It took a few days, but Conan O’Brien’s visit to Google has finally showed up on an internet video sharing site.
(YouTube, duh).
And it is one of the most revealing interviews he has ever given – much more so than the "60 Minutes" version.
Hosted by the decidedly engineer-like Vic Gundotra (Google’s VP of engineering) on May 5, the Q&A session is a mostly freewheeling affair — and O’Brien is at his absolute comedic best: wacky, weird, witty and very real.
And a lot of truth seeped out: "The last 3 months have been the most interesting time in my entire career," he said.
After mercilessly teasing the audience about being called Googlers, Conan actually showed himself to be a convert to new media. He said he started a Twitter account – which fast mushroomed to 941,000 followers – because he was contractually banned from appearing on television or radio.
“I was literally like a priosner in a 14th century cell writing little things on scraps of paper and throwing them out the window," he said.
And he discovered marketing via Twitter too, when he did his live show.
"I sent out one tweet directing people to a website where you could buy ticket, and that sold out in two hours. This has people rethinking how things are marketed." (Well, a lot of us knew about Twitter before. But maybe it has folks in late night television rethinking how things are marketed.)
Here’s the full 40-plus minutes from his Google visit:
