you wonder why the emperor only talks to people once every decade. Well, listeners, you can check out that photo at Team Coco Podcasts on Instagram. Yes. And if you believe in my lawsuit and you want to help me, let's get something going online. It's O'Brien V. Grint. I want my money. I want my freaking money, and I'm going to get it.

They know what they did. Let's get it to the Supreme Court. I'll take it to the Supreme Court. They're not doing much good these days. Yeah. Sorry. Things got dark. Conan O'Brien needs a friend, with Conan O'Brien, Sonam of Sessian, and Matt Gorely,

produced by me, Matt Gorely, executive produced by Adam Sacks, Joanna Solotarov, and Jeff Ross at Team Coco, and Colin Anderson and Cody Fisher at Year Wolf, theme song by the White Stripes, incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair, and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Apples, engineering by Will Beckton, talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Batista, and Britt Kahn. You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, and you might find your review read

on a future episode. Got a question for Conan? Call the Team Coco hotline at 323-451-2821 and leave a message. It too could be featured on a future episode. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. This has been a Team Coco production in association with Year Wolf.