Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsh, and welcome to Metaviews Streaming live in front of an automated audience. Normally, I say recorded live, but today we are actually streaming live to YouTube.

But my point about the automated audience is to acknowledge the algorithms and the AIs who are perhaps the primary consumers. I don't expect any humans to find us initially on YouTube because this is impromptu. This is a surprise.

If there's anyone I would be happy to experiment with such shenanigans with, it's Anna Melnikoff, who I'm really fortunate enough today to have as my guest.

And I kind of talked through the title, but, Anna, I was intrigued by your provocation that we talk about the decline and fall of Western civilization, which our titles are usually aspirational.

Actually, I tend to take three topics or three themes that I use to frame each chat, and today I've chosen the media collective Psychedelics and Healing, because I think as three pillars, they will allow us to get into quite a bit of depth and spontaneity when it comes to improvisation. But we do start every Meta Views episode with the news, partly because Metaviews publishes a daily newsletter.

And today, while all the news is about these tariffs that are rather stupid but damaging to pretty much all North Americans, we're actually arguing that it's part of a larger coup d'etat in which the executive branch of the United States government essentially ignores Congress, cuts Congress out of the picture.

And we have confirmed reports that Elon Musk now has control of the purse strings of the US Government, which is literally a coup because Congress holds those springs. But, Anna, our primary goal of the news segment is to throw to our guest and say, do you got any news? What news are you looking at?

It could be personal news, could be world news, could be otherworldly news. So tell us, Anna, what have you had your eyes on and what do you think our audience should know about?

I think that the coup south of the border pretty much drowns almost everything else out.

But what I am really enjoying is watching the reactions and responses of all the other world leaders to this situation and the utter contempt in which they hold Donald Trump and his, you know, gang of deplorables. And I think also the fact that Canadians.

I really like, the fact that Canadians seem to be really uniting around this whole thing and that Puello and all the people that are still sort of maybe kind of agreeing with Donald Trump are starting to look like pretty stupid, actually.

Well, and to your point, the consensus of contempt amongst world leaders, amongst politicians right across the Political spectrum is refreshing. And as.

As much as I loathe to give Doug Ford any compliments, I thought his call this morning to remove all American liquor from the Ontario system, like the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is not just the store. All restaurants, right, all venues get their booze from the lcbo.

And he's basically removing all American liquor from Ontario, which, again, it's the kind of thing to tell Americans, hey, don't fuck with us. So I'm encouraged by that.

Yeah, I don't. He's not the only person. I saw a post earlier this morning that BC has also removed all American liquor from their shelves.

So I'm sure we'll be seeing other provinces following suit and. Great. Bring it on.

And the other interesting thing to, you know, go back to this language of coup is we now have two elections here in Canada. We've got the Ontario election, which has just started, and we've got the federal election around the corner.

To your point about Poliev now looking like a bit of an idiot, do you have any thoughts on how this may play out or potentially how off the script it kind of feels like?

It's not your typical election in that you have this larger kind of threat hanging behind us with the erraticism and authoritarianism found in the Trump regime.

I think Doug Ford is turning out to be smarter than maybe everybody thought because he's, you know, he's, he's playing a good strategy. You know, he's, he's not only did he bribe most of Ontario with an extra 200 check, which I haven't received.

Mine, by the way, nor have I.

But, you know, he, he's been very visible in the media lately as a populist, but also being against what's going on south of the border. So I think that that's really going to play well in his favor. And so he'll probably win the election here. We'll see.

As for the national election, you know, Poila's poll numbers are falling so rapidly that I don't think he has a chance, to be honest. I think that whoever ends up leading the Liberal Party. Is it Mark Carney? Do we know yet?

He, he's got the Jon Stewart endorsement, which, you know. Yeah, yeah. Has, has definitely had a big impact on, on his fortunes.

He's, he's like the sort of the Gavin Newsomish politician of Canada, you know, like, he's, he's slick and he is a politician. Let's not forget about that. But, you know, he's, he's going to play well to the masses. And, you know, I think he'll.

People won't really want to change from Trudeau. And, you know, the Russian propaganda had its effect.

I don't particularly have a, I have some problems with Trudeau, but, you know, I don't, I don't have that visceral hatred that so many people seem to have been provoked into. And, you know, that was a very deliberate, very deliberate campaign that was quite successful.

And, you know, I mean, I don't exactly feel bad for the guy. He did choose to go into politics. It's a dangerous game. But, you know, yeah, time for, it's time for some new leadership anyway.

Well, and to your point, what now seems as a potentially likely scenario is Carney wins a minority government, but Doug Ford steals the spotlight and, you know, he potentially becomes Poliev's replacement at a convenient time where he can become that, you know, Conservative prime minister that, you know, the Canadian right wing desires so much. But on that point, we are kind of bleeding into the second segment we have on every Meta Views episode, which is WTF or what's the Future?

Partly because we are a future centric podcast and we like to ask our guests, like, what do you see on the event horizon? Right. What is it that you either are preparing for or anticipating?

Or, you know, when you're having your morning coffee and you're looking out into the world, what's staring back at you when it comes to kind of what we're collectively facing in the months and years to come?

Well, as I was, I was chatting with a friend yesterday and the subject of Revolution south of the Border came up and the phrase American Spring just popped into my head. So we might be looking at that this year. I don't know.

There might be, I figure things in the springtime in America are going to be looking pretty turbulent. And, you know, I don't know if it'll be enough to completely overturn the current administration. Let's fingers crossed.

But it's certainly going to, you know, I mean, they're doing a good enough job themselves with sinking that ship. So you almost want to just say, like, just, just sit and wait, like, they're doing it to themselves.

