#2388 - Lionel Richie

Lionel Richie is a singer, songwriter, producer, and television personality. He has sold more than 125 million albums worldwide and been the recipient of four Grammy Awards, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and 18 American Music Awards. Look for his memoir, "Truly," on shelves now, and catch him live on tour in 2025. www.harpercollins.com/products/truly-lionel-richiewww.lionelrichie.com Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at https://happydad.com Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up at https://dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in NH/OR/ONT. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). Fees may apply in IL. 1 per new customer. Must register new account to receive reward Token. Must select Token BEFORE placing min. $5 bet to receive $200 in Bonus Bets if your bet wins. Min. -500 odds req. Token and Bonus Bets are single-use and non-withdrawable. Token expires 10/19/25. Bonus Bets expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Ends 10/12/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  How we doing?

• 0:13Speaker 02

  Good.

• 0:13Joe Rogan?

  We're rolling.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  Pleasure to meet you, sir.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  It's about time.

• 0:17Joe Rogan?

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

• 0:20Speaker 02

  It is same here, man, same here.

• 0:21Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  70s.

• 0:44Joe Rogan?

  70s.

• 0:45Speaker 02

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

• 0:53Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  All right. I'm probably the only guy in the world that had a book, had a book with probably 1,000 pages in it. I turned 1,000 pages in it and they said, "What the hell is this?"

• 1:04Joe Rogan?

  War and Peace.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  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?"

• 1:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  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 and that. 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.

• 1:46Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:49Speaker 02

  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, cause you wanna, you wanna forget.

• 2:08Joe Rogan?

  You just kept going.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  And you try to kinda, you know, it's like playing football. You got hit really badly on that last play. But you go back to the huddle.

• 2:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  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, it's, 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, I can't believe I did that.

• 2:44Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Did I learn? Did I, did I learn? Absolutely. It's... If you had said to me, uh, when I first started, my life. You know, my dad used to always have this line over and over again. You know, uh, 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. Um, I'm the most unlikely person to take a punch, cause I'm not that guy. Uh, 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.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  You're gonna 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.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  But it's not fair because in certain cases, I want him to be here to laugh with a joke too.

• 4:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 4:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:40Joe Rogan?

  That's important.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  That's important.

• 4:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, 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.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  You miss a lot, and especially things that people thought were terrifying or tragic.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  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 alive.

• 5:57Joe Rogan?

  Did you develop this mentality along the way? Or was this something that you just uniquely had?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  This is my, this is my character. I, if you understand something, I was, and I tell this joke all the time, I was, 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 have to develop a sense of humor, otherwise you're gonna die. 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.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  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 use 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? Just on the invitation.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  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 songs stuck around. More importantly, I'm still here, which is the blessing.

• 8:01Joe Rogan?

  You're still here and you look great.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Well, I'll take that as a compliment.

• 8:04Joe Rogan?

  You really do. You look very healthy.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Well, considering.

• 8:07Joe Rogan?

  A lot of energy.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  That's my, uh, that's my golf game.

• 8:25Joe Rogan?

  Training.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Training. Cause you gotta 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, sing a slow song. I dare you.

• 8:45Joe Rogan?

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• 9:31Joe Rogan?

  Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. This episode is brought to you by the Apple Sports App. Guys, this is the ultimate best time of the year to be a sports fan. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer. The calendar is stacked, but it can also be hard to keep track of it all. And that is where the Apple Sports App comes into play. It is the fastest and easiest way to stay on top of all the action. With scores and play by play automatically showing up on your iPhone when the teams you follow are playing.

• 10:14Joe Rogan?

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• 10:37Joe Rogan?

  On the App Store or find it on your new iPhone. This episode is brought to you by The Mosquito Bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death. Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights, and starring Nicholas Galatzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis. The Mosquito Bowl, now playing in theaters.

• 11:22Joe Rogan?

  And do it since 1970, like, was it Commodores 72? Did you guys start?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you, we started in 68.

• 11:29Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  On the, 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.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Would you like to come and join this band over here?" The answer is, that was the beginning of the Commodores.

• 12:18Joe Rogan?

  And how old were you at the time?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  19 years old.

• 12:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 12:23Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  19 years old, and we're gonna take over the world. Joe, you know what I mean? In other words, you know, there's the, there's James Brown, there's Marvin, and there's the Commodores. You know, you know how that works, you know? And what I love about that period of time...

• 12:43Speaker 02

  We could be, you know, all right, all wrong, but we were all together.

• 12:48Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I can make that statement. I mean, but back then, it was, it was the best.

• 13:20Joe Rogan?

  And at nineteen years of age, you're just started, starting to become a man. And then you're thrust into superstardom in a crazy time in human history.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  It was, well, first of all, we didn't really get into recording until seventy-one, seventy-two. We were just the biggest, largest, most dynamic band in our heads

• 13:47Speaker 02

  across the South. And until we were the opening act for the Jackson Five, their first tour that 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, I'm an economics major and accounting minor. And all of a sudden, I kept thinking, I don't know what this business is, but,

• 14:12Speaker 02

  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, the Jackson Show, and all of a sudden, some girl said, "Sing it, baby." And I said, called the minister back on the phone, I said, "I don't think I'm going to be priest material."

• 14:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:00Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying?

• 15:02Joe Rogan?

  How many people ever get to hear Sing It, Baby?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Twenty, twenty-one years old.

• 15:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  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 end up in Motown. Hollywood Bowl, they, Motown saw us there. Suzanne DePass was, of course, the one who put the Jacksons together and all that. She knew us from, from our manager, Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard Island. Next thing we know, we're recording.

• 15:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Hallelujah.

• 15:40Joe Rogan?

  And then you're off to the races.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  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, it's, I mean, I can tell you stories and it, 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, didn't have any idea of what the heck you were doing, but what a great adventure.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  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 seath, she, she, sheath.

• 16:35Joe Rogan?

  Sheath?

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Seath, seath.

• 16:37Joe Rogan?

  Sheath.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Sheath around my neck. Didn't know it had a secret compartment. Of course, everybody in Harlem knew it was a secret compartment. I had all my money in that and I'm walking around going, no one knows I have my money in there. Right. Which is everybody knew I had my money in there. I would walk up and down the subway. No one would touch us. No one. I don't know. It has to be a sense of divine guidance. Or Big Frank Lucas just told everybody, "Don't touch us." One or the other, but I mean, it was just one of those moments in time where, you know, and I've had some people say to me, "You were in Harlem at four o'clock in the morning in the subway, alone?" I said, "Yeah."

• 17:18Joe Rogan?

  With a saxophone?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  With a saxophone. God bless you, kid. God bless you.

• 17:25Joe Rogan?

  It's, it must seem almost surreal, looking back, because you've had such an incredible life, such an incredible career, it almost, I mean, I can't imagine what it feels like just reminiscing and going through the stories and, and just, just looking at the actual facts of what you did.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  I'm glad I'm doing the book now, because otherwise, I would be, let's say, when I got to about ninety-eight, ninety-nine, because I'm planning on a full life, right?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  There's an old man at the barber shop, still telling lies about his life when he was growing up. Because it has to be a lie, you know, and, and, you know. There was one title I was joking around with, which is, "You're not going to believe this shit."

• 18:15Joe Rogan?

  That would be a great title.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  That would be the title, you know, and I was thinking, "That might be the way to go," and then, of course, I kept thinking, "No, but from a philosophical point of view, that's not going to fly." Okay, we'll pull that back, but the point is, it's almost not believable. I mean, when you start

• 18:32Speaker 02

  calling off names, it's almost like name dropping, and you start thinking about who mentored you,

• 18:41Speaker 02

  who gave you the advice, who was there for you exactly at the right time, who came in, who left right on time, you know what I'm saying? There are moments that happen, that if I tried to script this thing, if I tried to put it down as a complete play, chapter by chapter, you know, act by act, you couldn't make this up, I mean, it just, it reads like a, like a book.

• 19:07Joe Rogan?

  Or like a crazy movie, like, if your life was a movie, I'd be like, "That seems a little unrealistic." Too many good things happen to that guy.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, to the point where somebody says, "I remember a couple of my friends..."

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Um, why am I drawing a blank? Um, Rick James, Rick James had a great line for me. Every time he saw me, I'd say, Rick, how you doing? I hate you.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  And that means I love you, but I hate you. I, I hate you, man. And of course, I get it, you know, because things along the way become almost charmed.

• 19:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  You know, it's like, okay, um, did I go out and call Dick Clark and say I wanted to host the American Music Awards? No, no. He, he called me, us, and said, Lionel, forget that guy in New York. Look at that guy in New York. You, you're doing it. You're doing it. I mean, forget that guy. And now whoever that, that guy was, the gift was handed to me. And now I spent the next two or three weeks trying to convince Mr. Clark that I don't have any training in how to be a host. And that's when he would come to me and say, ah, you, you schoolboys are all the, all the same. You think you need a diploma before you think you know something.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  You know, these lines that come out of this whole story, you know, that's not orchestrated. That's not scripted. It came from the other side back this way.

• 20:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Do you feel charmed?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Do you feel like for whatever reason?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  The word I'll use is blessed. Um, um, it's one of those things where my grandmother said something to me a while, a while back. I just finished, um, I just finished Endless Love. And I went back to Tuskegee and I'm walking around in the house pacing back and forth. And she says, what on earth are you doing? And I said, I'm trying to figure out my next move.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And she said, "Did you come to school to join the Commodores?" She said, "No, no, I met them on the campus." She said, "Did you plan on being a writer?" "No, no, no, I found out I was a writer." She said, "Did you plan on being a lead singer?" "No, no, no, I found out when I joined the group." She said, "Why don't you just get a good night's sleep and wait for God to give you the next move." And that's how I started my career.

• 21:46Joe Rogan?

  That's an incredible woman. You know, that's incredible perspective.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Quit trying to figure this out. "Did you figure it out before?" "No." Then just relax.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Chill out. "Can you read and write music?" "No." "Okay, just chill out."

• 22:02Joe Rogan?

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• 22:44Joe Rogan?

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• 23:21Speaker 02

  I try to tell the kids on American Idol, you know, sometimes you have to look at failure as a great sign. If they had told the Commodores on the first time we auditioned, "You got it, ready to go." The answer is, "We weren't ready to go." It took no, and no, and no, and we... Signing at Atlantic, no. Signing at Philly International, no.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  But we're the greatest band ever, you're right. What did they say to us?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  "You sound just like The Temptations." "You sound just like Sly and the Family Stone." "What do you sound like?"

• 24:04Speaker 02

  "Wow." "What do we sound like?" "I don't know." So the only way we have to find out is we have to start not imitating somebody else. Now comes the thing of, "But what do we sound like?" Right. And I didn't know, I didn't know how to write, so I, "How do you write? You follow me?" And then you get to Motown. I'm signed to Motown.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  I don't know how to read or write music. What the hell am I doing here with this band? I'm not the lead singer, I sing some cover songs. And then you walk down the hall and there's Marvin. So I decided I'm going to interview Marvin.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  "Excuse me, Marvin, what music conservatory did you graduate from?" And he said, "What the hell is that?"

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I said, "Well, I mean, how do you write your music?" He said, "No, no, little brother, can you hum?" "Yeah." He says, "All that you can't play with three fingers, humming into a tape recorder." And then you go down the hall again. And it's Smokey. And there's Barry Gordy who built Motown. "Excuse me, Mr. Gordy, what university did you graduate from?" He said, "I was at a car plant." "What are you talking about?"

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Everything that I grew up with on the campus of Tuskegee as a kid, I grew up on the university campus, that's academia, did not apply in the world of hustle.

• 25:30Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  You understand?

• 25:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  So I'm now meeting the guys and ladies who found their hustle.

• 25:39Joe Rogan?

  They had a PhD in hustle.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  They had a PhD in hustle. And I am telling you, Joe, from that moment on, I was let out of the box, somebody let me out of the cage. Because in academia, there's a logical reason why you know what you know, because you studied it.

• 25:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  But I was that kid that was sitting in the class going,

• 26:06Speaker 02

  "Mr. Ritchie, Mr. Ritchie, would you like to join the rest of the class?" I was daydreaming.

• 26:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  I found in Motown, the whole damn company was tapping on the table. I found out in New York City, whole town is tapping on the table and dancing, right? And so from that point on, I joined this creative, source, force, fraternity, sorority of crazy, out of control people that gave me permission to dare to listen to myself.

• 26:42Joe Rogan?

  That must have been so exciting to learn that, that the structure that you learned in academia, like, no, these wizards,

• 26:49Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 26:49Joe Rogan?

  These wizards of music, these masters of giving people emotion and power and energy.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, I, I, I get chills sitting and talking to you. Watching Marvin record. And you keep thinking, he walked in with a paper and he, he had written these lyrics. No, man, he is scatting at the microphone.

• 27:11Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  "Oh, save the b- you know..." I'm thinking, I said, "What am I watching?" And then he said, "Bring the microphone over to the couch." He's on the couch, singing in the couch in the control room. What, what's, what am I watching? What's happening? In other words, it, it was just so organic and so, you know, because you think about the orchestra and they're there and the... No, man, this is...

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Inside of a wonderful dream of watching creativity just explode with no, no doors, no windows, no walls. And he was making this up in real time.

• 27:57Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  You're talking about freestyle. My man was freestyling, coming up with some of the greatest lyrics ever on life's planet. And I kept thinking, okay, so let me go back and put that in my little hamper.

• 28:09Joe Rogan?

  So was, did he have an idea of where he was going with these songs?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  I think he had a feeling about the idea. But did he know the exact words? You know, it's like when you close your eyes and you're in it. But see, I didn't understand how to be in it. You know, I, I kept thinking, well, let me put it this way. I was trying to think.

• 28:35Joe Rogan?

  So you, because of the academic background?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're, you're trying to logically, there's a logical reason why you're about to say what you're going to say.

