Supplementary Material 53: Matthew the Succulent, Bin-faced Politicians, and Very Very Tired Economists

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Growers Supplementary Material.

With your Chippy, Kohus, Chris, Kavna coming all the way from Japan, via Northern Ireland.

I'm a Cardinal von Fraudist, Upshorts.

Teaching a Psychology Department, the man over there is a purebred psychologist, a status matrician, a psychometrician, stathologist.

Psychometrician.

Psychometrician, all sorts of things. It's Machia Brian from Australia, line.

There in the bagel.

How are you doing, Matt?

Hello. You are Chippy this morning.

You were asking me just before we turned the recording on.

Are you ready, Matt? Are you ready? And I was thinking myself, God, I don't think.

Oh my God.

Chris, it's a very philosophical question.

If I was a king, I'd be Matthew the Unready.

That's what they call me.

So some of the kings got good titles like Matthew the Bold, Matthew the...

I don't know. I can't think of anything like that as a bold.

But I know that one of them was like Ethel Red, the Unready or something.

I'd be known as Matt the Fat and Unready.

Not the Fat? God, that's a fat harsher. Come on, like, months tired.

So Matt the Tired, yeah, I am a bit fat.

Some king was known as someone so the Fat, which was a lot of good, maybe better than Unready, but not as good as Bold.

I'm sorry.

Matt the succulent tenderer.

Yeah, I just live in a succulent. Matt the succulent.

Matt the succulent. Wow.

You're signed like a demon from Warhammer 40k, like the pressure got it.

That was the succulent Chinese meal.

Yeah, well, that's the differences in our references.

But that exists.

You know, what about with you, you know, your holidays are finished up back to the Deleague grind.

Have you been okay? You're...

I haven't been okay. No, I haven't been okay.

I'm actually... No, this is going to sound worse than it is.

I'm struggling to breathe, which sounds...

Don't worry. It won't come down. Relax. It's fine.

What happened was I tried Pickleball, Chris. Pickleball.

I didn't know what Pickleball was.

I went with my wife. Everyone there was between 10 and 30 years older than me.

We were far away from the youngest people there.

And I discovered that it's...

If you don't know what Pickleball is, it's like tennis for old or disabled people.

That's how I describe it.

But I really liked it. I thought it was really fun.

And I was thinking it far more seriously than everyone else there.

I was lunging. I was getting trick shots back.

I was diving, which I shouldn't be doing at my age.

And I dived for...

They found me very amusing with my antics.

They were all laughing at me.

And then when I made a massive lunge and tripped and stacked it,

landed on my shoulder slash chest,

they weren't sure whether to laugh or to call an ambulance.

And so now I've got a Pickleball-based injury, which is not my finest hour.

I'm not very proud of that.

But some people did find it funny at the time.

I did injured my back recently when,

when I was older in two days in a row,

I kind of called the muscle, I did something like that.

But I don't wear my ampak.

I'm back. I was on the wall yesterday.

And I almost cleared EQ, first create in Japan,

which is an achievement for me.

But I know I'm not really at that level.

So if it happens, it will just be a very specific group.

But point is, I was on the wall not hobbling around like an old band.

The rumors, but that's what I was doing.

They were spread by haters and liars.

I'm still young.

I'm worth a dick at the cake.

Yeah.

I actually think a guy cursed me.

Curse me.

What?

Well, yeah, because I went to a new boulder in Jem,

disproved it out from me and my son were going to go there.

So I was checking out me, sure, it's all okay.

And good end of words.

A friendly, middle aged Japanese man who was there.

And he befriended me and we were talking about,

you know, most about climbing and stuff.

But he was better than me.

I'll also happily, that's a given.

At any case, very friendly guy.

And then he started packing up early and he said,

I'm going to go, I've hurt my back a little bit.

So be careful with your back.

And I looked at my bed, pitting him for, yeah, yeah, I understand.

