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April 25, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

48:47

3270 The LIFE and DEATH of PRINCE

A deep look into the life and death of Prince Rogers Nelson. http://www.fdrurl.com/princeFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate

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	Listen, I don't want to make this about me.
	Obviously, Prince died recently, and for those who follow and are inspired by significant Mount Vesuvius-style eruptions of creative and musical genius, it's a tragic thing.
	There is, of course, since I don't particularly feel older on the inside than I was when I was 17, it is a grim reminder of the Vesuvian ashes of mortality falling down around us as we begin our grim march to the great beyond.
	And when you see people in the full flower of youth and vitality and then kind of lose track of them, as I think a lot of people who are sort of post-Patman soundtrack did with Prince, it just reminds you one day closer to death that we all get with every sunrise. it just reminds you one day closer to death that Every sunrise is a sunset.
	And I never saw Prince live.
	I was very affected by his movie, Purple Rain, which I found unbelievably shocking.
	Kind of almost like an assault on the senses.
	I remember watching the movie in the theater when I was younger.
	Young now, I guess.
	And the falsetto kind of got on my nerves for a while.
	It wasn't quite as fluid as, say, Somerville's, Jimmy Somerville's falsetto or Freddie Mercury's falsetto.
	But falsetto kind of got to me after a while, got a little grating.
	And I remember when he first started singing Darling Nikki, I was like, oh good, it's a non-falsetto song.
	And then he launched into talking about her masturbating with a magazine.
	I just remember being...
	I don't want to sound all kinds of square, but really, really shocked by what was going on on the screen.
	And I also got a sense of the agony of Prince's childhood, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.
	But my only other memory in particular is I used to, after high school, to make money to go to college, I was a goldpanner and prospector for a while.
	And I came into town once and had spent quite a bit of time in the bush, had the crap shower and a shave that's necessary, and I ended up going dancing at a local bar, and they played one of my favorite dance songs of all time, the song Kiss, which actually Prince gave to another band and then took it back the next day, saying it's too good.
	He recorded it himself.
	A fantastic dance song.
	And I just busted eight different kinds of moves, eight different waves from Sunday, and And the next day, I was picking up some clothes in a town to the next, like the next town over.
	And the guy said, hey, do you want me to put on prints so you can dance to it?
	And I just remember thinking, wow, I guess word travels around when someone lets themselves flail with the music.
	I kind of lost track of Prince, as I did on sort of a lot of contemporary music.
	You know, you get older, you get a career, become a dad, a husband, and you just lose a bit more track of contemporary music, though my daughter's bringing me back into that to some degree.
	But I'd sort of lost track of him in the 2000s and hadn't really heard much of him.
	I knew he still toured and I also knew that he'd released like an album a year.
	for the past 16 years but I didn't know any of them I bought an album of his last about 15 years ago played it once or twice and it never particularly grabbed me although I do remember being quite impressed at what a wasp-like youthful waist he still had and I'd sort of lost track of him and then it was I guess a week or two ago that I read that his plane he was I guess going from one gig to another and his plane had to Execute an emergency landing because of a health issue.
	And I do remember thinking, hmm, that seems very strange.
	They said, oh, it's the flu.
	And I guess I'm old enough now that when a celebrity, particularly a musician, talks about the flu, I assume that they're either talking about withdrawal or overdosing.
	And I remember sort of putting a little mental bookmark at the time saying, well, let's keep track of this because...
	I mean, I know that the flu can kill you, even if you're relatively young and healthy, but it just seemed like a bit of an odd thing.
	And I wasn't sure what, again, I'm no doctor, but I wasn't sure what landing a plane would do if you have the flu.
	I mean, do you need to be rehydrated?
	What do I know?
	But I remember thinking that was kind of odd.
	And I also remember thinking that if it was anything to do with drugs, then he was going to enter a particularly dangerous phase of his life.
	And we'll get into sort of why that is In a few minutes.
	So Prince was found dead, of course, April 21, 2016.
	On the Thursday, April 14, right, so a week before, he performed what would turn out to be his final show at the Fox Theater in Atlanta at 10 p.m.
	Now Friday, April 15, this was hours after the show, he's traveling, of course, by private jet.
	The jet makes an emergency landing in Quad City, Illinois, because of his health.
	So he was taken to a local hospital by ambulance And my understanding as well is that he couldn't secure a private room in that hospital, and they wanted to keep him there for 24 hours.
	Now, a lot of this, just so you know, I'll put the links to this below, a lot of this is unconfirmed.
	So please understand, I'm surfing on a foamy cloud of speculation here, so don't take any of this as gospel, and obviously I'm going to keep tracking the story because I do find it very illustrative and instructive for reasons I'll...
	I'll get into.
	But my understanding is that he could not secure a private room.
	And so he, I guess, signed himself out against doctor's orders after about three hours, went on his way.