• 28:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Instead of just saying, okay, just turn on the mic.

• 28:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying? Just turn on the mic, man, I got it. You know, to this day, I, I have a thing that I do that still wears out my management and, I have to do a speech or something and they say, okay, can you give me this speech so we can put it on the teleprompter? And I said, I, I, I don't have a speech to give you. Lionel, we need the speech to put on the teleprompter so you'll know what to say. I, I, I, I don't know what I'm gonna say. What do you mean you don't know what to say? I said, no, I won't know what I'm gonna say until I get there.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  And I walk out on stage. I said, now how long do you want the speech? They said, we have five minutes. I'll give you five minutes worth of speech.

• 29:32Joe Rogan?

  They just have to trust you.

• 29:35Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  That's how I do it.

• 29:37Joe Rogan?

  And you learn from watching the greats.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  The greats.

• 29:41Joe Rogan?

  And there must have been such an unique shift in perspective and how you view the world and how you approach things. To see people, to know that your daydreaming was actually just talent trying to burst free.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:56Joe Rogan?

  And they knew how to just take that talent and just be unharnessed.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  It was to the point where...

• 30:05Speaker 02

  I was actually trained, you know, this is Grandma Foster, A.M. Foster. She courted my grandfather in Booker T. Washington's house. That's where she came from, Tuskegee. My grandfather, they knew Booker T. She knew George Washington Carver. In my home in Tuskegee, Alabama, there's a crocheted piece from Mr. Carver, Dr. Carver. "My dear Mrs. Foster, congratulations on your wedding."

• 30:39Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  That's a crocheted piece. The, the deed to my house has the Washington family's name on the deed to my house. It was given to me, not to me, to my grandmother and grandfather by the Washington family Booker T. So now, when you have all that background, it's kind of one of those things where, where do you go with this thing, you know?

• 31:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  And so, you know, my, my upbringing was pretty, pretty amazing where it had structure, had structure. And now here I am over in this other side where, wait a minute, you mean, I don't have to remember anything, I can make up something?

• 31:21Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 31:23Joe Rogan?

  And allow the universe to just give you?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Whoa. I can just make up something. But what do you want to make up? I don't know. So then it's a word that we learned called receiving.

• 31:38Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  I'm just receiving. So now where does receiving come from?

• 31:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Receiving comes from the silence. It's not the noise, it's in the silence.

• 31:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  So here I am between one and six in the morning, and everyone thinks, what's Lionel doing? He's just kind of sitting in there. What's he doing? Nothing. But let me hear, let me let you in on a little sound that's terrifying to most people. You ready for this? You hear that, Joe?

• 32:17Joe Rogan?

  Silence.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Right? Now if you can hear.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Out of the silence comes the, you're receiving that from the other side.

• 32:33Joe Rogan?

  It is a receiving, isn't it?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you, you know, sometimes you just have to just blank it out. Some people call it meditation.

• 32:42Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Some people have all kinds of names for it. I just love to listen to silence. By the way, there's only 12 notes, Joe. It's not 145 notes. It's only 12 notes. So everything that has ever happened that you've ever heard on any radio, it's only 12 notes. So how do you turn 12 notes into something that sounds new, different? That's amazing to me.

• 33:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it is amazing.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And so in the silence, and all you have to do is learn how to figure out what are the four chords? Because if you've got four or five chords, you can write a whole album. But it's the melody that goes on top that you have to be able to hear. And so, once I learned that Marvin and Smokey and, you know, Michael, Quincy and, you know, these are Hendrix, I saw the poster coming in, you know, they all made careers. Not only careers, they had their unique sound out of 12 notes.

• 33:45Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Think about that. Now, if you think it's hard enough to get a hit record, how do you become unique unto yourself

• 33:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  with those 12 notes?

• 33:56Joe Rogan?

  That is one of the geniuses of Hendrix, is that you could tell Hendrix with like, in three seconds.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  He didn't have to come in singing.

• 34:04Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 34:05Joe Rogan?

  You just heard a little bit of guitar.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Do, do, do, do, do.

• 34:07Joe Rogan?

  And you knew.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Done.

• 34:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do, do, done. Do, do, done. Do. Do, do.

• 34:12Joe Rogan?

  You're like, oh, that's Hendrix.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  You can hum it, you can hum it, yeah, right.

• 34:14Joe Rogan?

  The six was nine, that's Hendrix. Like, there's a sound that he was able to make. And there's very few people that figure out how to do that.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  I did, I did not understand that.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  The blessing was not in having a hit record. The blessing was in having unique sound. Okay, Stevie sounds like Stevie, Smokey sounds like Smokey, you know what I'm saying? And so, when you start thinking about, okay, now by the way, you can't rehearse that. That's either your gift, or you can't say, well, I'm gonna work on my sound.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  No, it's a real thing. That's why when we do, when we do American Idol, I tell them over and over again, I'm not looking for singers, I'm looking for stylists. What's gonna make me close my eyes and remember you? I don't wanna see you. Can I identify you by your voice? That's a career.

• 35:13Joe Rogan?

  Do you have conversations with people that don't know how to receive? And do you try to, like, when you're talking to a young artist, and maybe they're a little bit too technical, or maybe they're a little bit too constrained, do you have conversations with them about, what do you say to them?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. And I could see their frustration, you know. Lionel, I can't believe, it's amazing how you went to that augmented seventh with a diminished ninth, with a raised eighteenth, with a forty-five, and I'm saying, I can't read music. And he goes, and the way you did that modulation from and I said, I can't read music. And he kept saying, and the way you turned that vocal around and came back down to that augmented seventh over a raised ninth, and I kept saying, I can't read music. So, I try to tell them, listen, forget the notes. Can the crowd sing your song? If they can't sing your song,

• 36:15Speaker 02

  dazzling them with notes is not gonna get it. That's the first thing. That's for the guys who can read and write and do the full Juilliard at Berkeley and killer. That's for them. Now, for the kids who are just brilliant, by the way, and they know their music, but they don't know how to receive. My answer now is, now that you know the technical, forget it. Now, tell me what you're feeling.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Now play that. And instead of playing 15 chords, play one and hum as much as you can holding that one chord. And then when you get tired of putting everything in that one chord, that's the second chord coming up. You follow me?

• 37:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Because what happens is musicians, they want to go, "We are the..." No, no, no, stop playing. Bang, "We are the world." Bang, "We are..." Just keep holding that chord. Bang, "We are the ones that make a brighter day." Let's not give a... Bang, "There's a..." Bang.

• 37:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Now you're changing.

• 37:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 37:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Because if you confuse me and you dazzle the world with all of your musicianship, you just missed the melody that the whole world can sing.

• 37:37Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. You missed the purity.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  You missed the purity.

• 37:42Joe Rogan?

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• 39:01Joe Rogan?

  Did, do they get it? When you try to tell it to you? Or is it one of those things like, you're gonna have to live more?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  You're gonna have to live more. Yeah, but, because remember now, when Marvin said to me, he was giving me the words of wisdom, when, when Norman Whitfield, who wrote Cloud Nine and all these, you know, just amazing Temptations songs. (singing) Cloud Nine, be what you wanna be. You don't need no responsibility.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Everybody come in now.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  He's playing, he's playing one note.

• 39:40Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Okay, they hadn't changed yet. He wrote the whole first verse, okay? Ball of confusion. He's still on one note.

• 39:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Okay? It takes time to understand what that master just told you.

• 39:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 39:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  And then, once you understand, the simplicity is the secret.

• 40:03Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  The simplicity is the secret.

• 40:07Joe Rogan?

  It's like when you go to a restaurant and they put too much sauce on the steak.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  I could have given you a better answer.

• 40:12Joe Rogan?

  You know, like, you didn't have to do that.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Just, just give me some chicken.

• 40:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Give me fried chicken, give me baked chicken, give me smothered chicken. Don't, don't, don't get too...

• 40:20Joe Rogan?

  You don't have to get crazy.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Right. And at the end, just give me an apple pie. Just, give me a key lime pie, man, just, just, you know what I'm saying? Give me a lemon meringue, give me pumpkin pie.

• 40:30Joe Rogan?

  You don't have to get crazy.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Don't get crazy. We have a deconstructed...

• 40:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  And I go, just put it together, put the whole thing together and give it to me, you know?

• 40:38Joe Rogan?

  Because that's, sometimes with some music, well, it's one of the things you can't connect to. It's like, it's overcomplicated. And you hear some music and it's like, God, there's so much going on. And then you hear some acoustic version of a song, you're like, oh, my God.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 40:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, you just hear the, the pick scratching across the strings, like, oh, my God.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mr. Gordy. I, I, I've known him enough now where I can say Barry. But he's clearly Mr. Gordy, you know?

• 41:08Joe Rogan?

  Clearly.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  He taught me the greatest line ever. I went to him and I, I met him in the hallway. And he would never, ever say, oh, congratulations, you got a hit record. That's not what he would say. He'd always say, oh.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Marvin's got a hit. Marvin's got a smash coming out. I go, Mr. Gordon, I just want to let you know I have a number one record. That's, that's, Marvin's got one coming out. It's gonna be a smash.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  And then, what do you have next?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  What do you have next? And then I said, okay, well, I, I, I got a hit record. He says, uh, I said, let me go out to the car and get a tape. I want, I want you to hear it. No, no, no, you got a hit record, hum it to me.

• 41:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Hum it to me. If you need to play music, you got a nice tune.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  There's your tempo.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Now hum it to me.

• 42:05Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Now that means the, the crowd is gonna sing along every note with you. You don't have to wait till the hook. They'll sing the verse with you.

• 42:14Joe Rogan?

  What is that pressure like?

• 42:17Speaker 02

  I would love to tell you was it pressure?

• 42:19Joe Rogan?

  No?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  No, I would tell you that there's an old expression,

• 42:26Speaker 02

  that a jazz musician said to me years ago. You either understand, or you don't.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  You can either hear it,

• 42:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  or you don't. That's all it is. In other words, if, and, and my line is, if you can hear me tapping on the table,

• 42:46Speaker 02

  and all you hear is me tapping on the table,

• 42:50Speaker 02

  you're not a songwriter. But if you hear me tapping on the table,

• 42:54Joe Rogan?

  And you start dun, dun, dun.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  And you hear a song.

• 42:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  You're a songwriter.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Class dismissed. We don't have to waste any more time.

• 43:05Joe Rogan?

  It is a bizarre thing that creativity, which is one of the most important things in our society, cannot be taught.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 43:11Joe Rogan?

  Very bizarre.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, you meet brand new person every day. I meet crowds of people. You meet one-on-one people every day.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  That's difficult. That's difficult. And to know something about them and wanting to find out more. And how does your personality work with that other person? That's a skill. But that's not even a skill. That's not something you practice. That's something you had in you from way down deep. It's just the more you do it, you got better and better at being that person.

• 43:44Joe Rogan?

  That's exactly correct.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 43:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  So if I said to you right now, "How did you study that, Joe?" You'd go, "Ah, just turn on the mic."

• 43:52Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'll tell you, I just got very fortunate that a job existed that didn't exist before, which is podcasting, where you get to talk to interesting people.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 44:01Joe Rogan?

  And luckily for me, I don't have anybody telling me who to have on. So I just go through, I have like a line of emails every day. And I'm like, "Ooh, Lionel Richie. Fuck, yeah." I said, "Fuck, yeah, that one."

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I put down, "Fuck, yeah, Lionel Richie."

• 44:18Joe Rogan?

  But there's a bunch like that, like, "Ooh, I'd like to talk to him." Or there's some guy who's an astronomer. "Oh, yeah, bring him on. Let me see some of his stuff." Then I'll go watch some videos, listen to him give lectures. I'm like, "All right." But to me, it's just, I'm just very fortunate that this is just how my personality is. I'm just curious about how people think.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, again, it's one of those things, out of your natural curiosity, that's you.

• 44:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  You follow me? Well, out of my

• 44:45Speaker 02

  natural ADD, ADHD, hypersensitive, whatever they used when I was growing up, I found it all serves me well.

• 44:53Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  It all came out in songwriting.

• 44:56Joe Rogan?

  It does serve you well, which is so important for people to hear. Everybody wants to diagnose everybody and medicate them. I had for sure ADHD when I was a kid.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Oh, please.

• 45:05Joe Rogan?

  I think everybody that I know that's talented and creative has ADHD, whatever that means.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I tell all the parents, "Leave him alone."

• 45:11Joe Rogan?

  Leave him alone.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Leave him alone. There's, there's two types of kids, and I keep trying to tell them. There's academics. They're great. You want them to remember, they can remember, they can recite, they do numbers. And then there's the creatives. Okay? The last thing you want to do is put a creative kid in a room full of academics. The grades are not going to be great.

• 45:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  And you're going to worry them to death. Put them at a creative school where they they're nurtured into their, yes, they they they're gonna they're gonna work on math, and yes, they'll work on their science, but don't make that the priority. No one to this day has ever asked to see my college degree. No one to this day has ever asked me to see my high school diploma. You understand?

• 45:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  So so was I an A student, B student, C student? C student, babes. I mean, I was right there on the borderline of disaster. But I was just happy to be there.

• 46:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  But the point was, it's not important.

• 46:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  What did you end up being? Who did you end up discovering? How comfortable are you with yourself? By the time you get out of elementary school, school, going into high school, you're so inundated in, let me tell you what's wrong with Lionel. Lionel has a problem with, and if you listen to that crap, by the time you go into college, it's not happening.

• 46:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Now, here's the joke. They told my family, my mom and dad, ah, truthfully, Lionel is not college material. I mean, in other words, he's to be creative. You know who they forgot to tell? Me.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  The best thing they ever did. They didn't tell me about that conversation, which means it was okay. I didn't use that as my crutch. Don't tell somebody they have a handicap. Just leave them alone.

• 47:06Joe Rogan?

  Just let them figure out what they actually like to do.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Because it's not a handicap.