You know, they're, you don't have to, you don't have to do anything much to let them completely fail spectacularly. So.

Well, and I think that's a. Both a hopeful but a potentially accurate prediction.

To your point, the success or not, it determines how many people show up, how many people, you know, feel that spark but our last episode here on Meta Views was Trans Rights. And the extent to which, you know, the US government is basically trying to make a whole subset of its population disappear.

And, and those people are pissed off.

And they have every reason amongst a whole bunch of other constituents of society to say, nah, this, you know, the way you deal with Nazis is to punch them in the face. There, there's, there's no quarter for, you know, the people we're facing in, in this moment of history.

Yeah, the social media comebacks from that community have been ruthless and beautiful. I love it.

And totally justifiable because, I mean, not only is he trying to make them disappear, but he's cutting off their access to the medications or whatever current treatments they're undergoing. Everything that supports their identity and their ability to be able to continue to live that way has been undermined.

And it's, it's terrifying, to be honest. I, I, I'm terrified for them.

I, I don't necessarily see that they're going to be instigating any, you know, overt kind of, let's round up all the, you know, this group or that group.

But what they've done is, is more subtle and insidious is that they've, you know, they've released all those January six protesters, the in people who they know are already inclined to be, you know, they're already radicalized and they're going to be hooking up with all their friends and there it's, this is already happening.

There are gangs of people going around and defacing properties and, you know, persecuting people and they've just decided to take things into their own hands, assuming that, hey, you know what, there's not gonna be any comps. They already let us out of jail, so fine, we can get away with whatever we want. Now, you know, that they've gotten, and.

To your point, the Jim Crow era was all about vigilante racism. Right. And racial violence done by mobs and paramilitary organizations like the KKK rather than the state itself.

And it does seem like we're seeing the ingredients for a similar kind of terror.

And so for people to stand up, we sort of are working on this phrase here on metaviews that, you know, under fascism, if you don't leave your comfort zone, your comfort zone will be taken from you. So, you know, it's a matter that we all try to link up with each other and find that common solidarity.

Which, you know, brings us to our feature conversation.

As I mentioned at the outset, we like to structure these around kind of three pillars or three themes that are, you know, designed to both give us a free flow, spontaneous conversation, but allow us to keep coming back to these pillars.

And that's where I felt the media collective and Psychedelics and Healing would give us a lot of room to kind of discuss the decline and fall of Western civilization, which is happening faster, I think, than we had initially thought. But, you know, as we age, I'm finding history to become not only more relevant but more interesting.

Especially as young people, people didn't experience what we experienced. So I do want to spend a little bit of time with you starting to talk about history.

And even before we get to the media collective, I would love for you to spend a couple of moments talking about ikageek because Ika Geek was a real pivotal moment in Toronto culture. So many different communities intersecting.

And I'm not sure a lot of people either appreciate what ikig was or let alone even know it exists because it feels that that level of our digital history, if you weren't there, if you didn't live it, it's kind of blended into the, you know, the matrix, as far as we know it.

Yeah, it kind of became a little bliss that, you know, I mean, nobody goes to Internet cafes anymore because Internet is just so they that, you know, it was such a groundbreaking idea at the time. And the fact that like, what is it 25 years later, 30 years later, it's completely obsolete now.

Yeah, but. And not even imaginable.

Like to try to explain to someone, hey, this was the first cafe in Toronto where you could go and get a coffee in the Internet. Like that boggles the mind to contemporary people. But again, give us some background.

Well, this is when the Internet was still a social place. And you know, I got interested in public access Internet, I guess in the pretty early 90s, I guess must have been around 92, 93, something like that.

With Internex Online being, I think, pretty much the first public access Internet provider in Toronto. And I used to hang out at the local, the Jet Fuel coffee shop.

A lot of people that I knew connected there and we all knew each other in the community. I've been living in this neighborhood for a long time.

So we, you know, the couple of the more tech savvy of my friends got me hooked up with a modem and an online account. And you know, there was no graphics on the Internet at that time. It was just Internet relay chat. And so I got right into it. It was fun.

I was doing graphic design at the, at the time, but you know, Desktop publishing, as we used to call it. And I found myself spending 10 or 15 hours a day on Internet relay chat and got to know a whole local community of people.

We would set up meets and, you know, go to this bar, that restaurant or whatever. So we all kind of got to know each other as a community. And at the same time, my.

My bff, Harriet, had been running a little beat store with a cappuccino machine in the back, you know, slinging coffees and just chatting with the locals and so on. And she saw my ongoing fascination with the Internet was like, you know, hey, let's do an Internet cafe.

And so she had the space, we converted it over to that and set up and off we went. And at first it was. She was in a smaller upstairs location, which was tiny, only two computers.

And I think when she moved to the location downstairs, that was larger, more like a restaurant. There it upgraded to, I think, three or four computers. So still not a lot of access. It was really more about the social connections.

It was always about that. And I think that that was a really good and healthy thing because I have maintained connections with most of those people to this day. Even.

Even if I haven't really seen most of them in person for a really long time. I haven't seen you in person for a very long time. So. But at least the connections are still there.

And these are connections that were forged in person, in community, in like live, not while sitting glued to your phone in a Starbucks or something.

Well, and to your point about the tangible community nature of it all, it was at a point for IO.org, you could go to IKageek and become a customer of IO. You could go to a store and buy the Internet.

The idea that you could go there, you could see other people using it, you could say, hey, what is this thing? How does it work? To me, that was such a radical concept. Not just a public literacy, but of media literacy and media education. Right.

That was way ahead of its time. And I say that.

