#2480 - Arsenio Hall

Summary

The Joe Rogan Experience #2480 – Arsenio Hall

Date: April 8, 2026
Host: Joe Rogan
Guest: Arsenio Hall

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Episode Overview

This episode features comedian, actor, and late-night pioneer Arsenio Hall in an expansive, deeply personal, and often hilarious conversation with Joe Rogan. The two legends reminisce about stand-up, the evolution of comedy clubs, fame, addiction, and the shifting landscape of late-night TV and American society. Arsenio shares stories from his iconic late-night show, backstage memories with artists from Prince to Richard Pryor, and insights into personal happiness, the pitfalls of fame, and generational change. The tone throughout is candid, nostalgic, and warmly comedic.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Tributes, Influence, and the Comedy Store

• Remembering Comedy Mentors: Early in the episode, Hall and Rogan pay tribute to comedy matriarch Mitzi Shore and the Comedy Store’s legacy.

  • Arsenio: “Mitzi made the greatest comedy mecca ever. And you gotta copy what she did.” (01:16)
  • Joe: “She taught me everything about how to run a club, how to do it right. Basically, kind of let the comedians run it, let the inmates run the asylum.” (01:30)

• Modern Club Culture & Phone Locking:
  Rogan describes the evolution of phone-locking (Yondr bags) at shows, freeing comics to experiment: “People are too fucking distracted… you have to be free to fuck around and experiment.” (02:12, 02:38)

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2. The Creative Process: Experimentation, Drugs, & Sobriety

• Hall on Substance Use and Stage Creativity:

  • “I never drink or smoke before going on stage... I tried to do it high and saying, this will make me creative. I'll be like Hendrix of comedy. That's all wrong.” (05:09)
  • Hall shares a hilarious memory of losing track of time on stage after smoking, thinking he did 20 minutes, but doing only 5. (05:43)

• Rogan on Chappelle’s Organic Process:
  “Dave (Chappelle) films everything so then afterwards, he goes over it, and he's like, oh, there's a seed right there... it's how you come up with stuff.” (04:47)

• Creatine, Sleep, & Brain Fog:
  Rogan underscores the importance of sleep for cognition and creativity, linking lack of sleep to mistakes and memory lapses. (06:46–09:08)

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3. Drugs, Alcohol, and Cautionary Tales

• Cocaine & Adderall Dangers:
  Joe reveals he’s never tried cocaine, citing friends whose lives were wrecked by it (“I've still never done coke. And I think that's why, because I watched.” (15:48)) and discusses the seductive productivity of Adderall, but warns it’s extremely addictive with serious downsides. (16:27–17:55)

• Alcohol vs. Weed:
  Both men reflect on their relationship with marijuana and alcohol. Rogan emphasizes weed’s nuanced effects and why it’s not for everyone; Arsenio recalls family alcoholism making him cautious about drinking. (13:30–15:09)

• Ambien & Sleep Aids:

  • Arsenio: “That's the drug that's most important to me. Having an Ambien nearby…A quarter. Just a little bite.” (21:31–21:48)
  • Rogan: “I don't think you should rely on anything for sleep. For me, I just—I’ve never had a sleep problem.” (22:16)

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4. Late Night Legacy & Show Business Stories

• Arsenio’s Game-Changing Late Night Show:
  Rogan recounts how Arsenio’s show changed late-night TV with its informality and cultural impact.

  • Joe: “It changed the whole landscape of late night television. Like, completely changed it. Because late night television was stiff...and then your show came around.” (35:47–37:17)

• Clinton’s Saxophone Moment:

  • Arsenio: “What my show did that night was changed how you run for the highest office in the land.” (37:36–37:54)
  • Joe: “Him playing the saxophone, running for president… I was like, what is happening?” (38:26)

• The “Things That Make You Go Hmm” Catchphrase:
  Arsenio recalls birthing the phrase—a comic’s trick for transitioning bits, which became a pop culture earworm and even a hit song. (40:00–41:00)

• The Desk, Format, and Authenticity:
  Arsenio and Rogan dissect how losing the talk show desk made interviews more intimate and changed dynamics (“For us, I think it's great….There is a freedom that you have that I would like you to have on the talk show.” (41:11–42:11))

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5. Fame, Money, Simplicity, and Staff

• Simplicity vs. Success:
  Arsenio shares a poignant Richard Pryor story about finding happiness in the simple, early days—“This reminds me of when I was happy.” (28:46–29:01) and how success can complicate life (“I realized what he meant when I was in a house that was too big…” (30:03))

• Assistants & Staff Trust Issues:
  Both discuss the perils of having staff and the resentment that can develop; anecdotes about overcharging, assistants, and the David Spade tasing incident. (30:45–34:31)

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6. Politics, Party Lines, and Late-Stage America

• Rogan and Arsenio: Politically Homeless:
  Discussion of polarization, manipulation by parties, and longing for a rational center:

  • Joe: “I'm politically homeless. I've always been political. I've been politically homeless for a long time.” (53:46)
  • Arsenio: “We've seen parties change. I'm always reminded that the Democratic Party was the party of the Klan. If you go far enough back...” (52:20)

• Money in Politics:

  • Joe: “Money in politics is the real problem... It's a dirty business.” (58:08–166:49)

• Media Misdirection & The Epstein Files:
  Both vent about media distractions and lack of accountability:

  • Arsenio: “There's a thing in magic. I take a coin and put in this hand. There's a thing called misdirection. That's the story of American politics.” (59:27)
  • Joe: “Right now...no one's being prosecuted for the Epstein files. That's nuts. That's a sick society.” (59:01–59:06)

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7. Generational Change, Technology, and Culture

• Phones & Changing Social Habits:

  • How smartphones re-shaped behavior, privacy, and dating (“From 98, when most…had a phone...2018, you'd be crazy to not have a phone. 20 years like that.” (118:17–118:36))
  • Both men reminisce about their children and being the only parents initially not allowing phones.

• Latchkey Kids & Resilience:
  Arsenio reflects on childhood independence, near-misses with stranger danger, and how modern parenting may overcorrect:

  • “Latchkey kids that grew up like that are so much more resilient…You had to figure it out on your own.” (122:00–122:59)

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8. Music, Prince, and Industry Grievances

• Prince Stories:

  • Arsenio details his friendship with Prince, receiving gifts (like the legendary pantsless suit), late-night hangs at after-hours clubs, and Prince’s prescience with musician independence (“He was dealing with these crazy contracts...so his response was, I won't perform as Prince anymore. Now I'm this symbol.” (80:47–81:20))

• Music Industry Evolution:
  Rogan and Hall muse on artists’ exploitation by record companies and how the internet changed the game. Both admire the new opportunities for creative freedom, but note young artists still get lured by bad contracts. (82:22–83:36)

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9. Stand-Up Comedy: Work Ethic, Evolution, and Iconic Figures

• Creative Habits & Hard Work:

  • Rogan: “Damon (Wayans) brings a camera to all of his shows...and he archives them, every set he ever does.” (137:27)
  • Arsenio: “The guys who are the best seem to go deeper and work the hardest…What an amazing documentary if we could go through the history of Damon's personal archives.” (141:02–141:58)

• The Necessity of Pain:

  • Rogan: “Rich kids are not gonna be good stand ups… I never met a good comic who had a great childhood.” (92:34–93:13)

• Fear, Bombing, and Experimentation:
  Rogan discusses the necessity of trying new material—and bombing—as essential to comedy growth. (134:09–135:47)

• Comedy Store Legends:

  • Mitzi Shore’s importance, Paul Mooney’s brilliance, and how greats like Pryor would collaboratively develop material at the Store. (99:36–103:07)
  • Arsenio: “All the great comics that we know now at one time would sit in the back of the OR and come late to watch Paul (Mooney).” (100:36)

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10. Media, Late-Night, and The Future

• The Death of ‘Traditional’ Late Night:

  • Discussing the rise of streaming, YouTube, and how the old late-night model is failing (“Late shows just don't work anymore. They just don't have the same thing anymore. Like that standard model show.” (155:16))

• Live Specials & Raw Performance:
  Rogan and Arsenio debate the value of live comedy specials (“I like things that scare me. I like things that are scary to do because I think it's good for you.” (158:52)) and the visceral fear that motivates them to prepare and perform at their best.

• Iconic Guest Moments:

  • Arsenio on reuniting with Richard Pryor, the culture around the green room, and the unique dynamic of the Mothership (Joe’s club): “The green room's an amazing hang too... That's where Shane Gillis is and Ron White is. Tony Hinchcliffe is. Everybody wants to come in.” (91:14–92:17)

• Enduring Influence:

  • Joe: “You had a gigantic impact on culture. You really did. Your show was amazing. You've had an incredible life. And I'm really happy to hear that you're happy now.” (172:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Simplicity & Happiness:
  Richard Pryor to Arsenio at his first condo:
  “This reminds me of when I was happy.” (28:46)
• On Comedy Creation:
  Rogan: “Stand up is the only art form that you have to kind of create in front of a crowd...” (03:19)
• On Phones in Clubs:
  Rogan: “It's the way to do it. People are too fucking distracted.” (02:12)
• On Money & Staff:
  Arsenio: “My business manager said something about my staff and it dawned on me, what the fuck do I have a staff for?... I've simplified things a little bit in my life and I'm really happy.” (30:45)
• On Party Lines:
  Rogan: “We need like a logical centrist government that just says, there's a lot of things that we should do to make this country a better place… It’s dumb. It’s a team thing.” (53:46–54:29)
• On the Evolution of Platform:
  Arsenio: “Now we have a hard time finding a guest that doesn't have a show...Anyone can have a show now. Yeah. And that's kind of cool.” (43:27)

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Noteworthy Segments & Timestamps

• Comedy Store & Mitzi Shore: (00:15–03:38)
• Yondr Bags & Stage Freedom: (01:46–02:38)
• Drugs, Creation, & Onstage Experimentation: (02:24–05:43)
• Rogan’s Brain Fog, Sleep & Creatine Science: (06:02–09:08)
• Substance Use & Comedy Safety: (13:30–17:55)
• Personal Stories: Richard Pryor, Prince, Stand-Up Origins: (28:46–32:26; 80:14–86:45)
• Late Night TV Impact & Clinton: (35:26–38:52)
• Politics & Money in Government: (50:50–166:49)
• Storytelling: Paul Mooney, The Magic of Pryor: (98:07–104:18)
• Phones & Culture Shifts: (118:18–122:59)
• Music Industry & Prince: (80:47–86:45)
• Bombing, Fear, and Live Specials: (134:09–161:09)
• Closing Reflections on Influence, Joy, and the Next Generation: (172:40–174:19)

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Conclusion

This episode is an essential listen for fans of comedy history, pop culture, and real talk about navigating life, success, and the ever-evolving world of show business. Hall’s anecdotes about Pryor, Prince, Mitzi, and the artistry of stand-up are invaluable oral history. Rogan guides with warmth, respect, and insight, and the chemistry and mutual respect are palpable. The themes of adaptation, authenticity, and distilling joy from simplicity will resonate with listeners of every generation.

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Arsenio Hall's book "Arsenio" is out now.
“If you open it and you don’t want to read it, there are really cool pictures inside.” — Arsenio Hall (174:19)

Transcript

[Arsenio Hall]

Joe Rogan podcast.

[Joe Rogan]

Check it out.

[Arsenio Hall]

The Joe Rogan Experience.

[Joe Rogan]

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. All right. Slap some headphones on. Let's rock and roll. Sir.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes. Our old friend would be so happy. Not just that picture, but so much that you've done. Like, do you believe that people who have gone on know what we're doing or see us?

[Joe Rogan]

I don't know. You'd like to think that you're that important?

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I have a feeling they have more important stuff to do on the other side.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I guess if you're in heaven, you're not thinking about the mothership.

[Joe Rogan]

Right?

[Arsenio Hall]

But.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the mothership definitely is from her.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes. Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Well, I mean, that's an incredible tribute to her.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the bar is named after her.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I've heard all the comments. I've heard Shane and Ian and all the guys talk about it after they came back. And that's just an honor, man.

[Joe Rogan]

That.

[Arsenio Hall]

That plus, you know, I used to say to people, if you haven't taken something from watching Richard Pryor, you're probably doing it wrong.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Arsenio Hall]

And Mitzi made the greatest comedy mecca ever. And you gotta copy what she did.

[Joe Rogan]

100%. Yeah. Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And this is.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, she taught me everything about how to run a club, how to do it right. Basically, kind of let the comedians run it, let the inmates run the asylum. Yeah. You know.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. We're perfect inmates for that. And right now, the Comedy Store is greater than ever.

[Joe Rogan]

That's awesome.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, it's. It. It's wonderful there because, you know, I even got Jay Leno to come back, you know, because he remembered the old days and hadn't gone back. And I'm like, dude, it's different. They. They pay you for coming. They split the door in a different way now. And there are phones in bags. I had to explain that concept.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. We had encouraged them to do all that.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. That was your era.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, once we left, we started doing that at the mothership for all the shows. Then other comedy clubs started falling suit. It's the way to do it. People are too fucking distracted.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. And I think it frees us up in a way. I'll say things and try things and not worry about seeing them on YouTube when they're not ready or when I've made a mistake and gone too far and said something, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, 100%. It's also, you have to be free to fuck around and experiment. And if someone takes that fucking run experiment, you don't know what's coming out of your mouth, like right now. I don't know what's coming out of my mouth right before I say it. Right. And people have to understand that this is not, like, when you're on stage and you're working out, like, a lot of it is free Ballin. You've got material that's, like, pre sort of established and you're, you know, you've got the bones of it, but you're also around in the moment. And sometimes you fuck around in the moment and it works. And sometimes you fuck around the moment and it does nothing. It goes. Or it's terrible. You said something awful. You're like, whoops, sorry.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, we make mistakes.

[Joe Rogan]

You're just fucking creating something and then stand up is the only art form that you have to kind of create in front of a crowd. You can't really. You can get ideas and the concepts and the flesh of it alone, but you have to. It comes alive in front of the crowd. You have to be able to fuck around.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I. Me and Chappelle and you've. You've done this kind of thing. Me and Chappelle met Chris Rock in Cleveland because Chappelle lives in Ohio. Obviously he's done something very similar to what you've done, but we'll get into that later.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he's done something really cool, incredible. Basically took over a whole town. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, and especially at a really funny joke about it, about how when white people move into a neighborhood, it's called gentrification. And he goes, they don't have a word from doing what I'm doing to these motherfuckers.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. It's crazy to be Dave Chappelle, the most important man in town.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

But Chris Rock was doing Cleveland and we met him there. And that was the first time I saw the bags people. And I was apprehensive. As a matter of fact, I saw a celebrity in LA who didn't want to put his phone in a bag. And so they had that motherfucker stay outside, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. There's too many snitches in this world. Too many people just want to film everything for the gram.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, stop.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Sometimes we're saying the wrong thing, Sometimes we're drunk.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, for sure. A lot. Yeah. Yeah, a lot. Dave loves to get lit and go on stage, but it's also like, that's one of the ways he creates. Like, I've seen him do entire shows when he's just completely around and he films everything so then afterwards, he goes over it, and he's like, oh, there's a seed right there. Let me plant that seed. Yeah, there's an idea there. And then, you know, it's how you come up with stuff.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I never drink or smoke before going on stage, but I love to create at home. And the next day. Cause sometimes you can write something down, and it'll be like, blazer, button, envelope. And the next day you're like, I don't know what the fuck I thought was funny about that last night when I was smoking, but I like to smoke and create at home and then take it to the stage. But when I'm on stage, I. I've had bad experiences trying to do it high and saying, this will make me creative. I'll be like Hendrix of comedy. That's all wrong.

[Joe Rogan]

Your memory will go.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, your memory will go. One time I was at the Laugh Factory, and I came off, and George Lopez said to me, why you come off? And I said, I told you I'd do 20. And he says, you did five. I was in tonight show mode or some shit.

[Joe Rogan]

Hey, speak. I got to clear something up. Speaking of, this has nothing to do with you, but I did a podcast last week with Theo Vaughn, and in it, one, there was, like, a video on the Internet is accusing me of lying about something. And what I said was that I was in the mountains of Utah when the Charlie Kirk thing was going down. What had actually happened was I was here doing a podcast with Charlie Sheen when the Charlie Kirk thing went down, when he. We stopped and took a piss break, right? And that's when we found out about it. Right? And then when I was in the mountains of Utah, that's when the Jimmy Kimmel thing was happening. When Jimmy Kimmel was getting in trouble, and I was getting all these messages, but I didn't have any service out there, so I had to hook up the Starlink in order to find out what was happening. Yeah, when I did the podcast the other day, it seemed like I was saying that I was in the mountains, and when Charlie Kirk got shot, I probably was saying that I was exhausted. When I did that show last week, I. So I did a show on Tuesday night at the club, and I have this thing that I do, unfortunately, where I come home, and it's the only time that I get alone time is when everyone's asleep. And I stayed up way too late. I stayed up super late. Then I had to take my kid to school in the morning, and I was like, I'll just power through. The problem when I do that, when I get no sleep, is my memory is dog shit. Like, I have a really good memory and a terrible memory. It's really good a lot of the times. And then sometimes, especially when I'm tired, it's fucking terrible. It's like from doing thousands of podcasts.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

My memory is like a room that's filled with boxes and files, and I don't know where the fuck everything is.

[Arsenio Hall]

See, as you were talking, the first thing, everything goes to sports for me. Some of our greatest home run hitters, they strike out a lot because they're swinging all the motherfucking time trying to get it to McCovey Cole or something.

[Joe Rogan]

Of course.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I think that's how we are. Well, not we. You, especially right now. You're doing this constantly. You're talking to lots of people, saying lots of things, and every now and then, it's going to be swinging a miss. Let me.

[Joe Rogan]

But the real problem was sleepy. The real problem was not getting any sleep. And I'm not going to do that anymore because I keep doing. I get home at night.

[Arsenio Hall]

Have you had that problem before, like, deprivation and you get yourself into something?

[Joe Rogan]

I've had that problem before. Usually I can fix it with creatine. So creatine is a great supplement when you're tired. It really. There's been studies that show that creatine supplementation, especially like 10 to 20 grams, um, it actually alleviates all of the problems that happen with sleep deprivation in terms of cognitive function. But I've been. I just was doing some blood work. So when I was knew that I was going to do my blood work, I didn't take any creatine for a month because I want to. Because I'd read something about creatine possibly being bad for your kidneys. So I wanted to get a baseline, do it, and then do it again. When I saw.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So I had this, like, strategy. But the point is, like, creature, I went, yeah, my brain was foggy. And so for the people that, like, heard that and, like, what is wrong with you? That's what I thought when I saw, like, somebody put a video on the line. Why is he lying about this? I'm like, oh, I forgot. It wasn't a lie. It's just my brain sucks when I don't get sleep. And I'm not going to do that anymore because it's like when I get home at night is the only time I'm alone. It's like my only alone time And I'm. Even though I knew I had to get up in the morning and take my kid to school, I was like, I don't care. I'm staying up. The problem with that is, like, when I have to do this the next day, I just don't function as good. I've done it. I've done it before, but I feel it the next day. Like I can't recall things. My. My words don't come out as smooth. I don't have as much. My. My vocabulary is limited. It's like there's too many problems with it.

[Arsenio Hall]

So, I mean, two things.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Arsenio Hall]

First of all, do guys with these arms do creatine? I mean, would it help me?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, it's great for everybody. Yeah. Creatine is not just a supplement for muscles. Creatine is actually a really good cognitive function supplement. It's actually a cognitive enhancing supplement. Yeah, there's a lot of research on that.

