Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch, and welcome to Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today I think we're in for a treat, partly because of our topic, quitting social media, but also our guest, who I can firmly say is the first neighbor, metaphorically, that I've been able to have on the show.

Susan, I say neighbor only because the guest I just recorded with shortly before you was in Madrid.

So geographically speaking, even though you're not technically my neighbor, we live in the same town.

So by Internet means, we are technically neighbors.

And as you may know, I like to start every episode of Metaviews by talking about the news, partly because Metaviews publishes a daily newsletter on the future of authority.

And today we were talking about the presidential pardons that Trump just issued and kind of the significance of that, looking at authority and kind of wondering about the puzzle of why he would pardon such kind of heinous threats to the Democratic apparatus.

But our real purpose of the news segment, Susan, is to give our guests a chance to share some news.

This could be personal news, this could be local news, this could be world news.

The goal on an intuitive level is to sort of ask, what have you been thinking about?

What are you looking at?

What's had your attention in the sense of, what do you think our audience should be paying attention to in the context of the news and current affairs?

Well, I've been preoccupied this week with the declaration by Mark Carney to run for the leadership of the.

Of the Liberal Party.

And I think that anyone's a better option than the other option.

Yes, Yes.

I don't want to name any names, but I think you know who I'm talking about.

We could.

I call him PP Right.

Because, yeah, it's both insulting, but you're not reinforcing his kind of name brand.

Yeah.

The guy that speaks in slogans.

Yeah.

I don't mind saying, just comes across as mean.

Right.

Like, in fact, I wrote that.

I just wrote that on my Facebook page.

Somebody said something to me, it's going to be our next PM And I said, yeah, he's hateful.

Yes, he's hateful.

He's manipulative and he's mean.

Yeah.

And I've heard.

So we had Rick Salutin on the show just a couple of days ago, and he kind of was saying the same thing as you.

He felt that federal politics is exciting again, that it feels like we're coming to a point where nothing's certain and we might even have policy debates.

But at the same Time.

God forbid.

Exactly.

Let's not get our hopes up, though.

I suspect we could be disappointed.

But he wanted to almost compare PP with Brian Moroney.

And where I feel that falls a little short is at least Brian Mulroney.

You could sort of say that he had the best interests of the country.

You might have disagreed with his policies, but he kind of liked people versus pp.

Just comes across as mean and hateful.

Go ahead.

Yeah, Mulroney had gravitas.

Yeah, yeah.

No, he had presence.

He had that deep voice, you know, that voice.

And.

Yeah, no, he, I was just looking at somebody at.

Who was it?

Somebody put up a, a comparison of disapproval ratings because you know how important that is.

And you know, Trudeau's was, I think his approval was something like, I don't know, 20, 20 something percent.

And then they was compared to Harper, which at the end of his thing was around, I don't know, whatever it was.

But Mulroney's was 12.

Yeah, 12% approval.

And I mean, you can't get much worse than that.

That's head.

That's headed towards zero now.

And not to get too sidetracked in history, but people put a lot of blame or guilt on Kim Campbell for the electoral result, but Mulroney, it was his legacy that the election was kind of on.

She unfortunately didn't get enough chance to govern and develop her own legacy.

So she was kind of running under the kind of Mulroney shadow, and she gets the blame.

And people like Alan Gregg get the blame for that electoral devastation.

When, to your point, I think it was a vote against Mulroney.

People were like, we want something new.

We want something fresh.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, interesting because we kind of find ourselves in a very similar situation, isn't it?

He left without.

There wasn't much time for getting to know the candidate.

There wasn't enough time for her to really get her hands into the, you know, her fingers into the dirt and.

But we're kind of, kind of in the same place.

Yeah.

Trudeau, in my view, should have resigned months ago, and now we've got this race on our hands.

I'm, like I said, I'm, I'm pro Carney.

I think he's the best one for the job.

I don't think anyone else, any of the other candidates can beat.

PP don't have a chance.

I mean, maybe we can get a minority.

We can get him in a minority position.

That's, that would be the target.

I, I would think from, from my standpoint, I mean, if, if we, if the Liberals won again.

And I'm, I'm not even a Liberal.

No, I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, you're just anti pp.

Exactly.

Yeah, no kidding.

And, and to your point, had Trudeau resigned months, if not a year earlier, Christa Freeland might have had a chance to differentiate herself.

And she does not now.

Right.

She like Kim Campbell, she would run under Trudeau's shadow and it would give her no chance.

Although paradoxically, because I also really like that Mark Carney is in the race.

I think he completely changes the discourse and the debate.

But where pp, I think is very vulnerable is the foreign interference part.

This is this scandal, right.

With India and idea that the PP hasn't got national security clearance.

Yeah, I'm not getting that.

Can you explain that to me?

It's, it's, it's, it's, it, it doesn't have a lot of substance, but the argument is that the, the Conservative Party, both from India and China, has benefited from external interference, specifically targeting the diasporas in Canada and trying to skew them towards conservatives.

And again, I think they're trying to embellish like Canada is a country of diasporas and as a result we are naturally gonna have inter border disputes, dialogues, discourse.

Yeah.

But here's the caveat, and I'm bringing this more as a joke than an actual implication.

I think Mark Carney is the benefit of foreign interference in the form of Jon Stewart.

Cuz Jon Stewart basically announced Mark Carney's campaign.

There's no one better.

You could have had to announce it and promote it.