Cause that was, I think, on some level, how we connected to then connect over the media collective was, you know, the Ikag era and the media collective had a certain amount of overlap. And you know, you guys were doing stuff that, again, I agree, within your IRC community was absolutely vibrant.

But for those of us who were discovering you, it was mind blowing because it was this connection between community and technology and politics and culture and all under the subtext of revolution.

So it was, these are the histories that we've kind of lost that I think are really important to bring back in this moment when technology seems to be authoritarian rather than have the democratic potential we originally saw.

Well, and speaking to, you know, where we want to segue to eventually, the media, an interesting thing that happened for me at around that time was that CBC wanted to do a news segment on the Internet and they, somebody told them about me. I'm a woman on the Internet. A woman on the Internet.

So we talked about all kinds of social, political, kind of subjects and in the end they distilled this down to a five minute news segment that got replayed endlessly for like about four or five years, I think. And the only thing that they focused on was the salacious aspects of Internet relay chat.

People, you know, assuming identities and little private chat rooms. And this was like, you know, before sexting was a thing. But yeah, wanted to know more about that.

That's interesting.

The whole two hours that they were there, we talked about so much stuff and that was just a tiny little amount of the conversation. And that was what they zeroed in on.

And yet to bring it back to our earlier point about trans rights, even then they're so threatened by fluid identities, right?

Even then they're so threatened by the idea that people might be anonymous or pseudonymous or they might be role playing or engaging in chats that don't reflect what they're doing during the workday that, that paranoia has always been a subtext of the modern media narrative. And not to get ahead of our conversation on psychedelics, but that's the nature of anyone who experiences psychedelics.

You realize identity is fluid, the self is fluid. Who we are and who we're connected to is a much more dynamic and multidimensional phenomena than the way the media think of.

Oh, it's Anna Melnikoff, pioneering woman on the Internet. She dares to go into this men's bastion as a woman. Which, that was their narrative back then, right? As absurd as it might be, I.

Mean, it's still their narrative. Let's face it. I worked in engineering departments from the time I was like 18 years old.

So yeah, I'm not unaware that it's a man's bastion of the technical world, is filled with A bunch of dudes.

Yeah, yeah. So it's the mid to late 90s.

You've already realized that the media is a joke, that it's this whole garbage process of taking someone, twisting their ideas, putting it into a package that is completely disconnected.

So give me your kind of memory of what the media collective, how you encountered it, what your impression of it was, because you quickly became one of the pillars of the, both, I think, the moral and spiritual compass of the media collective. So I'd love to hear your kind of subjective experience of how you saw it and kind of how that experience framed how you see that moment in time.

It was like a little magical moment of alchemy between a bunch of driven and creative and brilliant individuals who all had visions for a different future, different directions, ways of improving things. And I'm pretty sure I heard about it from you probably initially, you know, and we used to get together and have all kinds of deep chats on.

And in fact, you were the one who suggested that I approach reading Understanding Media like it was beat poetry.

Yeah, right on.

You know, I read it in one go, sitting on a beach in Mexico, you know, while smoking my brains out. So, like it was a perfect way to ingest that information and you know, have revisited many times over the years.

But, you know, a lot of his ideas were, were pretty amazing. And I, you know, he was really good friends with this industrial designer named Vic Victor Papanek.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he wrote a book called Design for the Real World back in the 60s that I read.

I was in the industrial design design program at Humber College and, and in my second year I read Design for the Real World and came to this realization.

It's like, what the hell am I doing studying to be an industrial designer to like make blow molded shampoo bottles and stuff that's going to fill up landfills and have meetings about built in obsolescence. Because that really happens. Yeah, yeah, that really happens.

So, you know, I realized, no, I can't in all conscience do that because what that book was, was a call to designers to take an ethical stand about consumer culture and what are the impacts of any given design that you're going to put out into the world? How is that going to impact culture and, you know, how is that going to accommodate people?

Is it accessible for everyone, you know, all of those kinds of, of things.

And, and from the point of, you know, acknowledging the fact that a large proportion of the world is incredibly poor and so he had designs for things like how to build a radio for a nickel or less out of just like junk that you find wherever. And so there were just so many really revolutionary ideas in that book.

And so it was, you know, realizing that he and McLuhan had been contemporaries and had, you know, hung out and were friends was. Was very interesting to me.

And so the media collective itself, we, you know, it just sort of started out with a lot of brainstorming, but it quickly kind of. Everybody kind of went off and did their own take on, okay, what are we going to do here?

And so I was connected with a bunch of people who were interested in, you know, culture jamming. And so we. We modified billboards and I designed a bunch of, like, stickers that could be placed. You know, this was pre Banksy.

So, you know, we didn't get the same kind of play that Banksy gets nowadays. But, you know, he's. He's on that same trajectory. He just sort of picked up and carried on that work.

Well, and as an example that. What was the campaign you did? It was like the man or the corporation. Like, you did this with, I think, Drew de Geer or something like that.

It was like a riff on. I'd use that as an example because that was brilliant design.

Executive removal. It's called executive removal and. Oh, that's a great idea. We should. It's so. We were so ahead of our time.

But again, describe it elaborate a bit.

Yeah, well, it was basically a very sort of tongue in cheek take on the idea that, you know, we. We sort of like borrowed the feel of sort of us kind of State Department Y type of logo to make these executive removal logo.

And just the idea being that we're gonna take the piss out of corporate culture and, you know, expose the shenanigans that go on under the guise of civilization. Really. It's just organized and legitimized theft and transfer of wealth. And that's what it always has been.