[Arsenio Hall]

And the other thing that hit me is I was listening to you talk recently and you talked about smoking herb and how it enhanced the weightlifting process.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

What's that about?

[Joe Rogan]

You feel it in your tissues, man. It's like you feel. It's really good for coordination exercise. Like, there's a lot of jujitsu guys who smoke weed, they smoke weed right before class, like, get ripped. And then.

[Arsenio Hall]

So the Gracies were high when I first started seeing.

[Joe Rogan]

Not those guys, okay? Those guys don't do it, but a lot of guys do. I think one of the. One of the. I don't want to throw them under the bus, but one of the brothers was really into smoking weed and doing jiu jitsu and arguably the best one, definitely the best one. But a lot of jiu jitsu guys do it, and a lot of guys like to do it before kickboxing. It's. You just feel your muscles More you feel like your coordination more you're more sensitive. It's weird. It's like instead of you being like abstract with your movements and, you know, just kind of like doing it. It's like you feel all the tissues, all the connection when you lift weights. You like. Like you feel all the fibers of all your shit moving. It's like it just makes you more sensitive. It's such an un. Misunderstood substance. Not for everybody. I really believe some people should not get high. I think for some people it throws them off and sends them down a dark road and it's just not causes

[Arsenio Hall]

them to procrastinate about their life and personal responsibilities.

[Joe Rogan]

There's a lot of that. There's a lot of people that just wake and bake and just live in the cloud all day and never get anything, anything done. And then there's a lot of people that also get like super paranoid and they get anxiety and they freak out. And then there's people that. There's a lot of connections to marijuana and psychosis or schizophrenic states that some. But the problem with that is were they already like. Did they already have a propensity towards schizophrenia and marijuana push them over the edge? Were they going to get it anyway? Like, it's hard to say.

[Arsenio Hall]

A lot of those guys on a Diet Coke would have problems.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, right, right. There's a lot of guys just fucking red lights freak them out. There's. There's people that just. Life is too hard for them and they don't need something else that fucks with it, you know? If you already have mental health struggles, probably shouldn't do mushrooms, you know? Yeah. If you're already up. If there's already some things that you're like struggling to hang on to everyday life. Yeah. You probably shouldn't do acid. You know what I mean?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You should probably just. Just try to like keep your together. But that's not everybody. It's like alcohol, like, alcohol is not for everybody. But some people can have a glass of wine at dinner and just start laughing. It's a nice social lubricant. Some people, they got one drink and they're doing coke and they're getting hookers and they're fucking driving on the freeway. They're shooting at cops. There's like, they go crazy. Like some people just can't handle alcohol. Doesn't mean it should be illegal. That's crazy. And this is the same thing I feel with pot. Pot is super beneficial to a lot

[Arsenio Hall]

of people and has been for millions of years. Yeah, for me, that's my. Like in the old days, you'd watch a television show and a guy would have a martini when he comes home, you know? Yeah, I even talk about that in the book. When I come home, my girl has me a joint laid out on the counter, you know, and, you know, nice little raw papers. And that's my. That. That's Daddy's cocktail.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's a nice one, too, because it doesn't fuck with your body. The problem with alcohol is, you know, it feels good while you're doing it, but then the next day you're like, oh, yeah, your fucking head. And your body's tired.

[Arsenio Hall]

I hear swelling, you know, and different kinds of things. And also, I'm from a home where my favorite person, My cousin. Cause I didn't have brothers and sisters, biological brothers and sisters. So when my cousin came to live with me, a male, he's a teenager and he had a drinking problem. Like, I would go inside my toy box and find Scotch.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, he would hide it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, he would hide it. He's parked in the garage when there were already two cars in the garage, you know? And I loved him, and he was hilarious. And he, in part, helped to make me who I am. But a bad experience like that in your youth can make you a little bit leery about liquor.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. I had a friend of mine when I was in high school, and his cousin sold coke. And I watched this guy fall apart. I watched him do cocaine constantly and fall apart. His life just went down the toilet. And I never touched cocaine because of that. I never did. I've still never done coke. And I think that's why, because I watched.

[Arsenio Hall]

So you've never tried a line?

[Joe Rogan]

Never. Never.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's heavy.

[Joe Rogan]

Not once. Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Cause I had to try it to see what it smelled like, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, I'm sure I'd like it. My friend Jimmy said, don't do this. You'd love it. But he's probably right.

[Arsenio Hall]

But you also have a certain kind of discipline where I think you could do a line and say, okay, I get it. But I love that you have the discipline to never try it. I don't have that kind of strength. I gotta see what it's like.

[Joe Rogan]

There's. The thing is, like, I don't know anybody who's had, like, cocaine was really good. For me, like, doing cocaine was really good. When I started doing cocaine, my life just really changed. I really got clarity. I started focusing. I was nicer to people. I don't ever hear that story. You never? Not once.

[Arsenio Hall]

I did a little coke, and then I was president of Yale and I ran for.

[Joe Rogan]

I do hear people say that about speed, which is weird. You hear people say that about amphetamines, like, especially Adderall. Like how. Like, oh, my God, it makes me so productive. I got so much done. But it's generally, it's like journalists and people that have to write a lot.

[Arsenio Hall]

Students.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Very curious about Adderall because I'm hearing so much and I'm thinking, like, when I was doing the book, right. I'm like, would Adderall be good to focus me, to do for me what it does for students that I hear talk about it?

[Joe Rogan]

Probably. Probably. But I don't.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's a pill, Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It scares me, though, because I know a lot of people with problems with it. It's. It's a. It's a real. It's a real catchy one. Gets you.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then you start leaning on it.

[Arsenio Hall]

So that. That's one of the. One of the downs is it's extremely addicting.

[Joe Rogan]

Very addictive.

[Arsenio Hall]

But what's the other downside? Any other.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I would imagine when you get off of it, you're exhausted. Because I would imagine whenever there's. There's always some sort of a biological. You know, there's. There's. Whenever there's no free lunch. Right. Anything that speeds you up is gonna bring you down like this. Get. If you're ramping your body up where you're focusing for 16 hours just sitting in front of the typewriter.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And that's what, like, why journalists like it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I would imagine the back end of it. You've done it, Jamie. Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

What's only twice?

[Joe Rogan]

Because it kept me up for two days. See, that's what I'm talking. That's it. It's an amphetamine. So, yeah, I went to try to go to bed and was like, oh, this is. This isn't happening. So let's get up and see how we're up all day. All right. Two days. Yeah, I just. I had to call off work. It wasn't good. And then you feel real dopey after it wears off, right? Yeah, it didn't. I didn't feel like I succeeded on anything that day. Man, that is a fucking problem for me is like, the lack of sleep thing after this whole Charlie Kirk thing with this, what I was just talking about.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm really going to concentrate a lot more on sleep. You can't fuck with that. Because it's like. Especially me. It's like I need my brain to be functioning at its highest potential most of the time. Like, that's what you're. Especially when I'm in here. I was talking to Theo Vaughn. I didn't think it would that be that big of a deal. Theo's a comic. We're just going to be silly. The most.

[Arsenio Hall]

The most recent one.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, the one I was just talking about. It's probably be good to be loopy, you know, like, because, you know, the writers on newsradio, they would stay up all night on purpose just to get loopy, because that was how. Because they didn't really do any drugs. They just would use sleep deprivation to be silly. Yeah, it was hilarious. Like, these guys would start writing at like 2 o' clock in the morning. Like, they would stay up, they would play video games and they would start writing a script at like 2 o' clock in the morning. And then they would stumble in to, like when we have a table read. They would stumble into the table read, like, just finishing the script. They would lay it out to us. They just got done printing it and these guys would be fucking just completely out of it. Hair off, all up, barefoot. It was really funny the way they operated, but it was. There was a method to their madness. And that method was the more tired you get, the more exhausted you get. You get into sleep deprivation, you get loopy and you get silly and you start thinking silly things. Yeah. When those guys. That's how they would use it. They would use that weird state of mind, that loopiness to write.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Arsenio Hall]

I need my sleep, man. If I have sleep, I can do anything.

[Joe Rogan]

I feel like they could have got there with weed without all the. The loopiness. You know, you want to get there, like, you get there with weed, and, you know, you don't have to stay up all night. You get it, like, right away.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, but weed ain't for everybody.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not for everybody.

[Arsenio Hall]

It ain't for everybody, but, yeah, I love having my sleep. As a matter of fact, that's the drug that's most important to me. Having an Ambien nearby.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you like that?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. A quarter. Just a little bite of Ambien.

[Joe Rogan]

Just a little bite.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Will hook you up.

[Joe Rogan]

I knew a dude who would take that shit every day. He had to take it all the time. And then he was taking two, and he told me, like, dude, my house could be on fire, and I would have no idea. I'm like, that can't be good. But he needed it. It was the only way he could go to sleep. But he was also taking Adderall. So he was taking Adderall in the day, and he was taking Ambien at night. Can't believe he's still alive.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, that's. That's too much.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, the Adderall. His life up, too.

[Arsenio Hall]

Whoa.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's not. You know, I don't think you should rely on anything for sleep. For me, I just. I've never had a sleep problem. Fortunately, I could go to sleep on a bag of rocks. I could just crash. It drives my wife nuts because, like, we're on a plane. The moment the plane takes up, I'm out cold. I could just go to sleep.

[Arsenio Hall]

The bad thing about me is I can sleep best in places I shouldn't sleep, like church or sit and talk to my woman.

[Joe Rogan]

Sleepy. I don't know why. Why is why Church. Make yourself sleep.

[Arsenio Hall]

Or reading.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, reading will put you out.

[Arsenio Hall]

There are some Audible books that are worse than Ambien.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. You know? Yeah. Something about physically reading puts me out.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Just sitting there, like, looking at the pages, I just start nodding off.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I, I. The Alchemist. I have been on page 12 for, like, a year. And a half. You know, sit down on a plane and just. Just read the Alchemist at the top of the page, and I'm out.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's fiction for me that puts me out. Nonfiction doesn't really put me out. Nonfiction is more like. I guess it's more stimulating because it's real, you know, because I'm reading about real things. Something about reading fiction is what puts me to sleep.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. For me, it's just reading. Just. I can take out my license, you know, and look and say, oh, halfway through my name out. This is cool, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Not having sleep is. Got, like, a person that's got, like, legitimate insomnia. That's got to be the nuttiest problem. Like, that's that movie the Mechanic. No, the Machinist. Did you ever see that movie the Machinist?

[Arsenio Hall]

No. Is that an action movie?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's. That's the movie with. What's. Christian Bale? Christian Bale, where he lost an insane amount of weight. Like, Christian Bale's a big guy, and I think he got to, like, 130, something pounds.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And the. The idea was that this gu. Was going completely insane because he couldn't sleep, and so he wasn't eating, and so he was just, like, up all the time, like, out of it. And he, like. If you see what he looked like when he made that movie, it's like, that's what he looked like in the movie. Oh, yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

That looks like he's about to make a whole different movie.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Like he was about to die. And then he went from that, and right afterwards, he did Batman. So he got super jacked. He went from that. And by the way, the movie sucks. So this guy, like, wrecked his health for a movie that wasn't even good. And, I mean, I wonder how good it could even be when your main guy is dying. Look at that image on the far right, the one that you just look at. Look at the difference between. That was like, six months later.

[Arsenio Hall]

That can't be healthy.

[Joe Rogan]

No, terrible for you. It has to be terrible. Terrible.

[Arsenio Hall]

Do you like to act?

[Joe Rogan]

No, I don't hate it. I don't like the process. I don't like waiting around all day. I don't like being on set. I don't like dealing with. Some actors are great. Some actors just like all kinds of people. Yeah, cops. It's a lot of cops that are awesome.

[Arsenio Hall]

Because I know you had a point in your life when you could probably do anything you want. And I never see you pursuing any acting roles.

[Joe Rogan]

No, I Avoid them. Yeah, I've been offered some fun stuff and I was like, I'm not going to Bulgaria for three months. That I'm just. It's not my thing. And if it was my thing, I would. I'd be like, feel very fortunate. And I'd dive on it.

[Arsenio Hall]

I'd be like, oh, my gosh. So when you look at something you've done and you're watching a role at in dailies or at the premiere, you don't love what you see so much that you do more of it.

[Joe Rogan]

It doesn't bother me. Yeah, it's not. It's just not what I enjoy doing. And again, it's the process that's the problem. It's the 16 hour days. It's like. And it's being around actors because you're around people that need to think and need to talk in a very specific way because they're always worried they're going to be cast out of the kingdom. You know what I mean? So it's like this very disingenuous way of communicating that a lot of actors have. And it's just.

[Arsenio Hall]

And you always feel when you do something that this person's gonna be your friend for life. I'll see you next month. And you never see that fucker ever again. It's such a disingenuous environment.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you enjoy it? Do you enjoy acting?

[Arsenio Hall]

I kinda like it. But at 70, I prefer to just be at home.

[Joe Rogan]

You're 70? Yes. You look so good.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, thank you.

[Joe Rogan]

That's kind of crazy that you're 70 and no creatine. Imagine how good you'd look if you.

[Arsenio Hall]

I'm gonna get it.

[Joe Rogan]

70, man. If you told me that you were 45, if I didn't know you told me you're 45, I'd believe you. That's nuts.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's a blessing.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm happy. So that's unusual.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, right. A lot of people when they're 70, they're bitter and tired.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I talk a little bit in the book about Richard Pryor coming to my first condo. I bought a condo so I could. I didn't have a car yet and eventually I got one. But when I first came to la, I wanted to be between the Comedy Store and the improv so I could get to both. So I bought me a condo and I told Richard Pryor that I got a condo. I don't know, it's one of those. I think I heard you in Shane talking about how you See your heroes now and then. And sometimes you just say the wrong shit. And I was expecting this to be the wrong shit, but it's all I could think of. And I said, richard, I just bought a condo. And he said, oh, wow, I'd like to see it. And I was like, oh, okay. And him and Rashon, his body man, came to see my condo. And that was the coolest thing in the world. But the one thing I remember, I remember I had no furniture. And Rashawn had told me his guy had told me to get some Courvoisier. So I had some Courvoisier, you know, and we sat on the floor and drank Courvoisier and listened to a boombox with jazz on it and talked. And he looked around at one point and he said, this reminds me of when I was happy.

[Joe Rogan]

Whoa.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I don't even have to tell you what went through my head and what I thought that meant. And I didn't listen to him then. That's the thing is people disperse knowledge to us from their experiences, and sometimes we're too young and dumb to listen.

[Joe Rogan]

What did that mean to you at the time when he said, this reminds me when I was happy?

[Arsenio Hall]

You know, I was so excited that Richard Pryor came to see my condo. I didn't process it, but years later, I start realizing that he bought things and philosophies that made his life more complex, and he was happy. This is what I think it means. He was happy with the simple shit, you know? And sometimes, I mean, it's nice to have. Isn't it cool to have money but still eat burgers if you want to? I mean, because I remember walking through supermarkets and pretending I was shopping and eating out of the child cart, that little. That little top part. And then leaving the supermarket, you know, so it's nice to be able to buy anything we want, but at the same time, I get that thing of the simplicity and, you know, no guard, gate.

[Joe Rogan]

Nobody's knocking down your door trying to get to you.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, just a kanto with no furniture. And for a guy like that, for the greatest that I've ever known in our world, to say I was happy when I had a little place with no furniture. I didn't think about it enough then, but later I realized what he meant when I was in a house that was too big with guest houses that would. You know, you walk into a guest house and cobwebs get on your face, you know, because you ain't been in there in a while. And you realize, okay, this is what Richard was talking about. I'm doing a lot of shit for other people that I don't need.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. And too much complexity. Yeah, Too much. Somebody said complications.

[Arsenio Hall]

My business manager said something about my staff and it dawned on me, what the fuck do I have a staff for? You know, And I've simplified things a little bit in my life and I'm really happy. It's, oh, just, you know, me and my woman and a scale down life.

[Joe Rogan]

That's better. Yeah. There's a lot of people that just want a lot of people around them because it makes them feel important. They have a big staff, they have a lot of people working for them, a lot of things going on, a lot of different projects. Keep moving, keep moving. Yeah, but no peace. Yeah, yeah. Not good. I always tell comedians, like, they're like, oh, I got to get an assistant. I go, no, you don't. Just do less. Don't get an assistant. You get an assistant, that person's gonna want to kill you. That person's. They're gonna feel entitled. You're making all this money. They're not. You're famous. They're not. They see you for who you really are. They're fault, you know, like regular guy. Why's he got all this, like David Spade's assistant duct taped him and tased him. Remember that?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Try to kill him. That's, that's, that's heavy, man. And I've heard that the people who work for us always hate us. I've always avoided.

[Joe Rogan]

Somebody told me, it's not always the case.

[Arsenio Hall]

They said, you know, your housekeeper hates you. And I'm like, no, she's been with me 22 years. That bitch hates you. And I don't want to believe that.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not always the case. But it is often the case that people that are around people that have so much, they feel like, why don't I have this? Like I'm working for this person. Why am I not doing. But why am I not rich? This person could just make me rich. It's weird. You know what I mean?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, that's not what the job is. The job is you're a gardener. Garden doesn't make $5 million a year. Like, this is, you're kind of being crazy. And then you, you get people that take advantage of you, where you get a bill and you're like, why does it cost this much? Like, this is kind of like, I have a friend who's very wealthy, he's a businessman. And he goes over every little thing that people charge him, and he's always looking for. They're trying to overcharge me.

[Arsenio Hall]

He signs his own checks.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. But he gets crazy when he thinks overcharging them. But I'm like, dude, you're almost 80 and you're worth a billion dollars. Like, why do you. Why are you looking at, like, how much the car wash guy charges you? This is crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Maybe that's why he has a billion.

[Joe Rogan]

Perhaps. I mean, he's a businessman. That's his thing. But what drives him nuts is this idea that people are overcharging him because he's wealthy, Taking advantage of him.

[Arsenio Hall]

Joe, the craziest I ever went was I had a barber when I had hair, you know? And, you know, a black barber is a skilled scientist, you know? Cause back then, I had it fried, dyed, and laid to the side with three Adidas stripes over on the left. And, you know, my shit was intricate that year. And my business manager happened to be a business manager for two other entertainers. And he's also my friend. And one day he says, you know, that guy charges the three of you different prices. And I'm like, get the fuck. So I found out that Johnny Gill was paying 100, I was paying 350. And that drives me crazy, because basically, like you say he was charging based on who I am, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he like, you can afford it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, yeah. And I had a friend who had more money than me, and he was charging him a crazy amount. It was. It was like the rental of a rose. Crazy money.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, that's what comes with the territory. People just think you're not gonna notice. They don't care, you know?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I guess. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Do you think you are happier now than you were when the Arsenio hall show was at its peak?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I think I'm happier now because with that peak comes a lot of pressure and a lot of work. And I'd be a liar to say I don't enjoy having the money without the other shit, you know, I did a good job of investing and making sure that when the lights went out, I was good. So I love my life right now, man. More relaxed being the og. And pretty much your responsibility is just giving advice to a comic in the hallway.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. You know, a lot of the young guys don't understand what you did because what your show was like back in. I guess. When was it? When did it first come on the air? What year?

[Arsenio Hall]

Probably coming to America was like, 86, 87. I left New York and went and started the show. So 87, 88. Sometime around in there. I'm bad with years.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. During that time and in the 90s, it changed the whole landscape of late night television. Like, completely changed it. Because late night television was stiff, you know, it was like. Yeah, fucking. The desk. The desk made no sense to me.

[Arsenio Hall]

I talk. I talk about the desk and how I got rid of it, but.

[Joe Rogan]

But it made no sense. But you would. I was like, oh, finally he got rid of the desk.

