Greg Daniels walked into the Conan O’Brien podcast offices at Larchmont one August morning and immediately became the subject of a minor archaeological dig: someone had picked up a piece of paper covered in Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett, rendered with the confident hand of a person who claims never to draw them. It is a small, accidental portrait of two men who have known each other long enough that old instincts surface without warning. The story of how Daniels and O’Brien got here, from a shared mattress sourced from a parking lot in Watts to a moment in August 2025 where Daniels has three separate television projects releasing inside a single month, is one of the more unlikely origin stories in American comedy. It begins, as most things between them do, with a cartoon.
The sea captain who started everything
At Harvard, O’Brien was already on the Lampoon when Daniels was competing to join. Daniels left a cartoon on the floor of the building where submissions were dropped. It showed an old sea captain at a party with a ‘Hello My Name Is’ sticker on his shirt. The sticker read: Ishmael. O’Brien saw it and thought, right then, that it was sharp enough to run in The New Yorker. He started thinking about whether this was someone he wanted to take west with him.
They graduated and came to Los Angeles together, sharing one car, one apartment, one office, and, according to O’Brien’s father, one towel. The car was a 1977 Isuzu Opal, a model the manufacturer apparently made twice before reconsidering. There was a corrosion hole in the floor of the back seat large enough that, as O’Brien put it, you could drop your litter straight through. They bought mattresses from a parking lot operation with no storefront, no warranty, and no clear provenance. They stacked unread copies of the LA Times into furniture because they had no couch.
Food required strategy. Daniels developed what became known in the retelling as the Flaky Jake scam. Flaky Jakes was a burger restaurant that baked its own buns and sold them separately for 35 cents, with access to a full fixings bar: tomatoes, onions, pickles, dressing. Daniels would buy only the bun, then build what amounted to a vegetarian sandwich tower at the condiment station for a third of a dollar. O’Brien, who was six feet four inches and 155 pounds at the time and described himself as perpetually hungry, ordered the double burger and watched.
Vancouver, a fishing boat, and a door-to-door search
The trip that Ari Emanuel would later insist was a movie came out of a newspaper ad for Expo 87 in Vancouver. The expo was already over. That did not stop them from flying to Seattle, renting the cheapest available car, driving to Vancouver, and checking into a motel where they quickly confirmed that the expo was not really happening, it was raining, the exhibits were closed, and there was, as O’Brien recalled, half a ferris wheel. They pivoted to a long-running Canadian television drama that O’Brien said had been on the air for roughly 50 years, with an actor they decided they had to meet in person before leaving the island.
They missed the last ferry to the island where the show filmed. They went to the docks and paid a fisherman to outrun it. They landed, fanned out across Mapleton Avenue knocking on doors, and O’Brien found the man on his seventh attempt. He shouted across the street for Daniels. They both shook the actor’s hand, then sprinted back to catch the ferry they had already beaten, flagging down a woman in a jeep who, O’Brien said, ‘completely loved it, got into the spirit of it’ and gunned down a one-way street to reach the loading lane in time.
Daniels put the whole episode plainly: ‘We’ve scratched the surface. There could be maybe 15 episodes where we talk about us in ’85 and ’86 alone.’
The piece of paper nobody was supposed to see
The Stormtroopers and Darth Vader, drawn on the morning of the recording, sat on the desk between them.
O’Brien picked it up, studied it, and noted that the renderings were those of someone who had clearly thought about these characters at great length, for many years, possibly since grade school. Daniels confirmed that was exactly when it started.
