Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Conan O'Brien

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

TV’s funniest redhead, Conan O’ Brien, talks about growing up in a big, loud Irish-Catholic family in Massachusetts. He opens up about being an insecure kid and how he first learned to be funny at the kitchen table. We learn about why Halloween is his favorite holiday, and he shares his favorite childhood meal: fried ham. Yes, you heard that right.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

And I still go home and I go into that kitchen. And I think, if I'm a clay pot, this is the kiln where I got baked. This is where it all happened. More so than my bedroom, more so than any other place in the house. Food is the excuse and it gets us in there. But then that's where all the molecules bang up against each other. And that's where there's the laughter. There's also some of the most intense arguments that I was in with my brothers or with

my parents. So yeah, it's ground zero, really. Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. I'm Michelle Norris. Joining me today is the flame-haired funny man Conan O'Brien. You know him from, well, you know him from everywhere. The Harvard grad started off his career writing for SNL. And then The Simpsons. He bundled up all that nervous, comedic energy and went on to host NBC's late night, then the Tonight Show. And then he charted his own path with his own late night show, Conan, on TBS. Since then, he started a media empire, traveled the world, and has gotten a bit more introspective. As he's turned 60, he doesn't mind

me telling you that, he seems to look through a more serious lens as a man with a long-time loving marriage and kids who've headed off to college. And as someone who has been able to to watch his parents move into old age in the same house he was raised in. His podcast, Conan O'Brien needs a friend, digs deep with interviews that are sometimes historical or anthropological. And yes, there is still the occasional joke about, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but the joke about farting in public. Well, since Conan needs a friend, we decided to invite him to our show so we could turn the table on him. In this case, the kitchen.

table to learn more about his great big loud Irish Catholic family, his hardworking maverick of a mother, and how people might not always speak the words, I love you, they are nonetheless saying it through food. I think you're going to love this conversation. And as a bonus, we learn about Conan's favorite food growing up, and well, he's a ham, and it turns out he likes ham. He really likes ham. We'll hear about that. Conan O'Brien, thanks for being with us. Honor to be here. Thanks, thanks. for having me. I have heard you talk about your mom so many times, your family so many times. It sounds like it was a big, loud, raucous household. So I'm eager to talk to you about your mom's kitchen. Well, I'm not sure my mom's eager for me to talk about her kitchen, but I'm going to go for it anyway.

Yeah, just to bring your listeners up to speed. I'm one of six kids. So my mom had six kids. And she went back to work as a lawyer at Ropes and Gray law firm. And my father, worked at Brigham Women's Hospital. And so, and our grandmother lived with us, and we had multiple dogs, cats. My brother had parakeets. So, yeah, it was kind of madness in the house. But the kitchen was a major focus in our home because we love to eat. Now, just a word about your mom, because we're going to talk about what life was like when she went back to work.

But she graduated Yale Law School. Yeah. 19956. Is that right? Yeah, I believe that's right. Her story is pretty interesting because my people, both sides of the family, settled in the Worcester area, which is kind of central Massachusetts. And my grandfather, my mom's father, was a policeman.

And he was the guy that would direct traffic in downtown Worcester. And he earned, I think, 55. dollars a week. My mother grew up in that environment, of course, he hadn't been to college. His mom had not been to college. I mean, her mom had not been to college. And so she came from this modest household, and she was very bright and very hardworking, and she got a full scholarship to go to Vassar because, you know, my grandmother, her mother had grown up during this era of real prejudice against Irish Catholics. And she had once passed Vassar, I think, in like a wagon, I'm going to say, like a horse and

buggy. And she saw all these ladies dressed in white sitting on a lawn having tea. And she said, what is that? And they said, that's Vassar. And she thought my daughter's going to Vassar. So my mom went on a full scholarship and did very well. And then she got a full scholarship to go to Yale law. school at a time when not a lot of was very rare for women to go to Yale law school.