And I mean the Tories aren't smart enough to make this argument.

But you could say that it's a little bit of foreign interference the way that Trump is trying to interfere in our domestic politics.

I thought that was a real coup.

It was brilliant.

And I think it was Jon Stewart as much as it was the Carney campaign.

I think Stewart is a genuine fan and he just decided, I would love to have Mark Carney on the global stage.

Yeah, he's brilliant.

He's brilliant that Jon Stewart.

He is so well read and well informed and clever and incisive.

He's witty, he's a great actor.

His comedic timing is charts.

I think as a sign of the tragedy of our society is that he would never consider political office versus he would win.

He would win.

He would be a senator, no problem.

Right.

And as a senator, wow.

The impact that he would have on the spectacle and showbiz side of politics.

Right now we're still on the news So I have to segue to our second segment just so that we keep the show going.

But our second segment called WTF or what's the Future?

Kind of reinforces that we are a future centric podcast.

We really try to keep our eyes on the horizon.

And so this is where we ask our guest, when you look to the future, it could be short term future, could be long term future.

What do you see?

What is it that you think our audience needs to be looking at or paying attention to?

When again, looking at the event horizon?

You know, it's funny because had you asked me that question two weeks ago, I probably would have had a completely different answer.

But I've been thinking, you do we talked or mentioned or you mentioned getting off social media.

I've been on, I've been on Facebook since pretty much day one.

And one of my pages, AmazingWomenRock.com I had a website, I had the page, right?

And that page was one of the first 10,000 business pages on Facebook.

I don't know how many pages there are now, but it's got to be millions.

And so I've, I've been there from the start.

And I was on Twitter, I was, you know, Reddit wasn't there, Instagram wasn't there.

What are some of the other ones?

Doesn't matter.

None of them were there.

It was Facebook and later Twitter.

I was going to say, do you remember when Facebook, the status always had an is, so it'd be Susan Is.

And then you'd have to craft your statement based on the word is.

And then they removed the is.

But I looked back at one time at my archive and I kept wondering, wait, well, there's a word missing here.

And it's because the original Facebook status was like, Jesse is.

And then you'd write whatever the is was too.

Funny.

Anyway, I've gone through that whole thing, you know, and I've gone through frustrations with Facebook running it, running a page, like from the very start.

And there's less and less users have less and less control.

And Facebook has obviously more and more and it's becoming a bit ott, you know, it's, you can't.

So now on my page, all of a sudden, my own posts, I have a new page now.

You know, I've got, I've had maybe six altogether.

And they're removing my posts from my own page, telling me it's spam.

I mean, that's gotta be a false positive.

That's gotta be the algorithm just being stupid, right?

I don't know with Facebook, again, the extent to which they've automated stupidity on multiple levels.

One can never underestimate.

Because I've walked away.

I still have my Facebook, but I've often walked away from it for years.

For the exact reason that you're describing.

Because it feels like a moving target.

Right.

Like the rules are constantly changing.

Exactly.

So the other day I went to Messenger, Somebody sent me a photo, and I saw it on my phone first.

And then I.

Because I don't like to work on my phone.

It's too small.

And so I use my laptop more.

And I went to my laptop to look at the photo, but I couldn't see it anymore because it was a one view only.

One view only.

And it said right there on the thing, you know, you can only look at this photo.

And so now you have the option.

If you're sending a photo to somebody, you have the option of having them view it only once.

And.

And then it's deleted.

You know, it's over.

It's not deleted, though.

That's the paradox.

That goes to your point.

Yeah, that goes to your point of how the user has less control.

They give you the illusion that the other user only gets to see it once, but Facebook has it forever.

Right.

And that is a bit of a.

Paradox in some virtual vault somewhere.

But to bring us back to where we started, this ostensibly is about the future.

So are you entertaining a future without Facebook?

Has the frustration reached that point?

It kind of is.

I'm thinking, so I'm a writer, so, you know, I want to keep writing.

And unlike some people, I'm like, unlike some artists, it's important for me for my work to be seen.

You know, it's important for my words to be read.

And I'm considering now going to substack as an option.

But I haven't had much experience with substack.

I see a lot of people using it.

I have my own blog, so it's how to.

Like I used.

Used to use.

And I still do use Facebook to drive people to my blog and whether substack will enable me to do that or not.

And.

And then you have to start all over again and building your audience.

And so I don't know.

Are you on substack?

I mean, give me a pause before we get to the.

That's my website.

That's the website.

Yeah.

And I will answer your substack question, but let me just briefly bring up your website, because I was absolutely.

I don't want to say overwhelmed, but that is correct.

I was blown away.

I was impressed when I looked at the site map and just how many amazing women you've got on the site.

It was really impressive.

So this is the.

Hey, everybody, go check out amazingwomenrock.com.

susan, over the years, has really built a phenomenal resource that is well worth going down the rabbit hole and checking out some of the stuff that's been put up there.

Yeah, but that site has over 2,000 pages, all of it written by me.

Yeah, that is, again, impressive, especially to your point where I have both been curious and I would say, careless over the last couple of decades on the Internet, I often just start something new.

So I'm always.

There's all these starts exactly right.

There is a little bit of that.

I'm definitely an ADHD autistic person, but I wish that some of the projects I'd started in the 90s I kept going until now because it is an accomplishment to have all of that knowledge organized in such a manner.

And that's where Substack, I think, is an interesting.

Not digression, but tangent for us to take.

