Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2388 - Lionel Richie
Uploaded: 2025-10-02T17:00:27.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2388 - Lionel Richie' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2388 - Lionel Richie' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-02. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2388 - Lionel Richie

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
How we doing?
Good.
We're rolling.
Pleasure to meet you, sir.
It's about time.
Yes, thank you very much for being here.
This is an honor.
Same here, man.
Same here.
How does a person like you fit your life into a book?
Because you, your career is so wide and so long.
You've had so many experiences from the Commodores in the 70s.
The 70s, still rocking.
70s.
70s.
So, Joe, let me tell you something.
It really accounts for, I'll tell you the joke of the book first.
Okay.
I'm 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.
They said, what the hell is this?
War and peace.
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.
Ritchie, no more stories.
We don't need any more stories.
In fact, can we take some of the stories out?
Oh, no.
So, to answer 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.
That's a very good way of looking at life.
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 Ritchie.
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.
You just kept going.
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?
Yeah.
And you try to kind of, you know, it's like playing football.
You got hit really badly on that last play.
But you go back to the huddle.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Right.
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.
And that's really what this whole thing was.
This exercise in this book was really for me to actually go, hmm, I can't
believe I did that.
Did you learn anything about yourself from going back and just recalling all
these stories and putting them to paper?
Did I learn?
Did I learn?
Absolutely.
It's, if you had said to me when I first started, my life, you know, my dad
used to always have this line over and over again.
And, you know, 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.
Right.
You follow me?
Yeah.
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.
That's important.
That's important.
Because so many times when someone passes and then you get this sort of cobbled
together version of their life without their own unique personal perspective,
you miss a lot.
You miss a lot.
And especially things that people thought were terrifying or tragic.
If you talk to the person themselves, that was a learning experience.
So you keep thinking, oh, my God, what did you do when that happened?
And you go, no, no, no, no, no.
I needed that because I wouldn't have been to the next person if I had not
experienced that.
Because it's like trying to go, you know, to scrimmage before a big game.
You're with your team.
Well, they hit harder from the other team.
So you got to practice hard.
Well, the only way to get into the music business, you got to be on the field.
Practice is not in the equation.
Right.
You got to get out on the field and it's nasty and it's not designed for you to
survive.
And I try to say this to the kids on American Idol.
I said, listen, I love you.
You got a great personality, but you better hope like hell you have a sense of
humor.
Because if you don't, it's going to eat you up alive.
Did you develop this mentality along the way or was this something that you
just uniquely had?
This is my character.
If you understand something, I was, and I tell this joke all the time, I was
too small to play football, too short to play basketball.
Baseball was a projectile coming at me at 300 miles an hour.
I'm not standing in front of that thing.
And the only thing I could play was tennis.
So you understand, walking around on a tennis court in the middle of the civil
rights movement, you know, you have to develop a sense of humor.
Otherwise, you're going to die.
And so I found also, again, it's funny what your father will say to you back in,
you wonder, how did he get through all of his life?
Because they went through the struggle of life.
And he said, if you lose your sense of humor, they got you.
And I always remembered the fact that if you can find something funny out of
this experience, take that ha-ha to the next day.
And so I kind of used that as my mantra, basically, that, okay, where am I?
I'm at the Grammys.
Okay.
What am I complaining about?
I'm complaining about I don't like my seat.
What did they just say?
I won.
Who cares?
You know what I'm saying?
Or you're just at the Grammys.
You know how many people don't get to come to the Grammys.
Right.
Just on the invitation.
And so you have to go back and look at this as far as is it really that serious?
Or, you know, you have to kind of put things in perspective.
And so, you know, the first half of my career was just a matter of how do I get
there?
The second half of my career is can I please try to enjoy a little bit of it?
And that's where I am right now because, you know, the song stuck around.
More importantly, I'm still here, which is the blessing.
You're still here and you look great.
I'll take that as a compliment.
You really do.
You look very healthy.
Well, considering.
A lot of energy.
Looking at you across the table from me, I think I left my muscles back in the
hotel room.