[Arsenio Hall]

Y.

[Joe Rogan]

Are we being lectured? Am I in the principal's office? Like, what is. Was the fucking desk for? But when they first started doing that in the 1950s, if you went to work, you had a desk.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You had to wear a tie. You had a desk. And they all smoked cigarettes while they were on the job. You know, you watch, like, the Johnny Carson show during commercials.

[Arsenio Hall]

Johnny will go under his desk, get a cigarette.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, they would often smoke on air. They would do it all the time back then. They all smoked cigarette.

[Arsenio Hall]

How about planes? How about the fact that. That we could get on a plane to go to a gig? And there was a row behind us where smoking began. Right. Which made sense. I'm in the no smoking row, and the bitch behind me got a cigar.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And it was just flooding the entire cabin.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, Dice used to have a joke about it. You're in a fucking tube. Where's the air going? Yeah, Dice. It was a weird time, but the whole idea was, what I was getting to is like, late night television was very stiff. It was. You know, it was like. And then your show came around.

[Arsenio Hall]

Paul Anka wrote that.

[Joe Rogan]

Did he?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow. Your show came around, and then all of a sudden it was fun and loose. And I remember when Clinton came on your show and played the saxophone, and I mean, everybody was like, what is happening? The fucking president of the. Was he the president back then?

[Arsenio Hall]

Was he. He was a governor and he was trying to get the young vote. So he did me. And then the next day they decided to do mtv, because I think what my show did that night was changed how you run for the highest office in the land.

[Joe Rogan]

Look at that. Yeah, look at that.

[Arsenio Hall]

The joke I had just done was finally a Democrat blowing something other than the election. When you look, you remember jokes in the moment and. Dude. So what's interesting is, after this, presidential candidates realized they had to come to Rogan and Sunday morning to meet the press, you know, And I like that. You know, they have to go everywhere now.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they go where the people are paying attention, right? But it was different because if they did the Tonight show with Johnny Carson, it would be a, you know, a very competent interview, but it would be stiff. It was. It was like very. I mean, not even. Stiff's not the right word. It was traditional. It was like. This was different. Like him playing the saxophone, running for president, playing the saxophone. I was like, what is happening here?

[Arsenio Hall]

And I tried to get. I told Jenna Bush this last week, I'm on this book slinging tour. And I told her, I said, I invited your grandpa. Because back then there was a mentality that you do equal both sides, you know, And I don't think it was a rule, but. But first of all, my dad was a Republican, my mother was a Democrat. So I was used to hearing both sides and learning both sides. And I thought the best thing I could do for young people is show them both sides, and that would be fair of me as a host. And. And we got a call from a man named Marlon Fitzwater who said, no fucking way we're coming there. You know, And I wonder why. It's almost like what you talk about with the desk. Society at a certain point is stiff, and it takes certain people to loosen it up and make a change. And I think it was just. They're not used to it. It's like, why are they barking? And what is

[Joe Rogan]

right? Things that make you go, oh, yeah, yeah. There was a lot going on.

[Arsenio Hall]

I had a couple of hooks going.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, you had a great hook. The things that make you go home. Everybody used that all day long. Like when if something weird was going on in the office, people. Things that make you go, hmm.

[Arsenio Hall]

And it was so cool. Then they wrote a song about it. And I would turn on TV and I would see.

[Joe Rogan]

Was that CNC Music Factory? Yes, that's right.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. And I would turn on TV and like, Nordstrom's would have a sale that makes you go, hmm. And I was like, that's very cool. You know, and it came about sitting with the writers, and I had done it at the Comedy Store. And he says, you know, we could use that and just throw any joke in there, like randos that we don't know where to put. Right. And so it really was a cheating technique for a comedy.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, Perfect non sequitur.

[Arsenio Hall]

Just a transition every now and then, hey, why don't you black women breastfeed chocolate milk and you have no place else to put that thought. So it's a stream of things that

[Joe Rogan]

make you go, hmm, yeah, yeah. Well, it was just finally there was a different kind of talk show. It was like finally there was a talk show that was more fun.

[Arsenio Hall]

Hey, the desk thing. My partner and executive producer Marla Kel Brown, we were sitting around one day and she said, after coming to America, I had done the Joan Rivers thing. I had filled in for her for 11 weeks. And I think her husband committed suicide. And she was going through all that period. Right. Conan's creating the Wilton North Report in the room that I leave and I go to Paramount and she says, I'm asking you one thing. She said, I watched you do Stand up the other night at the Comedy Store. And there is a freedom that you have that I would like you to have on the talk show. And I don't think we can have it with that desk between you and the guest. So I want you to just try without the desk. And I tried it without the desk and never went back.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, you changed it. I mean, like, and then George Lopez did no desk when he did his show. A few people have tried the no desk thing.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. But for us, I think it's great. And you know what? I was able, like somebody like Rosie Perez who would be nervous. I'd hold her hand and you can't reach across the desk and hold somebody.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, also, the desk was always elevated.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah. You want to be high.

[Joe Rogan]

The desk was always above the gas.

[Arsenio Hall]

We must be higher, which is weird. Well, that's a bizarre. I don't know if that's the ego of the entertainer or whether that's some ass kissing prop set designer move. Because we always wanted to be higher. And I remember they put something under my seat.

[Joe Rogan]

So make your seat higher.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. So I'm sitting even with Kareem, you know, which is, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's a weird thing. It's like, why would the host be above movie stars and rock stars? Why? That doesn't make any sense at all.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Unless your host is David Bowie.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, right, right. Unless he decides to do a talk show. Even then it doesn't make any sense. It's like if you want to have a conversation the way you did it was the best way to do it. Just be sitting there.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Sitting with each other, you know? And now you can lean in.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah, yeah. You could. You could touch the person.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Now we have a different era where everyone can do talk. I saw Mike Epps talking on his back from his bed the other day, holding his phone above him. And that's when it hit me. It's like, now we Have a hard time finding a guest that doesn't have a show. Right. We can. Anyone can have a show now. Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of cool.

[Joe Rogan]

It is kind of cool. And it's just like. And you find your. As long as you do it long enough and you put. Put the right attention to it and do it honestly, you'll find your own lane. You find your own way of doing things.

[Arsenio Hall]

I have friends who have children who have shows, makeup tutorials, and successful things going on in their bedroom.

[Joe Rogan]

One of the biggest shows on YouTube for a long time was a kid that was like, unboxing toys.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, that's cool.

[Joe Rogan]

And it was sort of. But then they started monetizing it. And I think, you know, as soon as your parents start making all that money off of you, opening toy boxes gets weird. It's weird for kids to get famous, period. But. But it was just like, no one had thought that out, like, that there would be a lot of people that were interested in you watching toys.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But there's a lot of shows that I watch on YouTube that it's just people cooking.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I just. I love watching people.

[Arsenio Hall]

I watch a lady cook with big titties and. And just an apron, you know? You know, side boobage be coming out.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a trick. She's tricking you. I like watching people cook with no talking. It's just asmr. You know, just they're like, chopping up the food and you hear the sizzle in the pan and like, it's. I don't know why I like it. I love. I love watching people do things.

[Arsenio Hall]

Isn't it amazing that you're younger than I am? But when I was growing up in Cleveland, we had three channels. Songs.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. I remember those days.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. And. And. And the. Signed off at 2, right? Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And you fall asleep watching TV. And that would wake you up. Yeah. Because it would be just crackling like, oh, geez, I stayed up too late.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You have to shut it off after the American flag. Because the American flag would wave on the tv, right?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. There would be a match fade from a soldier to the American flag.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And then it would just go static at 2 in the morning. And then I remember when Fox came out and everybody's like, this channel is crazy. Yeah. Foxes, they had the Simpsons and Mavericks.

[Arsenio Hall]

It changed my life, man. Those Tracy Allman. And then, of course, they discovered that they could get numbers with me and Living Color. And Fox was really important to us.

[Joe Rogan]

Fox was important to America. I Mean, it was, it was a looser, wilder network. It was like a network that was a little crazier. Like they were doing things, they're getting

[Arsenio Hall]

nuts and they had to, they had to take some chances and roll the dice in a different way, right? Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then cable came along. It was like the slow descent into madness. And then all of a sudden you have 150 channels and now you have like literally an infinite number of channels because of streaming and YouTube. It's like you can never run out of things to look at.

[Arsenio Hall]

Which is crazy because I turn a lot and I'm like, yo, motherfucker, they got 2 million stations and you channel chasing, you can't find something. But I'm a big YouTube guy because I don't like commercials. I want what I want and I want it in small increments. I actually, as a 70 year old, fit more into this culture than I did the culture I was born into. I like things for three minutes. It's fucked me up too, you know, I don't want long, I want quick and I'm jumping around.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, when I'm watching tv, I'm. I'm generally trying to check out, you know, or I'm trying to be educated, right? So either I'm watching some like, particle physicists talk about the way they find new particles by using particle colliders and large hadron colliders and the amount of energy required to duplicate the, you know, the conditions that happen right after the big bang. I watch a lot of that. And then I just watch people play pool. I watch people play pool and I watch, you know, people make furniture and people cook. I'm just trying to like, unwind. Yeah, I was trying to like, relax,

[Arsenio Hall]

but that's so heavy. I heard you and Cat talking about the pyramids and as a matter of fact, it was part of the reason I was afraid to come here because I've heard you talk about the re. Explosion of. It's just when you hear that kind of shit and you're like, I don't want to be here. Like pussy crazy, huh? I don't want to be that guy, you know? So it's intimidating to watch intelligent people have an exchange and say, I got to go. There is it. Oh yeah, you don't want to be the first idiot in the room. Nobody wants to.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, you definitely wouldn't be the first idiot on this show. And you're not an idiot anyway. But there's been plenty of really fucking dumb people on this show that were great.

[Arsenio Hall]

But do you know, somebody that is really intelligent and conversation with them is intimidating.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, sure.

[Arsenio Hall]

So I was afraid of this room. I mean, I know people like Bill Clinton. The first time I sat and talked to Bill Clinton not on the air, or the second time, I guess I should say it was kind of daunting because he, no matter what your politics is, he's a really smart guy. Yeah, Katt Williams is the same way. That motherfucker read a lot more books than I read.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, Katt's brilliant. I mean, you can't be that funny and not be very intelligent.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's the reason Bill Cosby was so funny. He was a bright man. Uh oh, I got you. Uh oh, I saw something

[Joe Rogan]

that's a problematic subject. Also, Bill Clinton. I wish Bill Clinton didn't have so many problems because I would like to talk to him. I would love to have to sit down with him on a podcast. You know, the problem is, like, how do you sit down and not talk about all the chaos and all the nutty and the Epstein files and all the other. Like, you kind of almost have to talk about it. So it's too bad, because I think he's a fascinating person and I think he's one of the greatest presidents of all time, for sure. And if you go back and look at what he accomplished during his administration, they balanced the budget. That was like one of the first times in the history of this fucking country that we didn't have a gigantic debt. Now our debt's like 39 trillion. It's crazy. Everybody's so bad at balancing the budget. And you go back and listen to him talk when he was running for president, he's like, super sensible. Like, everything he said made sense.

[Arsenio Hall]

And didn't he move a little to the right?

[Joe Rogan]

It wasn't to the right. It was just sensible. Like, what is to the right and what is to the left doesn't mean anything.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's accepting that a lot of things are valuable that are not a part of your party's philosophy. I think we have to be willing to compromise and move a little bit, and that goes for all politicians. We have to be able to move a little bit to be logical and serve all of America.

[Joe Rogan]

For sure. But I think the problem is parties all have to agree, and they then they form ideologies that you cannot stray from. So if you're one of those people that says, like, hey, maybe an open border is a bad idea because terrorists can come through, like, no, there's no one's illegal on stolen land, you Know, you get, everybody gets crazy because there's a party line that you have to stick with. This is today. Today things are incredibly polarizing. But if you go back and listen to some of the things that Clinton was saying when he was running for president and when he was president, boy, these are like almost right wing talking porns in a lot of ways. But they're reading right, but it's not really right wing. It's just sensible. Like what is right and what is left. Left used to be, first of all, freedom of speech was of paramount importance. It used to be that they were very open minded. It used to be like the, that education was of crucial importance and that discourse was crucially important and that you have to look out for citizens in, in sense of like having social safety nets and having welfare programs and, and food stamps and all those things are, which are really important for a society because not everybody is in the same position in life. And if we're a community of people, which is what a country is supposed to be, you're supposed to look out for everyone. You know that that's sensible. That's what the left used to be. And then it became trans. Women are women, men can get pregnant.

[Arsenio Hall]

Like, oh, and by the way, when you deal with left and right, you have to almost attach a year because we've seen parties change. I'm always reminded that the Democratic Party was the party of the Klan. If you go far enough back, so I'm a republic, I have to look at it all.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, wasn't Lincoln a Republican? I believe Lincoln was a Republican. I think the Republicans were the ones who were trying to abolish slavery. There was a lot of, there's a lot of weird things that shift back and forth and that you, you think of right wing and left wing in today's standards. Like we were playing a clip of Hillary Clinton the other day when she was running for president. I think it was. Was it 2008 or 2012? 8. When she was running, she was running for President. She's like, if you're here illegal from another country, you should have to pay a stiff penalty. You should have to learn English. And if you have any criminal history whatsoever, no questions asked, you get out of the country. And everyone's cheering like the ladies. Maga. That sounds completely maga.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's why I say when you deal with Democrat Republican, you have to attach a year because it's evolved and changed many times.

[Joe Rogan]

You just being manipulated and you're being manipulated by these two teams and you have to Pick a team. You have to decide which team you want.

[Arsenio Hall]

I hate that.

[Joe Rogan]

It's so stupid. I'm politically homeless. I've always been political. I've been politically homeless for a long time. It doesn't, neither one of them make any sense to me. We need like a logical centrist government that like just says like, there's a lot of things that we should do to make this country a better place. We can, we can do these things and we don't have to attach them to left or right. And anything that the left says that's logical to people on the right, they immediately dismiss it because it's coming from the left. And that happens the same where the left does it to people on the right. It's dumb. It's a, it's a team thing. It's like the Dolphins versus the Raiders. It's just you pick a fucking team and you lay that.

[Arsenio Hall]

What a horrible game, by the way.

[Joe Rogan]

You pick a team and your team rules and the other team sucks. And there's a lot of people out there that are not that they're not open minded and they love a good rigid ideology that they could adhere to. So now I don't have to think for myself. I have a predetermined pattern of opinions that I could just adopt and I'll just accept those. And that's how I think. And that's what I'm going to argue with.

[Arsenio Hall]

When I was young, I used to, in some jokes, say my heart is Democratic, but my wallet is Republican.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

You know, but it's not even that simple anymore. It's gotten much more complicated.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, much, much, much complicated. It's like, you know, everyone should be anti fraud, whether you're on the left

[Arsenio Hall]

or on the right or unless you're committing fraud.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Arsenio Hall]

Then, you know, then I'm pro me.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people that you know, are certainly benefiting from fraud would like to dismiss it. Whether it's the left or the right. Yeah, there's like we have a problem in this country where we have a two party system. Two party systems are inherently flawed because there's no way that one side is going to represent you entirely. And it's much more likely if you have like 5, 10, 15 different parties that are all legitimate because we don't have another legitimate party. If you vote for Libertarian, and I've voted Libertarian before, you're basically saying these people, you know, these people just, I'm voting.

[Arsenio Hall]

You're jacking up the Dolphin Raider game.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I'm voting for rugby. That's what you're basically saying. You're like, I can't get behind either one of these motherfuckers. So I'm gonna vote for this guy who has no chance. You know, and I've done that before. I did that with Joe Jorgensen. I did that with Gary Johnson. I voted for both of them.

[Arsenio Hall]

But why do you think we've not been able to come up with legitimate third, fourth and fifth parties?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they got it locked down. They've got it locked down with donations and money. Yeah, it's money. Money in politics, when they got. When they allowed corporations to just essentially give as much as they feel like it. Like. And when corporations.

[Arsenio Hall]

And not, not just corporations, but other countries.

[Joe Rogan]

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. A lot of people hit stretches where money gets tight. And it's not just the bills, it's the constant pressure, the mental load, the second guessing of every decision. And honestly, one of the biggest difference makers isn't some perfect budget. It's having a solid support system when things feel heavy. And if that support system includes therapy, even better. Because while it can't solve your money problems, it can change your relationship with finances. It can help you manage the stress, anxiety, and maybe even any shame you feel around money. A good place to find a quality therapist is BetterHelp. Plus, they do a lot of the work for you. Literally all you need to do is answer a few questions and BetterHelp will match you with a fully qualified therapist. Online they have an industry leading match fulfillment rate, which is a fancy way of saying that they typically get it right the first time. But even if they don't, it's super simple to switch to another therapist when life feels overwhelming. Therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] jre that's better. H e l p.com j r e oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not good. It's not good. Money in politics is the real problem. You know, it should, you know, the whole thing, it's a mess. And then you find out how much

[Arsenio Hall]

money politicians make while TSA guys have nothing. Yeah, and politicians are still getting a motherfucking check.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes, exactly. Well, I felt that way also about the lockdowns in California. I was like, all these people that are saying that you should have no outdoor dining. Your paycheck should be entirely dependent on the GDP of your city. And if your city starts suffering, you should suffer. And I guarantee you want those businesses to open right the back up because it didn't make any sense. They were doing things for optics only. And they were doing things because they like control. People love control. They love it once you give them power over people. They're in the control business. They like to keep that control. And it just gets gross. And they don't have any. There's no repercussions. They don't get in trouble if all these, like, California laws.

[Arsenio Hall]

Somebody should be in trouble for the Epstein files. Somebody.

[Joe Rogan]

At least one person. Please.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes. It's crazy that we're sitting around looking at that.

[Joe Rogan]

It's crazy and we know it and

[Arsenio Hall]

we say it, but ain't a motherfucking thing we can do about it.

[Joe Rogan]

Right? It's like right now there's some talk about journalists getting in trouble for leaking information about the downed pilot. And that they want to prosecute these journalists at the same time. No one's being prosecuted for the Epstein files. Yeah, that's nuts. That's a sick society.

[Arsenio Hall]

As a kid, I did magic, right? And there's a thing in magic. I take a coin and put in this hand. There's a thing called misdirection. That's what I just did to you. You looked at that. And I'm doing some shit right here.

[Joe Rogan]

Right?

[Arsenio Hall]

That's the story of American politics.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. Whenever something weird's going on. Look, when Monica Lewinsky, When. When Trump. When Bill Clinton got caught with Monica Lewinsky. They meet their bomb in some other countries. Like, we got to distract these people. This is just too complicated.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Look, the Epstein files comes out, we go to war with Iran. It's. It's a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things. You give them a new problem to think about.

[Arsenio Hall]

Hey. This morning I wake up in a very nice hotel, thanks to you. Breakfast was paid for, the tip was done, all that shit. It was kind of cool. And I was nervous, and I'm thinking, I'm nervous to go see my guy and talk, which is insane. But then, you know, sometimes you try to focus on why you're really nervous. Why am I so nervous? And I realized it wasn't just coming here. I had watched about a half hour of news, and it was making my stomach hurt.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Because I feel so sad on a lot of levels.

[Joe Rogan]

And anxiety.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes. Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

News just gives me anxiety.

