Andy Richter on Late Night’s decline, “Dancing With the Stars,” and new media

0:00A lot of the old timers would come on and they were used to this sort of this structure of I'm talking to the guy the host here and then if there's something where you got to go and then there's this idiot. there's the idiot that is sitting to your left or your right depending on how the thing and people would find out like that our audience they didn't think I was an idiot and they wouldn't go yeah that or you know or this drunk over here there was much more of kind of a clown buffoon kind of role for that kind of person like a little bit of a whipping boy

0:44Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media. I am Max Taney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. With me, as always, from across the office in a very well and normally lit room is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Okay, I'm persuaded. We're going to get a second studio in the office. But we are always excited for our guests. We never introduce our guests without any excitement. But this week, we have somebody who I think will be a real treat for many of our listeners, particularly those who grew up watching late night television. Our guest this week is Andy Richter.

1:20He is the famous game show host, a sidekick for Conan O 'Brien. He hosts a podcast. He was on Dancing with the Stars. He's been in about every single sitcom you can possibly imagine. And we're going to ask him a little bit about his 30-year career and how the shifting media landscape is impacting kind of a jack-of-all-trades such as Andy. Ben, you know Andy Richter a little bit, right? A little bit, yeah. This is my guest booking, but you know him a little bit. I know him a little. And then when I sort of started digging in, realized I had been seeing his face here and there for years. I mean, this is a guy for whom it's always been television.

1:55We have a lot of questions that we want to ask Andy about his long career in television and his new career as a TikTok star and a dancing sensation. And he is actually right on time. He's waiting for us. So why don't we bring in Andy right after this break?

2:25the marketing landscape today. Whether it's AI's impact on the industry or creator's role in culture, Josh is getting into the weeds with the people who are actually shaping what's next. These are your notes from the frontier. You'll hear from CMOs, agency legends, brand visionaries, and brilliant thinkers. Search for Frontier CMO from Think with Google wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

2:54Andy, we are very excited to have you on the show with us this week. Ben and I have been doing this podcast for a little bit less than a year together. We've got a nice little audience. We feel like we're starting to do okay. But one of the things that we've realized over the course of the year that we've been doing the show is that our interviews tend to get better as they go on for longer as people get warmed up, especially with people who don't know us kind of going into it. And so we're kind of curious, like, how should we start interviews? How do you get guests warmed up? How did Conan get guests warmed up?

3:28Like, what is actually the secret to getting these things going, do you think? Well, I would say what I like to do, and I often do this on my podcast, is that I have the engineer start recording the second the person walks in the door. And often people, I'll start talking to the person and we'll be talking for five minutes and they'll say like, wait, is this the podcast? I very much value authenticity in conversation. And so when you tee something up with my next guest is a blah, blah, blah, blah, you're already putting it into a framework that isn't conducive to real human interaction. collection you're already putting it into a commercial vessel when you set it up that way you know i i'm trying to get laughs i'm i'm a comedian first and foremost so i'm often i often will try and start with something that just maybe throws them off just a little bit you know not like tell me about the affair you had you know just but just sort of be like tell me about that guy you worked with i bet you hate him don't you you know just like something that's an obvious silly joke.

4:37And that tends to get you right into, you know, an actual conversation. I will say, though, that like this kind of conversation is completely different than talk show conversation. Talk show conversations are they're like gas station food to real conversations, you know, fine dining, because everything is so commodified and so quick and so compressed. And it's about getting it over within six or seven minutes and hitting a laugh. I've watched late night talk shows and I was always annoyed where the actual story would seem unimportant and the person, there would be a big laugh and then the host would change the topic.

5:16And I'd be like, wait, we never found out what happened at the youth hostel. Go back. I want to know what happened. So I think just try to keep things as low key and as conversational as possible. And you sort of get people to ease into it. Well, thank you for starting this, Max, in such a strange meta way. But this is one of the great things about our podcast is we get to invite people who are like amazing talkers onto the show and be like, tell us exactly how we should do this thing. And that's like, that's one of the privileges. Nice. Yeah, it's on the job training. Exactly. As you said, Andy, many years in late night, really a big part of American popular culture for three decades, done a lot of different things, you know, game shows.

6:01You starred in our producer, Josh Billinson's favorite sitcom, which ran for nine or ten episodes. But I am curious, and you're now producing a podcast, what kind of keeps you doing it? Because it's what I do. I'm a tradesman, and this is my trade. Quite frankly, the industry has been so weird and so sort of fractured that I am just trying to keep irons and fires and keep things going. I mean, say I got on a TV show, a single camera television show, and I was working 12 hour days, five days a week. I don't know if I would be a podcaster anymore because this is something I do that is in the absence of other things.