He's good, but you know, it's probably given way.

He's a bit older than me.

So I don't have to hurt my back in years.

I'm almost there.

Then who pressed my stroke as I injured my back?

About very session.

Like, it was warning was pressing it.

You climbed too close to the sun.

That's right.

I even thought of my head.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, some of us need to worry about entering our back.

And I'm, apparently, that was me.

Did you get too high?

You went too high.

I don't know.

I literally don't know.

It's just climbing like normal.

But I obviously, you know, maybe I'd been warm up properly or whatever.

Just foolishness.

And then I will say I did something that was probably ill advised.

I'm not going to work directly.

Not recommending this.

Okay, I'm saying I'm not recommending this.

I'm doing the strategic disclaimer.

But at the weekend, my back was still sore.

You know, it wasn't really moving, right and stuff.

But my somewhat integral bouldering.

And I wanted to get out of the house.

So I said, you know, let's go.

And I went and I didn't want to just be sitting there and not climbing.

So I climbed.

And I was careful.

You know, I didn't have any point jumped on or whatever.

But it was still feeling very sore and whatever.

But I climbed a couple of things that were relatively tough.

But I had to climb them much better because of, you know,

my back not feeling right.

I'm making sure that I could get on.

And after that, I felt like my back felt good.

So I don't recommend that.

I don't recommend doing it through it.

You climbed through it.

Yeah, just saying that.

How it didn't make it worse.

But you know, it could have gone another way.

I could have like fallen off and damaged it worse.

So it's one of those things where it's very easy.

I'd be like, oh, so maybe that's that was good for it.

But it could have been bad.

It went the other way.

Well, that's a respectable injury.

That's a masculine manly injury to have.

I think rock climbing or bouldering.

What if you call it?

Like my son, you know, he's quite a good soccer player.

He's like, he's 15 or 16 or maybe 17.

I don't know.

He's around that age.

And Betty, Betty plays in the men's open thing as well as his age group thing.

And he's very good.

And he had like serious sports injuries just from like overstraining.

Like, you know, like a professional sports people do.

Like they just push themselves too hard.

And I think you did get kicked a few times by some big blocks.

But that's respectable.

I don't think a pickleball injury is in the same.

I don't know.

You know, when you see the old people getting out there and doing their exercise, my I think

we got asked so far.

We've got to grade these things on age curve.

That's what you're saying.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, um, okay.

So, you know, I'm just reminding people that we are delighted with this because this is

a full-of-venture material.

You can't stop us.

There's this part of the deal.

We don't put this in the code.

It's anymore.

They don't want us to say these things, right?

They don't want us to talk about that.

I'm not going to say that.

I'm not going to say that.

I'm not going to say that.

I'm not going to say that.

I'm not going to say these things, right?

They don't want us to talk about this stuff, right?

They're trying to shut us down.

They're trying to shut down the pickleball and the ball during talk, but we won't let them.

We believe in this.

We won't let them.

Chris Williams said and stuff.

I was talking about, you know, you have to make the land acknowledgement.

The gamers about, oh, women are all oppressed and whatever.

What about us, Matt?

Like, all these girls out there complaining.

Can we not just talk about our middle-aged hobbies and the only ones coming on?

Why won't they let us, Matt?

We won't let us, as we have just done it.

So, yeah, they can't stop us.

That's the real deal.

And there you go.

But we really can't talk about it.

We can't.

Oh, sorry.

Did you want to continue?

No, no.

I was going to introduce a completely random topic that just...

Oh, sure.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Well, did you see another Chinese model has just come out?

This is the news of the day, cutting you.

Did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it?

I do, we pull it on releases for a week or two.

But, yeah, Kimi K3 is out.

And it might be Benchmark Maxed.

But it appears to be one open source too, as they all are significantly cheaper than the American models.

But it's also, for the first time, really, apparently a frontier, like a true frontier model.

I didn't think that.

I didn't think that.