• 47:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  In other words, I I learned years ago, a race car driver, he sees 200 miles an hour as, can I get this to go any faster? Magic Johnson, the basketball goal looks like the size of the inside of a of a building. That's how big it is in his head. To me and you, it's a little tiny thing at the other end of the court. You follow me?

• 47:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so my point is, everybody has a unique brain in how they see things. Quit trying to put everybody in this one little box. If we can set up education where let those that see it in freestyle has a freestyle moment. We'll get more out of kids, we'll get more out of people if you just quit trying to condemn them and let them flourish in their lane, if you will.

• 47:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  And that's the special part. Yes, okay, reading and writing, you got it, that's important. And now with with AI coming and all this stuff, you don't have to do that anymore, but I'm just saying it's there's some basics you have to have. But then after that, I think we're we're crippling our kids because we're giving them too many gaddas in a world that's constantly changing.

• 48:20Joe Rogan?

  Yes, especially now.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Especially now.

• 48:22Joe Rogan?

  But if you if you your child is a creative, the problem is that is such a gamble. Say if your child wants to be a lawyer, you go, okay, you go to law school, get your degree, pass the bar, get work for a firm, you're a lawyer, there's a path.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:37Joe Rogan?

  You want to be a singer, like, oh, Christ.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  My my recommendation,

• 48:43Speaker 02

  get the law degree and then try to be a singer.

• 48:47Joe Rogan?

  Have a backup plan?

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Backup, I mean, in other words, you know, in my case, I didn't have a backup plan. I mean, I luckily, my freshman year, I found that thing and, I mean, how did it work? That's why I said to you, is it divine guidance? It's divine guidance.

• 49:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  I didn't have a plan B, but I'm sure there would have been one if it was time for that to come into play.

• 49:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  If I told you how many lawyers now, excuse me, how many lawyers started out as singers? They wanted to be in a band. If I told you how many people that are now on Wall Street, what do they do on the weekends? They have a band.

• 49:25Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 49:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, there's a lot of that.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  And so as time goes on, okay, so you're not the lead singer, but you're the lawyer in the record company. Or you're the manager, or you're the agent. You follow what I'm saying? That ninety nine million jobs under the word entertainment.

• 49:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  It's just that maybe you weren't going to be the star

• 49:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  of the show, but you're in the show.

• 49:47Joe Rogan?

  That's easy for Lionel Richie to say, though.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  I know.

• 49:50Joe Rogan?

  If you're that lawyer that wishes he was the star, it's a real problem.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  I know, and trust me, I run into those guys who hate me.

• 49:55Joe Rogan?

  They would.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, Lionel Richie. Oh, yeah, right. No, I get it.

• 50:01Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  I get it. And I understand it's, and by the way, I mean, what I like about the book is everyone, just to let you know, it sounds like, you know, I won, I won. No, it was a struggle. I'm the shyest guy in the world. It was painful. Joe, walking down that stage, I said it was a freshman talent show. The curtains opened, I went off with the curtains.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  The only reason that I was on that stage, I didn't grow up with the guys in the mystics. They didn't know that Lionel Richie from Tuskegee, Alabama, was the shyest kid in town.

• 50:41Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  They didn't know that. These are guys that I didn't grow up with.

• 50:46Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  So they said, hey, hey, man, you brought your horn? Yeah. You want to be in a band? Now, you're talking to a kid who goes, okay, we're going to do a baseball team. What was the answer? Okay, we'll take Lionel. Which, okay, let's do a basketball game. Okay, all right, we'll take Lionel. Let's play football. Okay, we'll take Lionel. These guys came along and said, hey, you got your horn? Yeah, yeah. Want to be in our band?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right?

• 51:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Bingo. You mean, you don't know about me?

• 51:26Joe Rogan?

  You don't have to be defined by other people's ideas of you.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 51:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  So they said, and they said, okay, here's the part, and I, can you play the saxophone? Yeah, man, I play saxophone. I didn't tell them I brought the horn to school to learn how to play it. But I could play by ear. I could play by ear. So unless we're reading music, I sound like I know what I'm talking about.

• 51:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  So it became one of those things, and by the time I got in the Commodores, I didn't tell anybody.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  I'm the greatest horn holder that ever lived. Are you kidding me?

• 52:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  So just keep that secret and keep on going. But what I'm saying to you, just think about this for a moment. I mean, it didn't start out with confidence. It came out with, sooner or later, they're going to know I'm an imposter.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  And slowly but surely, who worked the hardest? Me, cause sooner or later, they're gonna find out.

• 52:26Joe Rogan?

  You gotta catch up.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  That I gotta catch up. So every time we had some time off, I'm interviewing Marvin, I'm interviewing you name it, anybody, tell me what you did to get to where you're going. Then I found out, nobody went to school to know what they know. Holy crap. Now we're on to something really serious. Cause then I had some aha moments. And so if I can't play it, I can hum it. But most of the time, I could just play it. Okay, I can play this. And as you learn, you grow quickly. You have to learn quickly now, cause we just signed the contract that said we're now on Motown records. I gotta do a fast track here. But it happened in real time.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  At any moment, they could have called up and said, we're gonna cut the group down to the most significant people in the group. Rich, you're out. Oh shit. So I had to make sure, let me, let me make sure I get this. I'm working harder than anybody you've ever seen before in your life. And so that's how, it's a whole life of insecurity. It wasn't secure. And then you get your first song and you go, okay, okay, that was lucky, okay. Then the guy said, hey kid, you got any more of those songs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, I got another one. You go home and look at the guy in the mirror and go, you got any more songs? Cause I'm talking to myself.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  And that's when you realize, okay, out of fear, I gotta come up with another song. So everyone keeps thinking, this, this confident guy walking in, I got another song for you.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  I gotta tell you how many times I walked on stage, Joe, and had a panic attack. Right in the middle of the show, I'm having a massive panic attack.

• 54:13Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Because I'm supposed to look like I got this.

• 54:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  When actually. I don't.

• 54:24Joe Rogan?

  But eventually you did.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Well, that's what happened to Barbara Streisand. And that's what happened to... I mean, once you realize, as you start interviewing people,

• 54:33Speaker 02

  the people who are scared to death onstage, and then they realize, as time went on, they got used to it. But I realize the thing that scares you to death is the thing you have to keep going forward on.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  That's my dad's line again.

• 54:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  What's the similarity between a hero and a coward? One step forward.

• 54:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  And one step back. No matter how much it scares me, step forward.

• 55:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  And so each time, I was not going to say, "I'm not going onstage." I go onstage, and I'm going to sweat for two hours

• 55:12Speaker 02

  and try to fake my ass off. And now, it's like second nature now.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  I'm pro-football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now, I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone. This little light of mine in the dark, sun that hopefully shines.

• 55:54Speaker 00

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• 56:14Speaker 03

  Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Dry mouth, feeling tired and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects. Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824.

• 56:47Joe Rogan?

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• 57:33Speaker 02

  But at the time, give me a break.

• 57:36Joe Rogan?

  That's so important for young people to hear, that a guy like you would panic.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Are you kidding me? Oh my God, man. Have you ever met the president before in life? No. Have you ever been on stage in front of 100,000 people? No. Have you ever been in a club with four people in the room looking at you going, what you gonna do? No.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, I mean, listen, I mean, it's, that's why when I see these kids on American Idol, I don't know how they do that. I came in with five other guys going, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:06Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  They're singing a cappella.

• 58:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  To me and Carrie and Luke, are you, excuse me, and 20 million people watching and a billion 200 million, uh, live impressions. Get the frick out of here.

• 58:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  So I'm just saying, for me to be this authority, if you will, I can relate to every one of their heartbeats on that stage. I know what they're fearing. That's why when I get around artists, you don't try to blow them away with your importance. First of all, do you need a hug first? What do you need? Let me talk to you for a minute. Because you need to, let me talk you down for, because you're, you're expecting too much out of us.

• 58:55Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 58:57Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Because we're all, we're all students of scared to death.

• 59:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. If you're not, you're, you're in the wrong business.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And by the way, the, the book is not about how I won. It's how I got, not to the peaks, how I survived the valleys.

• 59:13Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  The valleys of insecurity is it, man. How do you get up and go, uh, you're gonna host the American Music Awards. Dick wants you to do that.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Uh, okay.

• 59:28Joe Rogan?

  Was that a big scary one for you? Because you brought that up a couple of times. That one bothered you a lot?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Everything scared me.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  I know you're not expecting this interview, but.

• 59:40Joe Rogan?

  I'm pleased.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Everything scared me. You have to understand.

• 59:45Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Um, Lionel, we're going to do a, a, a instrumental for a movie. It's called, uh, In This Love.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  I'm only doing Kenny's album. I'm only doing the Commodores album. But because it's Franco Zeffirelli and John Peters and everybody, I'm thinking, okay, I can, I can do an instrumental. Right? Then halfway through the thing, they said, well, we're gonna shoot a scene where we just need the lady to sing a first verse to the person in, in the scene. Can you write a first verse? Uh, yeah, yeah. My love, there's only you in my life. The only thing that's right. My first love, you're every breath that I take, you're every step I make. Thank you. Okay, got it. Is that it? Yeah, right. No. Lionel, we've decided now to make this a duet. And we're gonna get Diana Ross to sing.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  The lady's part, who do you recommend to sing? The guy's part.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Are you out of your mind? It's me. What are you talking about? You recommend. I, I, I'm not gonna recommend somebody else. Were they beating around the bush? I think they were. They have to be. I think, I think they were backing me in because I told them I don't have time. Right. So I, they, they baited me by saying, you know, uh, it's gonna be instrumental. But by the time I got there, I'm thinking, okay, now, here's the problem. Diana's in New York. I'm in LA. I'm doing two albums, Commodores and Kenny Rogers. I'm not going to New York and she can't come to LA. Where we gonna meet? Tahoe.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Tahoe? We go to Tahoe, but what even Tahoe? Reno. She's playing Reno. So at the end of my Commodore night, ten to six Kenny Rogers, six to ten Lionel Richie. And then, ten to four in the morning, I gotta get on a plane, fly to Tahoe, and put Diana Ross on Endless Love. Wow. Now, what you don't know when you're that part of your life, that you could die from having creativity. Too much creativity. It was, I mean, it was so exciting, but at the same time, I'd never written a duet. Ever.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  So my first duet in life was with Diana Ross. Do you think I was nervous? Do you think I was nervous? Do you think I was nervous?

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  I mean, I just kept praying, God, for God's sakes, don't let me pass out in front of Miss Ross. Oh, my God. So what I'm just saying to you, the, the title of the book would be Scared to Death. I got titles, man, you know? Yeah. Because it's, it's not, it's, it's the first time of everything. I've never done this before. And so, just imagine being put into a situation throughout my entire career.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Where, um, you know, step forward Lionel, step forward, step forward, step forward, step forward. Can you all, can you all hear my heart beating? No, okay, good, good. Step forward, step forward. That's what it's been.

• 1:03:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Like I said, that's so important for young people to hear, because I think they see someone with such a career and so much success, they go, well, that guy's just probably crazy confident and always has been and just talented, kissed by God.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  No, no, no. I, I, I tell people every day, what this book did for me, I discovered Lionel Richie. I'm the Italian race car driver.

• 1:03:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  I never looked behind me. I never paid attention. And then all of a sudden, this book made me turn around and look behind me.

• 1:03:35Joe Rogan?

  It's interesting, because if you want to get things done in life, you kind of have to be the Italian race car driver. But if you want to get this thing done in life, write a book about your life, that requires that introspective thinking and that recollection and that recognition of like, oh, my God, like, what did I go through?

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  I mean, what, what was that? I mean, you think about it. You know, let's, I mean, you think, yes, I got the hit record at the same time my mother was dying. Now, those two don't go together. You follow me?

• 1:04:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  I'm in, I'm in the world tour of my life. It's the dancing on the ceiling tour. It's, I'm going to establish me around the world. It's the all night long dancing on the ceiling tour. My father's dying.

• 1:04:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  You follow what I'm saying? I mean, so it's, okay, so now, how's dad doing? Well, he's, he's, he's doing okay. How's mom doing? Okay, mom, mom, okay. Should I come home? Lionel, well, she's okay. She's, but, I mean, she's, she's okay. But I can cancel the tour and come home. Okay, but, I mean, but, but how's she doing? My sister's there. She, mom's doing fine. She's doing great. But you don't realize she's in the decline. But you keep trying to balance this. What do I do?

• 1:04:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  You know, and, and so it's, it's all happening while it's happening. And so it's, you know, how do you kind of compartmentalize the show, the writing?

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  And real life family? You know, is it the reunion? We're having the reunion, okay. You know, it's the class reunion, it's the family reunion, it's... Have you ever been to the family reunion? No. Didn't make the family reunion, why? Because when you're in the Commodores, when you really have your shows, it's Christmas, New Years, all the holidays, all summer. So if you happen to have any kind of reunion during those times, you're not gonna make it. So it's the sacrifices. How many barn fires did I make during college? None. Pep rallies? No. Basketball tournaments? None. But I'm the Commodores. We're the Commodores. You follow me?

• 1:06:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  So I always tell people, what comes with success are the sacrifices. And even after you make the sacrifices, it's not guaranteed that you're gonna win.

• 1:06:15Joe Rogan?

  And at your highest of highs, like the all-night long days, you're dealing with your father dying.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:06:22Joe Rogan?

  So people would just see, all they're seeing is you and thousands of people screaming and cheering when you're on stage, all over the world, sold-out shows.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Joe Rogan?

  But you're dealing with your father dying.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're dealing with moments...