6:43And I started doing it while I was on the Conan show still, and I enjoy doing it, but it's not my first thing. This is something that I'm doing, like I said, in the absence of other things. And I hope that doesn't seem like I'm devaluing it. That makes me feel kind of bad. Why? I don't know. This is the side gig, not the real thing. No. Well, you mean for you or you mean for me? For both of us. Oh, well, I can't help you with that. Podcasting is a real thing now. And I had been approached years ago. I've been doing mine since 2019. And I had been approached for years before that with people saying, you should do a podcast.

7:28But podcasting, I keep doing because it's fun. I have fun. It's fun and I have time to do it. You know, I do game shows because I make television and they hire me for television jobs. I just was on Dancing with the Stars. It was a TV job for me. It wasn't because I have a deep love of ballroom dancing. It was because I make television. I'm lucky that I can do different kinds of things in television. I can produce, I can write, I can act. So that's what I did. It's the same way if I get a part on a sitcom or on a drama, I have to know my lines. This was like I had to dance and I had to dance to the top of my capabilities.

8:08And I kind of like that. I like that I do game shows. I like that I do this morning. I just recorded some. I'm a villain on a new Disney or a new Disney DC comic kids show. You know, I was doing battle with Captain American Hulk this morning as my character, which I probably can't mention because I'm sure there's some contractual reason it can't be mentioned yet. But so I do cartoon voices. I do game shows. Honestly, it really all isn't just in the absence of acting work, because that's truly what I set out to do is become an actor. And acting work is, it eludes me at times for some reason. I don't think I'm bad at it.

8:49I just think that the industry is weird. I'm hoping now that I was on this ballroom dancing show that people will remember that I'm an actor and hire me to be an actor. A lot of media executives listen to this show, too. Okay, good. Call Andy. Hire me, yeah. That's right. But no, but we want to get to the Dancing with the Stars stuff in a bit because we've got a lot of questions about that. Oftentimes, I'll announce to the segment of The Office, you know, who we're having on our pod. And generally, I like to gauge the reaction. And, you know, if the reaction is very flat, I'm like, oh, no, we're fucked this week.

9:19But this week, we had a lot of Dancing with the Stars fans who were very excited about this one. But I want to go back to something that you just said. It does feel like there's a big conversation going on right now in Hollywood and the entertainment industry about kind of contractions and the changes. Is that something that you felt, especially post-2020 and post-strikes? Can I say, fuck yes? The only solace that I can take from the underemployment, let's call it, that I have experienced is that I have many, many peers who express the same kind of thing, many of whom are podcasters. And many of whom are podcasters who will tell me this person who is a comedic actor of our sort of, you know, colleague and sort of the same general demographic type just called me and said, well, what's this podcasting about?

10:09Like there are so little work for people, you know, and there always is this, well, it's getting better and it is kind of getting better. But there's so little work that there are people who never would have considered podcasting or like, I guess I'm supposed to podcast now. It has been really, really weird. I don't know exactly. You know, there were strikes. There's the contraction of the economy in different ways. there's the vertical integration that makes it so there's only three outlets pumping out shit you know i it there's just so few show so few places making shows now that i think that has something to do with it it's funny i think of you as having been kind of ubiquitous for my entire life was there a moment in your career where you felt like this was the moment you were working most this was the moment when the industry was at its peak well definitely yes and i was always aware of this.

11:04When I first did Late Night with Conan O 'Brien, I knew from having seen other people that had done shows in New York, namely Correspondence on The Daily Show, when they left that and came to L.A., very dumb place. Show business is dumb. I can't really say that L.A. is dumb, but it's very simplistic. And so there's a shiny new thing that they haven't been able to get. And everybody says, I have to get that shiny new thing. And I was a shiny new thing when I left the Conan show. Like at that point, I came out here for a couple of meetings and it was maybe a trip of like five days. And I went home with parts in six different movies.

11:45Like it just happened that fast. This would have been right, like 2000. 2000. 2000. I mean, none of those movies end up being, I mean, Elf is good, but that was, and that was kind of a little bit later, But you know these movies are mostly forgettable But that was just the way it was And it still kind of is like You know it's like new hot fresh And that's you know this dancing thing That's now I'm new hot fresh I've been sitting in Pasadena walking dogs And driving kids to school and gardening And nothing has changed I just had and now all of a sudden I'm a hot commodity But it's like no I'm the same guy Just with a little dance experience But that's not what people are calling for That would have been the time That would have been the time.

12:29And then I and I had in succession, I had three sitcoms that I was number one on the call sheet that I was the star of. Two of them I was an executive producer on and one of them I was just a star of and didn't really have anything to do with it. But every time one of those shows goes away, there is the, oh, shit, what if nothing else happens? And I've certainly had periods where not a lot happened. And the Conan show, I was on the Conan show on TBS for 11 years. It ended in 21. And I enjoyed working on this show. I was happy to work on this show. I got to see my older kids grow up because I was home for dinner five nights a week, which there's not a lot of people that are on a regular TV show that can say that.