Because like Facebook, it is a bit of a puzzle.

On the one hand, what it offers is discovery.

So it does allow you to connect to new readers.

It does allow you to promote your writing and get your writing out to a new audience.

And that, to me, is very appealing.

I first used substack kind of right before and in the early parts of the pandemic, I did a daily substack for I think, just less.

Just shy of two years, perhaps.

Really?

Yeah.

And I, to my earlier point about the squirrels, I deleted it all.

I just wiped it out.

Yeah.

And it was because I wrote a lot about the pandemic.

I wrote about COVID I was translating the kind of medical knowledge.

And then at a certain point, I just decided that we had lost that shout out to Biden giving a pardon to Dr.

Fauci, because I suspect had he not given that pardon to Dr.

Fauci, his life would be kind of difficult right now.

I just felt.

I kind of sensed what's happening now.

And I decided I didn't want to be on the wrong side of history.

There were better people than me who were cataloging that information.

And I was content to, as someone who has 25 years, 30 years of Internet history, to brush that aside.

And it was at the time when the Nazis were starting to become part of Substack, and Substack was going through this really interesting governance issue that everyone was about two years ago, which is.

Should we have Nazis on our platform.

And Substack said, yes.

And that's where I said, okay, well, fuck you, Substack.

I'm gone.

And I went to a platform called Beehive and it's Beehive with two I's.

So B, E, E, H, I, I, V.

And I do encourage you as a writer to check it out.

Okay.

Beehive does not offer the same kind of discovery as Substack, but it's far more focused on writers like yourself who fundamentally want to bring people back to their website or back to their blog or back to a digital property they own.

Versus Substack really wants to be a walled garden.

Right.

They really kind of make it hard to get your content, to get your readers.

They're now hosting podcasts and videos, but again, they want to keep everyone within Substack and they use.

They use all of them.

That's the problem with Facebook, right?

Yes.

And they are.

Content is no longer your content.

If you write stuff on Facebook, it just goes down your feed and never to be found again.

You can't find it, you can't search it.

Substack's a little better that way.

And they do allow you to export.

So you can, for example, constantly export it and import it into WordPress or import it into some other standalone.

But the design of Substack is very much like Facebook.

They want to keep you within that walled garden.

Now I'm back on Substack as of December because you can't.

Like the Nazis are everywhere.

I can't say, oh, I can't use that because the Nazis are using it.

And similarly, the discovery aspect of Substack.

Yeah, right.

As Elon Musk demonstrated.

So I don't know if I've answered your question.

Feel free to ask any follow up.

But it'll be a struggle for you to get the audience and the attention you get on Substack off of Substack.

That's certainly what I'm struggling with at the moment.

Oh yeah.

It's kind of the same with Facebook.

It's ultimately, I think it's better to have your own contact list.

Yes.

Which is what I used to have.

And I think that when I, if and when I decide to move completely from Facebook back to my blog, like to stop my.

So I have a number of Facebook pages at the minute.

I have my own personal page and then I have my Amazing Susan page, which is mostly devoted to motorcycling, so.

And my blog isn't motorcycling.

There's opinion and you know, other stuff there.

But I think I'm gonna ask my audience on Facebook to subscribe to my blog and then just stop doing Facebook because I'm tired.

I, you know, why do I want to get my post taken off as spam and Mike?

Like, that's ridiculous.

It's insulting, quite frankly.

Yeah.

And also, I had seven Twitter accounts.

I haven't been active on Twitter for quite some time now, but I had.

And two of my accounts, the one for Amazing Women Rock and I had another.

I have another site called she Quotes also has hundreds of pages on it.

All memes.

I was doing memes before anyone else ever thought.

Right on.

Anyway, have you looked at Blue Sky?

I'm going to, yeah.

Because.

Because I went to log into Facebook the other day, so two of my accounts were stolen.

Amazing Women Rock.

They were hacked.

They were stolen.

Your Facebook accounts you made or your Twitter accounts?

No Twitter accounts.

Amazing Women Rock and she Quotes were both stolen.

And so I sent a.

A complaint to Twitter.

This was like, I don't know, five or six months ago.

And got no reply.

And then a couple of days ago, I wanted to see.

Actually, I wanted to see if Mark Carney's.

I had seen a screenshot saying that Mark Carney's account had been suspended on Twitter.

So I wanted to check it out.

I always check stuff first before I post anything, but I couldn't log in.

And not only that, I could, but all my accounts were listed.

I had like eight, seven or eight Twitter accounts.

They're all listed down the side.

And it's telling me, you know, put in your email address, put in your password.

And I have a system that I use for the passwords.

And so I'm putting the passwords in every time.

It told me that the email address is invalid, the password address is invalid, and then it says, you know, give us your.

Your.

We'll email you a link and.

And then they email the link and you hit the link and.

No, it's not.

I mean, it was just a nightmare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that is.

That's why I'm calling it X now.

Because they don't deserve the legacy name of Twitter.

It has become such a monster.

And to your point, in December, when I started, when I sort of said, you know, our political moment demands activity, it demands, you know, media participation, media creation.

So I started playing with X again after.

After ignoring it, and it's been a waste of time, like, and.

And I say this in the sense that it's clearly a pay to play platform that if you don't pay for the blue check and the monthly thing, your content will be actively suppressed.

You're not going to reach your quote unquote audience.

You're not going to reach your followers.

There's absolutely no point in posting.