Yeah, on the same level as, you know, GPUT Soul 5.6 or Fable.

Clothes Fable.

So that's interesting.

I was just about to say that I'm quite happy with the new models that Kimite from OpenAI,

like the Soul models and the various other ones that I don't use.

But that's actually topic on that.

You said it's off topic.

And I haven't seen the AI news you had.

But it's almost like you via the ether and honed in on my psychic vibrations.

Because the first two clips I was going to play for you are from a discussion between Trevor Noah and Cory Doctoral,

where they're talking about technology and hyphens are developing or not developing, as the case might be.

So this is just saying, you know, pretty much on topic for the first clip.

So congratulations.

Do you know Cory Doctoral?

No, he wrote Ready Player One, didn't he?

No.

No, he wrote very well.

Very good.

But Cory Doctoral wrote in shittification why everything suddenly got worse and what the durability that radicalized,

like dying out in the magic kingdom and so on and so forth, is that he has a science fiction offer.

That's probably why you got.

What science fiction did he write?

Yeah, Ready Player One written by Ernest Klein.

Sorry, everyone.

Sorry for the misinformation.

Okay.

What science fiction did he write?

Well, apparently it has a thing called the Martin Hent series, Little Brother Universe.

He's got novels.

Like I mentioned, Dona Knight in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Makers, The Rapture of the Nerds,

they go map, all those.

Okay.

I may have read that I can't remember.

Some of them ring a bell.

Anyway.

Well, I mean, you probably read them, but like I know him for his tech commentary.

And he's probably most well known in the public discourse more recently for inshittification.

There are these public intellectuals with like a specific term attached to them and his inshittification.

But he has been like a tech comment theater for quite a while.

Yeah.

So, Antravo Noah is the comedian who went on to replace John Stewart on the Daily Show.

So, kind of, left leaning comedian slash TV host person.

So, let's listen to, then discuss the issues of the day.

Even when I was telling you, Gene, about this episode, I was like, I'm so excited to talk to Corey,

because he has done for society.

What I think society has been pining to do for itself, but just sort of hasn't been able to piece together.

And that is that like, everyone everywhere feels like everything that we're getting and experiencing

is becoming more and more shit.

Yeah.

Right?

We feel like the amount of food that we get for the money we pay is becoming shitta.

We feel like the amount of things that our time can do is becoming shitta.

We feel like our cause and the value that you get are shitta.

You feel like everything in your life.

Like, things that are getting smaller.

No, everything.

Everything.

Your body has just splashed in the last three years, not 30.

Yes.

Yes.

You can get, like, my grandmother in her house till the day she died,

the fridge that I knew from when I was a kid.

Yeah.

But even that term, lifetime guarantee is gone now.

Yeah.

I didn't even think of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Almost everything was lifetime guarantee.

If they say 20 year guarantee store or a lifetime guarantee of this, yeah.

Yeah.

And the thing is, this is why I appreciate your work so much, is because there are things that are so pernicious.

Is that the word in society where they like, they steal away and they, and they, and they like,

like, in, for what makes them, what makes them so insidious is that we all think we're being individually crazy and cramajony.

Mm-hmm.

You know what I mean?

So you just feel like in your life, you're like, I feel like old cars were made better than it's like,

Oh, here we go again, grandpa.

Yeah, it's right.

You know, I feel like this was, it's like, and what you've done is you've taken all of it and gone,

Hey, we're not crazy.

Mm-hmm.

Things are being made shittier.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, it's a great concept and certification applies to all products, I think, across the board.

Like my, my wife's car is this old van, a Toyota, you know, type type van.

It's been going for like 300,000 kilometers now.

And, um, I mean, it's never broken down or anything.

But, um, you know, when it's, it's comfortable and just just works and, and is good and very functional and quite fuel efficient and all of that.

But I, I still think that 1971 Ford GT clone, XY holder basically it was that I used to own as a kid.