13:17It certainly wasn't as lucrative for me as a lot of other kinds of shows. Like if I'd been on a sitcom the same amount of time, I wouldn't have to probably worry about money. Not to be rude, but like, I'm actually curious. What's the comparison? What do you make on a sitcom versus on a roughly on a show like that? Well, I'm not going to give you numbers because I honestly don't know, But I can tell you that if you're on a popular sitcom for five or six years that goes into syndication, it's an annuity that you can relax and live a very nice life on. Whereas what I made as the sidekick on a cable talk show, it was a very good living, but it isn't the kind of money that piles up like it does when you're on a.

14:03I would say it's probably a five to one ratio. That's just a guess. And we want to ask you about that because I think that's the way that probably most people, listeners of the show are familiar with, which is your 18 years that you spent in two separate chunks on Conan's show. I was listening to another interview that you did. It was really interesting. You said that you didn't want to be Ed McMahon, who was Johnny Carson's famously sidekick. What do you mean by that? And how did you avoid it? What I meant by that was that I had higher aspirations just in terms of being a comedic performer. I had gone into the Conan show and it was a kind of a, we were starting from scratch and we were kind of doing, I don't know what the phrase, you know, postmodern, you know, a comment on a talk show more than a talk show.

14:52And I didn't mean any insult to Ed McMahon. I just meant that he was part of an old paradigm that I didn't feel like we were going to be indulging in. And that I felt that like Conan's and my partnership and our relationship and our whole way of doing business would have a lot more sort of equity and there'd be more equality between the two of us than there would be between like Ed and Johnny. And as I was saying, a lot of the old timers would come on and they were used to this sort of this structure of I'm talking to the guy, the host here. And then if there's something where you got to go and then there's this idiot, there's the idiot that is sitting to your left or your right, depending on how the thing.

15:38And people would find out like that our audience, they didn't think I was an idiot and they wouldn't go. Yeah, that or, you know, or this drunk over here. There was much more of kind of a clown buffoon kind of role for that kind of person, like a little bit of a whipping boy. It's like the Hank Kingsley situation, right? Yeah, exactly. Not necessarily a fully fledged character that could stand equally with the fully fledged character of the host and the guest. And then, you know, it was funny because when he got the Tonight Show and asked me to come back to work for him, I was kind of like, well, I guess I'm going to be fucking Egg McMahon.

16:16man, oh, well, could be worse, you know. But I just think I always, you know, especially in the early days of the show, I did remotes on my own. And I was a writer for the show and I would perform in my own pieces and other pieces that people would write for me. So I just kind of felt like I was going to do more than just say, here's Johnny and then laugh. And I just think that wasn't even necessarily personal mission that was based on, you know, strong convictions. It was just, I knew we were going to do a different show. And how did your approach to that role and your role on the show change over the course of 18 years?

16:58And obviously you came back after taking, I believe it was something like an eight-year break or something like that in between. How did your approach change over those 18 years? Or did it not really change? Was it very similar from when you started to when when you ended? It was a homecoming, definitely, although they were coming to L.A. for me. And there was definitely an adjustment period when I came back because he had been doing the show for eight or nine years by himself. So he had a rhythm to himself. So I had to kind of, he had to learn how to have me back on the show and I had to learn how to be back on the show with him.

17:33But very quickly, we regained that kind of equilibrium, I guess. And then once we got to TBS. You know, there's the kerfuffle with Jay Leno, and then we went on tour, and then we got to TBS. And once we got to TBS, the difference in the way that I ran things was just that I wasn't looking outside the window at what was going on outside like I was when I was younger. I was on that show. I was happy to be on that show. I had children at this point. I had what is a rarity in this business, a steady paycheck. A couple of years into it, I moved just kind of coincidentally 10 minutes away. I had a 10 minute commute.

18:15As I said, I was home every night for my kids and I was a very happy denizen of Conan Island. And I lived on Conan Island for 11 years. And it was a wonderful time that afforded me a lot of wonderful things and a lot of wonderful experiences. But it did kind of take me off the market. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Andy, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.

18:49In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at CES. So Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs? So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even 10 years time. I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelley Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader.

19:28And he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and into the future. So what did you learn from that conversation? Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. Stuff gets announced. Some of it launches. Some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after CES a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target around agentic commerce.

20:07Super interesting building the new protocols for machines doing the shopping for you where appropriate. And then separately, I also saw a lot of expansion of what you might call intelligent ecosystems. These are technologies from different companies coming together, meshing together to enable you to do more interesting and engaging things. And again, with Google and Gemini leading the way. They're really fascinating forerunners of where we're all going to be in the near and medium term. And where can people listen to the whole thing? You can listen to my conversation with Shelley Palmer in my new podcast, Frontier CMO, on YouTube or wherever you download podcasts.