[Arsenio Hall]

But I gotta. As a comic, I gotta watch because I gotta know everything. I gotta have that, that. That mental Rolodex loaded.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Arsenio Hall]

For crowd work or whatever.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you have to know what's going on in the world. Unfortunately, if I wasn't a comic, I would have no social media. I would never consume the news. I would just hide. Yeah, I would just like go to a peaceful place. I'd probably have a place in the mountain somewhere and just chill. I would not want to have anything to do with any of this that's going on in the world. And I know people, a lot of people say, oh, you have to participate and this and that. Like, man. Yeah, I guess. But I don't think your participation is having the kind of effect that you'd like it to have. I think it's having an effect on the way you think and feel. Much more so like a disproportionate effect on your mental health and your anxiety levels and all these different things that you cannot control by paying attention to it. You can't control what these fucking people are doing. And it just drives you nuts.

[Arsenio Hall]

And it's frustrating because we realize, I mean, you and I are both millionaires, you a lot more than me. But at the same time we realize we don't have enough money to really affect it.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, you, you can affect some things, I guess.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Now that I think about it, I don't want to. I don't want to affect. If I can affect things in a positive way, I can. Yeah. I mean, there's some things that I can do.

[Arsenio Hall]

We affect things by dispersing information of candidates and helping to inform people. But that kind of money that you have to have to have a dinner in Malibu and later get some shit done that you want to get done because the president is your guy now.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Or girl.

[Joe Rogan]

Very complicated.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, very.

[Joe Rogan]

And that kind of complication comes with a lot of scrutiny, a lot of weirdness and, and also like, you don't really know these people. You, you support people like for running for president or governor or mayor or whatever. How much do you know them? Are you really sure that you. Is this like, is there no good option so you go with the least evil option?

[Arsenio Hall]

Well, a lot of us do that and that's, that's really painful to think that the lesser of two evils is a horrible thing as a philosophy for a place we raise our children.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Yeah. There's no one person that really comes along. We like finally like a peaceful, God loving person who's just looking out for everybody's best interest, who really only wants to do this because they think they can affect change. And then once they do try to affect change, they get shot. Because nobody really wants that because they're all making money.

[Arsenio Hall]

When we were coming up, remember the Sam Kinison bit?

[Joe Rogan]

Which bit?

[Arsenio Hall]

I think it was very similar to that. People who have an idea, we kill them.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that was Bill Hicks.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, it was Hicks.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hicks had a great bit about that. Yeah. And it's totally true. I mean, anybody that really wants to rock the apple cart like that, that person's a problem, you know? And all these people that are making all these sociopaths that are making fucking billions of dollars just being cunts, they do not want you coming along and waking people up to that and saying, hey, we should put a stop to all this. We should, you know, we should stop these people from, like, that's why people cheered when that guy got shot. The United Healthcare guy, he got shot. People were happy. They were happy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Like, finally, at first I thought it was. I thought, homie, who shot him, I thought it was his eyebrows, you know, because women were going crazy, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Hot guy. Yeah, he's a good looking guy, too. It's like, perfect guy to be like a martyr, like an assassin.

[Arsenio Hall]

By the way, have you noticed throughout history, good looking people get treated differently when it comes to the justice system. They've done experimental trials where the hot guy gets off for murder easy. Because the 11 women were cool with it.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, women are weird with killers. When guys are even serial killers when they go to jail, women, they get great letters. Yeah, it's women.

[Arsenio Hall]

Proposals.

[Joe Rogan]

Weird.

[Arsenio Hall]

Marry me.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Even like Richard Ramirez was getting all these proposals while he was in jail.

[Arsenio Hall]

But the ultimate game for a woman is to be married but not have to live with that motherfucker, you know? So that might be kind of cool, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Kind of. I don't know what it is. I heard someone talk about that, saying that there's women that like men that are capable of killing. Because back in the day, it was if someone was. If you needed someone to protect you, you didn't. You didn't want someone that would hesitate if they were going to kill someone. You wanted someone who has experience killing people. So it's almost like an attractive trait that someone's willing to cross that terrible line and just has no problem murdering people. And if they like you, they won't murder you, but they'll murder other people, like anybody. That's a problem.

[Arsenio Hall]

I knew a girl who went out with a couple friends of mine, and her M.O. was to do something publicly that would make the man whip somebody's ass to defend her honor or something.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh.

[Arsenio Hall]

And she, Because That. That made her feel better.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a crazy. I've been around people like that before. I always got rid of them real quick. I've had a few ladies like that.

[Arsenio Hall]

You gonna let him say that to me?

[Joe Rogan]

You know, I'd be like, why'd you say that to him? The fuck. Don't get me involved in this stupid shit.

[Arsenio Hall]

But it's hard, man. I was in a club as a young man on Sunset, left the Comedy Store, went down the street to a place called Carlos and Charlie's. And back then they had this garment called a tube top. It was just an elastic about elastic piece, about 8 inches or depending on your breast. And I watched a dude take his finger and just pull the girl's tube top down. Titties fell out and I'm watching her, man. He didn't know what to do, you know, because you don't want to fight these guys. You almost want to just say, baby, just pull up your top. Let's go home. You know? But he had to fight.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

And in that situation, I think you have to fight.

[Joe Rogan]

You just definitely shouldn't be there in the first place. That's the problem with going to clubs.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's the wrong club.

[Joe Rogan]

Running into the. The potential psychopath is just too like. That's where they go. Where people act like cunts. That's where they go.

[Arsenio Hall]

When is the last time you went to a club?

[Joe Rogan]

I never go to clubs.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's been a long time for me. I mean, there is no club for 70 year olds.

[Joe Rogan]

No, no, no.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's called ARP.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, if you do go, it's sad. Yeah. You don't want to be the oldest bar. Yeah. Hey, ladies.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Fucking grandpa doing here.

[Arsenio Hall]

But, but do kids dance?

[Joe Rogan]

Now that's a good question.

[Arsenio Hall]

My son has like. I remember a time when you say, I'm doing the Cabbage Patch now, you know, it's like you knew what the latest dance was. My son never dances. I've taken him to New Year's Eve parties. He never, during the slow record, says to a girl, you want to dance? You know, you go out and slow dance. What happened to that?

[Joe Rogan]

That's true, right? Well, because clubs got associated with violence. Like clubs get associated with people getting drunk. They're doing drugs and chaos and people getting shot, you know? Yeah, there's just too much of that going on. And you hear about that at concerts too. But yeah, you're right, you don't. There's no new dances. There's no things that like, you have

[Arsenio Hall]

to learn you know, but you know, you know what's replaced it may be the entire family on Tick Tock.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Tick Tock has definitely got dances that you gotta learn. Oh, really? All it is. Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, for people that are. Right, that's where the dances are. That's where the dancers. Yeah, they're not going to clubs, they're just doing them. Song just got viral again because they're dancing to Freak on a leash. It's a 25 year old song that has got a dance to it. What's the dance? Show me the dance. Couldn't even begin to start it. Get up here. Do it. You show you the video. You do it. You've been practicing.

[Arsenio Hall]

I used to.

[Joe Rogan]

Show me the video. What's the. What's the corn dance? In my head, you're like, get up and do it. But I'm not. Do we have to not play the music? Yeah, probably not play the music. So this is, this is the dance.

[Arsenio Hall]

See, it's a new day. You don't go to a club, you do it with your girl.

[Joe Rogan]

I think they made it back on Billboard because, you know, like the songs. Oh, that's hilarious. Got so many plays on it. That's hilarious. 1998. That's old. Wow, that's crazy. So I go, I don't know. And then to contrast to this is the club in Austin where everybody goes. They're not necessarily doing those dances. What club is this? This is called the Concourse.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, see, I. I can't go to a club with no shirt on.

[Joe Rogan]

And what do they do here? Like DJs? Oh, yeah. So they just bounce around a bunch of lasers.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, this is like.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, they just bounce around. They're all on ecstasy. Everybody stares at the DJ stage like they're performing. How weird. And yeah, this is a sign of a sick culture.

[Arsenio Hall]

Not the same thing, a different culture,

[Joe Rogan]

but it is like. But, but that. There's no. The other thing. There's no like people dancing, you know?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

On the old days, like if you go back and you watch like nightclubs from like the 1960s and 70s, what was everybody like? The disco days. Right, that's perfect.

[Arsenio Hall]

When Tramp was singing Burnt, Burn this mother down.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Yeah, yeah. People dancing. Well, I remember when I was a kid, Saturday Night Live or Saturday Night Fever rather came out. Oh. And that's when everybody wanted to learn how to dance. Because John Travolta, he could fucking dance. And they would have dance offs.

[Arsenio Hall]

And black people were saying, we got to step up the Game if this boy can do that, you know, so we had to get better.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, and then you had Soul Train, right, where everybody was dancing on tv.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Saturday Morning was that. That was life for me.

[Joe Rogan]

There's no shows where there's, like, a bunch of people performing music on TV anymore.

[Arsenio Hall]

Well, that's the. That's that gap between me and you as talkers. One of the problems I had, and I talk in the book about this, I love music, and I grew up wanting to do that show. So when they start telling me, you know, you can get better numbers with Howie Mandel just talking than you can with this, because I put Boys to Men and the Temptations together once. I had to fly Boys to Men from Philly, I had, you know, and they wanted it less black. And Now I got 14 brothers doing choreography, you know, and it's like, no, that's not what.

[Joe Rogan]

They wanted it less black. They would say shit like that to you.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah. They wanted. This is the carrot. They said, we know Johnny's gonna leave one day. You know, you always think it's gonna be two years so you can inherit his audience if you do the right show. But I. Joe, I used to do the talk show in my basement, man. And we'd put on a Temptations record, and my friend Junior would be my guest, and he would sing Get Ready on Soul Train, they lip sync. We knew the microphones wasn't plugged in, and so he would sing, and then I'd interview him. I wanted to do that show.

[Joe Rogan]

But you were doing that when you were young.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

How old were you when you were doing that?

[Arsenio Hall]

11.

[Joe Rogan]

Really?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. My mother would have rent parties, and so she'd rent these card tables and chairs, and the people. Like, in la, we call it Town and country, right? You can rent stuff for your party. So the next day they come and pick up the stuff in the truck. But before they'd pick it up, I would do a talk show with that stuff. And I dreamed of everything that I did eventually in my life.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And it was. It was the show I wanted to do. So at a certain point, when they say, does Prince need a purple piano? You know, I said, yeah, he want a purple piano. And the show I was doing was just too expensive. And you and I talked once at the Ice House when I tried to do the reboot show.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I was telling you how complicated it was. They wanted my Twitter site.

[Joe Rogan]

They took your. I was telling people they took over your fucking social media, and they wouldn't Give it back.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, it was hard to get back.

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy. I remember you telling me that we were standing out the outside area of the Ice House, and you're like, I can't get my fucking social media back. I'm like, that's crazy. They took your social media.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And they would use it to promote other shows.

[Arsenio Hall]

Absolutely. And the end of that reboot experience didn't go down exactly the way I wanted to. Like, I got picked up first and Jay Leno came out and read a letter from Les Moonves that I was picked up for a second season. And then we start talking about the second season. And here's the great thing they wanted. You really gotta stop doing the music. As a matter of fact, how about no house band? And it's interesting, but economically speaking, Joe, when I look at it, they wanted me to do Joe Rogan before there was a Joe Rogan. They just want you to talk to people and stop. I'd watched Fallon with Will Smith one night, and Will Smith rode in on a horse. And I'm like, that's expensive. You know, they wanted me to do what we're doing right now because this is cheaper to do. I would love for us to have a hip hop star here right now following me. But this is economically sound. It's a new day, Right?

[Joe Rogan]

So that's all it was. It was just a money thing. They just.

[Arsenio Hall]

Well, that was the reboot show, the first show, you know, if they want me to be in the position to inherit Johnny's audience. Cause that's. They wanted me and themselves to make more money, a lot of money, keep making money. And I was kind of kicking the bag because I had wanted to do this show since I was a kid. I couldn't imagine this.

[Joe Rogan]

But meanwhile, the thing is, your show was so popular.

[Arsenio Hall]

And by the way, they got numbers. One night when Whitney didn't sing, she just came on, and that was the kiss of death in my morning meetings. Because they were like, look, Whitney's saying nothing. And look at the numbers, you know? So they were shooting for the Joe Rogan Experience before there was an experience

[Joe Rogan]

fucking people concentrating on the numbers. It's like you're missing the trees.

[Arsenio Hall]

You got to. Joe, sometimes I. You know, it's really important for me to look back and say, I love that show that I did. And I don't regret a moment of it. But I get a corporate organization saying, we can make more money and we can get more people in.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, if I was a Cor, I would be A terrible corporate executive, by

[Arsenio Hall]

the way, because you would leave your heart.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I would say just be. You just have fun. And whatever ads we get, we get. Whatever money we get, we get. And that's good. You get plenty. It'll be fine. You can't. You gotta let. It has to. I feel like every show has to be a unique expression of the person that's hosting it and what they're trying to do. Like, let that person be free. Like, imagine if Quentin Tarantino had to sit down with a group of people that were executives before he wrote a script. You would never get any of these chaotic, crazy movies. They were like, no, no, no, no. You can't bash a woman's head on a mantelpiece. That's nuts. Like, don't do that. No, you can't. You know, like in Jackie Brown. No, you can't shoot that girl in the parking lot. That's nuts. You can't do that. You can't do any of these things. You've got to let someone just be free and then it finds its audience.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I remember when Ice Tea came on to explain Cop Killer and his way of explaining.

[Joe Rogan]

To Sell, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And it was a metal band. Yeah. People don't realize that, like, Ice T, people forgot Body Count was a metal band. Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

You gotta search that, yo.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. A lot of people don't even know that he did that. You think of Ice T, you think of Six in the Morning, you think of, you know, Hustler. You think of all those classic songs, colors. You think of that. You don't think of Body Count, which is like, Ice T reinvented himself. And he was like, I always love this kind of music. You can't tell me what the. I do. I like this kind of music. Music, too.

[Arsenio Hall]

Amazing career that I know.

[Joe Rogan]

And now he's. He plays a cop for, like, 25 years.

[Arsenio Hall]

How about that for irony? I knew him when he was a pimp. And now.

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy. We remember when he was in Pimps Up, Hose Down. Yeah, absolutely. He was in that, too. Yeah. I mean, he was talking about the pimp game. It's hilarious.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. He came on, by the way. They didn't want me to do that, you know, book him, but I thought it was cool to expose America to some conversations they might not hear normally. Right. And the more power I got, the more I tried to push that envelope and do those things. He compared it to Schwarzenegger. He says, you don't think he's really the Terminator Right. And he says, I'm not a cop killer, but there's a message through this character. And I'm paraphrasing, but it was nice to hear people who. I know I would talk to Tupac and I would say, say that on the air. You got to talk about that on the air. And that was. We didn't have Twitter, we didn't have the Bluebird. I was kind of the Blackbird. And I was able to, to have these like. Tupac called me once and he says, man, they want me to take an AIDS test before I do this movie. And unless I'm really gonna fuck Janet, I don't think I should have to take an AIDS test. And I'm like, please don't say anymore. Just come on the show. And this fit into both categories. Come on the show. Don't do any music, just sit and talk. And those nights would do really good.

[Joe Rogan]

Of course, of course. Because people want to hear people really talk. Especially in those weird settings where most of the time when people were coming on talk shows, they would just have this like very canned sort of like pre programmed thing that they would talk about. They would talk about their character.

[Arsenio Hall]

And we even have people don't know we have pre interviews, which you don't have in a show like this. But I get a card.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

That morning it's like, okay, here's what Jackie Collins would like to talk about.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Arsenio Hall]

You know, or Nicole Kidman has requested that you don't mention Tom Cruise. And I'm like, well, tell Nicole the only reason that bitch is here is because I think Tom Cruise is gonna walk out, you know, and. Oh, it was, it was crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Back then.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, it was all PR people. And it's. Again, you're dealing with too many different people that are peripheral people where all their money is dependent on this one person performing. So they just want to make sure they make the maximum amount of money possible. Like, don't make any ripples, don't cause any we waves. Don't cause any problems. Just go out there and smile and don't mess up. We'll sell more records, we'll sell more movies. TV show will get better ratings. Don't mess it up.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, guys like Prince used to be frustrated with the fact that if something's a hit, can you give us something like that again? How many beats per second is that? Can you give us that again? Or any big artist? It's like, we want more of Waterfall.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Prince was one of the Most revolutionary artists ever. And people that don't know the early stuff, they don't know how crazy it was that this guy was. Had a song called Head. Just singing about getting head.

[Arsenio Hall]

First time I saw him, he was opening for the Rolling Stones.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And the audience didn't dig him because it was different back then. And he was singing soft and wet.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, Right. Well, Prince was just. He was so unique, man.

[Arsenio Hall]

And he predicted a lot of the things that we're dealing with now and going through. I remember the first time he talked about what became Napster and he talked about owning your own property and what was going to. And slave on his jaw. And we thought that was silly, but it meant something.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he was dealing with these crazy contracts where these record companies, these predatory record companies would lock you into these contract. They owned you. So his response to that was like, okay, I won't perform as Prince anymore. Now I'm this symbol. I'm a symbol with a slave.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, Insignia.

[Joe Rogan]

What are you gonna do now I'm a symbol. I'm not even selling myself as Prince. And he would just. I mean, how revolutionary is that? This guy said, okay, I know the workaround. I won't use my name anymore. I'll just be a symbol.

[Arsenio Hall]

He was.

[Joe Rogan]

But he was such a bad. That people like, I know who that is. I don't care what that fucking symbol is. That's Prince. Let him sing. Let him do things.

[Arsenio Hall]

Did you ever meet him?

[Joe Rogan]

No. I had one opportunity to see him live.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And I blew it.

[Arsenio Hall]

At the Great Western Forum.

[Joe Rogan]

No, it was at. It was at one of the hotels in Vegas, but it was a really late show. And I had a show earlier that night and there said. And Prince was doing small shows back then. It was like this small, like, intimate audience. But it was like after midnight, I was like, I'm tired. I'm gonna go to sleep. And this is like, oh, I up, man. I up. It's like when his career was in a weird place because he wasn't doing like big shows anymore and he was doing this late night show and people were saying it was really good, but I was like, I'm tired. I'm not gonna see this. And then years later, when he was dead, I was like, God, did I up. I always thought Prince was going to be around.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And print. We lost Prince to Fentanyl. Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

A lot of people alone in an elevator.

[Joe Rogan]

God damn it.

[Arsenio Hall]

I remember the Musicology album where he toured and he attached the album to the ticket so that when you bought A ticket. You were buying an album and it instantly became a million dollar seller. With that philosophy, he had genius that was way ahead of the pimps.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, he just knew that he was being. And he knew that all they're selling is his brilliance. They don't have anything. What is a record company selling? They're only selling the art. That's it. They don't make it.

[Arsenio Hall]

And they were selling a penny a copy.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, exactly. The. The record company was getting most of it. Now it makes even less sense because nobody even buys albums anymore. It's like how the are these record companies even surviving? It's so crazy that there's. They still figure out a way to latch their tentacles onto these young artists. And for young artists, they feel like they've made it when they're a part of a record deal. Like, I got a deal. And I almost want to tell them, like, that ain't a deal. You got to deal with the devil. Like if you just put your on YouTube or on SoundCloud or anywhere where people hear it and they start sharing it, you'll be huge.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, we're getting smarter and learning how to deal with the pimps. That pimp was, you know, I talk in the book about Prince also had a great sense of humor. You would have loved him, you know, as a person beyond the musician. And there was a time when I was hosting the MTV Awards and he had no ass in his pants. And, you know, so when he's coming past me down the hall, I realize, oh shit. Cause this motherfucker ain't got no ass in his pants. We'll be talking about this tomorrow. So obviously when I get back to the show, my first monologue is about that night. Yes, yes.

[Joe Rogan]

1991. Isn't that crazy?

[Arsenio Hall]

That was nuts.

[Joe Rogan]

1991.