	And that may have proved to be a fairly dangerous or fatal decision.
	So about 8.30 a.m.
	the following morning, Prince tweeted to a fan that he was still on a, quote, cloud of purple intoxication.
	Now after his death, he was found in the elevator in his Paisley Park, 65,000 square foot home slash studio slash everything.
	And they sent out police, sent out paramedics.
	They were unable to resuscitate him.
	And just Friday, an autopsy was done.
	The cause of death has not been released, although there does seem to be no indication of foul play.
	The authorities have declined to comment on various reports.
	That Prince had been treated for a painkiller overdose when the plane landed.
	Now, his sometime collaborator, Sheila E., said on Friday that Prince had issues with his hip and knee, right, from his years of dancing, jumping off speakers, jumping off risers, on stage, generally in high heels, because he was like 5'1", nothing.
	And she says, well, he kept doing it because he loved it.
	Obviously, it was good for the crowd.
	But this may have been some cause for his painkiller use.
	He was actually seen in recent years using a cane.
	And this sort of reminds me of Michael Jackson, of course, who I did a video on when he died in 2009.
	Michael Jackson not only had, I would argue, fairly significant body dysmorphia issues, in that he was ridiculously skinny, but also had, you know, mashed up and broken feet, and I would assume was in constant pain because of his years of fairly extreme dancing.
	So, the story or the theory goes something like this, that Prince had some sort of overdose, this is a theory, Prince had some sort of overdose on his plane, And they had to land, and at the airport he was given what's called a save shot, which is an emergency shot of a particular antidote to opioid-style overdoses.
	And it just basically, it's like shaking your magic eraser.
	It just wipes out the traces of the drug within your system, and that was happened at the airport even before he got...
	To the hospital.
	Now, Cyril Wecht is a forensic psychologist, not linked to Prince's case in any way, said, quote, I would give overwhelming odds that tragically this is a drug death.
	When you rule out foul play, when there is no history of any kind of significant disease, when you rule out any kind of intervention, anything of an environmental nature, you come down to an autopsy that is essentially negative.
	And that probably means drugs.
	Now, he also went on to say, also, if they did have to give him a save shot when he overdosed, like everybody is saying, that removes all traces of drugs from your system.
	So we would have started to go into withdrawal and would have had to take a lot of drugs to feel okay again, which also could have killed him, right?
	So the save shot scrubs the drugs from your system and you go, I would assume, fairly quickly into a pretty staggering withdrawal because according to some reports, Prince's drug addiction had gone on for like a quarter century.
	Cyril went on to say, quote, You can't just stop taking these drugs when you've taken them for so long.
	But without knowing his drug history, doctors wouldn't have known that.
	It explains why he was spotted looking nervous.
	And pacing around at the pharmacy in the week before his death, right?
	So, of course, if there's an overdose on the plane, then the people on the plane would most likely scrub all the drugs, get rid of all the drugs, and then they do the safe shot to get the drugs out of his system.
	And if he's not going to tell the doctors about his drug addiction, and Prince did, according to reports of those around him, suffer some significant paranoia or fear about the medical establishment, if he hadn't told them, then he would have had to try and manage this overdose on his own.
	So, a source which you can, of course, question the veracity of, a fellow who calls himself a Dr.
	D, don't think he's actually licensed, said that he had met Prince during the filming of...
	Purple Rain, and that Prince was already addicted to opioids, largely due to what Dr.
	D referred to as a crippling case of stage fright.
	And he said that over the years that he was his drug dealer, Prince took two to three times the recommended doses.
	Of course, you build up a tolerance.
	And that Prince also began to use patches, like the Nicorette stuff, like the stuff you put on your arm, patches of fentanyl, which that's a synthetic opioid that is about 80 to 100 times more potent than morphine, And 40 to 50 times stronger than heroin.
	And so you wear them like these nicotine patches and they give you about 72 hours release of the drug through the skin into the bloodstream.
	And this drug dealer says that Prince would take the patch as well as taking the dilaudid.
	So it's the equivalent of smoking while you have a nicotine patch on.
	It's like having a constant supply of drugs.
	These patches, according to the drug dealer, sell for about $200 to $300 per patch.
	He says they come in boxes of five and I would sell Prince 20 boxes at a time.
	Now, the dealer says that Prince wasn't a party guy.
	He was doing these drugs so he could feel at ease around people.
	He said he needed the drugs because he was so nervous.
	He could be nervous in a room with just five people in it.
	So, you know, if he suffered from social anxiety disorder, this would be a form of self-medication.
	He said the prince was scared to go out in public, scared to talk to people, and didn't like to go on stage.
	According to the dealer, he had the worst case of stage fright I've ever seen.
	And, of course, a lot of performers rely on drugs to make them feel, you know, that big, massive, and confident on stage.
	But according to this dealer, he was by far the worst.