And, and right up until this week, I was still just throwing stuff out there, just, you know, to see what it gets.

And today I was kind of like, you know what?

No, I'm not gonna bother.

It's not worth my time at all.

No, no, no, no.

All right.

Yeah.

So.

And the problem is that lots of people, that's where their community is.

You know, you talked about community with John and especially during COVID like that was I, I'm here alone in my house.

You couldn't go anywhere.

That Facebook kind of kept me sane, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

Being connected with people through online kept me sane.

Well, and let, let's use that actually as an opportunity.

Not, not changing subjects at all, but remembering that I have a structure to this show and we've been talking about the future all that time.

But let us segue into our feature conversation because I want to talk about Facebook and I want to talk about it in the context of our local community, to everyone who doesn't live in our community.

I call it Almonte, and I love the Spanish pronunciation, but of course it's Almont here locally.

And you and I, because our grandfathers were not born here, you and I fundamentally are newcomers, no matter how long we've actually lived here.

And what I think a lot of people in cities don't understand is how powerful the Facebook local group in small communities has become.

And many analysts often point out that the reason Facebook continues to survive today is because of the anchor that they have in a lot of North American small communities.

Because the Facebook group is.

Is such a touch point and not even of like minded people, often quite the opposite.

Oh my God.

So I'm curious both in the context of the pandemic, because it was a really interesting touch point for our physical community who were using the local Facebook community as a way to disagree, to articulate, to connect in addition to the more sane groups that we belong to that could provide more of that social.

Contact, which are those, Jesse?

Fair enough, I was being aspirational.

But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the evolving nature of the Facebook local.

Well, you know, we had that page Friends in Mississippi Mills, Friends of Mississippi.

Mills, which was kind of the original.

That was the original one.

And then that the, the creator of that page finally I don't know how long ago it was now.

Eight months maybe.

Seems about right.

Nine months.

Gave.

Just shut the page down because he was tired.

I have to imagine he caught a lot of flack.

A lot of flack from everybody.

Like not just people from one side of the spectrum or the other.

But that's power.

Yeah.

Those in power get a lot of heat.

Yeah, but it's tiresome.

Yes, it is.

And it's tiresome for the.

For the users as well, coincidentally.

Shall I read you a little poem?

I wrote exactly about that?

Okay, so this, this is called the lowest common denominator.

It's about threads.

Not threads, the new threads.

It's about, you know, how things go in a thread.

One asks a question, the other replies with insults and slander that are hard on my eyes.

You answer, just like I've come to expect.

No doubt you are playing with just half a deck, you moron.

You fool.

The first one shoots back.

There's no proof of your truth and your brain's got a crack.

The other can't let that statement stand.

So he types out a comment, a terse reprimand.

How dare you accuse me, you nitwit.

You hack.

When it's clear as a crystal.

You're the one with the lack.

Back and forth, forth and back, round in circles they go, as down sinks the thread till it's lower than low.

That was fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic and a very astute expression or observation of the culture that exists in these groups.

But I'm curious, I feel, to bring us back to the quitting social media.

I kind of feel that those the original friends of and the new kind of friends in.

And I do actually monitor some of the right wing splinter groups that claim to offer the unfiltered version.

Honestly, that has kept me on Facebook.

There were parts of the pandemic where, and I agree, like the digital community side I was finding elsewhere.

I mean, I was finding it on Twitch and Discord and all sorts of other media.

Yeah.

But I feel even today that I can't quit Facebook because there's a lot of gossip, innuendo, nonsense, but also local intelligence that flows through that group.

There is like, you can put a post on there that says looking for whatever and people will answer you.

And it's like way faster than having to shop around and you get recommendations, you get a direct line to whoever it is that you need or want or whatever it is that you need or want.

And then there's events and all of that stuff.

Yeah, it's Important.

And I'm curious, your kind of strategy, because you engage at a level that I, quite frankly, don't have the courage.

I.

I will troll.

I'll sometimes ask people, especially some of the real wingnuts.

I'll ask them sincere questions to try to get them to unpack the logic they clearly don't have, versus you engage much more earnestly.

And I think there's a lot of community members who appreciate it, who are looking for that common sense amid some of the nonsense.

But I'm curious, are you doing it spontaneously as a writer?

Are you doing it out of a sense of community responsibility?

Do you have fun doing it?

Because clearly there's some stress that comes with it as well.

Well, in answer to those questions, I would say yes.

Well, I've been in a few circumstances where I've gotten into very heated discussions.

I wouldn't even call them discussions.

More like the poem I've just read.

Yes.

And then I just.

I said to myself, this isn't.

Why am I doing this?

There's no point.

And I think people need to be civil.

You know, we've lost civility.

We've lost reasonable discourse.

There's no logic out there.

People leap in with whatever tick tock garbage that they've assimilated.

And.

And it's some.

A lot of it makes no sense.

So I just try and be chill.

Yeah.

It's almost an attempt at a meditative exercise with the ultimate incendiary distraction there in front of you.

Yes, yes.

You have a way with words.

Well, okay, speaking of which, then allow me to throw a curveball at you.

And this is a curveball which I haven't really had the opportunity to throw at people, partly because I don't think that they've had your anthropological experience in Facebook groups.

And I say this because I find there's two types of people.

There's the people who avoid it entirely.

They're just like, there's no way I'm gonna wade into that.

And then there's the folks who have been driven insane by the nature of these groups.