[Arsenio Hall]

So I do jokes about that in the monologue. And like a week or two after the jokes, I get a box in the mail at Paramount and it's from Prince. And I open it. I figure it's maybe a hoodie. I opened it and it's a beautiful black and white suit with all the Prince symbols on it. Made me look like I was the drummer for New Power Generation or something. It was a cool suit. And I'm looking at it and my assistant said, turn it around.

[Joe Rogan]

I turned it around.

[Arsenio Hall]

There was no ass.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you wear no leg?

[Arsenio Hall]

Hell no. Not even at the crib. I never put it on. It's like I could never bring myself to putting on that suit. It had no back Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that's hilarious.

[Arsenio Hall]

But that's his sense of humor.

[Joe Rogan]

That's hilarious. That's so funny.

[Arsenio Hall]

I took him to an after hours joint once. I talk about that in the book. Cause he was very interested in what people listen to and what moves people in clubs. And I told him about an after hours joint down the way south of Wilshire that was in a lady's house. And you have pit bulls and a fence, and they let you in, they lock the chain back, bring you to the back, and, you know, you put money on the counter and they put your liquor in a solo cup, you know, not a legal place. And I told him about the place, and he said, I want to go. And I took him down the way to this spot. He had an acrylic cane and a suit where the shoes match the suit, exact same material. And he sat with me in this after hours joint and listened to the music, and it was where the strippers were. What year was this? Oh, God. This was maybe two years after I left the talk show.

[Joe Rogan]

And so did he need the cane back then? Was that when he was having hip problems?

[Arsenio Hall]

I think so. Now we understand that maybe he had a replacement, a hip replacement or something. I thought it was fashion, but it probably was a little necessary that year. And he said he was.

[Joe Rogan]

All his dancing and.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, he should jump off speakers, Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

And land with heels.

[Joe Rogan]

Mm. So that's what fucked him up.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. A lot of pictures with him with a cane over the time, though. That's. Well, he probably was struggling even back then, because there's a lot of guys that blew their. Their hips out. Yeah, he probably needed it because he

[Arsenio Hall]

was an athlete, per se.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, for sure. I mean, his dancing was insane, and

[Arsenio Hall]

he was a good basketball player. Hey, I have one of those. He. The hat with the police hat with the chain. He sent me that one day, so I'm sure there are a few of them. But just to have one of those from him. And he sent me what looks like a Smith and Wesson 38 long, but it was fixed up so the microphone was where the barrel is so he could hold the gun and sing into it like that. I have that.

[Joe Rogan]

It's very cool.

[Arsenio Hall]

Very cool.

[Joe Rogan]

I became good friends with Charlie Murphy, and Charlie had. Oh, look at that. Yes. Wow. Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

I have one of those. I don't know how many there were, but I have one from.

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy. Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

But Charlie Murphy.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, Charlie had all those great stories about Prince that he did on Chappelle Show.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, I Mean, that was like that whole segment of like how good Prince was as a basketball. And then people didn't believe it because, you know, he's so short. But meanwhile he could play like a.

[Arsenio Hall]

He had, he had a crossover move that was crazy. And he could roller skate and I mean, amazing. With a lollipop backwards and on one

[Joe Rogan]

foot, you know, so he was, he was an athlete.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Really? I mean, you can't dance like that and not have incredible body control. Yeah, but the problem is when you're doing show after show after show after show after show for years, you're tearing your fucking joints apart. And that's probably what blew his hips out.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's one thing about us, with the exception of the shit you used to do on a stool. That balancing act.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, the Kardashian joke.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, our joke.

[Joe Rogan]

Our.

[Arsenio Hall]

Our life of jokes isn't very weak.

[Joe Rogan]

No.

[Arsenio Hall]

You know, all we got to do is take care from the neck up. Take care of your mind, our body. We. No comedian has a bad hip.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you generally don't get it from performing on stage, that's for sure. But when you're dancing and jumping around and doing all that shit, like Ted Nugent blew his, his, his knees out jumping off of speakers. Like a lot of people did that, you know, they just, they went crazy. They were just putting on a show and you don't realize you're doing it. Maynard from Tool, he blew his hip out stomping on the ground all the time.

[Arsenio Hall]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Just stomping while he was singing. He had to get a hip replacement.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I like being a stand up.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's definitely easier on the body. That's true.

[Arsenio Hall]

You know, you still get up on stage ever?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah, all the time. I'm going up.

[Arsenio Hall]

In your own club.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

What nights do you go up usually?

[Joe Rogan]

Tuesday and Wednesday I do it, but I do it, you know, off nights to different nights. But Tuesday and Wednesday, almost every week I do a show there.

[Arsenio Hall]

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[Joe Rogan]

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[Arsenio Hall]

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[Joe Rogan]

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[Arsenio Hall]

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[Joe Rogan]

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[Arsenio Hall]

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[Joe Rogan]

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[Arsenio Hall]

I promised my woman I wouldn't go to the mothership.

[Joe Rogan]

Why?

[Arsenio Hall]

When I told her, she's like, when you go, I want to go. It's a big deal if you're a combo, you know, I mean, it's a huge deal. But I want to come one night, fly in and just let me have 10.

[Joe Rogan]

Dude, you can go up anytime. You can go up tonight if you want. I got a show tonight.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I gotta fly home and do. I'm still slinging this book, man.

[Joe Rogan]

I hear you, brother. Well, anytime. Anytime you want to come by and do a set, you're more than welcome.

[Arsenio Hall]

I love it.

[Joe Rogan]

Come and hang out.

[Arsenio Hall]

Everybody's been so friendly.

[Joe Rogan]

The green room's an amazing hang too.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's what I hear. But I've heard both sides of that that I've heard. Don't be in that if you're not supposed to.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the problem is you don't want anybody coming in and up the conversation, you know, so we, you know, you got to be kind of vetted. But it's only like during shows when you're not on, you know, if, like, if it's a show and you're on the show, everyone's allowed to be in the green room. Yeah, it's just like we don't allow people to just come in out of nowhere. There's like, you're from out of town, you want to come in and hang out in the green room, then there's too many people in the green room.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then people have to prepare. They're going over their notes. The green room is supposed to be a hang with the comics on the show that are getting ready to go on stage. And the problem is that's the cool spot. That's where Shane Gillis is and Ron White is. Tony Hinchcliffe is. Everybody wants to come in and, you know, it gets. It gets to be a little bit of a problem. So you can't go in the green room if you're not on the show unless we know who you are. And, you know, you're in town, you want to come hang, but it's like, you know, it's like you're having a party. You can't let everybody in the Problem is everybody wants to be there.

[Arsenio Hall]

I mean, look at the level I'm at and how long I've been doing it. And I know about the green room and want to get in there.

[Joe Rogan]

You can get it anytime.

[Arsenio Hall]

But when you were living in Hollywood still, did your kids ever want to act?

[Joe Rogan]

No. No, they're not interested in that.

[Arsenio Hall]

Never wanted to stand up?

[Joe Rogan]

No, they wouldn't. First of all, rich kids are not gonna be good stand ups. You're not gonna be able to deal with the torture of bombing. You know, you're not gonna.

[Arsenio Hall]

And they don't have to.

[Joe Rogan]

And they don't have pain. You know, their, their pain is so minor in comparison to the pain of poverty, the pain of struggle, the pain of, you know, not getting enough attention when you're young and, you know, moving around a lot. All the different shit that most comics go through. I, I never met a good comic who had a great childhood.

[Arsenio Hall]

As you're talking, I'm thinking, I'm like, do we know any comics who are good, who are from wealth?

[Joe Rogan]

None. I don't know any. I'm sure they can exist. I'm sure it's possible. But it takes a very exceptional person to want to be a great comic that's grew up wealthy. It's just not a thing that they seek to do.

[Arsenio Hall]

So much comedy comes from our pain.

[Joe Rogan]

I think the only exception to that would be the Wayans brothers, because the sons of the Wayans brothers all went on to be great comics. They all went on to have big careers in movies and films and television. But I think that's, it's like a family thing over there. Like, I remember Damon telling me that he set up a stage in his house.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's absolutely true.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they're just, I mean, they love stand up so much. They would do stand up for each other. Just around I, I used to see. First of all, I think to this day, Damon is one of the most underappreciated great comics of all time.

[Arsenio Hall]

And he's back out there now. I noticed in my room, Damon is at the improv.

[Joe Rogan]

And he's always been.

[Arsenio Hall]

I thought he quit.

[Joe Rogan]

No, no, no, he never quit. He was always doing stand up. But he's low key about it. He makes his money off of television, you know, and even like he wanted to do. We talked years ago about him coming on my podcast and he was like, I'd like to, but I'll say some crazy and then I'll get in trouble because he was in that, what I call the velvet Prison. The TV velvet prison. You're doing TV shows. You're playing a dad on a TV show. You know, you can't come on a podcast talk about getting your dick sucked.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's just Howie Mandel goes through that. I work with him a lot. And Howie is on America's Got Talent.

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly.

[Arsenio Hall]

This real commercial television vehicle. But nobody is more real and edgy than Howie Mandel when he's on stage

[Joe Rogan]

and in the green room hanging out. Like he's done sets of the Mothership. He's come and hung out with us. He did my podcast, and he came to the club. He's like, fuck, I want to be like that. I want to do what you guys are doing. I'm like, you can. You can do it. But he's worried that he would lose that velvet prison.

[Arsenio Hall]

Hey, when we're working and they have the phones and bags, that's when he's amazing to us.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Arsenio Hall]

Because he'll drop the C bomb in a minute.

[Joe Rogan]

He was saying it. He was saying it on stage. I'm just so happy I could say cunt. Yeah. I just want to say it. But he was funny. It was like he was having a good time. He was loose. And you could tell. It's like. Cause Howie was a great comic. Like, Howie had some hilarious fucking specials.

[Arsenio Hall]

I hated following him at the Westwood Comedy Store. Mitzi used to send us there to get better. Me, him, and Paulie. That's one thing I loved about her. You know how we have Nepo babies? She didn't have no Nepo babies. She was like, paulie, you're not ready.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, she was sent his to Westwood.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, she made Polly work. Yeah. I mean, Paulie's a rare dude in that regard. Like, he became a really funny comedian while he was, you know, living with a woman who's the great as in terms of, like, people in comedy that are, like, the. Some of the most critical, important people. She's the most important person in the history of comedy. That's not a comic.

[Arsenio Hall]

Absolutely. There is no argument.

[Joe Rogan]

No argument. There's no one even close to her. And her son, you know, I mean, went on to have huge success in movies.

[Arsenio Hall]

I took Mitzi. Remember when we had the Universal Amphitheater? I got tickets and took Mitzi to see Paulie open for Sam Kinison.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And it just blew her away because she had never seen him in that large environment. And it was really cool to watch her watch her son.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, she let him grow the right way, you know, she didn't she didn't give him a silver spoon, by the way. She made a figure.

[Arsenio Hall]

Mitzi Shore started the Comedy Store, and she's the mother of Paulie Shore. Cause I say Mitzi to you like it's a cousin, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, we talk about her so much. I think a lot of people listening know. But she's the most important person in comedy that wasn't a comic. And more important than most comedians. Like, she would tell you how to do it, right? And if she liked you, man, it

[Arsenio Hall]

was like, she tell you how to do it, in her opinion? I seen her tell some people some crazy shit.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. She was not right. A lot of times she had some wild ideas that weren't.

[Arsenio Hall]

She had a girl put on a green wig one time, and I'm like, I'm not sure, you know, but she was trying to find some kind of

[Joe Rogan]

hook for this girl.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I'm like, if you don't want to have to wear the green wig, go home and figure out a hook.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. She made Joey Diaz call himself Fat Baby. She.

[Arsenio Hall]

Ouch.

[Joe Rogan]

When you would look at the lineup, like, I bet you could find it online if you looked. There's lineups from the Comedy Store. It'd be a bunch of comedians, Bill Burr, blah, blah, blah. And then you'd see Fat Baby. And that was Joey Diaz. She would call him Fat Baby. She wouldn't even let him use his fucking name in the lineup. It would be Fat Baby.

[Arsenio Hall]

I remember having a conversation with her and Paul. And Paul was exacerbating the problem. Cause she was like, Rodriguez. Paul Mooney.

[Joe Rogan]

Paul Mooney.

[Arsenio Hall]

We got so many Pauls in our life.

[Joe Rogan]

So we're sitting there, I love that dude talking.

[Arsenio Hall]

And Mitzi's about to start the Belly Room. Cause she thinks women need a place to perform and to get better.

[Joe Rogan]

That was what the Belly Room originally was.

[Arsenio Hall]

It was a little college up there for ladies. And she was trying to think of a name for it. And she says, I'm also thinking about having one night of just black comedy, you know, because there was only George Wallace, Dave Tyree, and Mooney at one time. When I arrived.

[Joe Rogan]

What year was that?

[Arsenio Hall]

I came in 1980, New Year's Eve. Wow. I drove out from Chicago because I'm from Cleveland, and there were no comedy clubs in Cleveland back then. So I had to go to New York, L.A. or Chicago. And my mother was living in Chicago at that time. So I went there because rent was free for a while, and that was a lot of fun. But Mitzi, for the Black Knight. She said, paul, what do you think I should call it? And she says, I was thinking cotton comedy. And I'm not. No, Mitzi, no, no, you can't. You can't. And I was trying to explain why. And Paul was like, oh, that's wonderful. Let's see. That's exactly what she called it. Oh, homie. Oh, homie. He was cool.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, man, Paul, that. That guy would write, man, there'd be something that would happen in the news, like the day before, and Mooney would go on stage and have like 15 minutes on it and just crush.

[Arsenio Hall]

And he did something that I know I hated. He requested the last spot.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, he loved that.

[Arsenio Hall]

Wanted to go on late, wanted to stay on as long as he wanted, and would fuck with you if you tried to get up. Oh, you don't like a smart, but don't leave too early. My friends at your house robbing that.

[Joe Rogan]

He would have so many things like that, so many hooks. And he was just so good at working those small crowds. He just liked the freedom of just being able to.

[Arsenio Hall]

Around, you know, with a bottle of champagne. With a straw.

[Joe Rogan]

Little tiny bottle of champagne. Yeah. And he would. He would sip on it during punchline.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, nigga, please. And then take a sip.

[Joe Rogan]

We all used to sit in the back and watch him. It's like, if you thought you were good at comedy, you'd watch Mooney and go, God, I got so much to learn. Yeah, I got so much to learn.

[Arsenio Hall]

All the great comics that we know now at one time would sit in the back of the OR and. And come late to watch Paul.

[Joe Rogan]

Absolutely.

[Arsenio Hall]

I used to. On the landline, I used to call Keenan and say, yo, I'll meet you there. We were going to see Mooney at 115.

[Joe Rogan]

I would always love to see Mooney when something fucked up happened in the news. Like, if there's something up happened in the news, like, when's Paul going up? Yeah, you know, it's just like, you had to go see him because he always had a take. And, you know, that take was always like, oh, you know, it was like he would get you. He would, like, find an angle, or you'd be like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. He was. He was so clever.

[Arsenio Hall]

The coolest conversations at the comedy show when Richard would come up every night and Richard would go from five minutes to an hour, and then it would become a great special that you go to at the theater to see. But I would watch Paul Mooney before we had cell phones, after it was over, Richard would go and have a cigarette in the main room. Like, on a Monday or Sunday, I think it would be closed. And that's where he would call it holding court. He would go in there first and just want to dry off for a minute, smoke a cigarette. And Paul would come in with a napkin with stuff written on it, and he would just, you know, oh, and how about this? And he would give him tags. And as a matter of fact, Richard, on the back of an album, that joke, you go to prison, you get justice. Just us, nigga. And he gave that to Richard, and it was on a prior album. But, oh, those. Joe. That was a time Richard would work out every night. He'd work the original room, go in the main room and entertain his guests. And it would be like Burt Reynolds, Moses, Charlton Heston, Bernie Casey. You would see, like, oh, Burt Reynolds would have Sally Field with him.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

It was amazing. They would all come and bow to the king, dog.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, he was so different. I always say that the Godfather of comedy, who started everything was Lenny Bruce. But then Richard figured out a way to take that and make it way funnier. He figured out how to take that kind of honesty and social commentary and figure out how to, like, talk about life. Because people don't know that before. Before Lenny Bruce came around, it was just jokes. It was just like two Jews walking to a bar. They buy it. Yeah, it was jokes. It was like.

[Arsenio Hall]

It was Dangerfield's rhythm.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. But you know what? Dangerfield was a. He was a special guy, too.

[Arsenio Hall]

He was a beast, man. And he didn't.

[Joe Rogan]

He took, like, 10 years off and never stopped writing and was selling aluminum siding.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then came back and made it in his 40s.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Look at this willingness.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's the main room. That's the main room.

[Joe Rogan]

That's crazy. Burt Reynolds, Sally Fields.

[Arsenio Hall]

Now you see that picture? One night, I'm in that room, and Stevie Wonder is over on the piano. Remember how the piano used to be

[Joe Rogan]

in the main room on the far left of the stage?

[Arsenio Hall]

Stevie's playing, and there are a few people snorting coke. I think to this day, Stevie still thinks a few of those people have allergies. Because, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Cause they're all sniffing.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. He's just sitting, playing, and people.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Wow, look at that. Burt Reynolds on stage. Robin Williams.

[Arsenio Hall]

I saw Burt Reynolds give the parking attendant $100. And I thought I was on another planet. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. They should be parking cars.

[Joe Rogan]

Fuck. Stand up.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, that was. That's and for people who are looking at this picture, that's Richard holding court after his set.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow, what an amazing photo. But, Jamie, we should get some of these photos and. Yeah, get some of these photos and let's print them up and put them in the green room at the mothership.

[Arsenio Hall]

I saw it.

[Joe Rogan]

That's it back. He's got the zero signs in the back.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah, still. Wow. Yeah, that tells you a lot about the history Search that search.

[Joe Rogan]

That sign used to be Mitzi had this warehouse room, like, was just not a warehouse, but, you know, it was a storage room where she had all the old zero stuff. And I remember seeing that sign there and they eventually hung it up in the back bar area. And you just look like, wow, this was. This was a mob club in like the fucking 50s. Yeah, that's crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

I saw a picture you have in the entry of Richard Pryor's mug shot. Yeah, I had never seen that. What did he do?

[Joe Rogan]

I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember, but he was very young. That mug shot was. I think he was like 18. Yeah, I don't remember. It was. I have mug shots from everybody who got arrested.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I saw Larry King.

[Joe Rogan]

Larry was like, bad checks. He was writing bad checks. He had a gambling problem. Oh, yeah, yeah, Willie Nelson's up there. Yeah, I got everybody up there.

[Arsenio Hall]

There is a book that I have in my garage, and it's the first edition to tell you how much of this kind of stuff existed. But it's all celebrities and their mug shots. So it's a coffee table book of just the mug shots.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I should probably get that book. I bet there's a few in there that I don't have.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I bet there is a second one that they could do because the book's only like a half inch thick.

[Joe Rogan]

We got a lot of good ones out there, but. But, you know, so many people got arrested. You know, we got David Bowie out there, of course, Morrison, you know, it's like Hendrix gotta have that mug shot. That's a classic. Yeah, this is. There was a lot of mug shots.

[Arsenio Hall]

Have you ever taken a mug shot?

[Joe Rogan]

No, I've never been arrested.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I've never been.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm a good boy, believe it or not.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, you know, I mean, we. We've done things, but not enough to have to take those pictures.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, luckily. But also, we live in a different time, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, when those guys are getting arrested, they're getting arrested for, like, having a joint or something. Like that?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah, Richard. Or, excuse me, Jimmy. I think he got arrested in Toronto for having heroin on him. I think that's what he got arrested for.