	He was always paranoid about doctors, so he wouldn't ask them for help.
	He had a phobia of the doctors.
	So to talk a little bit about where Prince came from and what may have driven these kinds of addictions, he was kind of, for me at least, a unique crossover artist between sort of black funk and soul and more white pop, and that may have come from his mixed heritage, and also he did have a pretty keen commercial sense.
	His artistic sensibilities to create his own personalized vision always seemed to be at war with the fact that he also needed to sell records because he was a profligate spender who burnt through unbelievable amounts of money and then would go on tours and because his tours were so extravagant, sometimes they would break even or cost him money and then finally began to rescue himself out of his financial hole later on in the 90s.
	So he had, of course, some significant influences, George Clinton, James Brown, Sly Stone, but also on the other side, people like Joni Mitchell and so on.
	He was a very innovative way in terms of delivering.
	He was very innovative in terms of delivering He was the first artist to release...
	One of his whole albums online.
	He was one of the first artists to set up his own self-financed record label.
	And he's actually even given away his music for free, Coldplay style.
	And that, combined with his epic battles with Warner Records, where he would show up to meetings having penciled the word slave on his face with eyeliner because they wanted him to produce records for him.
	And he said, well, I'm just going to give you stuff from Princess's Giant Vault, Posthumously release an album every year for the next 50 years and not even run out of material.
	As one of his employees said that he has 50 fully produced music videos that have never been released with costumes and sets and shots and editing and the whole thing.
	So he produced a lot more than he handed out in his epic battle with Warner in terms of getting his music out.
	Warner got upset with him because he produced so much material that he was kind of in competition with himself.
	And he was not usually a huge fan of doing a lot of promo and interviews and so on.
	And so he wrote the word sort of slave on him when he would go for these negotiations.
	But this kind of rubbed people the wrong way because a couple of years before he bragged about signing a hundred million dollar record deal.
	And it didn't really seem to jive with slavery as an institution as a whole.
	So people got a little bit upset about it.
	And he was always sort of courting the edge of what was acceptable for people.
	Now, Prince did say about his childhood, and if you want to know where these kinds of adult addictions come from, I would argue, and I'm not alone in arguing this, We'll talk about Gabor Mate, who's been on this show twice, about the sort of roots of these kinds of addictions.
	But he said, he said, I went through a lot when I was a boy.
	They called me sissy, punk, freak, and faggot.
	See, the girls loved you, but the boys hated you.
	They called me princess.
	And of course, you know, a bit of an odd name to have.
	As a young man, both of his parents were musicians.
	His mother, Matty Shaw, was a former jazz singer and his father was in a jazz trio.
	His father was part Italian.
	His mother had African-American, Native American and white roots or DNA. His father, John L. Nelson, Never quite broke out of the small time jazz gigging scene.
	And he said that he named his son after his jazz trio because he wanted his son to be able to achieve everything that he himself, John Nelson, was not able to achieve.
	And the degree of Prince's youthful success is truly spectacular.
	He did burst like a supernova onto the, not just the music scene, but the video scene.
	And the movie scene as well.
	Prince was the first artist since the Beatles to land, at the same time, a number one album, a number one single, and film, which he did at the age of 24 years old.
	And by the time he was 27, he had $27 million in the bank, by which my daughter has calculated that he earned $1 million a year.
	She's a math genius.
	Now, when he was a kid growing up, a lot of conflict between his parents.
	His parents divorced when Prince was very young, and he bounced around various places And music and the radio became a sort of form of escapism for him.
	And his father introduced him to piano at the age of seven.
	And just based on various reports I've read, Prince ended up mastering between 23 and 27 various instruments.
	And he, along with Stevie Wonder, is one of the few musicians who can actually play almost everything that is needed for his records at a professional level.
	He's weak in virtually nothing.
	And people don't know the degree to which Michael Jackson was a musician and particularly a drummer as well.
	Now, Prince has never spoken directly, to my knowledge at least, about the physical abuse that he supposedly suffered at the hands of his father.
	He has downplayed some of this later.
	He told Larry King that his father was just, quote, a very strict disciplinarian, but...
	It seems to have been a rather more serious situation than that.
	Prince has reportedly shared stories of his abuse with a few close friends.
	Susan Rogers was his engineer between 1983 and 1988 and worked on a bunch of his best-selling albums.
	And she said, In his childhood.
	And you can see this showing up in the movie Purple Rain.
	And also he's got a song, Papa, in which Prince sings, quote, Don't abuse children or else they turn out like me.
	Now his mother, Matty Shaw, remarried a couple of years after his parents split up.
	But the new guy, Haywood Baker, well, it was a bit of an unpleasant and conflict-prone relationship.
	Prince said, I disliked him immediately.
	He would bring us lots of presents all the time rather than sit down and talk with us and give us companionship.
