#2388 - Lionel Richie

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

How we doing?

Joe Rogan (0:13)

Good.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

We're rolling.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Pleasure to meet you, sir.

Lionel Richie (0:16)

It's about time.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Yes. Thank you very much for being here. This is an honor.

Lionel Richie (0:19)

It is same here, man. Same here.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

How does a person like you fit your life into a book? Because your career is so wide and so long. You've had so many experiences from the Commodores in the 70s.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

The 70s.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

Still rocking. 70s.

Lionel Richie (0:46)

So, Joe, let me tell you something. It really accounts for, I'll tell you the joke of the book first.

Joe Rogan (0:53)

Okay.

Lionel Richie (0:53)

All right. Probably the only guy in the world that had a book, had a book with probably a thousand pages in it. I turned a thousand pages in it.

Joe Rogan (1:01)

They said, what the hell is this? War and peace.

Lionel Richie (1:06)

War and peace. And I said, and I've got some more stories. I've got some more stories. And so for the first time in the history of Harper's, probably they said, Mr. Richie, no more stories. We don't need any more stories. In fact, can we take some of the stories out? Oh, no. So the answer to your question, we can't fit all of my life story in a book. But we just had to find the ones that were actually, you know, humorous in certain cases, educational in certain cases, because it's wide, it's big.

But I enjoyed the process of kind of looking back. Because if you understand me, I have the Italian race car driver's theory. What's behind me doesn't count. What's in front of me?

Joe Rogan (1:46)

That's a very good way of looking at life.

Lionel Richie (1:49)

So what this book made me do was actually turn around and look behind me. And I tell you what I discovered. I discovered Lionel Richie. Because up to this point, I had never really gone into the depths of how I got here. I just remember, because you want to forget.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

You just kept going.

Lionel Richie (2:09)

Just kept going. Look, keep going straight. You tripped over that. I don't remember. You tripped over that. I don't remember. What's next?

Joe Rogan (2:16)

Yeah.

Lionel Richie (2:17)

It's like playing football. You got hit really badly on that last play, but you go back to the huddle.

Joe Rogan (2:24)

Right.

Lionel Richie (2:24)

You know what I'm saying? Are you hurt? You won't know until tonight after you get off the field and they'll tell you, you broke your arm. You know what I'm saying? But it's really don't stop moving forward. That's really what this whole thing was. This exercise in this book was really for me to actually go, I can't believe I did that.

Joe Rogan (2:44)

Did you learn anything about yourself from going back and just recalling all these stories and putting them to paper?

Lionel Richie (2:51)

Did I learn? Did I learn? Absolutely. If you had said to me when I first started, my life, my dad used to always have this line over and over again.

A great fighter is not determined by how many punches he can throw. It's how many punches he can take. And I realized that I could take punches. I'm the most unlikely person to take a punch because I'm not that guy. If I can talk my way out of it, I will. But if you understand life itself, number one, that's difficult. And then if you start thinking about the music business, the entertainment business, it's an impossibility. You're going to get punched every day of your life. And what's that punch? No, no, no, no. That's the punch. Now, can you get up off the floor and come back? Can you get a bad review and come back? Can they not like you and you come back? Can you find that that's a humorous thing instead of a tragic thing? Can you come back? Can you lose friends along the way? Can you come back? So you don't really realize, you know, this is a business, if you look at it, think about how many people we've lost. When I started writing this book, I started thinking to myself, where's Luther? Where's Michael? I want to tell you more stories about Prince, but it's not fair because in certain cases, I want him to be here to laugh with the joke too. You follow me? And so then you start realizing, damn, this is lucky. This is really blessed time now because I'm in rare survival air, if you will. I'm still here at 200 years old talking about my career, but I'm telling the story, someone else is not telling it for me.