And she has amazing stories of graduating, excellent law student graduates Yale Law School in the mid-1950s and goes to work at a law firm and they go in to meet with clients and it's time to break for lunch. and they told my mom, this is men's only dining room here at the law firm, and they set up a little card table for her to eat at outside the dining room. Now, you know, today that's a nice lawsuit that we can all retire on. And so my mom really was a, just did a super heroic job of taking care of all of us

and also being an estate attorney at this big-time law firm. She always knew when our appointments were for different doctors. She had our clothes laid out in the morning when we were a little, what we were going to wear. She just took care of everything. And then at a time when it was very uncommon, had this very serious job. She had stayed home for a while

and then she went back to work full-time as a lawyer. and I had read somewhere that she did a very lawyerly thing. She had almost like a deposition with all of you and sat down and said, what do you think of this? Yeah, she did. Mom's going back to work. Yeah, I don't think it mattered what we said, but she wanted to at least ask us.

It was a little like, I think if we had said, we don't like it and you're not going, she'd have said, okay, well, anyway, I start tomorrow. She took my brother, Neil, who's about two years older than me, two or three years older than me, She took Neil into downtown to the, it was at the State Street Bank Building into this big high-rise bank building and got in the elevator and took him up and showed her office to Neil, which was, I think, a modest office when she first went back. And then she worked her way up to partner and she got a corner office. But Neil said it was like a kid showing you his new bike.

She was so proud that she had her office in the law firm. and Neo remembers that very well. Obviously, we were very proud that she was doing that, but I did remember not liking it suddenly that I would come home from fourth grade, and she wasn't there. And that stinging a little bit. So your dad did something that was interesting also.

He shifted to take up a lot of the workload that I guess was traditionally seen as woman's work, the kind of thing that, a mother would do in the home. I wonder when you look back on that, what you think about your dad stepping in to do something like that. You know, what he did specifically was there was a bunch of things he didn't step in and do, but what he did, which I thought was remarkable,

you know, my dad's a very brilliant man, and he was doing his research, and he ran a laboratory where he studied microbiology and infectious diseases. and my mother has to go back to work, and also she had various health problems at the time. She had a very bad back injury, and they operated, and this is the 1970s, and I think they actually probably made it worse,

and she had a bunch of problems like that, and she was in a lot of pain, and there were times when my mom was in the hospital, and she just wasn't able to do the traditional Sunday meal, because we would have a Sunday meal, and that was very important. And so my father said, I'm going to step in and do the Sunday meal because that still needs to remain. That's important. That's the time when everybody gets together.

So my dad said, well, I know I'm a scientist and I'm really good at chemistry. So I'm just going to check out a bunch of books. My dad got a bunch of cookbooks and studied them and then approached it like a chemist. And he went and what I remember very clearly is he learned how to make about two meals or three meals. He'd make a lot of like, it'd be potatoes and sweet potatoes and, you know, some vegetables. But a grilled swordfish when it was in season, grilled steak. And what he didn't do ever was clean as he went. So, and my wife would be laughing because any time I make something, which is not often, I'm not talented,

but whenever I'm trying to make something, stuff just piles up around me. And, you know, there's like batter-covered bowls and broken eggshells and everything. And my wife is always astonished because she'll say, you know, you can, as you go, while this is simmering, you can clean up that area. And I think I did get that from my dad

because when he was done, it looked like there had been an explosion in the room over in the kitchen area, and we'd all finish our meal, and he'd say, well, I got to go to the lab. I'll see you suckers later. And so that was up to us to try in.

When you have six kids, you know, you know that it'll be taken care of. Somebody's got kitchen duty. Yeah, someone. And mysterious, I have the bad reputation in my family among my brothers and sisters is somehow I was very good at looking

like I was pitching in with everyone else, but I'd disappear pretty quickly. So that's what you would do. You never wanted to wash if you had the choice of washing or drying, because if you dried, you could kind of like just back out of the room. Yeah, yeah. What I liked was when offered the choice of washing or drawing, I liked sneaking out and watching television.

