Conan O’Brien Going on Every Podcast to Promote the 2026 Oscars

If there’s anyone who understands how significantly the cultural impact of talk shows has drifted away from late night and daytime TV to podcasts and YouTube, it would be Conan O’Brien.

The former NBC Late Night and Tonight Show and TBS Conan host ended his late night run in 2021, shifting his focus to his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. He was early to the video podcast game there, too, pulling clips when many other top shows were still audio-only, and clips from his HBO travelogue Conan O’Brien Must Go also travel well on social media.

And yet, it wasn’t until last year when he realized just how impactful digital media had really become, after his appearance on the YouTube interview series Hot Ones went extraordinarily viral.

“That was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,” O’Brien told The Hollywood Reporter in a cover story this week. “If a guy can do World Series numbers with overhead that looked, to me, to be about $600, and you have every big star lining up to do his show or Chicken Shop Date … that’s when I profoundly understood that late night shows are in trouble.”

So how is he promoting this year’s Academy Awards telecast, which he will host for the second straight year?

By doing Chicken Shop Date, of course. And New Heights, the buzzy show hosted by Travis and Jason Kelce; and IMO, hosted by former first lady Michelle Obama; and podcasts hosted by The New Yorker’s David Remnick and LateNighter‘s Bill Carter. Not to mention the Oscars mentions on his own Team Coco podcasts in recent weeks.

For Hollywood’s biggest night, the host is turning to digital media as the primary source of promotion.

To be sure, O’Brien isn’t ignoring traditional media. He spoke to THR, after all, and he also sat for the traditional interviews with ABC’s Good Morning America and Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC and Hulu will televise the show). He also read a category about the Oscars on Jeopardy! this week, with clips from that appearing garnering millions of views on TikTok and Instagram.

But it is pretty clear where the promotional firepower is being spent, and it isn’t on TV. In a world where buzz is defined by social media, that is where the host of the Oscars needs to be showing up. Last year’s Oscars saw a five-year high in the ratings, with some crediting O’Brien’s relevance with a younger audience that knows him as the podcaster, not the late night host.

His podcast blitz this year underscored that effort, seemingly strategically designed to appeal to the entertainment addicts who watch Chicken Shop Date, the women who watch IMO and the increasingly broad appeal of New Heights, which has been booking A-lister after A-lister this year.

And it’s hard not to look at the blitz in light of the Film Academy’s decision to move the Oscars to YouTube starting in 2029.

The Academy Awards are all about honoring movies, but it is a TV show at heart. And in a world where younger people just aren’t watching linear TV, the Oscars need to evolve and meet them where they are. YouTube, with its billions of users and global scale, is betting that it can take the nearly 100-year-old awards show and make it fresh and relevant for that next generation, and its stable of creators and podcast hosts are a big part of the equation. After all, their platforms are where the conversation about entertainment is happening.

So O’Brien, a creature of broadcast TV turned podcaster and HBO travel show host, is venturing to that brave new world to promote this most old-fashioned of shows, as the Oscars slowly tilt in the direction of the creator economy as the place to celebrate film.