[Arsenio Hall]

I got pulled over and had a joint in my ashtray in 1989, and I was scared to death, and the cop was real nice to me, but he did the corniest thing. He says, get out of the car. And he made me rip up the joint and drop it in the sewer at the curb there. And he says, now get your life together.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, bitch, this is helping me get my life together.

[Arsenio Hall]

It makes me funnier that.

[Joe Rogan]

That's funny. That's hilarious.

[Arsenio Hall]

Good old days, man. I remember you talking about Rodney earlier. Rodney Dangerfield. You know how we love comedy. We'll never stop doing it. We'll do it until the wheels fall off. And I remember him on stage at the Laugh Factory near the end of his life. I saw him there, and his wife was in the balcony giving him lines through a wireless earwig. And. And if you went up top, you would hear her say, I don't get no respect. I don't get no respect. You know, and first of all, two things. First of all, it warmed my heart that the woman who loves you is going to help you do what you love. So that made me feel so good, and it was like, I want a woman with that kind of heart, because I know I'm going to want to do it when I'm old.

[Joe Rogan]

She gave us his notes from one of his Tonight show appearances, and they're framed in the. On the wall in the green room. It's his handwritten notes in. In bold. He would, like, write it in bold where the punch lines were. It's like sitting there right above the couch.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's cool, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It was one of the first things. Whitney Cummings hooked it up. She got it for us from her. She wanted us to have it. Whitney Cummings, I. I saw Rodney live when I was a security guard. I was a security guard at Great Woods. Great woods center for the Performing Arts, which was in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Oh, I lived in Boston. Yeah. Me and a bunch of the black belts from this taekwondo team that I was on got jobs as security guards. And I was 19 and I was backstage and Rodney was walking around with a bathrobe on with nothing underneath it. That was when he was going on stage with a bathrobe. He got to such a fuck it point in his life where he would literally go on stage with nothing but a bathrobe. He would walk out there with a bathrobe and slippers and just fucking murder. I remember being in the hospital and I wasn't even thinking about doing stand up back then. Back then, I was just fighting. And I was a fan of comedy. I always loved comedy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Your fighting friends talked you into doing stand up, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah. One of the guys that I trained with, my friend Steve. But when I. When I went there, I remember like. Like, you want to talk about not giving a fuck? Like, this guy really didn't give a fuck. Like, he had gotten to a point. We had so much success and so much money. And this is after Back to School and all those big movies, and he was still just going out there doing stand up. He was smoking weed back there and he just would go on stage with a bathrobe on. And I remember thinking, that is the wildest I've ever seen in my life. I remember as a young man because I was always, you know, 19. You're scared of everything. You're worried about the future. You don't know what you know. You have no security in your life at all. And here's this guy with, you know, millions of dollars, massive amounts of fame, and he had got to that. I don't give a stage. And he. But he really did. He wasn't faking it. Nobody told him he has to go on stage in a bathrobe. I'll tell you what I want to do. I want to go on stage with a bathroom, stage of the bathrobe. See if you can find some photos of him on stage with a bath. I know he did it for years.

[Arsenio Hall]

I got in trouble because Eazy E. Came on my show in his bathrobe. And he was like, you gave it to me, you know, because we would give out bathrobes. And so he said, well, fuck it, I'll wear it out there. And he wore it out and had a. He was picking his teeth with a knife. And Paramount was like, oh, man, this is not what we asked him for. This is really not what we asked him for. He'll never replace Johnny.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, fuck off.

[Arsenio Hall]

But.

[Joe Rogan]

But I knew these people were ridiculous.

[Arsenio Hall]

Hey, I was where I was because I snuck in through syndication, did a first run syndication. I know network wasn't for me. And when Letterman got cbs, I knew I was really in trouble. So I had to figure out an exit plan. But the bottom line is, for six years, I did it the way I wanted to do it. And I wouldn't change a thing, man. To do it for 26 years. I wouldn't trade those six the thing

[Joe Rogan]

about it is, man, everybody wanted to be Johnny back then. It was so crazy. Even Letterman.

[Arsenio Hall]

I joked at the Emmys, I said, I had a dream. I wanted to be an old white man with a desk, you know? And that was my. To the point, Joe, that when I made it, I hired Johnny's architect that built his house to build me a house. I was deep into the shit. Like that.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he was the guy. People don't realize, like, that was the carrot. It. That was the thing that they got. I mean, Jay Leno and like that famous scene in that movie that talked about it where Jay Leno would hide in the closet and listen to them talk about it because he wanted that spot when Johnny retired. But they wanted Letterman. And it was like this battle between, like. But made no sense to me. Like, Letterman has the Letterman show. It's huge. It's amazing. Why would you want to do anything else?

[Arsenio Hall]

But everybody wanted that Tonight Show.

[Joe Rogan]

Absolutely wanted the Tonight Show.

[Arsenio Hall]

And when I was a kid, I was a magician. That's how I started. And I read an article that said that Johnny did sleight of hand and was a magician. So to me, that was God speaking to me, it was like, you are a magician and you do a talk show in the basement.

[Joe Rogan]

Ooh, one day.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, one day.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't it crazy, though, that it had to be the Tonight show for everybody? It wasn't. Get your own talk show dope, doing

[Arsenio Hall]

standup, getting that five minutes, having Jim McCauley come see you. I got on Dinah Shore. No, no. Mike Douglas and I got on Merv Griffin didn't do it for me. I needed Jim McCauley. Say that tonight show is yours. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy?

[Arsenio Hall]

Did you do. Did you were too young.

[Joe Rogan]

I was too young. And it's also, like, for me, I didn't understand it. Like, I used to like watching when comics were on the Tonight show, but

[Arsenio Hall]

it didn't like, you remember the night Roseanne came on? I'm a domestic goddess.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

I was like, oh, shit, she's funny.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, she was so funny. She can write. She was so funny. Roseanne was, like, way ahead of her time. She was so wild. There was no one like her when she came out. Yeah, she's still wild. She comes to the mothership all the time.

[Arsenio Hall]

And as wild as she is, Joe, the night I called her and said I need to rearrange the show tonight, her and Tom were coming. Tom Arnold? Yes. And it was the morning that I'd gotten a call from Irvin Magic Johnson, that he was HIV positive. So I needed the whole show. And this is how cool she was. She says, give me another date, but I'm still coming. Cause we love Ervin.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And they came and stood on the side that night when Irvin came and talked about it.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

She's cool.

[Joe Rogan]

She's cool. She's crazy as fuck. Yeah, she's cool.

[Arsenio Hall]

Aren't we all? And don't we have to be.

[Joe Rogan]

You have to be.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, a little bit. We gotta beat a different kid in the neighborhood.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. If you want to be as good as she was. These people, they don't. You gotta go back and watch some of her specials. She was killing in a way that no woman killed like that.

[Arsenio Hall]

That.

[Joe Rogan]

It was different. It was, like aggressive. It was aggressive and angry.

[Arsenio Hall]

It was.

[Joe Rogan]

It was.

[Arsenio Hall]

With a tent dress on.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

She didn't sell us any sexuality at all. It was just great writing.

[Joe Rogan]

Just great writing and great performing and a lot of. I don't give a. And it was just. Ugh. Do you find any photos of Rodney with a bathrobe on? I mean, yes, but not on stage. No. There's only. Yeah. I don't even know if they exist. They don't exist. That's crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

That was a pre show right there. You think he's not ready, but he's dressed to go on. Right.

[Joe Rogan]

For that writing.

[Arsenio Hall]

Look at the phone. Look at the landline.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy?

[Arsenio Hall]

I showed my son one of those. He couldn't believe that to drop down a nine, it was.

[Joe Rogan]

And if you missed one of them and fucked it up, you had to start from scratch. It was crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Back in the day, I remember when the iPhone first came out and it didn't have actual buttons like a StarTac. And I was freaking. It's like, how will I know where the L is?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

I can't feel it.

[Joe Rogan]

I remember I had a BlackBerry back then. You couldn't convince me that I needed to get an iPhone. I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm not typing on that stupid thing. I don't even know where the buttons are. It's crazy. You don't. It makes a click sound. That's stupid.

[Arsenio Hall]

Before you know it, we were doing it. We turned off the click. And it says a lot about progress. Don't. Don't be afraid of change.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, now I talk to it now I hardly ever text. I just say text, Arsenio, like, say, hey, man, looking forward to seeing you tonight. Blah, blah, blah. And just send it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I make most of my text messages. I just talk to my phone.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, pretty much me and Siri. And you can't say the N word to Siri. The other night I was writing, no, she won't fuck with the N word. Siri.

[Joe Rogan]

I wonder if Google will.

[Arsenio Hall]

She's like, I'm not getting canceled, you know, and let Alexa have the whole business. I'm not getting. I'm writing a joke. And I said the N word. Of course, I didn't say N word. I said naked. And Siri would not write it. And then when I kept saying it, she started writing other things, you know, that started with an N, you know, but they weren't even words. And I'm like, so they got Siri trained.

[Joe Rogan]

That's so weird.

[Arsenio Hall]

She not getting canceled.

[Joe Rogan]

It's weird that it took. It wasn't even 10 years, and then everybody just got accustomed to having a phone with them all the time. Like, there was. Think about, like, the difference between, like, it was probably like, what is like, 97, 98, when everybody had those Motorolas, Right? It was around then, right? Yeah, it was around then. Like, 96, 97.

[Arsenio Hall]

My friends laughed at me. My first phone was in a Halliburton briefcase. And you opened the silver Halliburton briefcase, take the phone out, and the phone was maybe 10 inches, you know, And I had an antenna that screwed on the outside of the briefcase. Cause you had this big possum tail.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I had one on the roof of my car.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

In 1989.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. You. You. Wow. Back then, I couldn't imagine that kids would be watching movies on the phone, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Playing games, watching movies. And that would be. Most of their social life was communicating through that thing.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Remember there was a time when dudes said to each other, yo, he got a strong rap, man, his pimp hand is crazy. He can get a bitch in a second, you know, and blah, blah, blah. He can talk. And now young men don't know what the fuck to say to a woman leaning against a wall at a club.

[Joe Rogan]

No, they have dating apps now. Yes, Swiping.

[Arsenio Hall]

Crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

But what I was going to get at, like, how quickly the culture changed from, let's just say, 98, when most. A lot of people had a phone. At least half the people had a phone on them. 2008, everybody had a phone. 2018, you'd be crazy to not have a phone.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

20 years like that.

[Arsenio Hall]

Okay, now hold your thought.

[Joe Rogan]

Okay.

[Arsenio Hall]

I remember a time when you and I were the only parents that didn't allow cell phones. In the hands of our kids. Because I remember my son said, dad, you gotta let me have a phone. You know? And I'm like, I'm not doing it until you're a certain age. I'd set it up and. And I said, does everyone in your class have a phone? And he said, no, two of us don't. And I realized you were the other parent that was saying, we not fucking with this.

[Joe Rogan]

I gave her a phone that has two numbers on it. There was a weird little cell phone that you get for kids where she could dial, like, my phone number or my wife's phone number. It was like. That's was like. I forget what it was called. It was like the Frog or something like that. Some little cell phone safe for kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you didn't have to worry about the things that kids have to worry about now. Like, I was watching this thing about Roblox, you know, that game that kids like to play that they're getting, like, predators are on roadblocks and they're trying to pick up kids, like child predators. So you have to worry about the games they play. You have to worry about them getting DM'd by creeps. You have to worry about so much more access than just a phone to call people.

[Arsenio Hall]

There was a time when my kid used to play games with a headset on, and he would play with people. You don't know, just somebody in the world, they would gather.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I remember feeling like, this can't be good. Right. You know, because these probably aren't all kids he's playing with.

[Joe Rogan]

100%. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when I first started playing video games, you'd have to chat by pulling down a window, and you'd have to type in the things that you wanted to say.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You couldn't talk to people. And then when people started talking to people in video games, I'm like, oh, well, this is crazy. But then the problem is, whenever there's anything that kids are doing, you're gonna have some creeps that are targeting kids, and they find where the kids are hanging out, what the kids are doing, and then they try to get those kids to meet them somewhere. That's what's scary about cell phones and the Internet and all that, is that it's not just a phone. It's a way that you can connect with people. And there's always creeps that are trying to connect with kids.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I was lucky as a kid because I talk about being a magician, and I worked at a magic shop when I was 12, took cash because I couldn't actually have a job. And I remember meeting older magicians. I remember going to people's house to see a new guillotine trick. And my mother, my mother worked two jobs. I was a latchkey kid. I never had any problems and I never was warned about it, you know, but I was a, I could have been a target because.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, you got lucky.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I really got lucky because I, you know, when I was writing the book, I'm looking and I'm saying there was a guy I met who worked until he died for Penn and Teller and this dude, I met him at a magic show and every year when he would come to Cleveland, I would go sit with him. My mother never knew I had this 40 year old friend, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Weird, right?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, but he was cool and I got lucky.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's the thing about latchkey kids. I mean, the thing is though, I was watching this YouTube video where they were talking about kids of our age, you know, our generation. Latchkey kids that grew up like that are so much more resilient because no problems were solved for you. You had to figure it out on your own. You went out on your own, you were outside with no cell phone communication, no way to call anybody.

[Arsenio Hall]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

When you were 10, 11, wandering around with your friends, it's like it was a different world. You had to figure life out in a way that, like helicopter parenting and parents that are like tracking their kids, you know, like a lot of parents, like, they're tracking their kids on their phone, they know where they're. You said you were at Debbie's house, you're not at Debbie's house. Where are you right now? Like, everyone is like looking out for their kids maybe a little too much. It's like you want your children to be safe, but you also want them to have like a little bit of freedom to figure out who the fuck they are.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I, gosh, as a kid when I would tell my mother, I'm spending the night at Kenny's house, I was never at Kenny's house. You know, my girl when I was 14, had a mom who was a nurse that worked the 11 to 7 shift. So we kind of lived together like a couple, you know, I would tell my mother, I'm going one place, I'd go to Robin's house, I would stay at her house till morning when I went home to get ready for school. You know, I was like a grown ass man with a woman and shit.

[Joe Rogan]

That's wild.

[Arsenio Hall]

Until one day her Parents. Parents. Had the grandparents come to town and to surprise her. And so the mom's at work. There's a knock at the door, and she said, it's my grandmother. We had little peepholes. It's my grandmother. And my grandfather and I had to jump with my clothes off their balcony. That was my action adventure teenage period.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's a different world. I don't know if it's better or worse, but I think it definitely made you more resilient. And that was this argument that they were making in this YouTube video that that generation is the most emotionally resilient, and that this generation coming up is, like, the least emotionally resilient. That's why they're always looking for things that are, you know, problems. They're always looking for things that bother them, things that cause them anxiety. They're always looking for things that, you know, they can't tolerate.

[Arsenio Hall]

Where's my bike helmet? You know, we used to have a car. It was a station wagon, and the backseat, you sit facing the opposite way. No seat belts. That had to be dangerous.

[Joe Rogan]

It's all dangerous. Those cars were dangerous. They could barely stop. They had drum brakes.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You ever drive like an old. I have old cars, but I have what they call restomods, where they take an old car, but they put, like, modern suspension, modern brakes, modern steering. It handles like a new car, but they have all the outside of an old car and, you know, and then the dashboard of an old car and all this stuff. That's what I like. If you drive a real. Like, if you try to drive a 1968 Camaro, you're like, what is this piece of. Like, they can't break. You can't go around a corner. They. There's no traction.

[Arsenio Hall]

What was your first car?

[Joe Rogan]

I had a 1973 Chevelle.

[Arsenio Hall]

I had a Cutlass.

[Joe Rogan]

I had a Cutlass once. Yeah, I had a 70. A 70 cutlass. Those are great cars. God, they knew how to make a beautiful car back then.

[Arsenio Hall]

You like muscle cars?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I love that. Well, when I was in high school, like, those were the. So I was in high school in the 1980s. I went to. I was a freshman in 1981.

[Arsenio Hall]

I had four kids in the 1980s.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

I'm much older than you.

[Joe Rogan]

In those days, those cars were the cars that we all, like, looked at. Like, you couldn't believe when someone had it. I remember, I have a 1970 Chevelle that I got to this day. I have it because when I was, like, 17, my friend picked me up in a 1970 Chevelle with his buddy. And it was perfect. It was a perfect car. I couldn't believe this guy had it. I was like, how do you have this?

[Arsenio Hall]

And when you say perfect to non car people like me, what does that mean?

[Joe Rogan]

First of all, it was what you would call cherry, meaning there was no dents, no scratches, perfect paint. It was beautiful. The sound it made when he pulled up, I couldn't. I think I was 16, because I don't think I had a license yet. And I remember getting in the backseat of the car going, how does this guy have this car? This is crazy. It's a show. You know what a 1970 Chevelle looks like?

[Arsenio Hall]

Absolutely.

[Joe Rogan]

With the white stripes. Black with the white stripes. That was it. I have that exact car right now. I love it. Whenever I get in, I think about when I was 16. I think about all those years ago

[Arsenio Hall]

when Burt Reynolds drove up. Those pictures we just looked at. When he drove up, he had what was called a Trans Am.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Arsenio Hall]

And it had a big eagle on it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. Smoking. The Bandit car.

[Arsenio Hall]

I almost lost my mind.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God. That was the Smokey and the Bandit car. That was the car that he had in those movies with Sally Fields.

[Arsenio Hall]

Hundred dollar tip. Have you ever been to. You ever been to Jay Leno's spot with the cars?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I did his show once. I brought my Corvette on. I have a 1965 Corvette and I brought it to his show. It's a resto mod too, And Jay drove it around. He's the only person that's ever driven it other than me. And you know, it's an honor, but you go to his place, it's like he has warehouses, not a warehouse where there's me.

[Arsenio Hall]

And Jay never sells one. He. He swears to me he's never sold a car, so anything he's ever bought, he keeps. And he recently told me, why did someone turn it?

[Joe Rogan]

Gold thumbnail. Someone. YouTube video. No, go to the other one. The other picture with the real picture. I was just clicking around, but go to the. Go to the real picture so you can see what it looks like.

[Arsenio Hall]

You know what he has now that's kind of cool. He has two tanks. Two army tanks.

[Joe Rogan]

That's us right there. That's my car. Look at that. See? But that. You see that? Modern suspension, modern wheels.

[Arsenio Hall]

Those are exhaust pipes on the side.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that. That car is so fun.

[Arsenio Hall]

Do those things get hot?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah. You'll your leg up if you got shorts on. Your leg touches it, you're in trouble. The outside part won't because, like, the outside is like, to protect you from the actual exhaust pipes, but underneath it is exhaust pipes. But where Jay's leg is, if he backed up right there, if it was hot, he'd singe the back of his calves.

[Arsenio Hall]

Joe, he has tanks.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he has everything.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes. The King of Jordan gave him a tank. And this was riding through Sherman Oaks.

[Joe Rogan]

He drives everything he has, too. That's the thing about Jay.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, it's kind of nuts.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's a lot of rotation.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he crashed one of his motorcycles just a few years ago.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Himself up.

[Arsenio Hall]

He does a bit about that. He's himself up without a motorcycle.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that was the one time he was climbing up a hill.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, we. We done a lot of dates together. We have the same agent, right. And he called us one day and he says, how about you? Jay and Craig Kilborn? And we call it Kings of Late Night. And so we went out and did like five dates and it was a lot of fun and me and Jay enjoyed it. So we added 20 more dates to it and.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, that ought to be great fun. He was a great comic in the 70s.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. People. People don't know. When I was in college, we would go in the TV lounge and watch Jay Leno. To this day I remember him saying I was a philosophy major. And so I just got out of college and I opened up a little philosophy shop, you know, just to explain what bullshit majors were actually being peddled to.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he was the edgy comic in the 1970s. And when he would go on Letterman show, he was like the edgy guy that would sit on the couch and be.