And so I had a pretty bad reputation, which I'm still living down to this day. Because if I go home now to Brooklyn, Massachusetts, and visit my family, if at any point I get up, rinse a dish, and put it in the dishwasher, any one of my siblings can say, oh, my God, look, Conan's cleaning a plate, and they all explode in laughter. And then I will never live down that reputation.

No, I will never live it down. I'm like a guy that, you know, lives in a small town who, you know, robbed the bank when I was 19, and I still live there. Since then, I've been a good citizen, but no one will ever ever, ever forget it. So yeah. What did that kitchen look like? I can remember it very well. My parents bought this old house. You know, you have to remember at that time, they bought the house in 1962. It was a house from like 1902, and it had a kitchen with like a big trough sink, and it had heavy black drapes, and I think the house was painted black. I mean, it looked, I think, a little

like a haunted house. My parents got it and they didn't have a lot of money, but they started slowly fixing as they went. And the first thing they did was they put down red 1962 linoleum tile on the floor in the kitchen. And that's my biggest memory is this red linoleum tile with kind of a swirly pattern that they put down on the floor. The kitchen, not that big. And what's interesting about, it is kitchens have evolved so much now. Now the kitchen is where everybody wants a kitchen where you can cook, but you can also watch television and the family can hang out. Everybody wants that kitchen and every time you go to someone's house, the kitchen has that kind of vibe. Yeah, it's the heartbeat of the house. Yeah, people can sit and sip a glass of wine and

and if there's a game on, you can be watching the game while someone's cooking. It's that whole thing. And back then, this was a kitchen. The people who had owned the house were these old women, and they had, you know, it was like, the cook is in the kitchen,

taking care of things. So nobody went into the kitchen. I remember our kitchen, by today's standards, would not be the nice, eat-in kitchen of the modern era. and it had an old-fashioned stove in it and it had an old stone sink

where you could, you know, I think with a real ringer on it, you know, if you needed to ring something out. So I remember the kitchen being kind of the hive of activity, though, because it's where everybody gathers. I mean, when you have six kids, food, everybody's really interested in food.

And so when it's time to eat, you're very motivated to get. get in there and you're really motivated to get your pork chop and maybe if there is an extra pork chop the extra pork chop and so I eat as a result very quickly and now I'm a 60 year old man and I my wife will be in a nice restaurant and the food will come and I'm stuffing it in my face and my wife will slow down you don't have to eat this fast my wife is always putting her arm her hand on my arm and going, your brother, Neil, isn't here.

Neil isn't here. So was Neil your nemesis? He was going to get that pork shop ahead of you? Guess what? He's still my nemesis. I'm still battling it out with Neil. Yeah, Neil was usually the one that would, he was bigger than me and older than me,

and he could probably, he could get that. And there's so much that happens in our youth, when we're kids, there are these things that have. happen and they get set up as patterns. And then your life changes later on, but you still have the old pattern built in. Like what? Well, just like that, meaning I've got to eat quickly because someone's going to eat it if I don't eat it. And I better get out of here quickly afterwards in case someone tries to make me clean up. So there are all these behaviors I have where I'm eating fast and dashing

out of a room and people are saying, what are you doing? And it's just these old habits that die hard. but that was a big one. My mom would make... The big thing I remember is she was... Even though she had this so much to do and so much pressure, she was in the kitchen making breakfast every morning because, you know, in New England, when you get up in the morning for nine months of the year,

it's dark outside and it's cold. You'd go in in the morning and, man, it's Monday, and it's February, and we live in Boston, and it's dark out, and I don't want to go to school. And my mom's in the kitchen, and she's making enough scrambled eggs for 35 people. And so it was kind of that mass production cooking. Did you learn how to first be funny at the kitchen table?

