Conan O’Brien shared that he now understood why film production has departed Los Angeles, citing one scrapped Oscars bit as an example.

While talking with his longtime late-night producer Jeff Ross on “Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend,” the host touched on the reason behind production leaving L.A. for overseas opportunities. Specifically, how the cost of production in California is sky high at the moment.

The two-time Oscars host and Ross remembered a scrapped bit for this year’s awards show, which would’ve had O’Brien rolling around with nine golden retrievers after cutting back from a commercial, quickly jumping up and getting cleaned up by a bunch of lint rollers before diving into the next award. O’Brien said the massive price tag for the small bit was eventually explained to him, opening his eyes to local production costs.

“One of the producers said, ‘Okay, this is going to be incredibly expensive,’” O’Brien said. “And I said, ‘Really? Just getting a couple of golden retrievers?’ And she said, ‘Well, the rule is each dog has to be acclimated with the other dogs, so they all have to live together for like two weeks before they can be on camera together. And if they’re living together, all their handlers have to live with them too.’ And she was going through all the things and how the cost got up to – I think it was going to cost as much as, you know, baseline sticker price for like a Porsche. It was like $30,000.”

He added: “We used to do things in the ’90s. We used to get away with murder because we would think of an idea at 4:30 – a really weird idea – and we would throw it out on the air, and then a lot of time goes by, and I think rules change. In that moment with the golden retrievers, I thought, ‘Oh, this is a concrete example of something that’s happening that’s making me see why people go to Budapest to shoot something.’”

O’Brien has been out of the late-night game for years now, but that does not mean the state of that particular industry is not still at the top of his mind. Although he’s moved on to creating a podcast empire and hosting the Academy Awards, he spoke on Michelle Obama’s podcast in March about late night’s struggles and the current hosts having to deal with the bleak news of the day.

“Things are so divisive right now and I think it’s got to be just a really tough task,” he said. “I do have empathy for people who are trying to figure out what’s funny in this because I know, just as a citizen, I get up in the morning and I look at what happened in the news [and] my first instinct when I read the news is, ‘Nothing here gives me joy or is making me laugh.’”

O’Brien added: “If you’re doing one of those shows, how do you not talk about it? And then how do you not wear your heart on your sleeve or maybe get mad? So it’s difficult.”