[Arsenio Hall]

Letterman would say, what's your beast? Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And he would always be mad at something. He was like, people don't realize that you see him as. But it's again, that carrot. The carrot for him was the Tonight show. That was more important to him than anything. And once he got that Tonight show, everything else was like, took a back seat.

[Arsenio Hall]

Did you do Letterman as a stand up? No, no, that was my first.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a. That's. That's a classic. That was a great place for comedy because Letterman, like, he really loved comedy comics and he really loved, like, solid stand up. I never liked doing stand up on those talk shows.

[Arsenio Hall]

Is it the five minutes?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, to me, I did a different kind of comedy. My comedy needs some time. I need to cook, you know, I need time to open up ideas.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I didn't like that.

[Joe Rogan]

I didn't like TV comedy. It's not my. That was a nightclub comic. That's all I ever wanted to be. I wanted to be a nightclub comic. I like doing comedy for drunk people.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, but when I first saw you, it all wasn't dirty. Some of it was TV stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it wasn't necessarily dirty, but it was free. It was like I was being free. I was doing things, whatever I wanted to talk about. I didn't like the idea of being constrained by any sorts of standards and practices. Like, I'm not interested. I've been not interested in that.

[Arsenio Hall]

I worked on my Tonight show set to try to get on the Tonight show with Johnny, and the guy would come see me a lot. He would change my jokes that I hate. I hate when they say, try saying vacation instead of gift shop. And I'm like, oh, let me just do my thing. But after a year of him trying to get my set right, he says, you're not a Johnny comic. Oh, God, you're not a Johnny guy.

[Joe Rogan]

What does that even mean?

[Arsenio Hall]

But then I got on on a Monday night with Joan, because I guess I was a Joan guy. And then I got to sit with Johnny just as a guest to promote coming to America. So finally, full circle from my basement.

[Joe Rogan]

That's amazing. I watch a lot of his old clips, like with Don Rickles and all these.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, Don Rickles talking about Snooki, the brother in the band, you know, and he would do a noise of a blowgun. It's like, snooki, you liking this stuff? Oh, you know, and. And you can't fuck with that now. No, there's so much. It's funny how we've come forward into a new era, but we've gone backwards in certain ways.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You can't joke about certain things anymore.

[Arsenio Hall]

Like, I'm scared to death right now, and I'm gonna say something that I shouldn't say, and I'm gonna be in

[Joe Rogan]

TLC prison to you now. They can't do shit to you.

[Arsenio Hall]

They can just be mad, I guess.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, let them be mad. Just don't pay attention. That's what I do. I just don't pay attention.

[Arsenio Hall]

Really?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I just. Don't read anything about me. Stay away. That's the best way.

[Arsenio Hall]

Are you a comic who. When you're on stage, it can be 200 people laughing, but that one person who's not laughing annoys the fuck out of you. You can't even enjoy the others. You don't even look at that person.

[Joe Rogan]

No. Those people have their own problems. K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast

[Arsenio Hall]

Meal and Hunt Trick's Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

[Joe Rogan]

It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

[Arsenio Hall]

It is an honor to share.

[Joe Rogan]

No, it's our honor.

[Arsenio Hall]

It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side a participating McDonald's while supplies last. Yeah. And by the way, sometimes they're just not laughers because that person will sometimes come up to you and say, love what you're doing. Love the new stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

Some people just like to smile. They don't want to laugh. They just want to sit there and watch. Or they just want to take it in. Take in the performance. Doesn't mean they don't like it. And then some people just are upset by everything. You can't control that. Just control what you what. The only thing that bothers me is if I'm off. That's it. If I'm off, If something. Something's right, if I stumble on a word, if I something up, that's the only thing that bothers me. The audience is like, you can't control that.

[Arsenio Hall]

Why.

[Joe Rogan]

Why be upset at things you can't control? Because who knows what their trip is? Who knows what they're carrying around with them?

[Arsenio Hall]

As a famous star now, do you ever bomb?

[Joe Rogan]

I have jokes at Bomb for sure. New ones. We tried out a new one especially, like, we do this show called Bottom of the Barrel. And Bottom of the Barrel at the Mothership is there's like a whiskey barrel, and you reach into the whiskey barrel and you pull just ideas and you just run with it. That's tonight, actually. And so you pull out a piece of paper and, you know, have a subject. You know, ice cream, sundae, whatever. Whatever the fuck it is that takes.

[Arsenio Hall]

Intestinal food.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, a lot of those fucking go nowhere. Yeah, but some of them don't. Every now and then you get a great premise out of those, and it's like a little premise factory, but the audience knows it there. So it's different than, like, when they go to see you and they paid money and they're expecting a polished show and you have a new joke, and the new joke is just not right. It's not ready. Something's missing. You're not finding it. You're trying to work through it. Yeah, it's always Gonna happen. And if it doesn't happen, you're not taking enough chances.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, see, I'm. I'm not as chance driven as you are. I'd be afraid to do that because my feelings get hurt too easy.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, it's part of the process.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, you're right. You're right. We should do the things we fear.

[Joe Rogan]

You definitely have to. If you want to write new shit, you're going to have to. There's that moment where you're like, do I trot this new one out? Fuck it, let's go. And you know, a lot of the new ones, the way they come out for me at least, first is just a frame. It doesn't have sides, it doesn't have windows, it doesn't have doors. It's just a frame. And I have to figure out how to make a house out of that frame.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's what I loved about going to the original room back in the day when we were young, watching Richard take out a pack of cigarettes, take a cigarette. And Mitzi had those smoke things that popped. Got smoke and everything. And Richard would have two minutes and then he'd have five.

[Joe Rogan]

He'd just build.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. And it was like when grandma used to make a quilt and it gets bigger and bigger and you've got an hour. I used to love watching him develop it.

[Joe Rogan]

I would heard. I heard that Richard would go in on a Monday and have a joke that bombed and then it would be murdering by Saturday. And then that's what he would do. He would just go and figure it out on stage. Damon used to do that a lot. Damon used to go and sit on stage and just sit with a premise, just sit with it. And he would trot it out for like 10 minutes and try to figure. And then finally he'd find something and everybody would be dying.

[Arsenio Hall]

We got away from that earlier, but I totally got your point. Damon is one of the great ones. And I hope he continues to do stand up and pop out to the clubs, because he's one of the great ones that a lot of people don't realize.

[Joe Rogan]

They don't realize how great he was when he did the Last Stand. That one HBO special that he did way back in the day is a phenomenal special. It's phenomenal. He was so good, but he wanted to be a movie star, you know?

[Arsenio Hall]

And like Richard, he had an ability to also be vulnerable and tell the truth about something that most of us wouldn't tell. Like he talk about having a club foot as a kid and. Yeah, and he. He was special, and I'm glad he's back out there.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Well, I think he never really started. You know, one other thing that he did that is very unique. Daemon brings a camera to all of his shows, and he films all of his shows and he archives them, every set he ever does.

[Arsenio Hall]

Really?

[Joe Rogan]

Yep. And he goes over it.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's work.

[Joe Rogan]

It's work. Because one of the things that he does, like I said, is, like, he'll take a premise and just try to find. Try to find it on stage, try to figure out what about it works, what about it pops? Like, what is it? And, you know, I guess, like doing that with a camera, and then you can go home, sit and watch it on the computer and just go, what is in this? There's something here. I gotta find it. And just look at it from every angle. Look at it over here, look at it over there. Try to do it backwards. Try to figure out what the. Makes it work.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And he would just. He had no fear of silence.

[Arsenio Hall]

See, that's. That's the sentence right there. When it's quiet in the comedy club, I lose my mind.

[Joe Rogan]

Chris Rock does that, too. True. Chris Rock did a lot of that at the Comedy Store. He would come in and just. He would have material that he was working on. Like, one time, I remember I brought him up on stage and everyone's going crazy. Chris Rock's here, they're cheering, cheering, cheering. And he goes, relax, relax. It ain't gonna be that funny. Just let people know that I'm working on some new. This ain't gonna be that funny.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And. But with confidence, like, everybody already knew he's funny. They already saw Bigger and Blacker. They already saw his specials. It was. It was Bring the Pain. Everybody already knew the one where he

[Arsenio Hall]

shot with three different outfits in three different places.

[Joe Rogan]

I hated that one.

[Arsenio Hall]

You didn't like that one?

[Joe Rogan]

No, not that I didn't like the material. I didn't like the idea of swapping outfits. The problem with that is it you realize he's saying the same thing in all these different places. It takes away from the. But it takes away from the magic. A performer. I want to see you, and I don't want anything to distract me from these. I don't want to say, oh, he just performs this the same way everywhere. I want you to just be saying it. The magic. Like, the trick is you are in the moment with whatever you're talking about. If you're changing outfits and you all of a sudden you're In Johannesburg, and now you're in Cleveland. Like, don't do that to me. Why? You got a leather jacket on in the beginning, and in the punchline, you got a fucking. A silk shirt. Don't do that.

[Arsenio Hall]

See, I saw it as a guy creatively trying to find new horizons, do different things.

[Joe Rogan]

Some horizons suck.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah,

[Joe Rogan]

it's not. The jokes were great. It's like, he's a great comic. It's not that. It's like, I just didn't like the idea of changing outfits. If I was friends with him back then, I would say, don't. I don't like it at all. And I would. That would explain. The problem is you're taking people out of the premise, and then there's a new additional thing that they have to think of. Oh, there's a different set. Oh, he's wearing different clothes. It's a new thing to distract you from the most. The primary thing. The primary thing is. What are you talking about? Like, what is this thing you're talking about? Let me get inside your head while you explain this thing. That's so hilarious. But if you're doing that and changing outfits and changing stages, like, I know you perform in different places. I know you wear different clothes. Don't show me right now.

[Arsenio Hall]

In retrospect, I wonder how he looks at that special. If he.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, he never did it again.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, it's not like, well, you don't want to do it again.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. You know, I mean, he did it once. He tried it. Different people like to do different things and try them. I just didn't like that for that reason. I felt like it was an added element that took me away from the premise itself.

[Arsenio Hall]

And by the way, something that's come out of this conversation in my head is the guys who are the best seem to go deeper and work the hardest. I mean, when you talk about archiving your practice.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, all of them. Damon has all of them. And he told me this years ago, because I saw him at the improv. He was in the lab. We were in the big room, and he was in the lab. This was not that long ago. When I say years ago, like 10, nine years ago, something like that. And I go, you record all of them? He's like, every set since, like, 1990 something, he goes, I record them all. I got this camera. I take them all and I archive them. I put them on my computer. I'm like, whoa. It made me think, fuck, I'm lazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, that's exactly What I'm thinking, and I'm also thinking, what an amazing documentary. If we could go through the history of Damon's personal archives, that would be a great idea.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

I think there's a special there, probably.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, probably. But I mean, I think that's just part of his creative process. And again, like, I just think people don't realize, especially in the 90s, the early 90s, how what a monster he was on stage. Yeah, he was a monster. He was one of the first guys that was, like, a really famous guy that I saw at the store. I came to the store in 94, and he was one of the first guys was like, oh, Damon Wayans is here. Like, it was weird. It was like, weird when people would show up. Like, you'd seen them in movies and shit, and all of a sudden they're there in real life. Like, you know, I was just coming from New York, I didn't know anybody, and I was like, this is so strange. I can't believe I'm around these people.

[Arsenio Hall]

So you went from Boston to New

[Joe Rogan]

York, Boston to New York.

[Arsenio Hall]

Catch a rising star. Where'd you work out in New York in those days?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I did the Boston Comedy Club, that. You know, the little place that Barry Katz had. I did the Cellar.

[Arsenio Hall]

Jay Moore's manager, right.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes, I did catch Rising Star back when that was there. I did.

[Arsenio Hall]

Was there's a comic strip.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I did the strip. Yeah, I did the clubs in town. I did Dangerfields a lot. But honestly, when I lived in New York, I really liked doing the road more, because when I did the road, I could make money. So, like, I came up in Boston, and in Boston, you made a lot of your money not in the clubs in town, but you made a lot of your money in, like, the bar shows, you know, outside of town, in the suburbs. And the thing about that is, like, you could headline and so you could do 45 minutes or an hour, and that that allowed me to grow and, like, to really become a headliner. Whereas, like, I found, like, a lot of the New York comics that I would go on the road with when I would work with them, even when I was a middle act and they were a headliner, they had, like, these 10 and 15 minute sets that they'd stitched together to put to make an hour. Whereas the guys that I work with in Boston, like the big headliners in Boston, they had a real hour like that, that was an hour of thunder, you know, they had a beginning, the middle and an end. And it was like, tight. It was tight. And I felt like I could do sets in New York, but I don't think it's really helping my career. Right. There's no one there to see me. I felt like I'm gonna make money. Like, I could do a set in New York and I make 25 bucks. Or I could do a set in Connecticut and make $250. I was like, I'll go to Connecticut. Plus, like, the people are more fun. They're more loose. They're a bunch of crazy drunks. I love doing Long Island. I love doing New Jersey. I like doing the road more. That's what I liked.

[Arsenio Hall]

I think I'm a product of my childhood environment. I. I discovered stand up because I was a drummer, had a band. I was a magician, had doves, boxes and shit. And then my house burned down. So I lost.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, I lost everything. But I had gone to an Al Green concert, and Al Green had a comic come out. House lights are on. People are still making their way to their seats, and this guy slowly gets them. And then the lights go down. And by the time he gets to 30 minutes, he's killing. And all he had was a glass of juice, something on the stool. And this is a kid who just lost his house and his cymbals and his Tom Toms and his doves and his boxes. And I'm like, that's me. Johnny was a standup. So I'm still dreaming.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And to this day, or even when I start making a lot of money after seeing that guy, I loved opening for people. People. I went on the road with everybody from Lou rawls to Patti LaBelle. Still, to this day, I'm comfortable doing 30 minutes, because that's what I did. But I. I had money. Like, I would come to the Comedy Store and I would have a really nice car because I'd spend most of my time on the road with Patrice Russian and Johnny Guitar Watson.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow. That's a different world. Opening for musicians is a different kind of comedy because, like, they're not there to see you.

[Arsenio Hall]

And that's what I found to be the challenge. It's like, I'm gonna make you motherfuckers who don't know me and are mad. Cause a lot of, you know, people would look at you like, that ain't one of the temptations, right? You know, I gotta get them. And I liked that challenge.

[Joe Rogan]

It is a real challenge because there's a lot of people like, boo. Bring on Metallica.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. They don't Wanna see you. They want to see the music app.

[Arsenio Hall]

I opened for Blood, Sweat and Tears once.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And they really did not want to see me. You think the Johnny Guitar Watson audience didn't want to see me? Them from Blood, Sweat and Tears, not fucking with me.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's definitely running with weights on, though. If you can make those people laugh. Boy, you take those weights off and go to a comedy club where they're there to see you.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's like, oh, just there to see comedy. Made it easier.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I just don't want to perform for people that aren't there to see comedy. But there's a value in it, I think.

[Arsenio Hall]

But that's when you're. You're young.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

And, you know, I had a nice car and a condo because I had just come off the road with Aretha.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I did a few of those. I opened up for Bon Jovi once. I opened up for bon Jovi for VH1. They had a theater in the round show, like a performance in the round. My job was to open up for Bon Jovi and then get the pretty girls and move them to the front so that they could be on camera. That's what they told me to do.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

So I did some stand up, and then I had to get people like, come up here. Come closer. Yeah, yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

I remember those times being on the road and if there were six girls in the green room, and you're opening for the Temptations, number six is yours. The other five go first to the temps.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's a different world. Opening for musicians, that's a hard world. And I know a lot of people, like, made a living just traveling with bands, and that's all they did. They would just open up for bands.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I would open up for RB acts. And as a matter of fact, I got discovered by a jazz singer, Nancy Wilson. And I used to love jazz audiences because that was the perfect type of music for a comic because they were mellow. Jazz audience, don't scream. Get the fuck off.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right, right.

[Arsenio Hall]

They just, you know, they.

[Joe Rogan]

Alonzo Bowden, he does jazz tours still. Like, he'll do, like. He'll do like a jazz cruise ship.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, like. And he'll do. Stand up with the jazz audiences.

[Arsenio Hall]

Hey. Every year.

[Joe Rogan]

But he loves jazz.

[Arsenio Hall]

I love jazz, too. And I remember going to see the Playboy Jazz Festival, and Bill Cosby was the host at the Hollywood Bowl. I host that every year now. I still love jazz. And that's the coolest two days of my summer.

[Joe Rogan]

What is it about jazz, what do you love about it?

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, about the actual. By the way, the coolest experience was sitting on the beach in Malibu with Miles Davis. After he came on the show once, he says, why don't you come over to the house, hang out? And he was a painter and he was sitting with his trumpet. It was a red trumpet. I had never seen a red trumpet like a crimson trumpet. And it was sitting beside him and he wouldn't use an easel. He had the canvas on a table and he'd roll a new piece out and he would paint. You ever thought about painting? No, I'm not a good artist. But being a jazz fan, that was the coolest moment ever. And what do I like about it? I almost equate my comedy to jazz because I love to say, I'm going in D guys and just play, you know, as a stand up, you know, I used to love to equate how I work to jazz.

[Joe Rogan]

But it takes a very specific type of person to be like a jazz fan that really enjoys listening to jazz.

[Arsenio Hall]

I'm also a musician and I know that some of the most respected musicians in my mind are jazz musicians. You know, the intricacy. Spending time with. I talk about this in the book. Spending time with Quincy Jones, who was from the world of jazz and a former trumpet player and all that stuff. Then he ends up the year I meet him, he plays for me these tracks and I don't know what I'm about to listen to, to. And he says, you hear that? He takes. He slides all the slides down. He says, listen to this. And he plays this thing. Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink. I'm like, what is that? He says, you ever heard of Sheila E. Man? And I said, yeah, the Escavito family. And I know the family. And he says, she put different amounts of water in little pop bottles and that's her tinging on those bottles. Then he starts bringing up the pots and you hear the bass and the drums and you realize you're listening to stuff from off the wall. And it's just this incredible moment when I realize, yo, he getting ready to bring Michael back. In a crazy way. I'm listening to, you know, you got me working, working day and night, you know. And he would just take out everything and just have Michael's voice. And I'd never been in a recording studio. And he's at the board 18 channel track studio. And then he says, you're from Ohio, right? And he had seen me Do Standup at the Roxy and invited me to his studio. And he says, you're from Ohio, right? And I said, yeah. And so he says, let me play you this, man. And you have to take big, giant reels and put them on this machine. And he'd put the reels on, and the song starts. And he says, this is a scratch track. And I'm like, what's that? He said, that's a demo. And he says, they want me to find a singer for this. And he plays me, James Ingram find 100 ways. And James Ingram, just once. Brilliant, beautiful songs. And I'm like, what's wrong with that guy? He says, yeah, I'm thinking about it, man.

[Joe Rogan]

He pretty good.

[Arsenio Hall]

He pretty good. And it ends up being the James Ingram from Ohio. And that was an incredible day. But I tell that story to say this great jazz musician had this talent that other producers didn't have because of his music genius, and he was able to bring us the off the Wall album and put Michael back in the mix.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Layers and layers to the sound.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

That's the thing. When you hear a song, you don't realize, like, how much shit is going on in the background.

[Arsenio Hall]

Sheila E. With pop bottles.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, easy.