You are a rare individual who has been in the social media weeds for pretty much its entire history, and you still have common sense and what appears to be sanity, although we'll get to the dementia shortly.

What if I were to pose to you the abstract but metaphorically accurate argument that our parliament is now on Facebook?

That our town council, from a participatory perspective, is Friends in Mississippi Mills?

And while Friends in Mississippi Mills does not have the electoral power to set Our council and mayor.

It sure seems to be where town debates happen.

And while you are someone who has taken the effort to go to town council and take notes and share those notes in the previous Facebook group, what do you think of my.

Sorry, go ahead.

You know what happened after.

After Covid.

So the Facebook.

The council meetings were held online.

They were streamed.

And then when Covid was over, I went back to the council meetings and I went to one and I started to do what I had done before, which was to follow along the council meeting and put the updates in the feed on the Facebook page.

Excuse me, but what happened after Covid?

Facebook, as we talked about earlier, changed so that the.

The updates didn't appear.

Yes.

Buried sequentially.

Yeah.

There would be one and then.

And then they would post another one and until like the next day.

And so that was the end of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But again, indulge me in this metaphor.

To what extent, And I'll reframe it in even more incendiary language, given our discussion today.

To what extent is Facebook taking over the democratic franchise?

To what extent is the decisions made in a community no longer happening in the town council, but happening in the Facebook group, which does not have democratic mechanisms?

To Tracy, the original owner, moderator of Friends of Mississippi Mills, he was never elected, and I think that's why he quit, because he had all the stress, none of the power, none of the benefits.

Indulge me in this.

Do you think my metaphor is there?

Do you see a parallel?

Or do you think I'm smoking way too much cannabis?

Yes.

They're not mutually exclusive.

I will acknowledge that.

I think that the.

I think social media has an inordinate power over the political process and that that power is increasing.

I mean, look at.

And, well, who is standing up there with Trump?

Right.

Given the Nazi salute.

Right.

And to your point, at the inauguration, all the heads of social media instead of governors and elected officials.

Yeah.

And so that is going to quiet the voice.

I think people will become more afraid.

And, you know, already you post something that.

I don't know.

I've been kicked off.

I've been, what, put in Facebook, Facebook jail at least a dozen times, and I've had posts removed.

It's getting worse.

Yeah, yeah.

Although the current moderator, he.

He does seem to welcome politics the way that in friends of Friends of, rather than friends in friends of, they didn't want any controversy, any debates, but now it seems like there is more opportunity for debates and for political disagreement, albeit it's still kind of uncivil yeah.

But Facebook can just.

In a group sometimes.

Facebook takes down the posts.

Yes.

It's not the moderators that take down the post.

It's Facebook or it's, you know, whatever algorithm.

The automatic mechanisms.

Yeah, the Autumn whatever is automatic.

Yeah.

They look at the.

They read the page or they read the picture, they.

Whatever they do, and then bang, it's gone.

And then you have no recourse.

Yeah.

And.

And maybe I wonder if that'll change now that Zuckerberg has embraced this kind of libertarian ethos of, you know, but what that entails.

Because your point is it's all automatic.

So we don't know what the logic is.

No, we don't know what the logic is.

Like, sometimes I wonder why my posts have been taken off.

But you can't quest.

There's no questioning.

Yeah, you can't question.

There's no person there.

It's just AI.

Yeah, well, not even AI, because AI suggests it's intelligent.

And that's why in this case, I use the word automatic, because it makes mistakes.

So.

So pervasively.

Speaking of which, I do want to talk about dementia because I feel it is both appropriate in the context of social media as well as appropriate in the context of contemporary politics.

But before we go there, allow me still on this subject of kind of local democracy and local social media, while I wasn't born there, I spent most of my formative life in Toronto, and certainly my political outlook was heavily shaped by my life in Toronto, and therefore my concept of politicians and municipal politics really reflects.

Rob Ford, Toronto.

Oh, my goodness.

As absurd as that might be, I'm curious what your thoughts of our local politicians and our local politics.

Partly because you have taken the time to hang out at town council and because you are the kind of curious person who pays attention to these things, I think more so than our other neighbors.

So I'm curious what your thoughts are on both the people who comprise our local politicians, but the culture of local politics here.

Well, I think it's improved since the last council.

And I think our mayor, Krista Lowery, is absolutely fabulous.

She certainly developed a profile, you know, provincially amongst other mayors.

Yeah, she just won an award.

I can't remember what it is now.

Some something distinguished service, you know.

Yeah, something like that.

At the Rural Ontario Municipal association conference.

How clever are you?

It's one of my.

And I'm getting to this in a bit.

One of my ambitions in life would to be a speaker at Roma.

I would love the power and privilege of addressing all those rural Mayors, So I pay attention to these circuits.

But you were saying.

Yes, our mayor.

The mayor is fabulous.

And I think the councillors are also fabulous.

I mean, it's not an easy job.

And I think I have another poem about that.

Maybe we don't have time.

I don't know.

No, you take a moment to find the poem and I'll share a quick anecdote.

I live in Ramsey, the Ramsey Ward.

And the counselor who was defeated in the last municipal election was an anti vaxxer, right.

And a full out kind of COVID conspiracist.

So I'm glad that she was defeated.

I really, you know, her and Randy Hillier brought a lot of shame to me politically that they were my elected representatives.

So I'm glad that they were defeated.

But as you look for this poem, I bring this up because, you know, Susan, you're exactly the kind of person I would love to have on town council.