That was cooler.

So, yeah, cars have gotten worse, much worse over the decade.

Well, like similarly, you know, I, when I was growing up, we had these like cassette player things, right?

And you like, awesome, awesome devices.

You had to turn them over, right?

In between and, you know, the little tip could get unwarranted and all that stuff.

But they could hold the quality.

That's the thing, the sound quality on that.

Sound quality was fantastic.

And, and also like, no, you know, then I have an iPod where you could break, you know, couple hundred songs.

No, I have unlimited storage on my phone, but like, it's on a phone, that, and it doesn't, you know, look, the button's not like a key.

I can access it from anywhere.

It's the same with me.

I've got this streaming device attached to the, to the high five in the lounge room, which has an app connected to my firing on Spotify, which is, you know, has, you know, I subscribed to it.

So obviously got a library of like every single song ever recorded.

And I stream it at a, at a lossless streaming rate.

But it's not the same.

It just doesn't feel the same as the old days when we're playing it on the cassette tape play.

Well, your sons and the vinyl, isn't it?

That's, I mean, that's my annual.

Actually, actually vinyl.

I can't tell the difference.

Actually, a good vinyl recording and the, the lossless digital thing.

To be honest with you, I can't, they both sound good to me.

I wonder if people in controlled conditions could in general, but like, yeah, we're, we're being sarcastic here, but a little bit.

Yeah, because the thing is, what struck me about this is like Trevor, Nora is basically saying, you know what?

People have always said that things were better in the past.

Like they always, in my grandpa, everyone they were saying, when I was a kid, we did things like this.

So that was better.

And you were your fancy new dongles and jangles, right?

It's all, it's all terrible.

And Trevor, Nora is like, and you know, they were talking like kind of nonsense, right?

Like it was based on this like imagined romanticized past.

And then I started feeling like that's it.

Like that's the popular sentiment.

And then you feel like, oh, wait, am I becoming like, is it, is it me?

That's how you know that's right.

Is it?

And then it's like, no, then you came along and you said, I'm right.

And I was like, oh, great.

He's telling us exactly what we want to hear.

Like it completely confirmed what I already believed.

So that was perfect.

That solves it.

And you're like, doesn't anybody realize you're describing confirmation bias almost directly?

I really wanted this to be true.

I came across your book which said, it is true.

And then I felt, yeah, I felt this click in my brain where everything made sense.

And I stopped.

Yeah, I mean, look, that's, that's true.

I'm big enough to be fair.

I mean, there's some truth in the insurefication idea.

Of course, of course there is.

There's very rich things where stuff is needed to be more disposable and all that kind of stuff.

But like in the same way, I don't know if the people that are cocking here,

their lifetime in the past was like this, you know, glorious world of great technology.

And fun times.

I grew up in the 80s in Northern Ireland.

And that was pretty grim.

That's pretty, pretty grim in lots of ways.

But one of the ways is just things like technology.

You know, like the internet developed in my lifetime.

And I was seeing this clip on TV where it was like an old school kid TV show by technology.

And they were covering the internet and people putting up streams on the internet.

And they were talking about these videos that regenerate every five minutes.

A still image and they're like, it's not really video, but that's what we're at.

Not like other and it was like the very early stage and we're like, you know, in the future, imagine

that people will be able to actually put videos and you know, you'll be able to broadcast

from your, your own room with actual live video.

And that was, you know, wasn't that longer ago.

So like, yes, there's things where stuff has become more disposable, but just things like the quality of TVs.

It's so much better than when I was a kid.

Yeah, I mean, just pure, the pure psychology of it.

I do find it interesting the kinds of opinions that are very broadly held because they feel right, right, due to whatever reasons.

In this case, there's a few things at play like everything is getting worse.

That is something that is like you've heard Corey Doctorer's version of it, but it's also a paleocon right wing thing as well.

And it's also like a militant left kind of thing as well, late stage capitalism, etc.