I think you will find that many people in the comedy profession, it all starts at the family meal. Because that's the first time where you think about it, it's your first real audience, especially if it's a large family. So that's a good number of people and you're there and people are eating and people are starting to be wise guys. And my mom was very much straight man.

She was very much a, oh, don't, don't say. that. Now sit up straight. Now, why would you say that? And what happens is that made me want to be really funny because the way if you ever watch an old Marks Brothers movie, Groucho Marx, Marx, worked off this woman who was a genius named Margaret Dumont. And she was always saying, please, please, you know, please, groucho, behave yourself, please. And he had, you know, walk this way, well, if I can walk that way. And it was a great thing for him to bounce off. He could be really funny because she was so straight. My mom was a little bit like a Margaret Dumont, and that made me want to be really silly to bounce off of that. And also when you're a kid, you very much pay attention to what makes your parents laugh because you're really trying to,

especially I think sometimes fathers, you're looking at the father who's not around as much and seems more remote. You're looking, what, wait a minute, this guy really loves. You're really laughs when he watches television at night. This guy really laughs at some people on TV. What's he laughing at? And then you figure out if you can do it and he really laughs, wait a minute, I know how to crack this guy. So that's an early connection that you make that I made with my dad, specifically and my mom. And that all happened around that table. All I wanted to do when I was in my high chair is make those two people laugh. And whatever I'm doing now, is just an extension of that.

You know, our show is called your mama's kitchen. And the assumption is that we're going to talk about food. And of course, we do. But all kinds of things happen in the kitchen that have nothing to do with what happens at the stove or what you pull out of the refrigerator. It's where when we talked to Gil King and Michelle Obama, they both talked about getting their hair done.

I bet that's where you probably got your haircut. You joke, but my mom used to do all of our haircuts. at the same time. And she had a, it came in a plastic kit. It was a Sears and Roebuck haircuting kit, which I can see in my mind to this day. And when it was haircut day, once a month,

she would call us in, I think, by birth order, one at a time. And you would sit in a tall chair, and she would cut our hair. And her method was nothing fancy. straight across bangs, just straight across bangs, like Moe on the Three Stoges. And that's what we all got. Boy, girl, didn't matter, straight across bangs.

So every picture of me as a kid, orange hair, and then straight across bangs. And I know that that came from that haircutting kit. And then it was only, I think when I'm like 15 or 14, I get to go to a barber, you know, And I get to start to say things like, hey, can you, you kind of comb it up a little bit, so it's got a little bit of a wave. And he'd be like, what do you want to do that? It's the 70s. No one's doing that.

You're going to look like Sean Cassidy. So, yeah, but that was what she did. The kitchen was where we got the haircut. The kitchen is where our dogs and cats got fed. It's funny because my parents are still with us. They still live in that same house. and I still go home and I go into that kitchen and I think this is really the kiln

if I'm a clay pot, this is the kiln where I got baked. This is where it all happened. More so than my bedroom, more so than any other place in the house, this is where it really happened. Food is the excuse and it gets us in there, but then that's where all the molecules bang up against each other and that's where there's the laughter.

There's also some of the most intense arguments, you know, that I was in with my brothers or with my parents. That's the room where they gathered us when they told us that my youngest brother was going to be showing up. They gathered us all in the kitchen. And I remember sitting around the table thinking, what is this all about? And they said there's going to be someone moving in.

I thought they were taking in a tenant. And in a way they were. And then my brother Justin showed up. But so that was where major announcements happened. That's where I, that's the room where someone would come in and say, I have to tell you, you know, your grandfather just died. Like that's, for some reason, that's where everybody happened to be when big news happened, when big things happened.