Because while you are correct that our mayor from a policy perspective is quite competent, I don't feel we have anyone in the town council who is media savvy, who understands how to communicate in a manner that counters the conspiracies, that counters the kind of far right who do have an anchor in our community.

And our mayor does great work, but she's the kind of person who thinks that the great work should speak for itself.

She is also fortunate to be part of the families who are the legacy of this community.

And that's a boost.

But I would love to see someone like yourself run for counsel, partly because we need better communicators in our public office.

Speaking of which, you got that poem cued up?

Yeah, I do.

Please.

Thanks for that vote of confidence, but I think not.

Yes, yes.

This is.

This is called rebuttal.

And I wrote this in response to complaints.

You know, everybody complains about everything all the time.

I'm glad I live in Almont.

There's so much here to do.

It doesn't matter if you're old or totally brand new.

The town is cute and quaint.

You see, it really is terrific.

Don't listen to the folks who say hey, this or that's horrific.

We have music, arts and plays, cycling, parks and rivers, shops and food and other stuff.

Get out there and just give her.

Our council works both long and hard.

Still citizens complain the traffic's bad and I'm so sad and they should stop the rain.

Some folks think it's a right to bitch they want to have their say because of taxes municipality, we all are forced to pay the Flowers suck, the roads are fucked the whole damn thing's a mess.

Get off your butts.

Do something now.

We need a full course.

We need a full course.

Press.

I prefer to be constructive and volunteer my time or take a poke at those who whinge with poetry that rhymes Is every little thing just right and always to my liking?

Oh, no, it's not.

Of course it's not but that's no cause for striking I feel so lucky to be here where abundance is on offer I'm grateful for the things we have unlike unhappy scoffers Even if the world were perfect a bunch would find it faulty they'd rant and rave from beyond the grave Their hellish voices salty.

Right on.

Fantastic.

And it is not ironic that you listened to the episode I had with John Wolfstone, because it was like this one, I was able to use my sound effects, which in developing a muscle memory of podcasting, I haven't got to yet.

And I do dare you to post this interview once it's published to the Facebook group to see if anyone realizes that we're talking about them and whether they wanna react.

To which I'd say anyone local is welco to appear on the podcast and provide a dissenting view or a different perspective on either the role of Facebook in local communities or why the future is rural.

But before we conclude this fantastic conversation, I did kind of want to pick your brain, no pun intended, about dementia.

And I say this partly because cognitive decline is something that I've been kind of conscious of my entire life because of my parents work.

My dad is a geriatrician and has worked in geriatrics his entire life.

But I also feel that we, especially given the current president of the United States, we're sort of in a demented society.

And I say this in the sense that fascism tries to erase history as part of its use of power.

So while we can get into specifics, I'm curious, Susan, as a poet, as a writer, whether you will again indulge me in this metaphor.

To what extent do you think dementia is not just an individual cognitive decline, but as something that could be ascribed to our culture and our moment in history?

Oh, well, there's an interesting question.

I've never asked myself that before.

I.

I think that the new pres.

Down south is.

Well, the previous one was definitely declining, for sure about it.

You can see the look of his face.

We've actually learned that the staff who worked around him in the White House was hiding it for months, that they were going out of Their way to really cover up and make it secret.

It was an open secret in the White House, and it very much hurt Kamala Harris's chances.

Yeah, yeah, he should have resigned way before.

But anyway, again, you know, same pattern.

And the new guy, in my opinion, has a cluster B personality disorder.

He's.

He's, you know, a combination of narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, which is sometimes called psychopathy or sociopathy.

And, you know, he's.

He's a mixed bag of that.

And, you know, I guess you could say.

And I.

He probably has.

He's probably getting mild cognitive decline now, from what I see.

My observation.

And, you know, you're.

To your point, it can be a little bit contagious in a.

Not in a physical sense, but in a mental sense.

People kind of go, it's a cult.

And we're seeing that in our Facebook group.

Right.

We're seeing.

You know, you earlier used the word nonsense, and I've been sort of framing logic that there's a certain dementia to these arguments, not necessarily to the individuals presenting them.

And that's why I say it on a cultural level.

It feels that there is a complete disconnect.

I think as a society, it's hard for us to wrap our heads around because we're used to political discourse being rational and reasonable.

And to your point, the cult seems to be having their own internal meaning their own internal logic, which seems to depend upon a certain break from reality.

Well, interestingly, that brings us kind of full circle back to social media, doesn't it?

Because.

And.

And AI comes into it as well, I think.

I was at.

Wasn't I at some thing that you did.

Was that about AI?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

Because you can't tell anymore fact from fiction, like I'm very.

I try to be as thorough as possible in something.

Post.

Somebody posts something.

I go and try and find the source so that I.

I know if it's either, you know, real or semi real or if it's just complete garbage like the.

The.

There was.

I don't know if you saw the.

The limo thing, but when Mark Carney did his.

His announcement in Edmonton, and so they.

There was a picture of this limo pulling up.

Look at Bacarney, you know, what's he doing?

Well, it turns out it was a complete setup.

Yeah.

Somebody ordered the limo there to pick somebody up.

Yeah.

I mean, we're at a level of dirty tactics.

In which point about AI.

Yeah.

And actually I did.

It's a terrible habit.

I'm Trying to break it.

I did open X today, and all the ads were like, fake news about Jagmeet Singh, fake news about Carney, fake news about other politicians.