But humanity has gone through all kinds of machinations to make the masses believe that the corporate overlords or the nobility or whoever it was, at whatever period of time in history, the Church has the best, you know, in mind for the masses, that they're really doing things in your best interests.

Although.

Well, to your point, though, in terms of design, the other thing worth mentioning is politics, especially protest politics in the early 90s, the mid-90s, it was very earnest, like, it was very boring. And the other motivation, and I think this is again, why you were one of the kind of Spiritual pillars.

Is that your design approach was very much of, no, let's fuck with it, right? This was trolling before trolling, right? This, this was trying to come up with different ways to make fun of the establishment but have fun doing so.

And it looked great, like it was the kind of propaganda you wanted to share with friends and go check this out. This is really cool.

Well, some of it was pretty subtle too.

Like we had the, you know, we had, we had the Ford, the Ford stickers, they, they were designed exactly the same shape and size as the Ford emblem on the front of the vehicles, but it said food in the same font. And so we would just, you know, we got a ton of these printed up and we would just go around, always with a handful in the pocket.

And whenever we'd see a Ford, we put a food sticker on it because really that's more important.

But to your point, it was so revolutionary because the moment you saw the sticker, it caused you to question so many things instantly. Right? That was just one example. The kind of stuff that you and other people in the media collective were kind of brainstorming and creating.

If only we had the kind of scaling ability that the Internet now has versus because this was all localized really to Toronto and people we knew.

I was also thinking about. It was localized to a point.

But remember the Global Knowledge conference that happened, which I, I don't even remember how did I get even an invite for that. Maybe it was because I was a woman on the Internet or something.

It's because they didn't gatekeep back then. This was pre 9 11, where like the World bank would hold a conference and any asshole theoretically could sign off because they would know.

But look, here's the other thing just to remind you, with your help, we reproduce the name tag. No, I remember that because there's no security. Yeah, go ahead.

And we infiltrated. So I was, I was legitimately invited to this conference and it could very well have been through.

My mother was quite well known in international development. And that was going to be the focus of this conference.

The idea that Global Knowledge, all these big corporations that, you know, have really well established in the western world, what were the, what they were doing with this conference? The aim was like, how can we colonize the infosphere in the developing world? That's. That was the whole point.

You know, who's going to get their foot in the door first and how are we going to take over and what's going to be different about the way that we've Done it in the west, you know, compared to this. And we thought, oh, this, this could be really bad. You know, we need to get some different voices in here.

So yeah, I, I had been doing graphic design. I had all equipment and scanners and everything at home.

So once I got my badge, I reproduced it and made a whole bunch of different badges for, for, you know, a bunch of media collective.

I was, I was tailor made.

You were tailor made. Yeah, I remember that. We used some very fun names and, you know, you infiltrated some interesting panel discussions.

I believe we all kind of spread around and went into different panel discussions and different areas, although raised difficult questions.

Yes, but you were also key in organizing what was the phrase, Local knowledge, Global Wisdom, which was our counter event that we held concurrently and attracted people who internationally had come for the World bank event, but then came to our alternate event.

Yeah, which I thought that was amazing. So, yeah, I think some good conversations and some good ideas were planted and I haven't really followed up to see what really happened with them.

But you know, you drop a rock in a pond and who knows where the ripple's going to end up.

Although again, the hindsight of history. Right.

The privilege of looking back is that was at the start of the anti globalization era in that, that was before the battle in Seattle, that was before the summit of the Americas. So we were kind of at the front end of infiltrating those global events and then holding alternative events.

With the difference being that when we did it, there was no security. Right.

So you could come and go and do shit versus they quickly started setting up barricades and having riot cops and all sorts of other security to keep the folks like us out.

Well, it was an interesting time just in history for media activism in general. Remember we also had that event, Plunderpalooza.

Yes.

And so that brought together a whole lot of, you know, artists and musicians that were not only the people doing things on the sort of media graphics kind of level like, like what I was doing, but a lot of musicians that were working with, with sampling and the whole fair use thing. And you know, we had Mark Hosler from Negative Land. There was John Oswald, I guess. I guess John Oswald was there from Plunder Phonics.

There were a lot of really interesting performers that gave a whole new perspective to, you know, what is originality.

And they were kind of ahead of their time because remix culture became huge.

But back then, like, we had a lot of the creatives really around the world at this really small community event and that was it like, that was almost the entirety of the genre at that time. And yet, if we look at where we are now with TikTok, with social media, that was the kernel that became remix culture as we know it.

Just five or ten years too early, right?

Yeah. And it wasn't a huge event. It was.

But when I look back on it and I think, wow, the people that were there were all went on to be huge in their own areas. And so, yeah, I think it was a pretty influential time for a lot of different things that happened.

Now, I don't want to, you know, before we close out the history part, I don't want to trigger you or, you know, go down this rabbit hole too much, but nonetheless, I want to get your emotional reaction.

Yes, I'm on Substack lot because I'm publishing daily and I subscribe to Doug Rushkoff's substack because he's an interesting guy and he's really into psychedelics now, as he always has been, but I think even more so as he's aging. And on Substack, every Substack person can have, like, a little chat where their subscribers and their readers can chat. And his chat's open.

Like, anyone can post in it. So the other day I clicked on it. This is like two days ago. I clicked on it and there was a name in his chat. I was like, oh, that looks familiar.

And I clicked on the name and I looked. I was like, oh, my God, it's Stephen fucking Marshall.

And it allowed me in a moment to kind of look at his profile, look at how he's grifting and how he's presenting himself now with like, a quick little, okay, where you been the last three decades? And I was like, oh, and I'm talking to Anna in a couple of days. I gotta bring this up with Anna.