It's the room that you started your day in before you went to school and you're miserable. It's where the day kind of ended because we'd all go in there for a snack before, before we went to bed. So yeah, it's ground zero, really. A lot of life lessons in a room like that. What did you learn about generosity, about, you know, important character traits in that room? One thing I learned, and this has been an issue between my wife and myself, is that, and it's kind of a running joke, I saw that my dad, my mom, they made a lot of food. To make people feel comfortable, especially when companies coming over, you make a lot.

My wife, her family is just so, they're sensible. They're so much more sensible than my family. What does that mean? Sensible meaning, I mean, the best way I can describe it is that we're Catholics, you know, and they're kind of this, you know, wasp family of lovely, lovely people. make enough food and everyone has it and they're done. And then, and we're, I think we were louder and there was more food. It just had more of this kind of raucous, Irish, you know, like, immigrant kind of feel to it. Like we're just, there's, there's more noise where, I mean,

her family came over probably on the Mayflower. And, and my family, maybe it was the bus said Mayflower that took us from Boston to Worcester, but it wasn't, it was not the same experience. So, as a result, when people are coming to visit when I first met my wife and we were dating and we would host people, should say, well, how many people are coming? And I'd say, well, I think it's going to be nine of us and should say, or it's going to be eight of us. And she'd say, okay, I'll go out and get eight bagels. And I would say, no, we need to have like 18 bagels. And she'd say, what are you talking about. And see, there needs to be so, we just need to, people need to see a lot when they come in. It will, we need to, and she'd say, well, then we're throwing the food away. And, you know,

I, I realized that that was a big difference with us, is that, and my wife, we joke about it all the time, but she'll now do the Conan math of, okay, we're having 15 people over or so, but I'm going to use his math and get this much food because I know that that's what makes him comfortable. But that's what I was used to because otherwise I would have that fear that, oh my God, Neil's going to get it, someone else is going to get it. So it was just easier to have that kind of sense of abundance. And what I saw was that whoever came to our house,

my mom and my dad were, and especially my mom, nice to a fault. I mean, whoever came to the house, come on into the kitchen, everybody gets fed, everybody gets coffee. I went through some thing. This is years ago when I was doing the show out of New York, but I had a stalker,

and the stalker was getting treatment, but then the stalker got away, and it sort of, I think, you know, it became a bit of a story for a day or two that there's this person who is obsessed with Conan O'Brien. We don't know where they are right now. And so someone in Boston or in Brookline said, let's just send a car over to be across the street from Conan's parents' house

because this person knows where Conan's parents live. And because my parents were always in the phone book and, you know, my mom was on cloud nine. She loved it. She loved it. She was like, well, there's a police car. outside. This is, you know, I think, and I would say like, yeah, I don't think they're going to show up. Oh, you never know. They could show up. And we've got this police car outside. And the next thing I know,

she kept going out there and bringing them in and was making them coffee and food. And then, of course, they caught this person and he went back into whatever treatment or whatever and was not, you know, never a problem again. And I think my mother was crushed. I think she was really disappointed because she loved feeding these policemen, these detectives that were sitting out in front of the house, she actively wanted to feed people. And she loved that. And that act of feeding people is so,

you know, my wife will laugh because I'm not great. I'm not a good cook or anything. I'll order a lot of food for stuff. But I love to have people into my house. And I'm constantly, I mean, I can be talking. talking to someone for 30 seconds. And I'll say, do you want to come on in the house?

Do you want to come in the house? I'll give you the tour of the house. You're done what your mom did. Yeah, I'm doing what my mom did. And, you know, I'll come in and I'll go, hey, Liza, this crazy person out on the street was, you know, wearing a tinfoil hat and throwing rocks at a tree. I just want to show them, I want to show them what we did with our kitchen. Do you like a bagel? Yeah, you want nine bagels?

One bagel. You want nine bagels? I'll make you a necklace of bagels. And so it was, it was. And it was... There's something beautiful about that, though. There really is. You know, that your parents had that radical hospitality.