And when you say that, you look up stuff.

When you say that, you vet the information that's there.

That is obviously a reflection of your literacy.

Right.

And as a writer, you have an advanced level of literacy because you're practicing your craft pretty much your entire life.

Unfortunately, that literacy is not as widespread as we need it.

Right.

And people are not putting that effort in to verify the information they get, which isn't hard.

Like, in the world we live in, it's actually quite easy to verify the accuracy of the stuff you get.

It takes effort, but not a lot.

No, no.

And yeah, that.

And perhaps that contributes to a dementia like condition, a decline of the community brain, if you will, or the social brain, the part that's meant to be leading in the thinking process.

There's no thinking process happening anymore.

It's just absent.

Which is kind of what happens with cognitive decline, isn't it?

Well, so go ahead.

So I, I don't think your.

Your metaphor or your is is off.

Let me put it that way.

I think it could.

An argument could be made for that.

Well, and your point about no thought is.

Is really my position on AI, that, you know, artificial intelligence is a very powerful tool, but it does not think.

It requires the thinking to be done by the user.

And unfortunately, not everyone understands that.

So they're not really making the most of AI.

And I, as part of this podcast, I'm interviewing, you know, lots of AI people just to pick their brains, but also to try to poke holes in some of their arguments.

Because a lot of the future of work stuff is all about how AI is going to take our jobs, to which I'm always kind of rebutting.

Well, what about elder care and what about the larger care industry?

This is something that I think, even though we grossly undervalue it in our society, ludicrously so, but that elder care and care labor in general is something that the demand is going to continue to grow rapidly, and unfortunately, the supply is not there.

But this is where I kind of want you to be.

A little political, maybe even a little aspirational.

What would it take to change that?

If we are an aging society, if part of aging is cognitive decline, what do we have to do to rectify, if not completely transform, our understanding of elder care, our understanding of care labor in general, so that as you and I continue to age, as we do start to see the signs of cognitive decline.

We have some hope that we will be able to live in a society where community.

To go back to John Wolfstone's point is something that we can see that we can look forward to rather than the current situation where we have reason to be concerned.

Oh, big reason to be concerned.

You know, there's.

There are a bunch of problems and looking at the cause, we.

So I don't know.

150, 200 years ago our life expectancy was 40.

Yeah.

And now it's 70, 80.

We're not.

And.

And everything hasn't caught up.

No.

The nursing home.

The history of the nursing home is.

Is.

Comes from poor houses.

That's.

That's the history.

Or that's like way back when.

But.

And there's not enough people.

There's a.

I've got a.

I've got a diagram.

I'll send it to you.

It's a.

I did the causes of the breakdown of elder care and it hasn't changed much.

There's, you know, staffing.

There's not enough staff.

There's.

The staff isn't trained properly.

There's not enough funding.

There's the profit side.

You know, people want to make money.

That doesn't really work.

Yeah, they make money.

Yeah.

But not.

The care is not there.

The care sucks.

Yeah.

There's the understanding of what is required to properly care for.

For elderly people and then there's the, the desire on behalf of society to people who are older, seen often as disposable.

So it's really complicated.

It's just not one thing.

It's this whole web of stuff as is usually everything.

Right.

You can't just pick out, oh, this is the thing that we need to fix and it's all going to be okay.

It's not like that.

It's.

It's multifaceted and.

And then there's maid.

Which is a whole other issue.

And for our non Canadian, non listening maid stands for medically assisted intentional death.

Is that no medical assistance in dying.

Medical assistance in dying.

But it's an option for people who are experiencing disability, people who are having a difficult time aging as kind of a way to choose death as an option.

But from a policy perspective it's still very problematic.

Sorry, go ahead.

You have to be.

Death should be imminent within six months or something like that.

I think the rule is now and they're trying to change it.

And the problem with dementia, of course, is that once you're at that point, then you don't have the Capacity to make that decision.

And so they're trying to change it so that people can decide in advance.

Yes, yes.

The whole notion of the living will, which for anyone listening right now, you might think, well, I don't have any assets.

I don't need a will.

You've got a brain.

And that's kind of the role of a living will.

Yeah.

So ironically, we should have you back to talk about this subject in particular, because where I think we had a lot of fun unpacking and playing with social media, I think this is worthy of its own episode because there are a lot of threads for us to pull, especially from a mediview's angle, both on the future and anticipating the future, but also on the policy sides to this.

There are a few things that you sort of said there that I also kind of at some point want to unpack.

One is the whole healthcare and staffing.

Because one of the other recurring threads in our local Facebook group is there are clearly staff of our local hospital system who are unhappy with management, and they keep posting comments that are alluding to this.

And I keep.

As a recovering journalist, I keep wanting to pull those threads and be like, oh, really, what's going on here?

What's happening?

In the same way that we are an aging community.

And so I think this conversation we're having now about elder care, about whether people who are aging are discarded in a society, society, or to, I suspect, our own mutual ambition, quite the opposite.

That we return to a society where us elders are revered for our wisdom and everyone wants to listen to our podcasts and read our blogs again, aspirational, but good.

Aspirational.

Yes.

Yes, yes.

I'm curious, though, you know, to kind of wrap this conversation up, do you feel that there is an intersection here between what we've been describing at the end here in elder care and where we started in terms of social media?

Because without disclosing our age, you and I are already past what used to be the life expectancy that you cited.

Well, past.

But intellectually, we're both clearly still engaged.