I mean, do you want to comment on the shit show that was Channel Zero and it was its own weird pop culture moment.

Too early, perhaps, in the larger scheme, but saddled by a grifter who had no interest in the larger revolution, but still to this day surfs the ethos of revolution as if he is the messiah no one else is entitled to. And I hope he hears me say this, but again, we don't have to get into it too much, but it was a blast from the past.

So I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that particular kind of grift and that cultural trend, either that we were at or how it's continued in history?

Well, it's an interesting question. Because his name has come up a bit over the years. He put together site called GNN or something.

Yeah. Global News Network. News Network or Guerrilla News Network. I think it flipped between the two.

Gorilla News Network, because, you know, I mean, this is somebody who comes from extremely wealthy and privileged background, trying to kind of get in with the activists and be cool. And I mean, that's sort of how I saw what was going on at the time, because he wasn't fully connected with what life was like for the rest of us.

You know, it never really occurred to him that maybe, you know, we. We had other concerns other than how we look to the external world. And, you know, he, you know, of course I worked for him for.

For a long time, designed a website. We won. Cool side of the Day. Remember when that was a thing?

Yeah.

Shortly after that, he. He fired me to hire cheap web designers in South Africa that could work remotely and ahead of his time. Never really paid me for.

For all the six months worth of work and editing and the content and everything that, I mean, like, I had a small payment up front, which I redistributed to content creators that I included in the site. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I basically was being paid less than a dollar an hour for my labor. So, you know, it.

I don't think it even occurred to him that that was a problem.

You know, although now that we think of it, it's kind of mirrors the president. Right. I mean, that is the. The grifter in chief. That's the business model that the.

This whole, like, I don't want to say class, but it is a class of people that. That have grown up with enough wealth and privilege that they never have to worry about the mundane things. They take it for granted.

So they've never had to think about things in a particular way. They've never. They never had to do their homework. You know, they. They knew they could always get away with something.

They knew they could always count on their privilege to let them sail through. And one thing I will give Stephen Marshall credit for is that what I was poking around on the GNN website.

He did credit me with inspiring him to go in this direction. I don't really know where that came from, but.

Yeah. You'd prefer a check?

Yeah. Oh, I got. I got name checked. All right. A real. A money check would be really great. That name is all right.

So.

So that was, you know, I wasn't expecting that, but, you know, hopefully he's been growing and learning as a human in all of the intervening years, I don't know, I can't, I don't want to assume that people can't do that because I've seen a lot of people grow and learn and change significantly. But it requires, you have to consciously engage with what you want to learn about.

And for example, things like understanding, you know, things like diversity and inclusion and race politics and things like if you don't, if you don't do the homework, if you don't look at it from other people's perspective, if you don't seek out sources of information about that stuff, how are you going to figure it out?

Because the world is already structured to favor us in our Caucasian ness, you know, and so if you don't ever cultivate a curiosity about, well, why is that? Why did it work out that way? And, and what advantage does that give me then? You know, you're, you're never going to really shift your perspective.

You're going to always be making assumptions about what's, what's fair or what is, what you're entitled to.

And you know, and it's like this level of unconscious entitlement that I think is, has become a serious problem in Western civilization, which is probably a good time to talk about the fact that as far as I'm concerned, Western civilization is in end stage dementia.

Well, and allow me to formally segue that to that exact topic because I don't want to give the person we just discussed an excuse to think that they should be invited on to reply because I do not want to see that happen.

But the archetype you describe does seem very fitting as an embodiment of the decline and fall of Western civilization in that a lot of it seems to be, you know, these white guys coming to terms with their power and their privilege and not really liking the results either that, you know, they are fundamentally responsible for a lot of the shit that we're facing, but B, that not everyone is going to buy their conception of themselves or their conception of the world as they see it.

Not to throw you a curveball, but to what extent do you think the mass or popular acceptance of psychedelics have enabled this shift in perception and the shift in culture?

I mean, I think that it is a very encouraging thing.

I think also that psychedelics, there is a danger in that a lot of people without any sort of background or research or cultural awareness assume that the psychedelics themselves are the magic bullet that will fix them or, or give them the answers and the insights. And I mean, it can open the Door to a whole lot, but it is. Psychedelics are a context amplifier.

And, and so as such, the way they operate in the brain is for approximately 72 hours after you ingest a serotonergic psychedelic, which would be things like psilocybin, lsd, ayahuasca, dmt. Those in that class of psychedelics, MDMA and ketamine are in a different class. They do different things in the brain.

And. Sorry, you said serotonin. That was the serotonin class. Was that how you categorized that?

Serotonergic.

Got it, yeah.

Because of the way that they impact the brain, what they do is they basically light up all of your neuroplasticity potential for approximately 72 hours on full blast.

And then over the course of the next 30 days, that gradually goes back to baseline of whatever most active neural pathways are, you know, you normally use. Now during that period of time, you have a high degree of neuroplasticity.

So you can literally change how your brain works by using intention and working with yourself.

I mean, there's a lot of ways of doing that, but the, the job description of integration, psychedelic integration, which didn't exist five years ago, but that's what that process is about, is working with somebody to help them to understand why their brain has gotten stuck in these particular pathways. Like for example, treatment resistant depression. Here's the thing. We function on frequency.

Our brains are functioning on little electrical impulses and that creates an electromagnetic field and frequency around us. You know, we all know this. Humans are inherently empathic, vibrational beings. We can normally sense, most of us.

Normally we have that potential that is part of our capacity. Just like animals in the wild can sense danger, we have these built in potentials and capacity in the way that we function.

But we have ignored that aspect of ourselves in favor of intellect.