	Now, one thing that happened, given that he had no relationship particularly with his father, he was actually estranged from his father for significant periods of his life.
	He didn't have a father around to teach him about sexuality, and Prince said that his mother taught him About sexuality by giving him a stack full of Playboy magazines and erotic literature.
	I'm not sure that's the best way to learn about sexuality.
	And that may have had something to do with his R-selected compulsive sexualization of just about everything he touched later on.
	And...
	Later, he had, well, quirks, right?
	So he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol of the combination between male and female, leading one wag to dub him Cymbalina, you know, for being a symbol.
	And his tour manager through most of the 80s said, quote, his mother basically walked away from him, and his father struggled to raise him and threw in the towel.
	It certainly doesn't add up to a very secure, well-rounded, And there are also reports that Prince recorded something called the Black Album, which he didn't release for seven years.
	While he was experimenting with ecstasy, he got the feeling or had the, I guess, paranoid idea that the Black Album was actually motivated by the devil.
	And so that was a big problem.
	Now, in 1985, there was a Rolling Stone journalist named Neil Carlin, and he went strolling around Minneapolis right after Purple Rain's extraordinary success.
	And Prince stopped him and pointed out, like, there was a phone booth, which I guess for young people is a tent for a non-portable iPhone.
	You put the quarter in before cell phones.
	And he said, over there is this cell phone.
	From which, quote, I called my dad and begged him to take me back.
	He said no.
	So I called my sister, Taika, and begged her to ask him.
	So she did, and afterwards told me all I had to do was call him back, tell him I was sorry, and he'd take me back.
	So I did.
	And he still said no.
	I sat crying at that phone booth for two hours.
	That's the last time I cried.
	Now that is an important statement.
	And again, the degree to which this is self-dramatization, I'm just going to, you know, accept this stuff at face value, but recognize that this is maybe, you know, self-promotion and so on.
	But when people go through, like he was, had no place to go, no place to live, he's bouncing back and forth between places, he tries to get his father to take him in, his father says no.
	As a great degree of betrayal.
	And then he says, that's the last time I cried.
	Oh, Christy Burke.
	Anyway.
	And so, at that moment, that's when a decision may have been made, within his heart, to shut down his feelings.
	To shut down his emotions.
	Now, that doesn't generally work in the long run.
	It gives you short-term relief, but not long-term relief.
	In fact, it comes at the expense of long-term stability.
	And, um...
	This combined with his social anxiety.
	There was 3,000 screaming fans one time were confronting him in Charlotte, North Carolina.
	He got really, really spooked, began to shy away from personal appearances.
	And early on, he had a sort of three-record deal at the beginning.
	He was one of the youngest people ever signed to Warner Brothers, and he had a sort of three-record deal.
	And the three records were supposed to, I think, cost about $175,000 combined, but he spent so much time and money on his first record that he was $500 short of the entire budget just for his first record.
	So he was supposed to go on tour, but he was...
	A very, very nervous and tentative live performer.
	And he would often, I guess this is sort of like a young Jim Morrison, would play with his back to the audience.
	Now, fairly, you know, to be fair, he did have a very nice, tiny Ken style butt, but not exactly what the audience wants to see.
	And so they got him up to try and do his tour because they needed to get their money back for the next albums.
	And his first couple of concerts, particularly the very first one, was just a complete...
	Because he put so much effort into making his first record that he was shocked and appalled that he couldn't do the same when the crowd was there.
	His cousin said, I kept trying to speak to him and he wouldn't even talk.
	He thought the show was shit.
	So the label, well, they had a bit of a challenge.
	What are we going to do with an artist who blew almost all of his three-album budget on one record?
	He actually just fired his management and he wasn't even ready to tour.
	This also happened when he opened for the Stones.
	Yeah, a little pressure there.
	And there were four acts on the bill.
	Prince was first, but he was booed offstage after 15 minutes.
	According to somebody who was there, he could only stay on for two or three songs.
	The crowd threw things at him.
	He made great records, but he couldn't perform on stage.
	Prince was so upset that he flew straight back to Minneapolis and refused to return for the second concert.
	Managers spent an hour and a half.
	Even Mick Jagger came in before Prince decided to change his mind and come back.
	And, you know, to his credit...
	He did end up staying, despite the fact that he got jeered and booed and people threw fruit at him.
	He did stay and sort of struggled through the next couple of sets, which, you know, I guess got some respect from some people.
	And Prince, in the early 2000s, he became a Jehovah's Witness, and this made him a little more difficult to book as a tour act because he sort of turned his back on his hyper-sexualized earlier books.
	It's a stable of hits, and that became more of a challenge.
	And this wasn't the only person this happened to.
	He had this young lady, one of his protégés.
	He was kind of famous for having sex with his girlfriends and then making an album with them.
	He spent $2 million for Carmen Electra to produce a rap album, which, as far as I understand it, did not have a huge amount of street cred and went pretty much nowhere.
