David Remnick

How old were you when you recognized this inbuilt irony, whatever it is, as a way of being in the world?

Let me ask you about late night.

The big news about late night this past year was Jimmy Kimmel and Trump and all that.

But I think we can agree that what's happening over time certainly is that the whole late night scene and especially being watched in real time, that's collapsed or it's in the process of collapsing.

How much do you care that it's collapsing?

Is Stephen Colbert treating it as a tragedy or what?

Conan, we're about the same age, and we've reached the age where if one of our contemporaries dies, it's incredibly...

but it's not an absolute shock.

It's not a tragedy in the sense that when we were much younger, somebody died in an accident or a disease or something.

You had something happen this year to two friends who had been guests at your house the night before, the Reiners.

Can you talk a little bit about your experience of that horrific tragedy?

I watched that Mel Brooks documentary that Judd Apatow did.

It's terrific.

And there's Carl Reiner, and they have such a close relationship when they were both in their, I guess, 90 until Carl died.

And then Rob Reiner pops up in this, and he seems relatively young and so vibrant and alive.

And to have that in the back of your mind as you watch this film,

For me, it's tragic.

For you, it must be, I don't know, it's incomprehensible.

See you again in five years.

Conan O'Brien is the host of the podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, and he's hosting the Academy Awards ceremony on March 15th.