And there's grains of truth in it, but everything isn't getting worse in terms of people's material well-being and society, etc.

It's just not the case on any meaningful timescale.

Another interesting one is, I don't know about other parts of the world, but certainly in Australia, I would say 80, 90% of the population are absolutely convinced that the major supermarkets are absolutely screwing us.

They are absolutely ripping everyone off.

They're charging more money for less stuff and worse stuff, and now you can't even feed yourself anymore where it was fine, right?

Now, obviously inflation has got a lot to do with this, and there's a lot of economic things and stagnating wages.

That's one thing, but there's a lot of vitriol targeted at the duopoly of coals and warlords, right?

And so this interested me because I thought, well, if they are ripping people off, and there is stuff they do do, for instance, they obviously can control the suppliers and stuff like that.

They can screw down farmers and stuff and pay less for milk or whatever.

I'm sure there's any number of dodgy business practices they do.

But big picture, if they're ripping everyone off and making excessive profits, these are publicly traded companies.

You can read their financial reports.

We should be able to see that, right?

If there's monopolist, essentially it's a case of monopolistic behavior where you should see it at their bottom line, and you look at it, though, which I did.

And man, their margins are razor thin.

Their margins are razor thin.

So Australians will hate me to be telling them this.

But if you're unhappy about how much your shopping cart and groceries cost, you know, it feels like it's way too much, it's not, it's not calls them or worse fall.

But everyone believes that because of course you do, right?

Because that's the point.

Like when you're at the checkout, when you're paying, you're, oh my god, it's $370 or $250.

That's a lot more than I would have guessed.

They're naturally going to attract the blame for whatever.

Both our natural perceptions of not keeping track of just normal inflation.

And, you know, and the fact is I think people are spending a much smaller proportion of their income on food and groceries than they used to.

So it shouldn't be the case that we're feeling like we can't afford it anyway.

Love story short.

It's just interesting where these devices and beliefs come from.

Yeah, there's a lot of, there's also a lot of different circumstances, right?

A lot of different countries, a lot of different economic paths and so on.

So there can be cases where, you know, things legitimately have got worse and very serious or Cory Doctoral does have a habit of, you know, documenting an investigative journalist kind of way or at least reporting investigative journalist stuff about, you know, companies that are trying to skirt regulations or that are

doing shitty shit, right? But you should call it because it's certainly not the case that like all of these technology companies or whatever, you know, like they're not out for people's best interests all the time, right?

There are to make money for the most part.

Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, sort of interrupt, but, but I think to also support Cory.

I think the part of the thesis, which is absolutely true, which is that there is a business procedure, which is, it's followed by big companies like Google and whatever, which is you, you gain market share, you dominate the market by subsidizing and providing a service for free or very cheap, good value.

Once you get the network effects and you've dominated the market, you obviously then can then exploit that by them caching in by getting the value through more advertising and basically making the service worse, but everyone's kind of locked in.

So that's when you've got basically a licensed to print money. And so, you know, this is a reason why company, you know, Apple has obviously done this with their closed ecosystems and they're ridiculous amounts they charge for their hardware.

So, you know, like it's absolutely all of this kind of, you know, various versions of monopolistic practice, certainly occur, right?

Yeah, and also, Matt, like, you know, if you compare my life to that of my parents, for example, right, they have a house, I don't have a house, right, I'm renting and I'm living that kind of story that people have, I have multiple jobs, they had a single job, right?

For basically their whole life, I've changed various jobs and have simultaneous jobs and side gigs and all these kind of things.

So there are differences, but I would also say that like when I look at the life in Belfast or life for my kids, right, in general, it's just so much better than it looked for me in the it is, you know, access to different kinds of food, access to leisure activities that are not just like getting drunk and forest, right?

And especially in Northern Ireland, you have the fact that there was the troubles and so on, right?