So all of Western civilization has been built from an intellectual foundation and there has been very little attention paid towards the more interior aspects of who we are as a species, what our potential is. What about the spiritual aspects of ourselves?

Like, like the, the fact that we are, you know, whether you're religious or not, it's not about religion, it's about the reality that we are. Our bodies, these forms are animated by a particular energy. And when that energy leaves the form, you're, you just have a body there.

It's, it's the energy that brings the consciousness in. And so if we ignore that aspect of ourselves in how we envision the ways that we interact as a culture, as a species, then we're way out of balance.

And this has been going on in humanity for a few thousand years now.

And even, even before that, even before they had put a name on it, even before we developed any kind of technology or, you know, like simple technology like pottery or cultivation or building houses or anything primitive humans had an interface with the divine, for want of a better word.

This, this interior sense of developing a relationship with their surroundings and the world and the animals, the weir, whatever you want to call that, they had this interior, focused relationship with themselves and the external. So we developed that sense before we even developed technology. Then we developed technology and suddenly things became very outwardly focused.

But for the whole Neolithic period, we refined and developed that sense of our relationship with the divine, with this understanding that that feminine principle is what, you know, brings societies together, that enables growth.

And so, you know, just interrupt briefly. I mean, you're partly describing what it's been like for me to have to leave Toronto and to live where I now live.

Because part of what always frustrated me with Toronto and this was a theme within the media collective, was the cement, right?

Was the skyscrapers were all the things that were obstacles between us connecting to nature and connecting to kind of larger things beyond just the human centric civilization. And what I've enjoyed about living where I do is I'm in the same spot every single day. I'm looking at the same trees every single day.

I'm engaging with the same animals every single day. And there's not only a different rhythm there, there's a different sense of awareness, right? Like I'm really able to under.

Like I no longer believe that sentience is just animals. Like, you know, for sure, plants are sentient.

For sure, trees are sentient because when you spend enough time with them, to your point, you start feeling them, you start getting a sense of their energy, of their thoughts, of their feelings, as abstract as that may be. And to your point, it feels like you're connecting to something very ancient, right?

Because there are still this empathy within us, these sensory capabilities within us that allow you to better understand that. And as you know, when I lived in Toronto, I had terrible allergies, I had issues with cats and dogs versus now it's the opposite, right?

Living in the country, all my allergies are gone. We have a cat Cat who lives in the house. We have lots of dogs. Right. I'm kissing my horse every day like it is.

I wouldn't have believed it had I not lived it. Right. Like I had the intellectual, theoretical to believe it. That's why I left the city. I was like, I need to do this.

But it wasn't until I experienced it that I was like, oh my God. And has really allowed me to understand how artificial the urban environment is and the extent to which to go back to where we started.

That the decline and fall of Western civilization is also the return of nature. Right. The return of natural rhythms, the return of humanity's need to reconnect with those natural rhythms and those natural cycles.

Absolutely. And also hopefully the beginning of a comprehension of how energy principles function. So, you know, you know the yin Yang symbol, right.

The yin side of the equation is the receptive, the hidden, the mysterious. That's the dark side of the yin Yang symbol. That is the creative principle from which the ideas, the creation springs forth.

The Yang is the physical expression, the outward expression of that. And these two forces have to be in balance, but Yang cannot be in the lead. It's the in from which it springs forth.

It's not about one being better than the other or one being on top of the other. It's about them being in balance. Yes.

And understanding how that actually works in terms of, you know, when, when you want to manifest something in your life, you first, you have to come up with the idea. You think about it first.

Before you have something that you create or you build or that happens in the physical world, you have to have the internal idea. This is how it works. You don't create something and it just happens without the internal creative process.

And so this lack of comprehension and this lack of focus on that, that very important underpinning of how humanity works, how humanity and reality works, has, has been a really big problem in not just Western civilization that we, as we talk about it now, but all of the iterations, all of the successive iterations of what I like to call dominator type civilizations, the empires that have risen and fallen throughout human history that followed on after that period of like 20,000 years of prosperity and expansion for humanity that happened during the Neolithic period. So every basic branch of technology that humanity has developed was developed during the Neolithic period of human history.

All we've done since then has been refined those technologies. That's all we've done.

And so, I mean, this is an interesting parallel to why, you know, the AI narrative is kind of false. Because, you know, they keep saying, oh, we're going to have like all these.

A thousand years of discoveries in ten years, thousand years of discovery. And. And I don't think that they really understand what they're talking about on a number of different layers. Go ahead.

And then I want to shift this into healing, because I kind of feel that that is the narrative direction. Go ahead.

A good segue. Because when I talk about that, we've developed all these significant advances in civilization.

So when we've done the refinements throughout the history of the more Westernized or the more hierarchical, patriarchal kind of civilization that have followed on since then, our big advancements in humanity happened in, you know, certain technologies were developed. Suddenly we understand our place in the universe.

Astronomy or, you know, developing vaccines, things that changed, you know, when we developed the telephone, electricity, things like that. These big advances, these were all external technological advances. So when did religions all develop? It was a long time ago. Right.

And religions, most of them have, are pretty distorted because, you know, they're functioning from that place of unconscious entitlement because they are a product of the power structures that were in place at the time that they were birthed. So here's the thing is, humanity has had a confusion between the concepts of power and control for a very long time. They are not the same thing.

Power means understanding when you are in balance with your environment and creating from that position of correct inspiration, understanding all of our connectivity and how important that is, and envisioning a way forward that is sustainable and equitable for everyone. So Neolithic civilizations generally did.