Right.

And like a fine wine, I think a brain can really become stronger and more valuable with age.

So to what extent do you see social media as that kind of aging strategy, as a counter to potential cognitive decline?

Because if we're having our gray matter continue to connect and flare and do interesting things, that's got to be a positive, no?

Well, for me, I don't know.

For me, what I've noticed is, is that social media, the amount, the volume of Information that I am exposed to and trying to manage every day is getting to be beyond my capacity, and it's causing.

That's causing me to be anxious because I can't.

I.

I think I can't handle it like I used to be able to.

But on the other hand, there's way more information than there was before.

There's a certain relativity here, I think, worth keeping in mind.

Yeah.

And so.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I think we'd probably be better off going out in nature for walks than being online.

I agree.

Hours and hours and hours.

I mean, you're out there in the country in the snow and the dogs and, you know, all of that stuff.

Good for you.

Although that's healthier.

To your point, it's still.

Even though I have all of this literally as my backyard, sometimes I'll fall into a TikTok hole, right?

Yes, but.

But to your point, to bring this kind of to a close, this is why I recommitted to podcasting, because I kind of felt that it still gives me the desire for media.

It gives me the desire to connect with my world, but it's more conversational.

Right.

Like in you and I having this conversation, on some levels, we're recreating social media.

We're, you know, emulating some of the dopamine hits from having good ideas and, you know, connecting on different levels.

But it feels more human to me in terms of the dialogue and the conversation.

So that's part of why I'm currently trying to commit my.

My screen time.

Well, I'm doing both, though, right?

Because I do feel that writing exercises a part of our mind that's different than oral, that's different than dialogue.

So I'm trying to do both, but I'm trying to do both more.

As I am the creator, I am the producer, I'm still consuming podcasts.

The thing about farming is podcasts and farming go hand in hand, because when you're out there mucking a stall or moving hay or bringing the goats to the back, I can have the, you know, be listening.

I can have that kind of combination of physical activity and intellectual stimulation.

But this is why I'm really enthusiastic about podcasting, and I'm kind of enthusiastic about substack, as problematic as it may be, because it allows me to do both.

It allows me to kind of engage the world, play with media, but have more intention, have more mindfulness to it, and still spend as much time outside, you know, with my animals and breathing fresh air and Hanging out with the trees.

That's a bit ironic, Jesse, to say you're being mindful when you're doing the, you know, mucking out the stall with your podcast on.

But, but that's the paradox, not mindfulness.

But it is, it's meta mindfulness here on Meta Views.

Cause I agree, it is.

And this is where my kind of autistic ADHD mind requires a certain level of stimulation.

But it's why computer programmers say that they have their best thinking in the shower, right?

Because they on the one hand have to get away from the screen.

But on the other hand, the shower, the water on their body is giving them a physical stimulation that allows for the mental.

So I think it's complicated.

And maybe that's where we will have you back for the cognition episode where we don't just talk about aging, but we talk about how brains work.

Some very strong ideas about dementia.

Right on.

Right on.

That are not kind of mainstream.

Good.

Then this is the place to air them here on metafuse.

Now, Art, we end every episode by asking our guest to give some shout outs.

And we partly do this because, you know, the Internet is all about links.

It's all about kind of connecting people.

And just like we started with news in the future, is there anyone that you're reading, is there anyone that you've been thinking about that you want our audience to know?

It's kind of on the spirit of we stand on the shoulders of giants, right?

As human beings, we are iterating the art and culture that is inspired before us.

So is there any person or two people, Susan, that you think our audience should know?

I've been thinking about that since yesterday and I don't want to single anyone out.

I really, no, I would like to shout out to the Canadian people and how they're responding to a multitude of challenges and mostly with grace, I think mostly with, you know, we're stalwart and, and I think that's important.

I think we should not bend.

Right on.

And, and, and I, I really feel that people are kind of embracing that position and.

So good on us.

So good on Canada.

Right on.

And you know, to your point, I think Canadians have always struggled with what it means to be Canadian.

And I think we're going to get a real opportunity to have a deep think about that because of course, it's not just a federal election, which I tend to love elections because they are opportunities for us to have these big questions.

But I think we're gonna have an Ontario election too.

So it's you know, a double whammy, double peril, double opportunity to have these big discussions.

So again, more reason to have you back on the show.

Thank you very much, Susan.

You're so much fun.

Well, and as a poet, we need to have more poetry on metaview, so thank you again for that.

And I do encourage you to post this interview.

I'll email it to you to post it on our local Facebook group because maybe we will provoke more local conversation about these particular issues.

Susan can be found@amazingwomenrock.com even the website you're saying is not as active as it used to.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

It used to be.

But you can go to amazingsusan.com okay.

Amazingsusan.com is the hub.

Go ahead.

And.

And for people who are in contact with people who live with dementia or care partners, My Alzheimer's story dot com.

Right on.

My Alzheimer's story.

And I suspect when we have Susan back, she will either have a sub stack or potentially a blue sky.

So it will be like a sequel of, you know, Amazing Susan reiterating on social media or abstaining from it entirely.

It's like a cliffhanger.

Tune in and find out.

But of course, Meta Views is still available on most socials where you can find us.

This has been another fantastic episode.

I tell you, Susan, we're on a hot streak, which makes me feel that I'm gonna have some terrible episodes coming up.

But we will continue to try nonetheless.

For those tuning in.

Thank you, and we'll see you soon.