What Carson Daly Eats for Breakfast

The radio and TV host dishes on his morning routine

September 10, 2012

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Welcome to My Morning Routine, where we take a look at how people kick-start the day. And by "people" we mean celebrities.

Carson Daly stole our hearts in the late 90's as the host of MTV's TRL. Now, he sends us to bed with NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly, and he keeps morning commuters awake in Los Angeles on SoCal's KAMP-FM. He is also the host of The Voice, one of NBC's top-rated shows, which premieres its third season tonight at 8 PM EST. So, needless to say, homeboy is busy. Here's how the triple-threat starts his day. --Danielle Walsh

The alarm goes off at about 4:45 AM and my feet are on the ground at roughly 5 AM, depending on how much wine I had the night before. But I have to get up--I have a radio show at 6 AM so I'm out of the house and in the office by 5:30 AM.

If you're in radio, you're used to sucking down really bad coffee. There's no room to be a coffee snob if you work at a radio station. But listen, at like 5:30 in the morning, you just need that eye-opener. It's gotta happen.

The first thing I do when I get to the studio is put the air down to 66, 67 degrees, then I turn on the lights and blast music. So by 6:03 in the morning, I'm in an icebox of a studio, with David Guetta blaring like I'm in Ibiza. Other than coffee, that's the only wake-up I need.

Eating breakfast is tough, because between 6 AM and 10 AM I'm busy. When I do eat something, it's usually during a Lil' Wayne song, since he happens to have a lot of songs that are over 4 minutes and 30 seconds. "Wide Awake" by Katy Perry is another song where I have time to heat up my oatmeal, drop in the blueberries, and refresh the coffee. But I can't do that during "Payphone" by Maroon 5 because it's barely 3 minutes.

I always eat a banana at some point in the morning, and I'll have a hard boiled egg now and again, but my breakfast is usually oatmeal. I go to Costco and buy this big, giant variety box so I don't get bored of it. Sometimes I'll supplement that with a granola bar from the vending machine.

I have a New York Post subscription that I got when I lived in New York--I still get it here in Los Angeles. So I flip through the Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and USA Today. I like to physically hold the paper. And I still--because I was brought up this way in radio--take a razor blade to the stories I want to cut out. I like to make collages.

After I'm done with radio, I have to usually shoot my late night show, and that requires driving all over LA. I started a new segment we do every Friday called "Food Truck Friday," which tips our hat to the food truck craze here in Southern California. We invite a new truck to come in every week, put them on the air, give them a little plug, eat a little bit of their food... So I look forward to Fridays because I get to eat like, a lobster roll from the Lobster Truck. And I get to have these great conversations with people who are trying to reboot their careers. It's just fun.