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  You're trying to pretend like you're not seeing it. You know, there's a moment when you go home and your parents age right in front of you. You never noticed it before. He wasn't dying yet, but you could see the decline.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Until dancing on the ceiling, you'll see a little bit more of the decline. You follow what I'm saying? And then finally, you realize, holy shit, this is not gonna be good at all. But you keep pretending like it's not happening, if you know what I mean. You kind of put that in that little compartment. He's getting older, but he's okay. He's okay. He's okay. He's okay. The answer is, oh, he's not. And then from that, you think that everything else in your life is okay. Is the marriage okay? No, it's not okay. Nothing's okay. Why? Because all priorities are going towards this new thing you've never experienced before called frickin' hit record. Going solo.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  I'm leaving the Commodores. I'm leaving the Commodores.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  These are the only five guys I've ever trusted in my life. So everyone keeps thinking, "Yeah, you went solo." No, no, no, guys. What was that word that comes with that? Scared. Fear.

• 1:07:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  So everyone keeps thinking, "And then I decided to go solo." Bullshit.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Who are you talking to?

• 1:08:07Joe Rogan?

  Leaving the Commodores too is crazy.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  Come on, man.

• 1:08:11Joe Rogan?

  Crazy. The Commodores is a once in a lifetime opportunity. And for you to say, "I'm gonna do it on my own."

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  No, no, that's not the way it was.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  "I'm not leaving you guys." What are you talking about?

• 1:08:27Joe Rogan?

  Leaving the Commodores is crazy.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 1:08:30Joe Rogan?

  You almost can't.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  You can't do it, but what was happening behind the scenes? That's the story. What was happening behind the scenes was, and I understood, I understood, but still I didn't want to accept it. It's the guys.

• 1:08:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Okay. The article read.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  "And then Lionel Richie sat down to the piano and started playing his classic hits."

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Review. What's a guy like the Commodore, what's a guy like Lionel Richie doing in a funk band like the Commodores? Joe, try to go back to rehearsal after that review.

• 1:09:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  You got it?

• 1:09:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Or now we've done Endless Love. Now we've done Lady with Kenny Rogers. Tell us Lionel how you started the group.

• 1:09:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  I didn't start the group.

• 1:09:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  And now you walk into a group interview and they knock Clyde over and they knock, uh, Whack over the trumpet player, Tommy. Lionel, tell us about the band.

• 1:09:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  So what I tried to do was come later. But by coming later, "Oh, you think you're big enough now where you don't have to be in the group." Well, if I don't, if I'm on time, they'll disrespect you.

• 1:09:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  I got the feeling, I got their angst.

• 1:09:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 1:09:53Joe Rogan?

  And this is a different time in the world. See, today. You could elevate those folks through social media and bring them up with you.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Of course, of course, of course.

• 1:10:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's the beauty of today.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 1:10:03Joe Rogan?

  If you're working with talented people and they're not getting shine, you go, hey, this is, this guy's great.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:08Joe Rogan?

  Everybody go see him.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Joe Rogan?

  Check it out. And then all of a sudden, boom, and now they get the love and the recognition. But back then, everybody was on their own. It was a dog-eat-dog world, and it was controlled by gangsters.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  I rest my case.

• 1:10:20Joe Rogan?

  Gangsters.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  The answer was, I realized one very important thing. Throw the word "degree"

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  out of your vocabulary. The music business. A degree? A degree in music, a degree in business, a degree in what? No, no, no, man. This was street degree.

• 1:10:41Joe Rogan?

  Right. Street psychology, too.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, what did the guy tell me? He said, um, I'll tell you the best course I ever took in life. And this is a true story. He said, you know, you schoolboys are funny, man. He says, you all learn how to account for the money. He says, we count the money. And I said, okay, so what does that mean? He says, somebody's got to teach you how to steal.

• 1:11:06Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. Best lesson I ever took in my whole life. Because, once you learn how to steal the money.

• 1:11:13Joe Rogan?

  You know how to stop.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  You know how to stop people from stealing.

• 1:11:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. There's so many stories of bad deals. I mean, I was reading an excerpt from this book, and I don't know if it's true.

• 1:11:26Joe Rogan?

  It's a guy that thinks that Hendrix was killed rather than he died. And he thinks that what was going on was that Hendrix was leaving his management.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:11:35Joe Rogan?

  And his management had him locked up in some crazy contract. They were stealing money from him. And they thought that he'd be more valuable dead since they owned the records.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 1:11:46Joe Rogan?

  And that's, this is, this is like you coming from the seventies. In the professional business from the seventies on, dealing with, that was the business back then.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Joe Rogan?

  I mean.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Joe Rogan?

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• 1:13:05Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Believe it or not, the holiday season is here again, and that means you might need to fill some seasonal roles. Fast. Maybe you need extra cashiers or stockers, or maybe something more unique, like a lead elf, or an expert gift wrapper, or a Zamboni driver. Whoever you're looking for, whatever skills you need to power through the rest of the year, ZipRecruiter is one of the best places to start your search. Because you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogen. And because ZipRecruiter helps sort through thousands of resumes and applications, showing you the most qualified and interesting ones first. There's even an option for candidates

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• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, the answer is, there is a, uh, one moment when I looked into my mom and dad's face, and I said, hey, they, they just stole three hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars from me, and my mother said, you leave those people alone and come home, and I go, no, no, no, no, mom, mommy, mom, it only cost me three hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars to learn that lesson, it's never gonna happen again, and I was so excited about it, she looked at me and said, my son's crazy. That is a crazy response. But, but the answer is. It's very logical. You can lose millions.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Right. You can lose billions. Sure. Okay, so if it only took me three hundred and sixty-two thousand, I got off light, man. Yeah. You understand me? For sure. But it's, and not only that, can you keep your, can you keep your, can you keep your life, I mean, just think about it, you know, when you go to the box office, everybody had a gun, now here's the beautiful part about it, cause I knew that later, nobody's gonna shoot anybody, it's just if you, how naive were you, if you were naive and a little schoolboy, you could get shot and killed, but as you started learning who the gangsters are, that was just an intimidating factor, but you had to be, once you knew them. Yeah. Then they go, come on, Lionel, just cover us a little bit, you know.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  But that's even more disconcerting, they become normal. They become normal. That's what gets weird. That's what gets weird. When you're around normalized gangsters. That's exactly right, and then you start, and then your mother starts meeting them on their way to Miami, they would drive, and they stopped by Tuskegee to see the schoolboys, and here's a guy, dead of homecoming season, in a full, head-to-toe mink hat, mink coat, pink El Dorado. St. El Dorado. Driving across the campus, and you go to your instructors, yeah, this is my, uh, my friend, uh, you know, uh, Tall Paul, I got all kinds of, got names for him, we had

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  a, oh my god, we had, we had names, you can't, you can't make this up. Yeah. You know, and how do you introduce them to the president of the university, the answer is, you don't, you don't do it, you don't. You don't, god, what was it like navigating? That world. It was, Joe, one of the most exciting things ever. Why? I never experienced anything like this before. Right. I mean, I, I mean, listen. Who does? I, I, listen, you mean, wait, see, see, we played gangster. They weren't playing gangster. Right. You follow me? Right. So we are with the gangsters. Right.

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  And it, it just became so another world where, what the guys say, in our world, I'm, it's not how long you live, it's how well you live while you're living. Hmm. Now, that's a profound statement from him. That's, I don't want to know anything big about that, but you have to listen, right? Yeah. They don't plan on living a long life, but they plan on living well while they're here. Right. So it's nothing to say when you go back to New York for the next summer. Whatever happened to so and so? Oh, yeah, he got shot in December. Normal, normalized. That's, that's normal. Yeah. He's leaving town, or they're leaving town. Right.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  And so as time went on, it became a short-term view of a very long-term problem that has always been normalized because a part of legal is illegal, or desirables and undesirables. That's just a part of the city. Right. And here's what you'll find out, the most important thing. The desirables know the undesirables. Yeah. You go backstage and you go, wait, you two know each other?

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  What? Right. You know, but that's what happens in this world of cities, in this world of culture, you know? Everybody has that, what's that line I used to use all the time? Who are you really? Right. And until it is revealed later.

• 1:18:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  In the music business, we see it all.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Backstage is all. Front row is all.

• 1:18:53Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  So you just have to understand, it's probably one of the greatest educations in the world because everybody backstage is who they are.

• 1:19:03Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Not who they say they are.

• 1:19:04Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. That's gotta be bizarre seeing like captains of industry mingling with gangsters. Heads of enormous record companies.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  Hi Phil, hi Bill, hi John, hi David, and by the way, it's okay. But remember now, we're a street business.

• 1:19:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  We're a street business.

• 1:19:23Joe Rogan?

  And is it a street business because gangsters always controlled a certain percentage of what's going on in the streets and cities? Or is it a street business because you don't really need an education to do it? You do it on instinct and everyone needs it because it's really like, what you produce is like a drug. You know, I can listen to one of your old songs and it just puts me in a state of mind like, ah.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Bingo.

• 1:19:50Joe Rogan?

  Man, it does something to you physically. So they're, you know, they're in the drug business too.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  Bingo.

• 1:19:56Joe Rogan?

  They're in the cash business, they're in the live entertainment and nightclub business.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  Let's talk Vegas.

• 1:20:02Joe Rogan?

  Right, founded.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Was a Harvard grad the founder of Vegas? No. Okay, so what I'm saying to you, the problem that happened with all of these businesses we now have, they legitimized it.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  They messed the whole thing up.

• 1:20:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  Did the movie business start out with wonderful PhD guys from?

• 1:20:25Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  No, it started from the street.

• 1:20:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 1:20:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  And so what we are trying to do now is we've tried to legitimize all of this stuff.

• 1:20:34Joe Rogan?

  Homogenize.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  Homog- pastorize. We want to do the whole thing. The answer is no, no man, we messed the whole thing up.

• 1:20:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Because what it was is the fascination of, hey Lionel, can I put my name on your album? Why? I gotta move some stuff around. But the answer is I couldn't do it because I don't wanna get in trouble from the, you know, you're kinda trying to dodge these guys. But the point is, it's real. So I care what, I won't, I won't put a business like that together. What I'll do is start the business. Hey, what a great way to do that. But the only thing wrong with that is, as time goes on, someone asks a very difficult question. I like to see the books. That's a tough one. Go deal with that one.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  So you follow where we're coming from. So I, for us, for me, as, as they used to call us in Harlem, the schoolboys. You know, for the schoolboys, this was Fantasyland.

• 1:21:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Are you kidding me? I mean, we didn't think we were gonna die. This was like the best course we ever took in the world, from the originals.

• 1:21:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  This is not some hearsay. And they adopted us as the schoolboys.

• 1:21:45Joe Rogan?

  That's so wild.

• 1:21:48Joe Rogan?

  That must have been just an insane experience as a young man going through that.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Oh, God. You have no idea. You have, Joe, you have no.

• 1:21:57Joe Rogan?

  I can't even imagine.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  Idea. And then, you know, I mean, the days of, the days of Smalls Paradise. I mean, this is the club of clubs in Harlem. The days of, um, Studio 54. Michael Jackson's 21st birthday. Give me a break. I mean, and back then, what I loved about private clubs was, the reason it was private is because if you can't keep a secret, if you weren't in the building, you can't find out what's happening in the building. Now everybody's got a phone.

• 1:22:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  And everybody can't wait to take a picture or rat on somebody. So you can't have a private club in the world. Because everybody's gonna tell what they saw inside.

• 1:22:48Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  But back then, once they let you in those doors.

• 1:22:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  First of all, it was a privilege that they thought that much about you to let you in. And then once you got in, it was, you were in the, you were in the club, man.

• 1:23:04Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:06Joe Rogan?

  God, it must've been so exciting. And to be surrounded by so many extraordinary people at that time. What was it like watching Michael Jackson explode? You know, I talk about him and I talk about Elvis a lot in that if you look at it as a study of fame, that there's a certain level of fame that you achieve that's completely and wholly unmanageable.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:32Joe Rogan?

  And it's like the Elvis level. And I think he was like the first guy to really reach that level. And then it was Michael Jackson who went to a completely different place. Michael Jackson, he's even surpassed that, which seems more insane.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:43Joe Rogan?

  And look at that photograph.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  That's at Studio 54 on Michael's 21st birthday.

• 1:23:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  And the mustache was thicker than ever, man.

• 1:23:55Joe Rogan?

  It dripped down a little.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I had the little hook up on the side. Come on, man. You know?

• 1:24:03Joe Rogan?

  Because he never had a normal moment.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:07Joe Rogan?

  He was famous when he was a little boy. I remember when, when AB, what was, was, what show did ABC, what did they broadcast?

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  That was, was it Ed Sullivan? Was that, then they first, when they first hit?

• 1:24:21Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  It was either Ed Sullivan or Dick Clark. I think it was Ed Sullivan when they blew up, blew up.

• 1:24:26Joe Rogan?

  But I remember him singing ABC's when he was just a boy. And I was like, my God, he is so talented. Like, like exploding in talent. Exploding in charisma like I'd never seen before. You'd seen so many artists and so many people that were, maybe, maybe it was because of the youth too. It's like he's so free. He was so free.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Joe Rogan?

  He has so, so much charisma and talent. It was just insane. Like, look at this. Give me some of this.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, come on. Listen.

• 1:25:02Joe Rogan?

  You can't play any of it?

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  No, no, but, but, but, but watch him jump out front if he does. If, when you see the scene where he comes out front, oh, I didn't know the clip, but if he ever spins around one time and you'll see something that looks so simple to do, he got that from Jackie Wilson. I said, "Where did you get that from?" He said, "Lionel, that's Jackie Wilson." That's, but if you see him spin and come back to dead center.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Now, this is when he was just getting his wings to flap. Wow. How old is he here? Ah, he's gotta be twelve. Wow. Twelve, eleven, twelve. And, and of course, at this time, it was just ridiculous because he knew what he was doing.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  He knew exactly, I mean, this is the oldest soul you've ever met in your life. Really? I, I couldn't tell you. And then they walk offstage and turn into twelve-year-olds. This kid turned into itching powder in your Afro.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  See how he stand up front, see how he points to you? Now, shake it, shake it, I know what he's saying right now. Wow. Right?