[Arsenio Hall]

I loved that day. That's a. That's a favorite time. Because Michael had been missing, you know, and I had bought the Moving Violation album. So I. I knew he needed Quincy.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. Yeah. There's some geniuses of music, man. I had Rick. Rick Rubin on the podcast, and he's explaining, like, his creative process, and just like, that guy's out there.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. Yeah. I had to go his way. When I started the talk show that I took over for Joan Rivers, when I first had the idea that I want to try to find my own friends of the show, I want to find my show. And I put on LL Cool J doing a song called I'm Bad. And that night, I found what I was going to do, win or lose. Next, I booked the Freaks Come out at Night Houdini.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I remember that.

[Arsenio Hall]

And that was. So I found my home.

[Joe Rogan]

When you did the Joan Rivers thing, did you think that that was going to lead to you doing your own show?

[Arsenio Hall]

Absolutely.

[Joe Rogan]

You did.

[Arsenio Hall]

I was like, I am. Because Joan Leaves goes through all the stuff she's going through, and they give me this show for 11 weeks, and it starts to get numbers. And I know that she left because of a lack of numbers, and I'm like, oh, this shit is mine. So when I come back from doing Coming to America, I'm gonna come back to Fox and do this show. And one day I walk into the cafeteria and I realized they had hired Conan o' Brien to create a show. And I think the show was called the Wilton North Report or something like that. But I realized I wasn't in their future. So Paramount, they were popping over to say hi, sending me flowers, and when I finished Coming to America, actually halfway through, they were like, when you finish, you can do that talk show here in first run syndication. And they had to explain that to me. And at the same time, I was being pitched by the King brothers who created Oprah. So I kind of understood that first run syndication could work, except Oprah had ABC Networks behind her, which is good. I had some CBS affiliates and all worked out. Right now, with the exception of Byron Allen, I don't think anybody gets rich in first run syndication.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he's a very unusual case, you know.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I mean, he's figured out a cheat code like Byron Allen. You know, I heard when they cheat

[Arsenio Hall]

him, he sues them and wins.

[Joe Rogan]

I think Byron Allen's show, Comics Unleashed is gonna replace Colbert.

[Arsenio Hall]

Absolutely. That was just announced this week.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Late show will be replaced by Byron Allen's Comics Unleashed released. That's crazy. That's how in that weird. Like late shows just don't work anymore. They just don't have the same thing anymore. Like that standard model show.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Where people like, I don't think they do well.

[Arsenio Hall]

And they're expensive, Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I can imagine. They were saying the Colbert show was costing them like $50 million a year to keep it on the air. That's. I don't understand it. Like, how, how's it costing you so much money?

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, gosh.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, but you know what I'm saying,

[Arsenio Hall]

like you have ads when there were three channels though, and only one had a talk show. Everybody was there, of course, and it made sense. It made dollars and cents.

[Joe Rogan]

There's also the problem that in when you compare it to things that are on the Internet is that you have to stop conversations every seven minutes for a commercial. That's an issue. It's an issue with depth. You don't get to go, like, you and I have been talking for two hours and 40 minutes.

[Arsenio Hall]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. So like when you're doing this kind of thing, you just flow. Everything flows. You just have a conversation, you just have a good time. It's so different when you're stuck in this format where you only have an hour. Everything is like, you got to cut to the commercial in five Four, three. We'll be right back. Like, we'll be right back. Where you going? Stay here. Like. No, you have to. To sell Tide. You know, it's like that format is so limited, it's so restrictive that people knowing that, that. That there's other things out there now where you could just go and watch it anytime you want. You don't have to tune in at 11pm yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

We used to have must see TV and we would all gather as a nation to watch the finale of Cheers. And now we don't do anything together.

[Joe Rogan]

Nope. No nation. Except sports. Sports. Except like super bowl, there's only sports, live boxing events, ufc. That kind of. Where it's live. That is the only thing that people all watch together. Yeah, that's it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Did you watch Chris Rock live? Selective outrage.

[Joe Rogan]

I didn't watch his live special. I watched it after, but I didn't watch it when it was live.

[Arsenio Hall]

So you knew it was available?

[Joe Rogan]

I was busy.

[Arsenio Hall]

When we grew up, it wasn't a. Wasn't available the second time, but I

[Joe Rogan]

did a live special on Netflix for that very reason. Just because I thought it was. Thought it was scary. Just because my last one, I did live. And I only did it live because the first time they asked me, I said no, that. And then I was like, why being such a. And I remember driving home, I had a conversation with my manager and I called her right back. I got. Let me decide. Tomorrow I go. I'm thinking about this. Hold on. Because I was driving home feeling like I was a. For not wanting to do it live.

[Arsenio Hall]

And now in retrospect, what did you get out of agreeing to do it live?

[Joe Rogan]

Fear.

[Arsenio Hall]

You wanted to feel that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I wanted to be nervous. I was legitimately nervous. I never get nervous for shows anymore.

[Arsenio Hall]

When you have. When you killing a while I heard you talking about killing a wild hog. When you go hunting. Like, that is the same kind of.

[Joe Rogan]

Very different kind of fear. That's a primal thing. That's very different. That's a very different thing. That's like. That's a life or death you're in. That's a weird, weird. That's a weird primal connection with nature where you're gonna eat this thing. You're sneaking up on this thing that has these survival instincts and sense of smell and ears pop up.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And you have, you know, you don't want to it up either. You have one moment to take a shot. That's even more intense. Honestly, like, elk hunting with a bow and arrow is even more intense than Doing a live comedy special, if you could believe it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I believe it.

[Joe Rogan]

I like things that scare me. I like things that are scary to do because I think it's good for you.

[Arsenio Hall]

Except cocaine.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I don't want to ruin my life. That's the problem. I just, like I said, I don't hear any success stories from cocaine.

[Arsenio Hall]

No.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, nobody's like, Nobody's got like a meth story.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's like, man, I started doing meth and I started seeing the world for what it really is. Start being more at peace. I was living in the moment.

[Arsenio Hall]

Nobody says, right before I invented the hard drive, I did coke for three days.

[Joe Rogan]

Right now, no, I'm not interested in anything that's going to ruin my life, but I'm interested in things that are going to help me grow and help me expand my capacity to do things that are scary.

[Arsenio Hall]

Would you do stand up live again?

[Joe Rogan]

100%. Okay. Yeah. I'm thinking about doing my next one live again, too. I liked it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Did you make any mistakes that.

[Joe Rogan]

No, I didn't make any mistakes, but I prepared more than I ever prepared before. One of the things I did, I listened to. To my recordings every night, and I wrote out my act over and over and over and over again. I wrote it out. I wrote it out both on paper, like hand to paper, and I wrote it out with keys, like typing it on a laptop. I did it over and over again. I listened to recordings, I watched recordings. I. Way more preparation than I had ever done before for any other show.

[Arsenio Hall]

The night that you did it, did you change anything or do anything new?

[Joe Rogan]

No. No, but I was free. I felt very loose once. Once the show started, I felt like a regular show. I didn't because I was prepared, but it's like, just like a fight. Like if you go into a fight and you're like, I should have done more road work. Oh, I should have sparred more. Oh, I should have hit the pads more. You're, you know, that's not a good place to be to hope that you could pull it off. You have to be 100% prepared. And that's the thing about doing a live show. As opposed to. Usually when I would film a special, I would have. Have four shows. So I'd film all four of them and I'd be like, I'll find one of them's gonna be great. I'll just use that one. Yeah. But when it's just one and the whole world, like millions of people are watching simultaneously, that's very scary.

[Arsenio Hall]

Makes you prepare.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it makes you prepare. It makes you prepare. And it also, it's like, it's fun to do something that scares the out of you. Like, let's go.

[Arsenio Hall]

Where did you shoot it?

[Joe Rogan]

Go? San Antonio.

[Arsenio Hall]

Okay.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's cool.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, yeah. I've only done one net.

[Joe Rogan]

I barely leave Texas these days. Really? I love it here. I love it. I love it.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, it was amazing when you made the move, man. Because that's what I asked you when we first started talking. It's like, were you thinking about this in LA, but way back, like 20 years ago?

[Joe Rogan]

I was thinking 20 years ago about getting out. I moved to Colorado for a little while in 2009, but for legal weed? No, no, no, no. I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to try, but I went too crazy. I got a house in the mountains that was 8, 500ft above sea level. It was like, it was too much. But when I came back to la, I always had this thing like, eventually I got to get out of here. First of all, I always thought LA is 100% going to have a massive earthquake one day. Yeah, like a massive earthquake where everything up and falls apart.

[Arsenio Hall]

You lived through the Northridge earthquake.

[Joe Rogan]

I didn't.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh.

[Joe Rogan]

I came to California right after it happened. Okay. And when I got there, like, parts of, like, one of the freeways was collapsed on the other one. I was like, this is nuts. The freeways fall down here. This is crazy. So I feel like I've always been thinking that there's gonna come a time where that place just breaks off and sinks into the ocean and it's just not well run. Like, the whole thing is like just waiting for one little catastrophe. There's very little coordination. Very little. People don't. They don't. There's not like a sense of community in the greater Los Angeles area. Like, you get in a smaller place like Austin.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Austin, like, feels like a small town that has everything you want, want. Whereas LA just feels like a poorly run, bureaucracy driven, chaotic shill game. It's like just a shell game of. And money and people just grifting. And the homeless situation is nuts. Like, everything's nuts in la. It's just beyond fixing.

[Arsenio Hall]

I think here in Austin, a lot

[Joe Rogan]

of homeless, not nearly as many. I mean, it's a very small problem. You're always going to have homeless people because you're always going to have mental illness, you're always going to have drug addiction, you're always going to have some people that have problems, but in comparison, like skid row is 50 blocks. Yeah, 50 blocks. 50 blocks of homeless people just outside, just camped out.

[Arsenio Hall]

I left a Laker game recently and went through that area. It's not broke my heart, man.

[Joe Rogan]

It broke my heart. In 2005.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

I was filming fear factor downtown in like 2005.

[Arsenio Hall]

Shout out to David Hurwitz.

[Joe Rogan]

Ah, you know Dave.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. He was my intern. I set him up for you. I taught him so he could come

[Joe Rogan]

and get worms for you. That's crazy. Yeah. We were filming downtown and I went for. I was driving home and I took a wrong turn and all of a sudden I. Since Skid Row. I was like, this is crazy. And this is back then. And no one was talking about it back then. I was like, there's so many homeless people. It's like a zombie movie. I remember I came to the set the next day. I was like, you guys ever go. Go this way and take a left. It's nuts. There's so many homeless people. Again, they. They figured out a way to keep them there. They just pushed people there. Like they started doing it decades ago, where they would take all the problem people out of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills and they would just bring them to downtown and go, you got to stay here. And that's what created Skid Row.

[Arsenio Hall]

When we were kids, I used to hear about mental institutions. We don't have that anymore.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, they shut them down during the Reagan administration. That was one of the giant errors of society when they shut down all the mental health institutions and they just let all these people just exist in the street with schizophrenia and just let them do drugs and then in some places, give them drugs and give them needles and encourage them to come there and give them money so they could stay on the street.

[Arsenio Hall]

Austin loves you. But you ever think about back in the day, not leaving California and running for governor?

[Joe Rogan]

Fuck that. I don't want to be a politician. Why would I want that job?

[Arsenio Hall]

You want a terrible job. You want the problem. You see, you want to help.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. You ain't helping nothing, man. You're going to get killed if I. My help would be expose all the fraud and lock everybody up. And then they wind up killing me.

[Arsenio Hall]

Then you'd lose the big money from the real rich.

[Joe Rogan]

They're not going to give it to me anyway. It's like, not the guy. I'm not. I wouldn't be good at it. I wouldn't be good at the job. I'd be good advisor. I tell people what the People want, but no one's going to listen. I think politics we're talking about with money being involved in it, it's almost inexorably unfixable. It's almost impossible to untangle that beehive of chaos. So much, much dirty money involved.

[Arsenio Hall]

And if I'm a politician, I'm not going to stop taking this money. I'm not going to be first. If we all gonna do it, I'm not gonna be first.

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly. Look at all these congressmen that make, you know, $170,000 a year, and they're worth 80 million. How the did that happen? What did you do and how. How did you. How do you have time to invest? Aren't you busy being a congressperson? How the do you have all that money? You got all that money because you're a grifter. They're all grifting, and they're all just like. Like doing it. Sneaky. It's red and blue. If you look at. We pulled up the numbers of people, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, how many of them are insider trading? It's across the board.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

They all have just unexplainable amounts of money.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a dirty business.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's not like one of the parties loves money more than the other.

[Joe Rogan]

No.

[Arsenio Hall]

They're all I see. I get in trouble for that because usually my humor is written around not liking any of them, and people want me to take a side.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's a problem.

[Arsenio Hall]

I had a joke in my Netflix special about the Democrat versus the Republican that was running at that time. And it was like, that's like asking me who my favorite Menendez brother is. Motherfuckers. Did not.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a great joke.

[Arsenio Hall]

Like, oh, kind of like Lyle, he made in prison with a toupee.

[Joe Rogan]

Weren't they trying to get them out recently?

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah, bro.

[Joe Rogan]

That documentary on them was nuts. The docu drama series where they recreated

[Arsenio Hall]

it, like, oh, my God, I love documentaries.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that was a docu drama like. Like they recreated. Yeah. Actor. So you don't know how much of it is true, but, boy, did they come off like complete psychos.

[Arsenio Hall]

I remember for the O.J. simpson scripted doc, they wanted me to come read for OJ What? And I'm like, yo, man, how the

[Joe Rogan]

fuck are you gonna be?

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, you gonna have Judge Edo barking because I'm just too recognizable as me.

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly. That wouldn't work at all. That's crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

I think they chose Cuba Gooding Jr. That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

That's Right. He actually did a great job in that. But what a. That. That story was nuts. He was the first famous. There it is.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

And that's Kim's dad.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Arsenio Hall]

That's Mr. Kardashian's second dad.

[Joe Rogan]

John Travolta's in there too. I forgot Travolta's in there. Those are fucking so weird.

[Arsenio Hall]

It's the dream team.

[Joe Rogan]

Famous people pretending to be other famous people. Yeah. So odd.

[Arsenio Hall]

I do a story in my book about OJ coming to stage 29 at Paramount to whip my ass one time. Did he really? He was angry and did you say a joke on. I booked. It's when Naked Gun was out and I booked Leslie Nielsen and we got a call from OJ's people because he wanted to come on. Obviously he was in that movie, but the second one, it had legs. So I booked Priscilla Presley, who is a great guest and a lot of history. And after that, I get a call from the gate. Is there O.J. simpson here at the gate? Wants to talk to you. And he didn't park. He didn't want a space. He parked outside the elephant door of stage 29 and wanted me to come out. Uh. Oh, yeah, and by the way, this is at a time when we didn't know he cut a motherfucker's head off.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, also at a time we didn't know about cte.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Which is probably a lot of what OJ was going through, a lot of that violent behavior. Yeah, there's probably a lot of cte.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, man. I mean, when you think about it, those days in San Francisco when he couldn't quite cut the way he used to. He was getting hit, he was taking head on shots.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. And NFL back then was nuts.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. I feel bad for him and Junior Seau and some of those guys. Junior Seau was trying to scream to us what was going on.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Arsenio Hall]

You know, he committed suicide, left a note, left his. Made sure he didn't damage his brain with the bullet.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. So they could check it out.

[Arsenio Hall]

But. But OJ stopped by and we had a talk and.

[Joe Rogan]

And so he was mad that you didn't have him on the show.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah, he. He was a little mad. And.

[Joe Rogan]

But was it your call?

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, yeah. I mean. I mean, but by the way, it was my call to just do things that would get numbers right, you know? Well, the. The Leslie Nielsen one, I liked him because I saw him someplace with a little thing in his hand to make fart noises.

[Joe Rogan]

This. I saw that yeah, yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

So I. So I knew that I would say to him, so, you got a big hit here. And you. And he would do it. Squeeze the thing. And, yeah, I was just trying to find the funniest guest, you know? And O.J. you know, he told me, he said some about, you know, I thought having a black host, things would be different, you know? And I'm like, don't you play the race car?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Settle down. Yeah.

[Arsenio Hall]

Not you, Juice. But I ran into him in a club one night. I was hanging out with a couple members of New Edition. And we're in this club, and he comes over and he gets drunk with us. And after, we're pretty tanked, Nicole and this gorgeous girl named Fay Resnick. I'll never forget her name. She was beautiful. And these two women come over, and I realize, oh, so because. Because OJ Is alone. I realized he was going to places, finding her. And so. So she comes over and she says, juice, you know, and she says, what are you doing? You know, and he says, hanging out with these guys. And he, you know, when you drunk, spit be flying. I wasn't drunk enough that I didn't see the spit. And so she said, well, I'm going to be over here with Faye, and blah, blah, blah. Say something before you leave. And so we sit there and talk. But he said something at night that blew me away. We talked about her, and he said, I still love her. I've tried to give her up, and I can't. Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

And that's crazy.

[Arsenio Hall]

Not too much later, she was dead. That's what. That's around the time, too. I remember missing the show because one thing that's addictive about the talk show is anything in the news, you get

[Joe Rogan]

to handle it right.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I remember watching a basketball game and seeing the freeway chase with the Bronco, and I was like, I want a monologue tomorrow. You know, I couldn't believe I didn't have a show that night. That's the only time I've ever really missed it. Cause most of the time, you just go to the store.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right, right. That's hilarious.

[Arsenio Hall]

I wanted to talk to the nation that night.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, listen, brother, you had a gigantic impact on culture. You really did. Your show was amazing. You know, you've had an incredible life. And I'm really happy to hear that you're happy now. Now and just enjoying life, you know, and you look fantastic for 70. That's amazing.

[Arsenio Hall]

Thank you, man. I. I appreciate you inviting me. This is one of those shows.

[Joe Rogan]

Next time you kind of come to the club next time you're in town. Just let me know. The show is good.

[Arsenio Hall]

But I can't come to the club. I look at the mothership behind you. The neon mothership.

[Joe Rogan]

That was actually before the mothership was made. Oh yeah, this. This was six years old. This sign, this is. We got this sign. My friend Brigham got me this when I first moved to Austin.

[Arsenio Hall]

So what did the spaceship mean before there was a club to you?

[Joe Rogan]

I just UFO fanatic.

[Arsenio Hall]

Oh, okay.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm.

[Arsenio Hall]

I've always been obsessed, cuz that looked like some shit. I went to a Parliament Funkadillic concert where they landed in some shit like that and George Clinton came out and sang One Nation under a groove.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, wow. I've just always been obsessed. That's all it is. But next time you're in town, you're coming. Promise?

[Arsenio Hall]

Absolutely. All right, I'll come. I won't be in town. I'll figure out a way to hit you and say, siri, Joe, I'm coming.

[Joe Rogan]

Let's go.

[Arsenio Hall]

And I'll be hearing. Thanks for doing this, man, cuz your demographic reads and I know I sold some books today.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, and tell everybody the name of your book. And is it out right now?

[Arsenio Hall]

We had a long ass meeting about that. Do we call it things that make you go, Hmm? A life that makes you go, hmm? Do we call it. We didn't know what. And then finally one day we named it Arsenio Perfect. That's it.

[Joe Rogan]

That's perfect.

[Arsenio Hall]

Yeah. And there's a book on tape for those who don't like to read. Oh, that's the book. And you know what? If you open it and you don't want to read it, there are really cool pictures inside.

[Joe Rogan]

There you go.

[Arsenio Hall]

All right. The art department threw some AI on me. I'm 35 in that picture.

[Joe Rogan]

You look 35 right now. All right, appreciate that, you brother. Thank you, dog. Bye, everybody.