	But one of his protégés was a woman named Vanity, and, well, you know, she...
	He'd get involved in someone new.
	She'd still be on tour.
	She said she was bullied by the tour people and sort of sat alone.
	And she ended up doing a lot of drugs.
	By the time she was in her 30s, she'd smoked crack cocaine for years.
	She actually found herself temporarily blind and deaf.
	She had already lost one kidney, had another kidney failure.
	She had internal bleeding, a stroke, and spent three days wired up to a life support machine.
	Unbelievably, she survived all of this and then became a born-again Christian, and she now runs a ministry in Fremont, California, and this is not wildly unusual.
	Now, his outlandish persona, I mean, this giant-haired, pompadute, purple sequined Ken doll of explicit sexuality, got him a lot of attention.
	And I remember, too, when I saw Purple Rain, there's a time, I think it's in Purple, he's doing a guitar solo, and he just gives this amazing smile of confidence and larger-than-life personality structure.
	And I just remember finding out now that it may have been because of his drug addiction, well...
	It busts the bubble just a little bit because I thought that was quite compelling.
	It was also interesting to me that one of the things that motivated him to do Papa Rain was the fact that Sylvester Stallone, who was a down-and-out broke actor when he wrote the script for Rocky, and the studio said, well, we'll give you a million dollars for the script for Rocky, but we want somebody else to star in it because you're a nobody, and he said, no, I'm going to star in it.
	The broke guy turned down a million dollars to pursue his dream, and that's why and how you become a star.
	But there were these two opposing poles of masculinity at this time, right?
	I mean, there was, of course, the Rocky stuff.
	I think by the time Purple Rain came out, Rocky was in its third round.
	Sort of hyper-masculine, big, buff, Italian, stallion kind of stuff.
	And then there was this diminutive, metrosexual eyeliner and, you know, all the kind of funky stuff he did with his dancing and all that.
	And it was quite, you know, who the hell are you supposed to be to get the girls?
	It was a little bit confusing.
	I guess it was a little bit easier back in the days of Ward Cleaver when you had to be stayed solid and responsible and never, ever exit your bedroom without wearing a shirt, tie, and jacket.
	There was some of the really macho stuff, and then there was all this really heavy eyeliner, lipstick, glam stuff, and the guys who looked gay got all the girls, and it just became kind of confusing, and then Migrant Crisis.
	Anyway, we'll connect those dots a little bit later.
	When he was a teen, Princeton School would go down the hallway, platform shoes, giant afro, a choker around his neck, looked pretty unique, and he was known at the time already as a gifted musician, How could he get noticed?
	According, you know, outlandish outfits, he's a tiny skinny kid from a broken home.
	He tries to get noticed that way.
	According to someone who knew him at the time, he was trying to be cute and get attention.
	He didn't get it at home.
	A lot of people felt sorry for him.
	And of course, isn't that the pull?
	People start off feeling sorry for you, you achieve giant fame and wealth, and people envy you, and then when they hear about your passing, if it's grim, well, they then feel sorry for you again.
	Because look, the guy sold over 100 million records, got seven Grammys, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar.
	But still, the fact that his parents split when he was two was a big problem, and we'll talk about that a little bit in a moment.
	So he was shy, but desperate for attention.
	He was sexually compulsive, I would argue, and then found religion.
	He courted fame and made himself as much of a, in the public eye as possible, then became a sort of recluse.
	And yet, that whole thread of musical genius continues throughout his life, and the legacy of his compositions is truly, truly staggering.
	Now, the fact that Prince lived the life that his father dreamed of is not unknown.
	I think Carl Jung said that nothing has more effect on a young person's life than the unlived life of his parents.
	Hey, my mom wanted to be a public intellectual.
	I can't imagine where my drive comes from.
	And so there was that aspect.
	And there was also poverty, you know, significant poverty.
	Prince once said, we used to go to McDonald's.
	I didn't have any money, so I'd just stand outside and smell stuff.
	Poverty makes people angry, brings out their worst side.
	I was very bitter when I was young.
	I was insecure, and I'd attack anybody.
	So, Prince was, of course, bullied at school, but also suffered with epilepsy from birth.
	Now, he said, I used to have seizures when I was young.
	From that point, I've been having to deal with a lot of things, getting teased in school, and early in my career, I tried to compensate by being as flashy and as noisy as I could.
	And it's not uncommon for people who have a different kind of look, and I actually think he was a very handsome man, but when you have a different kind of look, if you pour enough talent and charisma into that look, you can actually move the needle of sexual market value closer to where you came from.
	Well, he joined his first band when he was 14, reportedly wrote his first song when he was 7.
	It was a band called Grand Central, then another group, 94 East, and at 19, 19 years old, Warner Brothers, youngest ever signing, and he fought hard, and this is an amazing amount of confidence at 19, he fought hard.