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  Crazy. He was so good. And if you see him with that, I mean, I, I'll be honest with you, I mean, we forgot sometimes that, that this is gonna happen. Cause when you're backstage or in the hotel room, that's a kid. Right. That's a kid. Then as time went on, things happened where you could see it getting weird. For example, I'd go down the hall and I'd say, "Where's Mike?" And they said, "He's in the room." Okay, and meanwhile, what became normal was, "Watch out, be careful, the girls are coming." "Watch out, be careful, stay in the room, the girls are coming."

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  Now, if you understand the Commodores, Jermaine was a bass player. He hooked up with the bass player of the Commodores, Ronald. The drummer, Clyde, follow me? The lead singer, me. So Michael and I bonded at 12, 13 because of the lead singer. So I went down to check him out. And I'd say, where's Michael? He's in the room. I go in the room. Hey, Mike, where are you? Okay, where is he? He's hiding in the bathroom. The girls are out there. I said, girls? What do you mean? There's no girls out there. They sealed off the floor. Come go with me. Now, they got mad at me because I'd walk out in the hall and go, come go with me. I said, you seen the girls out there? Oh, I thought they were, I thought they were in the hall, Lionel.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so in other words, watch out, be careful. But they're protecting the golden goose, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, no. You follow me? But the golden goose needs play period time. He needs playtime. Right, he's still a kid. He's a kid. And so. You're freaking him out. Jermaine, Tito, they, listen, they go on dates, guys. They hang, they, you know. Michael can't hang downstairs. Wow. Right? And so as time went on, you could see the slow shutdown of trying to protect an incredibly talented person. But at the same time, he got special treatment. Mmm. And so what I tried to do every chance I could was, hey, man, come and get you in the car. Come over here. Let's get it together, you know. Right.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Hang, hang, hang. Yeah. You know, and, and so, you know, we went through that period of time where we don't stay together long. Because once we, the Commodores took off, we didn't have that everyday time anymore. Right. You follow me? But every once in a while, we'd get together and, and, you know, there's a little rumor that's out right now that I, I want to clean up right quick. They said, in Lionel's book, Lionel called my, uh, Michael smelly.

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  Didn't like the way he smelled. I said, no, that's not what it. So let me clean this up, okay? So imagine sending your clothes out anywhere and you get half of your clothes back. The other half of your clothes are souvenirs. You follow me? So what he would do is if he had a pair of jeans, right? He'd wear the jeans until they tried to run away from him.

• 1:29:35Joe Rogan?

  People were stealing his clothes?

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Stealing his clothes, right?

• 1:29:38Joe Rogan?

  Oh my god.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Or, or, or he'd, he'd, he'd walk in the house some days. And I'm looking down at his feet and I go, "Michael, your shoes are flopping on your feet. They're, they're two sizes too large for you." I know Lionel, the guy we were in someplace, he gave me a pair of shoes and I told him, "Thank you very much." I said, "But Michael, you could have gotten the shoes in the right size." I know, but I didn't want to embarrass him. So he's walking around with two sizes too large. You understand me? So, he'll come by the house, we wore the same size, right? Insert, by the time he became that teenager. So I said, "Go in the closet, get a pair of jeans." So, literally, he'd change clothes, and by the way, he left the clothes on the floor,

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  in the room, and walked away from them. In other words, he, he'd wear them until he got another pair. And so we'd call him, Quincy called him, "Okay, here comes Smelly." And so, his nickname was, for, for the insiders, was Smelly.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Follow me? So when I said it in the book, everybody go, "Oh my god, Lionel called Michael Jackson Smelly." And I go, "No, that's not it. That's, that's his name. That was his..."

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  I revealed that.

• 1:30:54Joe Rogan?

  That's hilarious. But it's so hilarious that people were just stealing his clothes.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  Oh man, please. I mean-

• 1:30:59Joe Rogan?

  The poor guy.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  The kid when he was 12, 13, 14, sent underwear out, it doesn't come back. T-shirt out, no t-shirt back. Socks out, no socks back. So, it's, what he basically had was a new pair of underwear. Every time he put a pair of underwear on, it was new.

• 1:31:16Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's just not gonna happen it's coming back.

• 1:31:20Joe Rogan?

  I wonder how many Michael Jackson's underwear is out there on eBay or something?

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Can I tell you? If they, if they-

• 1:31:25Joe Rogan?

  I stole it in the-

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  That's an admission, I stole it. That's number one. But by the way, very valuable. Very valuable.

• 1:31:33Joe Rogan?

  Probably crazy valuable.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  You know what, I would love to put that out there, say, no prosecution needed.

• 1:31:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  It was not gonna happen, but could you reveal yourself, so, cause that's gotta be the... I would have that framed right away.

• 1:31:45Joe Rogan?

  It's just so bananas that that was just ubiquitous, they would just steal his clothes. But it just makes sense.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:31:51Joe Rogan?

  What I was saying is, about the Elvis thing, applies to him plus, is that there's no roadmap for that. There's no roadmap for navigating that level of fame, you know, and even you as, as an adult, as a grown man, you know, your, when your peak of fame had to have been so surreal, that it's, it's hard to not lose who you are. Most people lose who they are.

• 1:32:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:32:20Joe Rogan?

  If you say, "Oh, she went crazy," bitch, you would go crazy too.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  God damn right.

• 1:32:25Joe Rogan?

  What the fuck you're talking about?

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  Damn right.

• 1:32:26Joe Rogan?

  You'd never been a superstar in front of the whole world, or judging everything you do.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  And then, and then that thing came along, called the phone. At least, at least if they did see you, they caught you in that place.

• 1:32:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  But they only saw you, but now, they're looking at you everywhere.

• 1:32:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  So, the press is everybody. Just imagine that.

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so, but, I mean, in my case, I got used to it. I, I gotta admit, I mean, of course.

• 1:32:58Joe Rogan?

  Think something happened.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Oh, did I do it? Did I, did I?

• 1:33:01Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no worries. Somebody was probably messing with it before you.

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  I, I live.

• 1:33:05Joe Rogan?

  They pop out all the time.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  I live with that sound. All the time. No, but what happens with me was, we went from, you could actually be, you could actually sneak, I like that word.

• 1:33:18Joe Rogan?

  Sneak around.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Sneak means you could look out, do you see anybody you know? If you don't see anybody you know, you can sneak. And then something happens one day, you walk in a room.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  You came in through the back door. You sit at a table in the back door. The band starts playing three times a lady. Oh, my god. And then everybody turns around and says, hi Lionel. Oh, no. Okay, alright. And you thought you were just sneaking your ass off. You ain't sneaking nothing. You're trying to sneak around and get some dinner. That ain't not happening. Nope. And then the next thing that happens, which is you wanna have a nice anniversary dinner. Right? Anniversary dinner is the best dinner ever. Romantic place. Mm-hmm. And three ladies walk over to you and say, hi Lionel, I want to tell you we love you and we want to tell you about... Great. That's great.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  And then your wife says, who are those ladies? I don't know. I've never met them before. I know, but they seem so familiar. What? Oh, okay. Wait. This is not good. Because now the romantic session just turned into... But now, I've never experienced this before. Remember now. This is new. This is not... I know now not to go to the romantic place. You go someplace where you can have a great time. But the point was, back then, this is first time happening. Right. And you're trying to be like all your other friends. You take your wife out, or you take your girlfriend out, or you go to dinner and you have a... No, no, no, man. It becomes now, everybody's watching you and they can't wait to come over and say, can I have an autograph? Right.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  And now they come up and say, can we have a picture? Right. And so it becomes, this is very weird. This is very weird. Yeah. You have to plan where you go. Plan where you go. And more importantly, be fully dressed before you leave.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Don't do something stupid, right? But I mean, it... I don't want... I'm... I love it. No, it's not a complaint. It's just you're just detailing a unique aspect of your life. I've got a thing. Being a famous person. I tell people all the time, and this is the truth. I hope you like people. I hope you like people. Because if you don't, you're not gonna like fame. Right. Okay? They keep thinking they're gonna be famous and rich and... No, no, no. Do you like people? Right. Because they're gonna be in your face and in your business with an opinion.

• 1:35:50Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 1:35:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  Now, you want to go to a recital with your kid? And it's your kid's piano recital. I hope you like being famous. Because while your kid is playing the recital, the parents are going to be asking you for your autograph.

• 1:36:04Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  Not the kids. The parents.

• 1:36:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  I made the mistake and decided, I'll go to SeaWorld with my kid. And I'll go by myself on the parents' bus. You know who protected me on the whole trip? The kids, my kid. Miles said, okay, we got to protect my dad. Because the parents are coming. And everybody at SeaWorld showed up and there's Lionel Richie at SeaWorld with his kid. So I had four little kids surround me and go, I said, guys, I'm with them. We're with the school. But I mean, it becomes, holy crap, what the hell is going on?

• 1:36:41Joe Rogan?

  And it's annoying for them, too.

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  Of course it is.

• 1:36:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  But you can't have that moment.

• 1:36:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  With your kids and it's, and it's a big, it's a big deal because at that time, ABC, NBC, CBS, and a new station just came out called CNN. Other than that, to see you, to have a sighting.

• 1:37:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  Was like.

• 1:37:06Joe Rogan?

  Different.

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  Come on, man.

• 1:37:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no one, I. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks

• 1:37:48Joe Rogan?

  and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States? You can still get 10%. Off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com. This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist and trust me, I know.

• 1:38:33Joe Rogan?

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• 1:39:17Joe Rogan?

  Plus get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. I couldn't imagine what it was like being famous when there's only four channels in the radio.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  The Olympics, 2.5, 2.6 billion people watching live, live.

• 1:39:43Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  So I went from Lionel Richie to Lionel Richie all night long. The end of my name became all night long. Lionel Richie all night long. Hey, that's Lionel Richie all night long. Every country in the world, I became Lionel Richie all night long.

• 1:40:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:40:03Joe Rogan?

  What was that like, performing?

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 1:40:06Joe Rogan?

  In front of that many humans? What was that feeling like? Was it different than a regular performance?

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  Joe, it felt like a regular performance. But I had never in my life had the world watching. So I rehearsed it. We did it, not realizing it was the world, literally the world, watching. And if you go back and look at that little podium. What was supposed to happen at the beginning of this was Ronald Reagan was supposed to come out and greet, had his speech. "I know I speak on behalf of everyone in America and the entire world, how proud we are of these fine athletes." That was his speech, right?

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  Because that night, there were death threats, they had, you know, they decided it's too risky to have him on the field. Lionel, would you give the speech on behalf of all of America and the entire world? Stop me where I am. Oh, my God. So before I started singing, I had to make my speech. "I know how proud we are, here in America and around the world, of these fine athletes." And now, we're gonna sing all night long. But I had to give this thing. Wow. And I told them, I said, that was the proud moment after I came offstage.

• 1:41:41Speaker 02

  Before I went onstage was, well, Mr. Reagan's worried about his life, what about mine? What's gonna happen here? You know, but it was so overwhelmingly, you're talking about energy and adrenaline and you can't beat 2.6 billion people live. And you think Super Bowl was something special? I'll tell you what this was. Nobody, there was not another channel covering anything. The whole world was watching this.

• 1:42:17Joe Rogan?

  That's hard for people to... Imagine in this day of content.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 1:42:20Joe Rogan?

  That that will never happen again.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Uh-uh.

• 1:42:23Joe Rogan?

  Unless it's the aliens are landing Monday at 8 a.m.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Exactly correct. That's the one where the aliens landed.

• 1:42:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that fake fake UFO.

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  Right, and by the way, that's what hap- that was the opening, but what you don't see there, that's that was the op- that's very good, man. I hadn't seen this clip. Uh, what was happening with that was, just before it started, they sealed off the airspace. And I I remember looking out, there were four helicopters facing out.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  And the problem was, you couldn't hear them, Joe. And I kept thinking, I'm looking at helicopters, and they said, I said, what's that right there? And they said, they sealed off the airspace.

• 1:43:08Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  Nothing's coming into this place. One, two, three, four.

• 1:43:13Joe Rogan?

  You couldn't hear the helicopters that were holding up the flying saucer?

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  I couldn't hear a thing.

• 1:43:19Joe Rogan?

  How's that possible?

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:43:21Joe Rogan?

  That's what's scary.

• 1:43:22Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:43:23Joe Rogan?

  Creepy military Area 51 ship.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  Listen, you understand what I'm saying? And the answer to me was, okay.

• 1:43:32Joe Rogan?

  Then the alien guy comes out.

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  You understand me at this point?

• 1:43:35Joe Rogan?

  This is 1984.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Howard K. Smith, remember the sports announcer, I think, was it was it Howard K. Smith?

• 1:43:42Joe Rogan?

  Howard Cosell?

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  No, Howard, he was with.

• 1:43:44Joe Rogan?

  Howard K. Smith.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  No, he was with, uh, Wide World of Sports.

• 1:43:48Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  And he kept saying, this is going to be an amazing night for you. And I said, yeah, okay, not knowing what this was gonna be. And there was a kid that was backstage, and he said, oh, my God, this is gonna be the biggest night ever. You know who that kid was? Cuba Gooding Jr.

• 1:44:08Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  He was one of the dancers.

• 1:44:11Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  And from that moment on.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  I kept thinking, what's gonna happen? I said, here's what I want you to do. They're not looking at me. Your parents are looking for you. So get a signal. Give them something where you wave your hand so they'll know that that's you. But the truth of that was, that was one of those interesting moments in time. Where the world was watching and it was no other way to happen. I woke up the next morning, drove down the street. I could be five cars back from the traffic light. And somebody passed me and go, hey Lionel Richie all night long. Lionel Richie all night long. It's Lionel Richie all night long. Oh God, what just happened?