But, you know, it's all about two and a half hour show a night for the last 50
years.
That's my golf game.
Training.
Training.
Because you've got to be ready for two and a half hours.
And I don't care what you think.
You're the greatest guy in the world.
I'll put you on that stage and give you 50,000 people.
And you, after running with a night or all night long, sing a slow song.
I dare you.
Yeah.
And do it since 1970.
Like, what was the Commodore?
72?
Did you guys start?
Well, let me tell you.
We started in 68.
Whoa!
On the university campus.
We were students.
It started out as a group called the Mystics.
And we were the talent show.
We didn't realize that we were the joke of the seniors, of the juniors.
But they have a freshman talent show every year, and we wanted to be the band
to be the freshman
talent show.
We came out on stage and killed it.
And it was a guy, another group there called the Jays, which was the seniors.
They had been there for the last four years, and they were the biggest group on
campus.
They were about to break up.
And a guy named Michael Gilbert gave us a phone call and said, I want to put a
group together.
And I was looking at you four guys.
Would you like to come and join this band over here?
The answer is, that was the beginning of the Commodores.
And how old were you at the time?
19 years old.
Wow!
Thank you very much.
Wow!
19 years old, and we're going to take over the world.
Joe, you know what I mean?
In other words, you know, there's James Brown, there's Marvin, and there's the
Commodores.
You know how that works, you know?
Yeah.
And what I love about that period of time, we could be, you know, all right,
all wrong, but we were all together.
It didn't make any difference.
So we experienced every possible imaginable part of growing up together.
I didn't grow up with brothers.
I had one sister.
So these became, forget the band, these were five brothers.
And we were in every disaster you could probably think about.
And we laughed our way in and out of every—today, we'd all be in jail.
You know what I mean?
Right away.
I can make that statement.
I mean, but back then, it was the best.
And at 19 years of age, you're just starting to become a man.
And then you're thrust into superstardom in a crazy time in human history.
It was—well, first of all, we didn't really get into recording.
Until 71, 72.
We were just the biggest, largest, most dynamic band in our heads across the
South.
And until we were the opening act for the Jackson Five, their first tour they
went out on, we were the opening act for them.
That was our first look at, holy crap, this is—this is huge.
And then I'm an economics major, an accounting minor, and all of a sudden I
kept thinking, I don't know what this business is, but I think I want to be in
it.
Because you have to understand something.
When you play tennis, what's the number one thing you will never hear ever?
A girl screaming.
That's not going to happen.
Football, basketball, you hear them all day long.
I was going to be an Episcopal priest, thinking that's my avenue, and I'm on
stage one night at the Jackson show, and all of a sudden some girl said, sing
it, baby.
And I said, call the minister back on the phone, and I said, I don't think I'm
going to be priest material.
I just want you to understand.
You know what I mean?
You have to know at that point.
You have to identify your lane.
You know, I had never heard that, Joe, in my life.
Of course.
Who gets to?
You know what I'm saying?
How many people ever get to hear sing it, baby?
21 years old.
Yeah.
Right?
I got an emotion.
Thank you very much.
And from that point on, it was just a matter of riding this wave of, we
finished that Jackson tour.
We ended up in Motown, Hollywood Bowl.
Motown saw us there.
Suzanne DePass was, of course, the one who put the Jacksons together and all
that.
She knew us from our manager, Cape Cod, and Martha's Vineyard Island.
Next thing we know, we're recording.
Wow.
Hallelujah.
And then you're off to the races.
We're off to the races.
Off to the races, Joe.
And I tell you, you know, looking at this book, it's a question, I survived or
how I survived?
But the question to me was, I survived?
Because it's not, I mean, I can tell you stories and it's, well, they're in the
book, but I'm just saying there are moments when you just look around and go,
thank God for just being naive, young, stupid.
And I didn't have any idea of what you're doing.
I didn't have any idea of what the heck you were doing, but what a great
adventure.
I'm in a subway, four o'clock in the morning, my saxophone, and I had this
little secret thing that no one knew.
I had this seeth, sheesh, sheath, sheath,