	For complete artistic control, absolutely unheard of at the time, and that is some very, very impressive dedication to his own vision.
	His dedication and his workaholism were staggering.
	He would burn through engineers like a compulsive smoker goes through matches.
	He once fired a keyboard player for looking at his watch during a rehearsal.
	Hey, are you not committed?
	Do you have someplace else you want to go?
	And he brought, he tried to work with some issues around gun control and war and so on.
	But at least what I remember the most, you know, sex, compulsive sex, masturbation, incest, blowjobs, you name it.
	And very quirky, right?
	So there was an old TV show called American Bandstand.
	The host Dick Clark said he was one of the most difficult artists he'd met.
	In one of these interviews, the band had decided to answer no questions.
	So the guy said, how long have you been together?
	Prince just held up.
	The number four, with his fingers, didn't say anything.
	And 1978, with his first album, For You, the rumor is he actually played every single instrument.
	And that is his second album, Prince, a year later, the track I Want to Be Your Lover.
	And it's tough to find some of this stuff on YouTube because he was pretty compulsive about controlling some of his rights.
	It was very big.
	The album Dirty Mind.
	I just remember flipping through it in the record store, being a little shocked because he's on the cover wearing a thong.
	To be fair, again, he is one of the few guys who can pull off a thong.
	He's not like a sunburnt elderly German tourist on the beach that makes you want to gouge out your own eyeballs with a tent pole.
	And he had a couple of other albums.
	And of course, in 1982...
	His album, 1999, you know, tonight I'm going to party, three million copies.
	And this was, of course, you know, they call him black, but, you know, obviously he was mixed race.
	But I guess like Michael Jackson, who was a combination of Michael Jackson and, I don't know, let's say Elizabeth Taylor, hard to say.
	But this was during the rise of MTV, and Prince was one of the first black artists to get into the mass market.
	Little Red Corvette, I think, came out a couple of months before Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, and they were one of the first black influence or black recorded albums or songs to be played on heavy rotation on MTV. And there was supposed to be this big competition between the two.
	They had fierce battles of basketball and ping pong when they met up.
	But of course, Michael Jackson, his biggest selling album, and I still think the biggest selling album of all time, Thriller, came out eight months before Prince put out his most successful album, Purple Rain.
	Purple Rain, dedicated to Prince's father, sold 22 million copies around the globe.
	And of course, an epic title track, Purple Rain.
	When he played the Super Bowl in 07, and while he was doing Purple Rain, it started to rain.
	It's pretty cool.
	And of course, When Doves Cry, and one of my personal favorites, Let's Go Crazy, and I Would Die For You, he just was a true fountain of amazing talent and energy.
	Now, apparently he's died worth about $300 million.
	And the value of his catalog in the future is estimated at half a billion dollars.
	So we're talking about $800 million.
	Who's going to get it?
	Who's going to get it?
	Well, he's got a sister.
	But his sister, well, had a bit of a rough life, was a singer, but never quite broke through.
	And she...
	Welcome to my show!
	Welcome to my show!
	He was married twice, and what happened was he had a son, but his son only lived for a week, was born with a particular genetic disorder of the skull, and his son only lived for a week and then died.
	And he had this kind of weird interview afterwards with...
	Oprah Winfrey, where he was walking around showing her the nursery as if the son was still alive and referred to his son as still being alive a couple of times afterwards.
	But as he said, he just decided to not deal with his pain.
	He threw himself into work.
	He was doing concerts like three days or promotions three days after his son died and all that.
	It was a huge, I guess, dissociation or rejection of emotions which maybe had kind of followed him from that phone booth that he last cried in when his father rejected him.
	Also, there's probably a whole bunch of songs you didn't know that he wrote.
	Of course, you probably know Sinet O'Connor's Nothing Compares to You.
	She covered his song in 1990 and was very famous.
	And he once demanded she come down to Paisley Park and said that she was using too much bad language in her interviews.
	According to Sinet O'Connor, she said, I told him to fuck off.
	He got violent.
	I had to escape out of his house at five in the morning.
	I think she also claimed she spat at him.
	And I just love being half Irish, don't you?
	And you probably maybe know that the Mangles' Manic Monday, which I think Leonard Nimoy's niece was in the band.
	Why do I know these things?
	Why can I not remember my phone number?
	Anyway, so he just wrote a whole bunch of songs for other people.
	And you can look some of these up.
	We'll put a link below to like 12 songs you didn't know were written by...
	So after his son died due to Pfeiffer syndrome, his wife, who was a belly dancer, he met when she was 16 and said, that's the girl I'm going to marry, but waited, obviously, a little bit of time.
	I think they got married when she was 21 or 22.
	She also then had a miscarriage, and this was tough, you know.
	The loss of a child brings couples closer together, as he said, or drives them further apart, and sadly, their relationship went the second way.