• 1:44:56Joe Rogan?

  Did you get your windows tinted?

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  I got everything tinted, babe. I was wearing tents. What you talking about?

• 1:45:03Joe Rogan?

  That might be the biggest audience anyone has ever performed forever. If you think about it.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Without dying, of course. I mean, yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know what that was, but it freaked me out. Because I went from slightly invisible to fully visible. Anywhere. My friend got married. I kept saying to him, you don't want me at your wedding. He said, no, no, you have to come to the wedding. I said, you don't want me at your wedding. Here's what happened. I decided to go. Here's, there he is walking down the aisle. There he is saying I do. And there he is walking out with his lovely bride.

• 1:45:48Speaker 02

  Every other picture after that is his mother-in-law with me, his family with me. He's no longer in the wedding.

• 1:45:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  Every picture was me in his wedding book. And I said, you don't want me at your funeral. Nobody's gonna ever know you left.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  It's not gonna happen.

• 1:46:10Joe Rogan?

  What was that like for you, like psychologically, that giant shift? Was that hard to manage?

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  Pain in the ass. For the first couple of ten years.

• 1:46:22Speaker 02

  You know, you gotta get used to this. I mean, you know, and also you have to understand, it becomes an annoyance to your friends. Hey Lionel, let's go down to the bar and get a drink. Very simple. That's like, you've been doing that for the whole life.

• 1:46:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  Now, you go down to the bar, the bar turns around.

• 1:46:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  No, so now your friends become security officers.

• 1:46:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  You follow me?

• 1:46:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  Okay, this is not cool.

• 1:46:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  You know, and so, yeah, it becomes a little bit of a hassle. So if you wanna have your friends, you either have to bring them up to your hotel thing, or you bring them over to the house.

• 1:46:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  There's no hanging out.

• 1:46:58Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  You know, it's not gonna happen that way. And again, it's, you get used to it over time.

• 1:47:05Joe Rogan?

  Did it fuck with you psychologically?

• 1:47:06Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah. Are you kidding me, man? I mean-

• 1:47:08Joe Rogan?

  Because a person relies on the perspective that they get from interacting with people. If the majority of your interactions are bizarre.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  And then finally, one day, you say, okay. You walk into the room. Prepare to talk to the room.

• 1:47:25Joe Rogan?

  Right. Just accept that this is what it is.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  Muhammad Ali said it correctly. We had lunch one afternoon in New York, and it's time for it to be over. And as we were having lunch, there are people coming up to the glass, looking in. Oh, there's Muhammad, there's Muhammad, there's Lionel, there's Muhammad, there's Lionel. Muhammad, okay, it's time for us to go. And my security had me, and I'm ready to go. I said, where's your security?

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  Muhammad, he said, I don't need any security. I said, what do you mean you don't need security? I said, there's tons of people out there. He said, no, no, no, no, no, they'll take care of me. And he walks out the door, and everybody's going, get back, get back, get back. It's Muhammad. In other words, you-

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  You neutralize the room. You can either make it a frenzy.

• 1:48:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  Or you can, that's what Michael, God bless him, he couldn't get that in his head. But he couldn't, even if he tried to do that. His whole persona was the frenzy.

• 1:48:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  He has to have the frenzy, otherwise that's not Michael.

• 1:48:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:48:30Speaker 02

  You know, so I, I just kinda got to the point where you go into that zen mode and, how do I get across the airport? It's only one way, you gotta walk across the airport.

• 1:48:39Joe Rogan?

  But the difference in you and Michael though is like you had a normal life.

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:42Joe Rogan?

  For a long time and then became an artist and then.

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  I knew how to navigate it.

• 1:48:47Joe Rogan?

  You got a slow drip in the initial days.

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  He had the explosion.

• 1:48:51Joe Rogan?

  The explosion that he got was like, like I said, unlike anything anybody had ever seen before. I don't, I can't imagine how he could diffuse a crowd, like it's not even possible.

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:49:00Joe Rogan?

  They would just swarm him.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Never was going to happen.

• 1:49:02Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  Never.

• 1:49:03Joe Rogan?

  The thing about Muhammad Ali too, who's like one of the rare people that was loved by almost all humans.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:49:11Joe Rogan?

  Especially after everyone realized he was right about the Vietnam War.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 1:49:15Joe Rogan?

  And then he returns three years later and then, you know, he makes his way to the title again.

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  Again.

• 1:49:21Joe Rogan?

  And then the, he was so loved. He was so loved.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  And a beautiful person. I mean, what I, and again, trauma. I mean, when you see him out in public, he was Mr. Chopin. But he was carrying a lot. He was carrying his belief, he was carrying his, his growth. Losing the family, gaining another family, still being the icon. I mean, think about that.

• 1:49:52Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  You know, is he gonna win, is he gonna lose? With me, I just gotta sing all night long again.

• 1:49:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  But him, he's gotta win again.

• 1:49:59Joe Rogan?

  And he knows he's starting to get brain damage.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 1:50:03Joe Rogan?

  He knows it.

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Joe Rogan?

  There's no ifs, ands or buts about it. By the time he gets past Frasier in the first fight and then. Foreman, just the Foreman fight alone, Ernie Shavers.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  Every, every hit.

• 1:50:14Joe Rogan?

  Every hit.

• 1:50:15Speaker 02

  Every hit.

• 1:50:16Joe Rogan?

  And then later in his career, it gets sad.

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:18Joe Rogan?

  It's just like, there's very few people that transcend whatever sport they are and become like, one of the key features of culture.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, he was magical, magical, but for me, he was the hero. Because this is a guy who found his freedom. When you can walk out and go, I'm gonna speak my truth, and I don't care. Now, this is back in the days when Hoover was Hoover and the, you know, the investigations where the investigations, that's heavy, man. I mean, this is not, this is life and death situations, and for him to accept his role as the educator, and also the, the beacon of hope, you know, when I got that in, in my book, when that, when that man came up to me and said, you must survive, because

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  you're our beacon of hope.

• 1:51:13Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  I, I, there's a moment in time when you realize, there is a responsibility here. And whether you wanted to be the teacher or not, there are folks looking at you besides the folks in Tuskegee.

• 1:51:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and you've got something to share, and that something is very valuable. When someone can hear wise words from someone they love and respect, it, it'll shift your perspective in life. And that, that's such a gift that you could give people.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  But it doesn't come, I, I keep trying to tell people every day, it doesn't come with the word flawless.

• 1:51:48Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  It comes with flaws. How did you, how did you learn that? You put your foot in the shit.

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  I mean, you understand, how do you know that? And, and the only way to know it, the only way to understand it, you know, what you don't wanna do is have someone describe to you life, because they read it.

• 1:52:10Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  I wanna know about life that you lived it.

• 1:52:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  Now, that's the person I'm taking my advice from.

• 1:52:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, like, someone teaching you music. That's never written a song.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:52:19Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:52:20Joe Rogan?

  Unless they're Rick Rubin.

• 1:52:21Speaker 02

  Unless they're Rick Rubin.

• 1:52:22Joe Rogan?

  That weird motherfucker.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  By the way, by the way, you said, that's a strange brother boy.

• 1:52:27Joe Rogan?

  That dude's out there.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I got chills when you called his name. No, man, I can hear.

• 1:52:32Joe Rogan?

  He's the real deal.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  I so love him.

• 1:52:37Joe Rogan?

  He's the real deal. That's a real eccentric.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  That's a real.

• 1:52:40Joe Rogan?

  It's a real eccentric.

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  I went to Rick's house one day and I said, oh, man, this is gonna be great. He's out by the beach. Walked in and I said, he said, sit right over there.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  Rick, it's only one beanbag chair on the floor. That's it. That's the whole living room. And I said, where's the living room?

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  Or there's the terrace of his bedroom. Great, he has the doors, the doors open off onto his terrace.

• 1:53:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  They forgot to put the terrace out there. So, so open windows.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  There's no terrace.

• 1:53:22Joe Rogan?

  I think that's what he wants.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  That's exactly what he wants.

• 1:53:24Joe Rogan?

  He wants things off.

• 1:53:26Speaker 02

  Ah, but I love him.

• 1:53:27Joe Rogan?

  He's such a genius.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  I love him.

• 1:53:29Joe Rogan?

  I love him to death.

• 1:53:30Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 1:53:31Joe Rogan?

  He sends me the wackiest texts, too.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  Well, he ain't gonna change.

• 1:53:36Joe Rogan?

  He goes down rabbit holes. But he's awesome. But there's people like him, right? They just have some special gift of, they just hear things.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  But that's the point.

• 1:53:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

  That's, that's the point. In, in life, in life, if you have a chance to be around someone that's authentic unto themselves, at the same time, they're receiving. It's not just songwriting.

• 1:54:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  You know, there are people who are receiving messages and you go, do me a favor. Just sit down and tell me the story.

• 1:54:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, authors all talk about that.

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  I, I love, I love. I mean, for example, every time I go to Atlanta, Georgia, who's backstage? Greatest fan, greatest mentor ever, Andy Young. Okay. Did he see it? He saw it all. Did he miss anything? Nothing. And he sits back there. I've sometimes been 15, 20 minutes late to go on stage. Why? Keep talking. Keep talking, Andy. You follow me?

• 1:54:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  And he's just spewing the message. And again, the answer becomes, hmm.

• 1:54:46Speaker 02

  How do you feel about where we are now? I'm optimistic. Wow. That's really heavy. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:54:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:53Speaker 02

  And so I, I just sit as a student. And that's what happens in life. If you have a chance, who comes backstage to my shows? Everybody. And they sit there and I have a chance to find out, hmm. Now, they say you're this person. And the answer is, no, they're not. Everybody has a front.

• 1:55:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  And a back.

• 1:55:17Joe Rogan?

  Especially a public narrative.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  You understand.

• 1:55:19Joe Rogan?

  If you don't know them personally.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  You don't know them personally. And so with me, I have found the greatest parts in the world of this whole story is that they come as fans, everybody. And that's the part that really makes me feel really great about traveling around the world. Because it, it, it gives, remember now, I know the world of the world. A lot of people know Detroit, or they know America, but they don't know Europe, or they don't know Asia, or they... Joe, I'm 200 years old. I scratched on everything. But the point is, it's, when I come home to write a song, I don't write a song based

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  on, is it going to be a song that can identify to America only? I write a song that the world will understand.

• 1:56:12Joe Rogan?

  Because you've been to the world.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  I've been to the world.

• 1:56:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  So when I came home to write All Night Long, everybody looked at me like, you're out of your friggin' mind, this friggin' calypso. Ain't no calypso music on the radio. I said, there's a thing called world beat. That's why every gangster, every politician, every schoolteacher, everybody, when you go on vacation, what do you hear? It's called the world beat.

• 1:56:40Joe Rogan?

  Mmm.

• 1:56:42Speaker 02

  So when I play the world beat on anything, you automatically feel familiar.

• 1:56:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  But now try to play that in the middle of funk. Try to play that, yo. What is Lionel doing, you know, but the point is, you know, it's, I, when you travel the world and you come back home and you put a song out, it's gonna resonate to the world. And as time goes on, it will resonate to America.

• 1:57:10Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:11Speaker 02

  But I, I do from the world back in certain cases.

• 1:57:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:16Joe Rogan?

  Just based on your life experiences?

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:18Joe Rogan?

  No, that's amazing.

• 1:57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Joe Rogan?

  But it's like, a lot of great artists have done that.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:57:22Joe Rogan?

  Broke out and where people are like, what are you doing?

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:57:26Joe Rogan?

  Why are you doing something that's different than something that's been insanely successful?

• 1:57:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:57:30Joe Rogan?

  Why would you mess with the formula?

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  Lionel Richie's story. Lionel Richie crossed over and can't get black.

• 1:57:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  You got me?

• 1:57:38Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  So in other words, what, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Three times a lady, yo.

• 1:57:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  That's a waltz.

• 1:57:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, right.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Little brother.

• 1:57:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:48Speaker 02

  That's what, what, what, what, what you doing, man? You copping out? And the answer is, no, no, no, I'm not copping out, you know? But my answer was very clear. If Mozart were black, would he be Mozart? No, because he wouldn't be funky enough.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  And you wouldn't have played him.

• 1:58:07Joe Rogan?

  Also, why would anybody challenge authenticity? If someone has an authentic idea, it's, it's who they are at this moment. This idea that you're supposed to stay in this box.

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  Well, you know what that's called now?

• 1:58:21Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 1:58:21Speaker 02

  An algorithm.

• 1:58:22Joe Rogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  You following me?

• 1:58:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's basically the same thing.

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  Everyone keeps thinking, oh, man.

• 1:58:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  It's gonna take over. No, it won't. And hopefully, if you're smart enough and get out of the way of the, of this regurgitating over and over again, the same goddamn song.

• 1:58:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:39Speaker 02

  And go over here, it's gotta be somebody that goes, I wanna say this.

• 1:58:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  And, and, and no AI can tell you that.

• 1:58:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:47Speaker 02

  That's gonna, what's that word? Touch people.

• 1:58:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  You gotta have something that touches someone.

• 1:58:54Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  It can rhyme all day long.

• 1:58:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  But does it touch you?

• 1:58:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  That's coming from something else that's gonna be the new thing. And we've gotta allow a place where the new thing can come through.

• 1:59:08Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Cause otherwise it will become, it gets to be a hum.

• 1:59:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:59:12Speaker 02

  And that's when you hear, "We only play ninety-eight beats a minute." Well, you know what happens on the fifth song? You turn the channel. First song.

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  Second song. Third song.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  Fourth song. Turn the channel.

• 1:59:31Joe Rogan?

  It's formula.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  Because you wanna hear something that goes.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  That's the trick.

• 1:59:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  Change up the ear.

• 1:59:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  But someone said, "Let's just keep it all the same." So now I have to ask the question.

• 1:59:47Joe Rogan?