20:46Or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn. Great. Thanks, Josh.

21:02you're one of the real sort of stalwarts of late night you know kind of one of the great broadcast formats from the old days the thread through the kind of explosion of cable and the proliferation of shows and is now part of this kind of diminishing splintering broadcast world Do you think late night survives? Does late night still mean anything? I don't think it does, to be frank. I think there will always be people that sit at a desk and interview people because it's cheap. It's a cheap, easy way to get content. I mean, talk shows exist because they're cheap. There's a publicity machine that needs places to display their wares.

21:42And so networks figured out, well, we just get a desk and a band and a couch. And we can get stars in here to fill the time and we can say, we have stars on. And then they sell their movie or they sell their TV show or their book or their personal brand of chili or whatever they're doing. And then you write some jokes in the middle and it's all very cheap. And I have people, obviously, that I know and love who still work in that industry. And, you know, like I had Jimmy Kimmel on my podcast and I said, well, you know, the ratings are down all over the place. There's just not that many people watching.

22:15And he said, no, no, no, you know, there are, there are the same amount of people watching. They're just watching in different ways. And I was like, all right. And I, cause I love him. I'm like, okay, fine. But in my head, I'm like, okay, yeah, they're watching different ways, but there's a lot less people watching. They're just, they're just is. Yeah. And the number diminishes and the numbers like the Tonight Show or Colbert's like big numbers now would have gotten us canceled at 1230 back in the 90s. Yeah. Because it's just such a different world. Yeah. And I also think that, again, it's podcasts and the Internet.

22:54They're just the notion of, oh, there's a big star that's going to be on and talk about themselves. Who gives a shit anymore? You know, it just there's that happens everywhere. Right. And now people would rather see them eat wings with hot sauce on them than sit and talk to like a trained improv comedian. Yes. They'd rather watch them like cry as they're trying to answer questions. And I don't blame them. OK, I get it. Just to hear a movie star sit and tell about their ski vacation, it's not, it's been done, you know? Yeah. And also there's just all of these other, there's just so many more options, right?

23:37Like we had Adam Friedland on our show. Do you know him? Are you familiar with him? He's - The name's familiar. Yeah. He's got this like, he's got this up and coming show. It's basically kind of like almost a parody of kind of a late night show where he kind of slips in and out of character. And it's I personally think it's really funny. The people, you know, a bunch of people my age find it to be funny. And he has kind of managed to nab these big stars who are on this promotional circuit who are all kind of weirded out by the whole thing. But there's just a whole greater menu of options now, which is kind of what you're saying.

24:07Although everybody comes on this show, not because they're promoting anything or anything, but because they really want to they really believe in what we're talking about. They want to talk about the media. They want to talk about the changing media land. What else is there? You mentioned Dancing with the Stars earlier, and we want to dedicate a significant portion to that because it's a big deal now. It's kind of this TikTok thing, has this kind of social media and TikTok component. How did Dancing with the Stars change your career? Because it seems like it did have an impact in addition to being another one of your fun gigs.

24:36Yeah. How it has changed my career remains to be seen a little bit because I have a ton of new people who know who I am and who are interested in me. And I, you know, I'm still seeing it being late November and I'm still seeing TikToks from people that texted my name 10 times every week to keep me on Dancing with the Stars. I see TikToks where people say, holy shit, he was on Elf. And it's lots of young women. There's lots and lots of young women that have taken me under their collective wing and that they were somehow touched by what Emma and I did on the show. So it remains to be seen, but it certainly has gotten me, you know, if I could show you my calendar, there's a lot more meetings now than there were back in August.

25:26Yeah. Like meetings with people that, you know, that sort of can get things done or get me jobs. It certainly made me relevant. It certainly, you know, I mean, I've been saying this because, you know, I'm on SiriusXM and I haven't done an interview through their PR department in probably two years. And I think I've done six in the last four days. So, yeah, I've been I said to my wife, oh, SiriusXM has been reminded that I exist. So that's nice. Yes. But they actually have been really lovely. They gave me a billboard. They gave me a congratulatory billboard. There you go. For being on Dancing with the Stars, so I can't really complain.

26:05So there seems to be kind of this meme or this point of view that you kind of lasted longer than you should have on that show. Is that an offensive thing for me to say to you? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No. Because I've said this many times now. People would attempt to insult me by saying I was the worst dancer on the show, to which my answer is, no shit, really? I'm not aware of that because, you know, A, I'm the oldest person on the show. I took the job in April and in June or July, I found out that I need a hip replacement and was like, can I do this? And the doctor said, yeah, we'll just, you know, shoot you up and it'll hurt.