	So, he found religion.
	Apparently his mother, when she was dying, demanded or begged him to take on religion so he became a Jehovah's Witness.
	So he stopped performing a lot of his X-rated material, which made it a little bit tricky for people to enjoy his live acts as much.
	So as I was saying, you know, in the past 16 years, 16 albums.
	2004 Musicology, a very, very famous album.
	2004, the year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
	I'm pretty sure he showed up wearing more than underpants for that, although I wouldn't put a huge amount of money on it.
	So, for thousands of years, philosophers and thinkers have been saying to people, look, fame, talents, looks, money, this is not going to make you happy.
	And Prince said this.
	He said, look, I make these gold records, I hang them on the wall.
	They just sit there gathering dust.
	They don't Make me happy.
	And this compulsive chasing, this workaholism, this feeling of not-enoughness, that I can't just be myself in the world.
	I can't just be myself with those around me.
	I have to be me plus.
	Me plus.
	And I talked about this when I talked about the death of Robin Williams, which you should check out.
	We'll put a link to that below.
	Can you be...
	Who you are and be enough for those around you.
	This doesn't mean don't try to do great things.
	I'm certainly trying to do great things with my life.
	But can you be satisfied with who you are?
	Because it seems to me that Prince had, you know, this anxiety, which the social anxiety, this performance anxiety, which had been covered up by this, again, potentially, if it's true, quarter century of opioid addiction.
	And of course, you know, the opioids mellow you out, and then you need speed to bring you back up, which according to the drug dealer was supplied.
	Can you just be who you are or do you have to put on a show for people to find you worthwhile?
	If you're an addict and the addict is profitable for those around you and Prince did hire a lot of his friends and a lot of people that he knew to the detriment of his business empire, Paisley Park was a disaster.
	His accountant said, you know, this is the line going down, and that's the cost, and this is the line going up, and that's the expenses, and it just never quite sunk into Prince.
	Prince would spend half a million dollars a year just to have his studio at his Paisley Park compound fully staffed, 24-7, just in case.
	He wanted to record anything and that was incredibly expensive.
	So, can you just be who you are?
	Once you get that kind of fame and that, if you are addicted, the people around you aren't going to mess with your addictions because if you are an addict, of course, you're going to be very aggressive in general towards people.
	Who question the value of your addiction.
	So you end up, if you are addicted or compulsive or a workaholic, you end up with people around you who are profiting from your dysfunction and therefore don't have any very strong Reason to help you get better.
	And I think this is one of the things that when he had, if he had the OD and then he got this safe shot and they cleared out the drugs from his system and he didn't consult with doctors to say, listen, I've had this long-term addiction.
	I'm going to need, I'm going to wean myself off this stuff.
	I'm going to need to be under medical supervision.
	He basically went back to self-medicating without a doctor's advice.
	And that may have been, of course, what killed him.
	We'll find out.
	Over time, the police are currently questioning all of the people who were on that plane to find out what actually happened and if there were drugs involved, in which case, well, it might be a rather exciting time for them.
	So, just to end up, and I appreciate you listening to this stuff.
	I hope it's helpful.
	Just to end up, so Gabor Mate, who is a Canadian physician, works for the downtown east side, works with a lot of drug addicts, His argument is that when you have a lot of deprivation, if your feelings aren't mirrored, you know, we're not born with any capacity to manage our own feelings.
	That's something we learn through eye contact, through mirroring, through empathy, through sympathy from a loving caregiver.
	If you don't get that, then you're going to grow up with your body being short of endorphins or short of dopamine receptors, and you're just not going to be able to feel as happy, right?
	If you just say the average well-tended child grows up to a person with an average happiness of 100, well, if they take a drug, they go to like 120, 130, but then they settle down to 100 again.
	It's like, okay, so this is why most people who try these drugs don't become addicts.
	But if you come from a disturbed, dysfunctional, brutalized childhood, Say, where your parents divorce when you're two, and there may be indications of physical abuse, and you don't get along with the stepdad, and you've got no place to stay, and you're poor, and you're bullied at school, and you're lonely, and you've got epilepsy, you know, the deck's somewhat stacked against you.
	And you're five foot one, which again is not hugely problematic, but in combination with all the other things.
	Then what happens is you're growing up at like happiness level of 20 or 30, and then you take the drug and you go to 100.
	And you feel what it's like to be normal.
	To feel not high, but average.
	Most addicts, in my opinion, they don't take drugs, they don't pursue work, or sexually compulsive, or drink, or whatever it is that they're doing.
	They don't do that to feel high.
	They do that to feel normal.
	And then what happens is, they go from 20 or 30 to 100, and then they go down to 10.
	Now 20 or 30 was kind of bearable when they didn't know any better, but when they lived life without pain for a couple of hours or a couple of days, and they go back down to 10, they gotta get just even back to where they were.