Yes, that's a great word for it. I love that radical hospitality. Almost aggressive hospitality. Aggressive, invasive hospitality, yeah. Did they ever experience hunger? Because I ask this, because a lot... That often happens in places where people didn't have a lot. Right.

You know, it's like that Rosemary Clooney song, everybody eats when they come to my house. Yeah. They counter that by making sure that theirs is a place of plenty. I'm quite certain that they didn't. I'm quite certain that they always, that both of them, and they grew up in the Depression, and still they were very fortunate because they're both the grandfathers had jobs and work throughout the Depression.

And so everybody had enough and had plenty to eat. No one went hungry. So I don't think anyone went hungry either of my parents when they were growing up, but I do think they saw food, you know, it's a culture. I'm talking about my culture

is a culture where we don't naturally say I love you, I really care about you, you mean a lot to me. Those words don't come naturally, but what you can do, is hand someone a corned beef sandwich that's the size of your head.

And that means the same thing. And I think because my dad, I grew up in a house where my dad didn't talk that way. It was just a he's a different generation. My mom's comfortable saying, I love you. It's not the language of my father or fathers from that era. but he would rush out into the kitchen and start cooking up a big meal that would take him like five hours to make and leave half the house destroyed. But that's his way of doing the same thing.

And so I think culturally that's, I mean, that goes across so many different cultures. Food is a way of saying, I literally want to sustain you. You know, you mean a lot to me. I want to enrich you, sustain you. I want you to know that you mean a lot to me. And so that makes sense. And I'm probably, I use the word, I was going to use the word guilty.

Like I'm guilty of the same thing. But I do like to, you know, feed people. I like to take people to dinner. I like to, you know, have people over and then make sure that there's a lot of food. it's very primal way of letting people know you value them. I hear that Halloween is your favorite holiday. I loved Halloween at our house because we grew up in this sort of kooky old house. We would go all out.

So we would carve pumpkins. We'd put them on the roof of the house. We would... You put pumpkins on the roof of the house? Yeah, there's a lower roof. There's the lower roof that goes. over the porch that you could climb out onto if you went out on the second floor. Yeah, and so it wasn't.

And so we put it on that roof. And we loved it so much that we would keep the pumpkins going way too long, like into late November. And we would, they'd start to rot and would use toothpicks to try and keep them held together. And they would really get grotesque and stink. but loved Halloween, loved going out at night. To me, that was the key, is going out at night.

The fact that it was just so cool to get to walk around at night at a time when usually we were supposed to be in bed when we were little kids. And one of my favorite memories is that my brother, Luke, the pious good one, he'd always make his costume. The rest of us would, you know, get those plastic masks and the little smock you wear.

And I'm Spider-Man and I'm whoever. He would always make his, and they were incredibly elaborate. And I remembered one year there was like a, my parents got a new washing machine and the box was in the basement. And my brother, Luke, went down into the basement. And you could just hear sawing and hammering and all these noises. And then this thing came out of the basement. and he had built this giant robot that he was inside. Little things would come out of different slots,

and he was in there working at all, but he couldn't see very well. So I remember us just walking around at night in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and you see, oh, there's Spider-Man, there's Batman, there's Wonder Woman. There's a giant refrigerator box. And it's crashing into trees. and bubbles are coming out of it. Like it's, you know, he had put all this thought and craziness into it.

And there was a place where like a little arm would come out and get the candy and then retract again. And I think he was suffocating in there. He's probably oxygen deprived. But, yeah, those are just the fun. Those are memories that are fantastic now. Think about it. Did you choose your own customs? We did.