  This is the business people, right?

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  Yes. These are the people who don't write songs.

• 1:59:51Joe Rogan?

  Right, of course.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  I mean, that's like going to a concert. And the first song is, and the second song is, and the third song you go, "Uh, where we gonna eat?"

• 1:59:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:00Speaker 02

  Okay? If something's gotta switch up, the lights have to change, something has to happen.

• 2:00:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  Otherwise it becomes monotonous. Thank you.

• 2:00:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. That struggle between the creatives and the money people always exists.

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm telling you, it used to be wonderful because the creative people were the guys who owned the labels.

• 2:00:22Joe Rogan?

  Right. When did it switch?

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  Uh, when they started consolidating all the thing, in other words, they started buying up Motown. And then they bought up A and M, and then they bought up Mercury, and then they bought up Polygram. Now you've got this big giant, okay, so it's Warner Brothers, Sony, Universal. We got them all. And then the independents, and then the da-da-da, and then it became one big.

• 2:00:46Joe Rogan?

  Just a machine.

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  One big indigestion.

• 2:00:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and a bunch of people just wanna make money and they don't make music.

• 2:00:52Speaker 02

  And then what if the guy says, "I know how to sell, uh, uh, uh, I know how to sell, uh, uh, records, Lionel. I sold eighteen billion hamburgers before I came here." What the frick are you talking about?

• 2:01:08Joe Rogan?

  I'm a businessman, Lionel. You think it's complicated?

• 2:01:12Speaker 02

  Now, can you give me your album in the third quarter?

• 2:01:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  And I'm going, I normally give my album when I finish it. Now, what are you talking about?

• 2:01:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:21Speaker 02

  Third quarter means what?

• 2:01:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:01:24Speaker 02

  Can we have it in the first quarter? If we can have it in the first quarter, it'll be fine.

• 2:01:27Joe Rogan?

  Did you say, was this a slow thing? Or did it just become overwhelming at a certain point in time? Like, when did they consolidate?

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  The most irritating part of it was, you start an album, and by the time you finish the album, they sold the company.

• 2:01:42Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  And the people who started the album with you are no longer there. So, it's a new group of people that's receiving the album. They have no idea that you've been working on the album in the first place.

• 2:01:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:53Speaker 02

  And then what label did they put that on? Okay, they put Motown over on Mercury. And then they put Motown Mercury over on Palador. Then they put, now you're sitting there going, "Okay, guys, who do I belong to? Who do I belong to?"

• 2:02:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:02:10Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no. It went, it went, it went so sideways that, you know, and then as we slowly get further, further down the road of, of lack of, of communication, half the time you go to another company, they don't even know what the hell you've done. You know, they go, "Okay, now, you know, I've got a hip-hop group that love, I've got a writer that can write with you, Lionel." Who, who are you, who are you talking to? I mean, you know what I'm saying? I mean, you know, "We got a writer that can write with you. I don't need a writer to write with me." What are you talking about? I, I don't, I got my own, what? It's like having somebody say, "I got a guy that can help Stevie."

• 2:02:53Joe Rogan?

  It's just imagine at that stage of your career, someone coming along and telling you how to do it.

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, because they are A and R people from the last label. And so you get up there and you go, and by the way, whatever person they tell you they want you to write with, that's the single.

• 2:03:11Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  So you go, okay, just hold on for a minute. Everybody take a step back. The worst thing, the worst thing I ever heard in life one time was that the guy said, I've got a surprise for Stevie. He turned in his album and I got, I've forgotten the artist's name, I can't think of it. I got them to remix his album.

• 2:03:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  Joe, you never heard from Stevie again for 10 years?

• 2:03:35Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:36Speaker 02

  I mean, come on. First off, if you know Stevie, every ch-ch.

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  Okay, he knows where that is.

• 2:03:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Speaker 02

  And you remixed it before you put out the original?

• 2:03:51Joe Rogan?

  Just imagine the gall to think you could do it better than Stevie Wonder.

• 2:03:58Speaker 02

  But that's what I'm saying. When you, when you bring in non-creative people.

• 2:04:03Joe Rogan?

  Who are doing cocaine.

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  I, I didn't want to say that, but the answer is a lot of it, a lot of blow.

• 2:04:09Joe Rogan?

  They're doing cocaine, so they have some really unnecessary confidence.

• 2:04:12Speaker 02

  Right, and again, you have to understand something. They know. They know because, why do they know? Because they said so. And what I've learned is, there are two types of artist. Creative artist and created artist. Okay, and these people are specialized in creating artists. But if you happen to be talking to a creative artist, shut the fuck up.

• 2:04:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, shut the fuck up.

• 2:04:42Speaker 02

  Shut the fuck up.

• 2:04:43Joe Rogan?

  Leave him alone.

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  Shut the fuck up.

• 2:04:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, could you imagine a group of those people and Prince brings them head? And says, this is my song. They'd be like, are you out of your fucking mind?

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  And by the way, they did.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  They did. And you know what he said? Fuck you.

• 2:04:59Joe Rogan?

  But you know what I'm saying? Like, that's one of those songs where you're just like, it's so great. And so authentic and so insane and nobody had heard anything like that before.

• 2:05:07Speaker 02

  That's, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:05:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  You, or Madonna, Madonna for the Pepsi commercial. Know what he gave, what she gave him for the Pepsi commercial? Like a prayer.

• 2:05:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:05:18Speaker 02

  You're right. Black man on the cross with Madonna. That's the commercial she gave him.

• 2:05:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  And I, they said, this is disastrous. I said, it's Madonna, what were you thinking you were gonna get?

• 2:05:31Joe Rogan?

  What'd you think?

• 2:05:31Speaker 02

  What did you think you were gonna get?

• 2:05:34Joe Rogan?

  She's giving him a real name.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  But I mean, you see what I'm saying?

• 2:05:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  But yet, was the record successful? Hell, yeah.

• 2:05:41Joe Rogan?

  Huge.

• 2:05:42Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:05:42Joe Rogan?

  Massive.

• 2:05:43Speaker 02

  Get out of the way.

• 2:05:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, get out of the way.

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  Bob Dylan, get out of the way.

• 2:05:47Joe Rogan?

  Get out of the way.

• 2:05:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:48Joe Rogan?

  But people can't figure that out if they're not creative people. They really genuinely think that they know better.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  But they want control.

• 2:05:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  And the answer to it is, I would rather have a company full of out of control artists than a bunch of control pencil pushers and accountants. They know nothing about people and what they like or what could titillate their sensibilities.

• 2:06:13Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  Okay, it's gotta be somebody that knows how to, well, are they gonna be in clubs all night? No, but we are. Are they gonna travel around the world to festivals and everything? No, they're not gonna be there, but we are.

• 2:06:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:06:27Speaker 02

  So wouldn't you trust us when we come back home and say, okay, I got this shit?

• 2:06:32Joe Rogan?

  It's just, they think they know better and they have the money and they have the power and they wanna keep control. And one of the things that they really do enjoy controlling is controlling people that could do things that they can't do.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Ah, very true.

• 2:06:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  And that's the, and by the way, they know.

• 2:06:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  And they'll come up to you and what they call is giving you advice. You know what it's called to me? Insulting.

• 2:06:53Joe Rogan?

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 02

  It's insulting.

• 2:06:57Joe Rogan?

  The giving you advice is just so, it's just so crazy. Someone who doesn't do it, giving you advice on how to do it.

• 2:07:02Speaker 02

  You wanna hear how that sounds? Lionel, if I were you.

• 2:07:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:07:05Speaker 02

  And you know what I say back, quiet it to myself? But you're not.

• 2:07:09Joe Rogan?

  But you're not.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  But you're not.

• 2:07:10Joe Rogan?

  If I were you, if you were, if you were me, you would be listening to you going, what is this fucking idiot saying?

• 2:07:16Speaker 02

  If I came back to you, mister, you know, and I'd say, hey, if I were you, I would do this with the company. And you look at me and go, kids, you don't know what you're talking about. And that's the right answer.

• 2:07:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:07:28Speaker 02

  But if you're talking to an artist.

• 2:07:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:07:30Speaker 02

  By the way, we could run the company. If you let us.

• 2:07:36Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:37Speaker 02

  But the point is, it's too late. Everybody knows everything now. And so that's the point. It's called the Peter Principle. Everyone elevates themselves to their level of incompetence. And now that you're who you are, you've now null and void yourself and the industry, whatever it is we're into. You've done it. It's done. Cooked. So my point now is, we've got a world now of specialists that knows nothing about the actual doing it.

• 2:08:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  It's a world.

• 2:08:08Joe Rogan?

  That is crazy, and they have so much power and control over artists. And they have been successful in creating an artist.

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

  But not even artists. Everybody. I mean, in other words, they have people who have never been in a successful marriage longer than 12 weeks, giving you advice on marriage.

• 2:08:29Joe Rogan?

  That's true.

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  I'm thinking about this.

• 2:08:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:31Speaker 02

  You know, if I were you, I'd do this. My answer is, if you ever want to find out about anything, don't ask anybody young. Ask old people. They've been through the blitz of World War II. They've been through the Depression. They've been through the crisis. Don't ask anybody young. Why? Because if it comes on the phone, you don't know anything. If you want some real good advice, when I got to Motown, who did I ask first? Marvin.

• 2:09:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  You think he knows?

• 2:09:05Joe Rogan?

  He knows.

• 2:09:05Speaker 02

  Crazy as he can be, but it doesn't matter.

• 2:09:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:09:08Speaker 02

  He was the creative killer. Who did I ask about record business? Barry. Ahmet Ertegun.

• 2:09:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  Come on, guys. These guys were the most incredible people on the planet. And so what I'm saying to you is, right now, we're taking advice from people who just graduated from nothing.

• 2:09:28Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  What are you coming from? So that's why I only, I just find it very interesting that before I ask the question of anything, I go, how did you do it first?

• 2:09:42Speaker 02

  And you say, well, this is my first time doing it. Thank you.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  I'll talk to you later.

• 2:09:49Joe Rogan?

  It's just bizarre that the the industry needs people like that. It's just a bad setup. It's a bad set. It's like it doesn't maximize creative output. It gets in the way.

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you, it's we're so far down the road now because what happens now is it it all became legitimate when I say that I not that I was a a nice

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  a nice fan of of gangsters, but but it's something rewarding about giving someone a chance to play. Here's some money, go play. Now, what's gonna happen is he's either gonna win

• 2:10:38Speaker 02

  or you're gonna lose. But if you win, you might get a group called The Beatles. If you win, you might get a group out of San Francisco called Sly and the Stones. If you win, you might get a group called The Temptations. If you win, you might get Diana Ross. If you win, you might get a Taylor Swift. You know what I'm saying? In other words, just just let the artist go.

• 2:11:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  Let him go. And that goes with everything. You know, there's there's people who, like I said, in in school, they're incredible academically. They can recite to you everything that's ever happened and will give you every, you know, backup to that. Now that we have chat G P T, it's not so much the same, but but the point is, and then there are those that go, I wrote a poem, I'd like you to hear it.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  Or I read a book, I want you to hear about it. I have an idea about going to Mars.

• 2:11:36Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, you just, I mean, the first thing is, before you become a genius, you have to take the responsibility of being an absolute idiot to everybody around you. An idiot is when you came up with your first idea. Lionel, where do you hear all your songs from? I hear them from the other side. Lionel's an idiot. Where did I say that? On a university campus. Now, when the world finally becomes attuned to your frequency, oh my god, you hear the word genius. The answer is, no, I'm still the idiot that suggested it from the beginning.

• 2:12:17Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think if you said that today, though, don't you think more people would be inclined to listen to you saying the songs? The ideas come from the other side?

• 2:12:25Speaker 02

  But now, yes.

• 2:12:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, now.

• 2:12:27Speaker 02

  But now, yes, because I can explain to them.

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  Because why? They trust me now.

• 2:12:33Joe Rogan?

  But even if they didn't know you now, I think that idea is more acceptable.

• 2:12:37Speaker 02

  Well, yes, yeah, now, yes, you're right, because now we've opened that channel up now to where people can talk like that.

• 2:12:41Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 2:12:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  But back then, nineteen seventy, sixty-nine, sixty-eight.

• 2:12:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  Talking like that means Lionel is on either LSD

• 2:12:55Speaker 02

  or some kind of tab. He's on some kind of tab, yeah. But he's definitely not in his right mind.

• 2:13:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, or he's mentally unwell.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  You understand, exactly.

• 2:13:03Joe Rogan?

  And that just aids in his brilliance, but he's crazy.

• 2:13:05Speaker 02

  He's crazy, the bedbug.

• 2:13:06Joe Rogan?

  He's a genius maniac.

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. But he won't be here long.

• 2:13:10Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:10Joe Rogan?

  That's like Kanye West.

• 2:13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll get.

• 2:13:13Joe Rogan?

  Genius maniac.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  We'll get him to rehab as soon as possible.

• 2:13:16Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:18Joe Rogan?

  I mean, that's what they were doing a lot of Kanye's career, just trying to manage his insanity. That also led to this insane creative output.

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest with you. Richard Pryor, I use this as my perfect example. I mean, I would just wait for his next, what's coming out of his mouth.

• 2:13:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  And then one day, he sobered up.

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  And couldn't get funny. And I kept thinking, what just happened? Well, he went to rehab. Well, yeah, I know, but where's the?

• 2:13:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  Where's your edge? And now, so, you know, some, there's a word for it, there's a phrase for it, where you learn your craft under the influence of. And if you happen to not know how you got there off of the influence, that when you finally get off of it, you don't know how to get back to it. Unless you go back on it.

• 2:14:12Joe Rogan?

  Even if you do, it's a different place. Like, my, one of my favorite examples of this is Stephen King. I love.

• 2:14:21Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 2:14:21Joe Rogan?

  Early Stephen King.

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 2:14:22Joe Rogan?