And to your point, Neolithic civilizations also created community, which is what we are currently lacking and require. But to your point, two episodes ago, we. And this was recurring on a previous episode, so this is something that I'm going to keep reinforcing.

That power is vulnerability, and that vulnerability is power. Right. Which is completely different than control.

And it speaks to how that level of power, that level of vulnerability, is exactly what the fascists are afraid of. Of. It's exactly what the Trump regime is afraid of because it is at the core of healing, right? That in order to heal, we have to be vulnerable.

We have to. To your point, look at what was the original trauma, right?

That set us on the wrong path, that in recognizing, in many case, the aggressor has a trauma that is fueling their aggression that we had.

So where I've often aligned with your kind of worldview and your, in this case, assessment of the decline and fall of Western civilization, help us out with the healing piece. Right.

And at one point, not to be simplistic, at one point, I imagined Greta Thunberg, like, I imagine, you know, these young women warriors as being the antidote that we require. But I also am very fond of the Council of Grandmother Others as an antidote to authoritarianism.

But without playing any of my cards prematurely, help us transition into this notion of healing. What are we going to do as the west continues to decline and fall? How do we protect ourselves from the falling pieces?

How do we build the new society within the shell of the old? How do we curb the violence and insanity through love and through healing?

Well, that's a lot of good questions. Okay, so let's just start with why was the destruction and fall of Western civilization built right into it?

Because it was built on generational trauma. It's been built on generational trauma and has been functioning from that basis. And so my theory, partly this is just a wild theory.

Take it as you will. European culture was collectively traumatized by the Black Death, which killed half the population.

Just to remind everyone, if you can imagine a situation where, you know, instead of the pandemic, where we all had comfy lockdowns and checks coming in and.

And, you know, it was frustrating and it was traumatic, but let's think about what it would have been like in medieval times when half of the population died.

Now, I don't want to call you a prophet, Anna, because, you know, we don't want to get too much ahead of ourselves, but they do say that that's avian flu if it actually mutates in the right direction. But please, you're making a profound point that I don't want to detract from.

So the collective trauma of living through a time when half the population died. And I mean, my parents lived through World War II in Europe.

So that is its own kind of generational trauma that carries on wartime babies and parents that, you know, live through that carry all kinds of stuff. But even in Europe, half the population didn't die during World War II.

So if you think about the horror of what was going on at that time, the shutdown emotionally on a collective level in European society, and all of the area where that was affecting must have been massive and generationally, how do you deal with that? Well, not long afterwards, we had the Renaissance. So what happened there? Everybody got focused on intellect. We're not going to feel too much.

We're not going to feel anything, really. No empathy. Just cut off the empathy, like just function from glorifying the intellect. Let's See what we can invent.

And, I mean, we're pretty brilliant, so we came up with all kinds of good stuff.

Although an interesting argument that reinforces your wild theory. David Graeber, who recently deceased anarchist, wrote a lot of great books, including, I'm pretty sure it's called the History of Everything.

He argues that the Renaissance was also a reaction to Europe's exposure to North American indigenous thinking and democracy, and that there were so many Europeans who thought, hey, that's a way better way of living. Why do we need a fucking king?

That they had to come up with a lot of European philosophy to inoculate themselves against the threat that the freedom practiced by the first nations of North America posed. The genocide also helped in eliminating that threat. But that threat still exists today and is fueling that decline of the West. Please.

Well, and it's interesting that you bring that up because, yes, the influence goes both ways, but all at the same time. The ruling classes were enacting colonization all over the world.

They were enslaving whole populations and setting up plantations in the New World and all over the place. This is all over Europe. So the intellectuals and the artists were, you know, having this renaissance of ideas.

The governments and the ruling classes were enacting horrors throughout the planet that, you know, the generational effects of that linger to this day.

Well, and the practices, trauma, if you're.

Not aware of it and you don't address, just keeps on repeating generation after generation and morphing into new forms and ways that humans can be absolute shitheads to one another.

Well, I was going to say, like, Israel is kind of an example of that European colonialism, you know, still being practiced in a way that much of the world thinks is absolutely absurd and a crime against humanity. But we're in a might is right era where as long as you have the gun and the tanks and the drones, you can seemingly get away with it.

But onto the healing and the generational trauma of having been victimized. Yes, and this is the thing is we don't.

You know, we've had all of these external advances in technology, all of these big shifts in the way that humanity functions. And, you know, especially nowadays where technological advances are happening very quickly.

But in all of those advances, really, the only place where we have started to look inwards again is coming back to the psychedelics.

You know, in the 60s when people started playing around with that stuff and all the researchers went wild like, oh, my God, this could be so useful for healing so many different things. And of course, the backlash in the early 70s was, was to, you know, shut down all the research even. So that just kind of stopped completely.

But, you know, this is, I think, something that's going to be really necessary as.

Although, you know, to your point about the, the kind of crackdown or the backlash, do you anticipate that happening again? Because I, I don't.

I don't think they're going to get the cat back in that. Back there. It's. There's too much out there already. There are too many practitioners. There's too many little weird. Yeah, it's.

It's too much out there now.

And you mean that just in a knowledge perspective that as long as there's.

Enough people like labs everywhere, there's people that have the. Know how to make their own. There's. The dissemination of information nowadays is so fast and so global that you can't.

Once, once something like that gets out into the public eye, you can't really stop it.

And the fact that, and I want to bring in the indigenous connection here is that there are many indigenous cultures that have incorporated into their culture healing practice that involves psychedelics that is to address the mental health and spiritual health of their communities.

So this, you know, these ayahuasca ceremonies that people from the west are flocking down to Brazil and Peru and paying thousands of dollars to do this is the sort of the globalization of indigenous psychedelic practice, which again, is its own problems. But if it's bringing money into these indigenous communities, which I hope it is.