Although sometimes early on my mom would just go out and get a bunch and sort of, you know, they came in that box and they were pretty cheap and she'd just curl it at you. And I remember one year I was not happy because I think it was the height of Vietnam War, Watergate, all this kind of people questioning, what is America all about? People, you know, and my mom tossed me my costume and it was Uncle Sam. It was like a mask of Uncle Sam and a big star-spangled smock that you wore that said, like go USA and it was you know it would have been fine during Reagan's first big tall hat and oh yeah it had it was plastic like the face melded into the hat and you wore it and I just

I remembered um vocalizing my displeasure that you know this isn't cool man I look like a narc you know how did you get to be Uncle Sam instead of I was just random I honestly just think she just, you have to remember when there are six kids, it's just like you walk in the door and you've got six boxes and you just start chucking boxes at people. So I don't think a lot of thought went into Conan is Uncle Sam. It's just what happened. So what tastes like home to you? Because we always leave our listeners with a recipe that means something special to the guest. So if you wanted to share a recipe from your life, what would that be? Well, I would say, I don't know that it's a recipe so much because things were pretty simple when I was, my mom would cook, but what she

used to do in the morning is, and again, this is probably not going to meet the standards of, you know, the surgeon general or anybody in the cardiac health industry. But I think my mom learned from her mom. And in those days, you just got a big skillet out and you put a hunk of butter down. And then you sliced up big chunks of ham and you fried them. And so it was just fried ham in butter. And then you'd have that with, in the morning, you could have that with eggs. But, you know, to me, if anyone can beat ham frying in butter, I will shake their hand, but I don't think it can be beat.

I just think it's, and it's such a simple thing. I wish I could say there was one special recipe that if you do this and you do that, but then you add this and add that. And I think, yeah, I come from, you know, Irish farmers and stone wall builders. And it's just been passed down over the years that if you can get your hands on some ham

and fry it up and some butter, there's nothing better than that. And that's still in my genetic code to this day. To this day, in a day of, yeah, to a day where I might go to a little bit of a little. like a nice sushi restaurant tonight, or I might be invited to some fancy person's home, and they've like, here's, you know,

this really fancy meal. And I'm thinking, where's the, why don't we get a hold of a ham? Why don't we steal a ham, hack it up into chunks, not even slices, and fry it in deep butter. That actually sounds delicious.

It is delicious. I'll make it for you any time because an idiot can make it. Ding, don't say that. I'll show up. Oh, yeah, and I will bring you, I will invite you in, and I will fry up.

some big chunks of ham in butter. And then we will all go to Cedar Sinai Medical Center and have our cholesterol check. It has been so much fun talking to you. I've loved talking to you. This is nice. This has actually been,

because you've had me thinking about things I haven't thought about in a long time and really making me go there, which were leading me there. So it's nice. I feel like I just got in a time machine and went back to a nice place. So thank you very much for having me.

I appreciate it. Thanks for being with us. We were glad we could take Conan O'Brien in the Wayback Machine to learn about his childhood and how he became the unfiltered, introspective funny man that has kept us laughing for years. In some ways, he's practiced his own version of radical hospitality, welcoming us in his life over all these years,

making us laugh and making us think. And isn't it just perfect that the guy who's hammed it up for a living, finds that hot buttered ham sizzling in a skillet is the taste of home. Maybe it's just me, but that was a surprise. I was not expecting that. But I do expect that there might be some hot buttered ham in my future because I got admit, it sounds really good. Sometimes you just want to keep it simple.

Make sure and check us out on Instagram to find recipes from all of our conversations, including Conan's hot buttered ham. Thanks for listening to Your Mama's Kitchen. I'm Michelle Norris. See you back here next time. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original produced by Higher Ground Studios, senior producer Natalie Wren, producer Sonia Tund, and associate producer Angel Carreras, sound design and engineering from Andrew Eepin and Roy Baum.

Higher Ground audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camilla Thurdecuz. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Anne Feerman and me, Michelle Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Zola Masheriki, Nick DiAngelo, and Anne Heberman. The show's closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels. Editorial and Web Support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media, engagement and marketing from inside projects,

Talent Booker, Angela Paluso. Head of Audible studio, Zola Masheriki, chief content officer, Rachel Giazza. And that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Come back next week and be bountiful. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright, 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.