  If you listen, I mean, if you read, rather, The Shining, Tom

• 2:14:28Joe Rogan?

  Tommyknockers, I mean misery.

• 2:14:32Joe Rogan?

  Kujo, Pet Sematary, but this was cocaine snorting, beer drinking, out of his fucking mind. Like, he, he wrote entire books and doesn't remember anything about writing them.

• 2:14:46Speaker 02

  To be in their presence is one of the most incredible things you'll ever see and hear and experience in your life. Again, I got to the point where if I was just allowed in the room. Remember now, I mean, I was allowed in the room when Marvin and Stevie's and, oh god, I couldn't believe it.

• 2:15:11Joe Rogan?

  Did you grasp that historically at the time, like what that meant?

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  I couldn't breathe. Did I grasp it? I couldn't breathe.

• 2:15:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:20Speaker 02

  I mean, do you know what this was? This was the gift of life. I mean, that's Barry Gordy. Right. You know what Barry Gordy was back in the day? God. He existed on the moon somewhere. You know, Hollindoian Holland. These were, you know, this is, they're on the moon. Aretha Franklin and, and Ahmet Ertegun and King Curtis and this, this is the moon people, man. Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, these are moon people.

• 2:15:57Speaker 02

  And to have them sit in a room, not in a seminar, in their living room, saying, you know what, let me tell you a story about.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  Now, there's one part of me going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And then there's another part of me going, holy shit. I'm sitting here listening to a friggin' Barry Gordy and Sidney Poitier. You follow me?

• 2:16:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:22Speaker 02

  How did I get in that room? So another title it was gonna be was Fly on the Wall, but I just didn't want to be a fly. But, but the point is, I mean, I had the opportunity, one-on-one, not in a TED Talk. But one-on-one with some of the greatest people of our time.

• 2:16:43Joe Rogan?

  Richard Pryor.

• 2:16:44Speaker 02

  Oh, my god, man. Richard was wonderful. I mean, well, I mean, Paul Mooney, Richard Pryor, and.

• 2:16:55Joe Rogan?

  I knew Mooney real well.

• 2:16:56Speaker 02

  I mean, this is, again, totally out of his mind, totally funny, but more importantly, totally in charge. I mean, he knew his, I saw his frustration because they were trying to deal with him commercially. They discovered that maybe he might be able to be on network television. Eh, wrong answer, you know? But he was so gifted in presenting the street struggle, and you laughed about it. Ms. Rudolph was Ms. Rudolph, man. I mean, when he said Ms. Rudolph, everybody knew what you're talking

• 2:17:37Speaker 02

  about, you know? Or, you know, "They put me in jail for shooting my car."

• 2:17:45Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, but to know him off camera, to know him off the stage, you know? What I found a lot about my comedian friends is, you know, there's a, to make things funny, you have to take dark things and make them funny.

• 2:18:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:07Speaker 02

  But they stay most of the time in darkness. And Richard was in darkness a lot of times, a lot of the time of his life.

• 2:18:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that was surprising to people, you know? When you see a guy that's so funny and so loved, you see, assume his life must be amazing. But he was struggling all the time.

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 2:18:26Joe Rogan?

  I mean, he later revealed that, you know, the story from Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling, which is like loosely based around his life.

• 2:18:34Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 2:18:35Joe Rogan?

  He accidentally caught on fire.

• 2:18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:37Joe Rogan?

  But in real life, he set himself on fire.

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  Of course he did.

• 2:18:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean.

• 2:18:44Speaker 02

  The book, the book that I just finished. It's, it's the struggle. Everyone keeps saying, well, did you start off in the rural south? Forget the rural south. I was struggling with myself, which is what everybody struggles with. So the answer is, it, it's not that I made it. It's the, who was I struggling with?

• 2:19:06Joe Rogan?

  You were struggling with yourself.

• 2:19:07Speaker 02

  And all of us are struggling with ourselves.

• 2:19:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:10Speaker 02

  That's what made the book to me so meaningful, because people will walk back to me and go, Lionel, I felt the same way. Now, you know what that's called in my business? A hit record. When you write a song and everybody comes back to you and says, man, I was feeling the same way, you got a hit record.

• 2:19:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:25Speaker 02

  Well, when you can write in a book vulnerability, where you can write in a book fear, where you can write in a book, I'm not sure. I wasn't sure. I was scared. They go, how could you be scared and, and do all that? And the answer is, step forward.

• 2:19:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  Step forward. Scared to death. We're all scared to death. Are you kidding me? You know, we don't know what we're doing from day to day. It's just we work it out.

• 2:19:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:55Speaker 02

  But it's not where we, all this confidence and crap. No, no, no, no. And as time goes on, you kind of develop a little, okay. And it's called filling out your skin as time goes on.

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  You get a little bit more confident in the fact that I, I kind of know what I'm doing.

• 2:20:09Joe Rogan?

  Becoming a professional.

• 2:20:10Speaker 02

  There you go. But for the beginning stages of your life, what the hell you doing?

• 2:20:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:14Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 2:20:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you can't. Yeah, but it's just very valuable for people to hear that from someone that's very successful. Because people just look at a guy like you and go, he's just Lionel Richie. I mean, it's just, it is what it is. You know what I mean?

• 2:20:29Speaker 02

  I know.

• 2:20:30Joe Rogan?

  Must be nice.

• 2:20:30Speaker 02

  I know.

• 2:20:31Joe Rogan?

  That's how they look at it.

• 2:20:32Speaker 02

  I know, I know.

• 2:20:32Joe Rogan?

  They don't think of, oh, that's a bizarre path that a human being took to superstardom.

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

  It's a strange.

• 2:20:39Speaker 02

  And at any one point in the life, I could have turned around and said, I quit.

• 2:20:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and that's, that's very valuable for. People to hear as well and people will in the fact that you're so honest and you're so open about things it helps so much because when people read that they'll they'll think of themselves and the moments where they've struggled or the moments where they've been unsure of themselves or not sure what to do or wanted to quit and didn't.

• 2:21:01Speaker 02

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 2:21:02Joe Rogan?

  It's like this is universal.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:21:03Joe Rogan?

  It's universal and the difference between Lionel Richie and Sandy Smith out there who's listening to this is that Sandy Smith hasn't started taking her first steps.

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13Joe Rogan?

  And that if she keeps going down that line.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:21:15Joe Rogan?

  She could be her.

• 2:21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:17Joe Rogan?

  You know, it's just.

• 2:21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:18Joe Rogan?

  It's just keep going.

• 2:21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:20Joe Rogan?

  It's the there's there's talent, there's gifts of God, there's all sorts of things. But one of those things that they all have in common, if you know of them, it's they kept going.

• 2:21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:29Joe Rogan?

  Like Jimi Hendrix clearly obviously was a godly gift.

• 2:21:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:21:33Joe Rogan?

  Gifted, just gifted, something special.

• 2:21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:35Joe Rogan?

  Also worked like a motherfucker.

• 2:21:38Speaker 02

  Like the work, the work ethic was insane.

• 2:21:42Joe Rogan?

  Has to be.

• 2:21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:43Joe Rogan?

  Think about how many records Nas wrote. They were releasing records for years after his death.

• 2:21:47Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 2:21:48Joe Rogan?

  Years after his death.

• 2:21:49Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 2:21:49Joe Rogan?

  Cause he never left the studio.

• 2:21:50Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 2:21:50Joe Rogan?

  It just worked.

• 2:21:51Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 2:21:51Joe Rogan?

  That's how you get that good.

• 2:21:52Speaker 02

  But that's how you get there.

• 2:21:53Joe Rogan?

  You see Biggie on the streets in Brooklyn when he was 17 years old, you're like, oh, okay.

• 2:21:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:21:57Joe Rogan?

  With sheets of paper.

• 2:21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:59Joe Rogan?

  Rapping with perfect flow at 17, you're like, okay.

• 2:22:01Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 2:22:02Joe Rogan?

  You just go.

• 2:22:03Speaker 02

  Or you get around major corporate leaders and you say to myself, oh my God, you built this company. I say, I was bankrupt 12 times.

• 2:22:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying? Oh, you were?

• 2:22:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:14Speaker 02

  All you remember was the smash.

• 2:22:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:16Speaker 02

  But you don't remember, oh, what, what are you talking about? You know, in other words, how many times can you take no? How many times can you take rejection?

• 2:22:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:25Speaker 02

  How many times can you go, I quit? And then you wait for the next moment, go, I got another idea.

• 2:22:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:30Speaker 02

  Cause the, the world is designed to make you go away.

• 2:22:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

  It's very simple.

• 2:22:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:22:37Speaker 02

  Don't get psyched out. I tell the kids on, on American Idol, don't get psyched out. Just because this person can hit every note perfectly and you have this cracky voice and it's, it's, but I can't remember this perfect voice, but I can remember your cracky voice.

• 2:22:53Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:22:54Speaker 02

  That means you've got a personality. This is a great karaoke singer over here.

• 2:23:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:01Speaker 02

  Perfect notes don't work.

• 2:23:02Joe Rogan?

  Versus something authentic that really resonates with you.

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 2:23:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:06Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 2:23:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:08Speaker 02

  I wanna know what your little quirk is. What's that, what's that thing?

• 2:23:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:13Speaker 02

  You know, Cardi B is Cardi B for a reason.

• 2:23:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:15Speaker 02

  Do you follow what I'm saying? There's a lot of folks that came along.

• 2:23:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:19Speaker 02

  Cardi B is Cardi, I mean, I'm just using her as one example. But the wonderful thing about it is she came with a personality. She came with a thing.

• 2:23:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:27Speaker 02

  You know?

• 2:23:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:28Speaker 02

  And, and, and to me, that's the quality I'm looking for, not only in the music business, but in life. Okay, so you're rich. Okay, so, but who are you?

• 2:23:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:40Speaker 02

  What, what, what's your, what's your thing? What's your, who are you?

• 2:23:44Joe Rogan?

  Do I like being around you?

• 2:23:45Speaker 02

  Do I like being around you? Are you, tell me what's your, what is it?

• 2:23:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:48Speaker 02

  Otherwise, you're just rich. Okay.

• 2:23:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:51Speaker 02

  And you got stuff. Okay. But who are you?

• 2:23:55Joe Rogan?

  Right. You have a shitty foundation in your house.

• 2:23:58Speaker 02

  Exactly, right.

• 2:24:00Joe Rogan?

  You have a beautiful house on a shitty foundation.

• 2:24:02Speaker 02

  Oh, you got no taste at all.

• 2:24:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:03Speaker 02

  There's a lot of no taste.

• 2:24:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, listen, Lionel, it's been a real honor having you on here, man, and a real pleasure. And I really enjoyed talking to you, man. It's fascinating conversation, and I really applaud your honesty and your, your insight into your life. It's, it's amazing. It's really awesome.

• 2:24:21Speaker 02

  Well, I gotta be honest with you. There's an old expression that goes, uh, sometimes you don't wanna meet the person because they may not be what you thought they were. You know? Uh, you're exactly who I thought.

• 2:24:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I mean, cause you know, you've mastered this personality where you can sit down and talk to just about everybody. And on the days when you struggle with trying to make a communication with somebody and it doesn't work out, I go, I understand why it didn't work out. Because, you know, you, you, sometimes you have a block right in front of you, go, okay, I just have to deal with the block.

• 2:24:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56Speaker 02

  But I've enjoyed this, man.

• 2:24:56Joe Rogan?

  I really have as well.

• 2:24:58Speaker 02

  Lot of fun, lot of fun.

• 2:24:59Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. And best of luck with everything. And you've already had Best of Luck.

• 2:25:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, the book, come on.

• 2:25:05Joe Rogan?

  Truly, Lionel Richie, out now. Did you do the audio version?

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  We did the, I did not do the audio version.

• 2:25:10Joe Rogan?

  Somebody else did it?

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  I did, I swear to you, I did not do it.

• 2:25:17Joe Rogan?

  How?

• 2:25:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know what it was. If you know Lionel Richie, okay, let me tell you something.

• 2:25:24Speaker 02

  For the time it took me to write this book.

• 2:25:28Speaker 02

  Two and a half years. Okay, so let me just, let me be honest with you. You don't want me to read this book because I'd go, I don't want to put that in, guys. Can I change that one line? You follow me?

• 2:25:40Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:25:41Speaker 02

  So I keep creating, I keep creating. And so it's just one of those things.

• 2:25:47Joe Rogan?

  The dude who read it at least sound a little like you?

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no, wait, wait, I'm drawing a blank. Why am I drawing, drawing a blank? Blair, oh, geez. Blair Underwood.

• 2:25:56Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:57Speaker 02

  Blair Underwood, I love, we, first of all, we kind of had kids in common. Our kids went to the same school. So when I say we had kids in common, no, we didn't have the same thing, no, no, but we had kids at the same time and so we met back then, but what I love about him is he understands the, I call it the middle-class approach to, to my life. In other words, he understood the fact that, did we grow up in the rural south, did we struggle, did we, no, no, it's not that kind of struggle. We had a struggle of understanding our identity and how to take that forward as artists. And he understood the humor. I love his voice because it's not so identifiable

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  that it, if it was a Morgan Freeman, I'm just giving that as a perfect example, and I love Morgan, but it's too identifiable. I want somebody who can tell a joke and it sound like Lionel.

• 2:26:49Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  He had that quality. And so when I, I said, no, no, I want you. We hit it off, well, his voice, you'll hear it.

• 2:26:57Joe Rogan?

  Understandable.

• 2:26:58Speaker 02

  You'll, you'll understand.

• 2:26:59Joe Rogan?

  Well, thank you, Lionel, thank you again, and best of luck again with everything. Really appreciate it.

• 2:27:03Speaker 02

  Thanks, dude.

• 2:27:04Joe Rogan?

  It was awesome. Bye, everybody.

• 2:27:20Joe Rogan?

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• 2:28:02Joe Rogan?

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