And not just that, I think it's also legitimizing these indigenous practices, which in and of itself I think is important because for a long time we would demonize or stigmatize indigenous science. Because that's what we're describing, right, is they may not have the same scientific methods as Europeans, but it's still science.

Well, and we are very fond of compartmentalizing.

And so right now in the west, the legal psychedelics, allopathic practice that is sort of starting up is really centered around you have to be a doctor or a psychologist or you have to have gone through that Western allopathic medicine system to be qualified for this.

And what they're realizing is that the demand is so high that they can't, you know, possibly train up enough people who have the right kind of perspective or to be able to work with people on. In these modalities.

So they're realizing that, well, there's all this indigenous knowledge out there, and while we're at it, we should probably maybe try and learn a thing or two.

From them about why it was, how.

It works for them.

And to your point, and unfortunately I have to start to wrap because we're past an hour and my bladder can only go so long, especially with a live stream. But for sure we have to have you back back probably multiple times, both because there's about how the world is.

Being run by a bunch of four year old sociopaths.

Well, unfortunately those sociopaths are going to have more time to do damage. So that will be an excellent opportunity to bring us back.

But there was something you just said that I want to reinforce, which is one of the themes ideas, to use your language. Wild theory that we are going to continue to unpack on this podcast is what I am thinking as the new abolition movement.

And it's kind of new for me in that I've known radicals who've been saying this for a long time, but for various reasons I've only recently come to the idea that all prisons should be abolished, that all police should be disbanded, that, you know, we're dealing with a mental health crisis. We're dealing with a health crisis.

To our point about trauma, and you were sort of alluding to the demand far exceeds the supply, especially if that supply is gatekept by medical monopolies. And I'm suggesting that no, this isn't just about health. This is about crime. This is about community. This is about safety.

We need social workers, we need healers like yourself. Not just dealing with, with people's trauma and anxiety, but dealing with their trauma and their violence, dealing with the discord and community.

And that's a huge subject which I will give you an opportunity to respond to. But that I think we should have you back on the show so that we can get into it in much deeper detail. Go ahead though.

Absolutely. Yeah. The indigenous perspective is really important for that reason because they take a much more holistic view.

The integration aspect of, of the person's psychedelic experience in an indigenous community is integrated into the way the community functions. So it's not like you have to book an appointment and pay somebody to go through whatever exercises you're doing to do your integration work.

It's just built in the community. There's an understanding generally in the community that, oh yeah, there was just this ceremony and everybody is a little sensitive right now.

We're trying to incorporate new ideas and some healing and some exposure and some clearing. But whatever it is, you know, we, we haven't, in Western society, we don't honor that kind of level of community connection.

And vulnerability and courtesy.

I guess I want to say, you know, we, we're very focused on our individual, you know, the individualism, being separated, competing, you know, achieving some kind of status.

I mean, the fact that people still admire billionaires and think that that's an aspirational goal is, Is to me, mind boggling because, you know, we, we have at the same time as we have a reality TV show called Hoarders, and it's very clear that these people are sick, they have some mental health issues and we're helping them here, but we don't apply that same thing to billionaires, to people who hold money. Yeah, it is the same sickness. And when it comes down to it, it's exactly the same thing. What, it stems from the same type of trauma.

Right on.

And so, you know, if we don't begin to talk about this and to bring this into public discourse and to begin even educating people about how real and important this is in how we function as a human species among ourselves. If we don't start teaching our children from like, you know, we have to be aware of this because repeating over and over and over.

Yeah, no, we gotta, unequivocally, we gotta be ringing the alarm and, you know, letting people know about all the stuff that we're dealing with. This brings us to our last segment of every Meta views, which is the shout outs.

This is where we invite our guests to, you know, let us know someone that they're thinking of that we should be paying attention to or listening to. Is there anyone you want to shout out? Anna? Again, this is meant to be intuitive. It's meant to tie into the conversation that we've been having.

You know, I, I think I just want to shout out to the prones of the world, the Crohn's and the aunties and the grandmothers and that sense of not only feminine wisdom, but righteous feminine rage.

Right on.

Shout out to that. Because, you know, I've been seeing some super inspirational rants on, you know, Tick Tock and Instagram and so on.

And the most inspirational stuff is coming from these women who like, have got to this point of like, they're about to explode. And, you know, let's harness that because it's, it's time, it's time to need it.

And this is the, the big shift that I see coming back is a shift away from this patriarchal system of thinking because it is very toxic and it is not sustainable. And we are at a point now in our evolution as a species where we can choose to evolve consciously.

And if you don't start paying attention to the ladies, man, you guys.

Well, and to your point about tick tock, I saw a tick tock where a guy was basically like, yeah, when the hits the fan, I'm with the witches. That's just it. I. I'll do whatever they want. I'm with the witches. That that's how I'm surviving it.

And you know what's up?

I. I'm currently living with a very powerful witch, so I, I can very much say that you're spot on, Anna.

I hope you will join us again soon because you provide an analysis and an energy that we need more of in this society. Witnessing the perhaps rapid fall of the patriarchy, potentially the violent fall of the patriarchy.

But make no mistake, it is the fall of the patriarchy and that in its own way makes it a very exciting time to be alive. That's another Meta Views that was another fantastic episode.

We are on a roll, partly because we've had a lot of really smart and powerful women on the show lately. Talk about ingredients for success. You can find us on social media. We were actually live streaming today on YouTube.

We may do that a little more frequently, but of course we're also available on all the podcast platforms. So check us out and we'll see you soon. Bye.