	So Gabor Maté has said, quote, All addiction is an escape from pain.
	All addictions come from emotional loss and exist to soothe the pain resulting from that loss.
	Or as he's pointed out, one heroin addict said that the first time she took heroin, it felt like a warm hug.
	Early neglect and abuse affects the brain development of a child.
	In particular...
	The system of self-soothing brain chemicals, serotonin, endorphins, that help make us sort of healthy and happy and loving and contented human beings.
	The neurochemistry of the brain is strongly affected by the environment during infancy and early childhood development.
	He says, we know that the majority of chronically hardcore substance-dependent adults lived as infants and children under conditions of severe adversity.
	Their predisposition to addiction was programmed in their early years.
	Their brains never had a chance.
	And he's saying addiction is occurring massively throughout Western society because so many of us have this emptiness within us.
	We've got no particular community, no large or long-term family relations.
	No attunement in infancy, people being dumped in daycare with stressed parents and so on.
	So if you have a mother who's in tune or a father who's in tune with your emotional state, being present, reflecting, understanding, that's how you build the empathy bridge to other human beings.
	If you don't have that, you feel isolated, alone, sting style all the time.
	He says attunement is the real language of love, the conduit by which the pre-verbal child can realize that she is loved.
	And it may be, as the doctor points out, that it's not because the parents don't love you.
	They could be depressed.
	They could be stressed.
	They could be broke.
	They could be facing their own health issues.
	There could be some crisis that keeps them away.
	There could be fighting between the parents.
	And this...
	It can cause things to go haywire, to become miswired in the infant's brain.
	And that can contribute to addiction, the potential for addiction later in life.
	So if you've had this kind of harsh childhood, I'm a big fan of talk therapy myself, but it's just important to understand.
	Gabor Mate's book is called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
	And it's really, really important to, if you know people, it doesn't have to be you.
	It's important stuff to know.
	So poor attunement if you don't have a loving companion early on in your life.
	You get fewer brain receptors of dopamine.
	And these are the brain chemicals and neurotransmitters.
	They send messages of incentive and reward and happiness.
	And so if you don't have this normally developed dopamine system, The doctor says you're more likely to crave things like nicotine or cocaine or caffeine and so on.
	Cocaine in particular.
	And what does it do?
	It increases dopamine levels.
	It triggers these wild feelings of elation.
	It wears off very quickly.
	And this is why...
	Coke addicts need to get it back, need to get it back, need to get it back.
	And as he also points out, it's a 10 to 1 steal to money ratio.
	So if you've got a $3,000 a month cocaine habit, if you don't have that kind of money, you need to steal $30,000 worth of stuff in order to pay for that habit.
	So in the absence of this internal contentment of this peace of mind, we look for externals.
	That's what he calls them, externals, the status.
	Work achievement, money, looks.
	Do I look good enough?
	Do I have enough abs?
	And can I raise my status in some other way?
	And this also is where I think people get cruel because they want to gain endorphins by putting down others and feeling superior themselves.
	So it may have something to do with sadism.
	Again, these are all just my particular opinions.
	But...
	It is a chilling thing to sort of understand and to recognize and to realize.
	Maybe you've seen this in yourself.
	Or maybe you've seen this hopefully not just in yourself or not at all in yourself but in other people that pity often provokes actions which result in envy.
	So you feel pitied, you feel humiliated, you feel you have low sexual market value or low social value.
	And so you pour yourself into becoming greater than you were, which provokes envy.
	But envy is not a cure for pity, because both are states of inequality.
	If you pity someone, you feel above them.
	If you envy them, you are below looking at them.
	None of these are equal states.
	And this inequality showed up in Prince's relationships all the time.
	He was very controlling of his band.
	His band was constantly chafing.
	His series of bandmates were constantly chafing under his control.
	His first wife said she was never allowed to call him.
	She always had to wait for him to call her.
	So control freaks, if that's what he was, it's not an equal.
	You can only find soothing and comfort in relationships of equality.
	And to constantly either feel humiliated and below people or in command and control of them is going to provoke loneliness.
	There is no There's no external solution to the problem of insecurity, to the problem of not feeling good enough, to the problem of feeling unloved, of isolated emotions.
	There is no external solution.
	You can get as buff as you want.
	You can get as sexy as you want.
	You can get as rich as you want.
	You can be as successful as you want.
	You can be as good looking as you want.
	None of it fixes it.
	The cure for dysfunction is honesty with the self and with others because when you are honest with people and you are vulnerable and open with them and who you truly are in the face of their existence when you are actualized when you are direct in your communications the only people who can stand to be around you are people at the same stage of development this
	is true wherever your development is And so the more honest you are with people around you, the more you will drive away manipulators and parasites and linguicides and deniers.
	And the people who want to either profit from you or control you or manage you, exploit you.
	Honesty creates a safe zone of honesty around you.

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