All right. Good evening. Good evening. Now I just started the recorder. It is the 11th of August 2023. It is Friday night live and I am ready for your questions and comments. I was just saying that I did a call in this afternoon. It was a long call into over two hours.

It was the first in the history of the show because this was a mother whose son listens to the show and he really, really insisted that she call me and of course she didn't really know me that well and so we had a very, very interesting conversation and I was really, really glad that you called in and I absolutely encourage other people to do the same. So I hope that you will check that out. It's going to go out to donors. She was a little registered at some of the topics which I can completely understand you'll know.

Exactly what I'm talking about when you listen to it so you can check it out at freedomain.locals.com for donors. So it's like five bucks a month, right? Honestly, it's like two coffees a month. All right, John says I've had a recurring, recurring, recurring dream for 10 plus years. I'm back in high school, but my current age in the dream. I always come to the conclusion that I'm an adult and don't need to be there anymore. Could you help me understand,

why this keeps coming up? So I have a general theory about people in life and the theory is something like, where do you get stuck? Where do you get stuck? So one of the reasons why addicts are so immature is that they get stuck. So when I was in theater school, my writing teacher gave me a writing assignment and the writing assignment was to write about a plan

to write about one of the patients of all of his sacks, all of his sacks. He was the inspiration behind the movie with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro called Awakenings. He's a

neuropsychiatrist or something like that. He does a lot of work with the brain. And he had a sailor. Now the sailor had a very interesting. He was in a psychiatric ward. The sailor had a very interesting mental issue, which was he forgot everything. He had almost no long to memory.

He forgot everything. What happened is he'd think he was still 23. He would have forgotten everything that happens since the age of 22 or 23. And every now and then, because he was in his fifties at this point, every now and then he would look into the mirror or catch side of himself in a mirror, or even the side of a toaster or something, and completely freak out, like, what the hell's the matter with me? Where did my hair go? Why is my hair? What's happening? And completely freak out, but five or 10 minutes later, he would be perfectly calm again, because he wouldn't remember.

What had just happened? So I wrote a play about this guy. And in the play, he was an alcoholic in the Navy. And in the play, I had alcohol affects your memory, alcoholism destroys your memory. So in the play, I had him in the Navy. And he was drinking and drinking and drinking until.

He drank back past his first drink. He only started drinking in the early 20s. So he kept drinking kept destroying his memory until he erased even his memory of drinking. And therefore, that's why the memory last stopped at the age of 22 or 23 because he stopped having the memory of even being an alcoholic. Right. So that was my big sort of twist in that plan. I've got it. I'm sure somewhere, but that was that was the play.

So he got stuck there. I mean, very sort of physically, he got stuck at the age of 22 or 23. And if you look at your life, if you look at the lives of people around me, one of the things that I first ask is, okay, where did this person get stuck if they're sort of stuck in their life? Where did they get stuck?

And tell me if you know someone like this, right? You know someone like this, which is...

Yeah, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, that's another one hits, right?

So I had a friend when I was younger. When we were in our midteens, he did martial arts and we played Dungeons and Dragons. And then the last time I saw him was probably, I don't know, 17 years ago. And he was playing Dungeons and Dragons and doing martial arts. And he was still single.

And so he just stopped. He stopped there. He just was not able to progress beyond the midteens.

You know that, oh, Julia, your parents, right? Yeah, this happens a lot. This happens a lot of immigrants, right?

So let's say that you grew up in Italy in the 1960s and then you moved to America, you moved to Canada, whatever.

Then what happens is you carving up a piece of 1963 Italy and you're moving over to some other place and then you hang around with all these other people who've also carved off a piece of 1963 Italy and you all hang out together and then you completely end up with nothing.

Because you don't change, right? 1963 Italy goes to 64, 65, continues to progress, continues to change, but you're like this broken off little sharp that doesn't progress, doesn't change.

And so you end up, you can't get back to Italy because Italy's not the way you left. You get frozen in time, time stock, you get time stock.

Somebody says I have roommates, seems about 50 years old hasn't dated since he was 18, still hosting Dungeons and Dragons and working as a grocery butcher.

Yeah, stock. So what happens with addicts is they have some emotional trauma, they use their addiction to try and deal with that emotional trauma.

It doesn't work, but they get stuck. That's the price. The price I'm not dealing with your shit is you get stuck.

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