There's obviously a bit of a bit of improvement there from the threat to violence and so on, but it's just that thing where like if you focus on housing, you could present it that I'm living in a much more precarious circumstance, but I would take my life over, you know, return to the 70s.

At any point, so anyway, I just feel like you can please rate you much emphasis on this and in liberal species, there is this very strong emphasis to everything is getting worse, but like you said, there is the flip side I suppose on the Maga and Pilewokon thing that in the past we used to have real communities and real people and all that kind of stuff and you just have the question there.

Question now.

Yeah, I mean, you just made me think about my, you know, so if you go back, if you look at my father and father's father and so on, it's it's an interesting trajectory, which I think illustrates that because you can pick a truth, but this is just me, right? There's no cherry picking.

So some of my great grandfather, Irish Australian, he's gassed on the song, drank himself, came back to Australia and drank himself to death, domestic violence, not not a very happy scenario.

His son, my grandfather had a better life than him, but still he had to go and to some island in the Pacific and wait there, hoping the Japanese Navy didn't turn up.

And, you know, he worked incredibly hard, but was poor, you know, like and eventually became a bank manager, so he did well for his time, but you know, really had to struggle pretty hard.

My dad had an easier life than him, but he still worked an awful lot more than me in terms of the like struggle to just comfort ratio.

And in turn, I think all, you know, my kids are still pretty young, but I've already noticed it up and able to do a bit more for them than my dad could for me.

And I think they've had a better, they actually have had a better, a better lifestyle, right from, from zero to up to 20 or so, than that I had that is just an objective fact.

So, you know, maybe we're just an upwardly mobile family, but I don't, you know, I don't think we are really actually we're pretty, you know, there's been no great arc there.

What you're sort of seeing there is just the general arc of increased material, living standards and a greater degree of security and comfort that you see in Australia generally.

Not like just as an example, which has nothing to do with, you know, most of the things we've been talking about, my mom's siblings, two of them died, right from illnesses that know I you would be unlikely to die from.

My mom has a peacemaker installed where she had opened the heart surgery, but it was, sorry, she didn't have open heart surgery because she got it installed, you know,

is it open heart, but like it's the the small incision version, but they install that and the point is, in all her time, she really likely, you know, had either very more serious health things or that just wouldn't be an option.

So like there is stuff that has improved growth medicine with technology with the quality of food, quality of food in Northern Ireland.

Thanks for the comments come.

It's really gotten better.

Actually, speaking of which, cervical cancer, the developed vaccine for it and in Australia anyway, it's basically been given to everyone or women anyway.

And I think last year I ran the news, the count of cervical cancer cases zero zero, they eliminated it.

That's great. That's fantastic.

Fuckin news. You know, there is no way that's a bad thing, not quite on the same level, but speak but back on your food point when I was growing up, you couldn't get things like freshers barrigas.

It didn't exist, right? I'd never tasted freshers barrigas nor any of the fancy Japanese mushrooms or a million other things, right?

You can only get a sparragas in a can and for so many years that is pretty much what I thought wasparagus.

Just the cancer signs like torture.

I thought it came in a can and Chris, when I when I first tried freshers barrigas, you know, change your life.

Change your life. Change your life.

Change your life. So I think, yeah, I think this far this in the can I thought I had a girlfriend over nine years.

Yeah, genetic genetic engineer, some kind of super sparragas is going to taste even better. It's going to be onwards and upwards.

Yeah, I just think that these people almost all of them tend to be like very rich people living in relative opulence in America.

Perhaps your life wasn't worse in every facet when you were a kid. Perhaps maybe you aren't just a bit moody.

Like that's maybe I don't know maybe maybe the right and everything's getting worse but well, it's always a mix of the two.

Look, this is going to be the final thing I say about it. It's a mix of the two.

I think there's a bunch of technical points that someone like Corey Doctorow is making and it's totally right.

And at the same time, there was the broader narrative sweeping claims.

Right.

Not a more questionable.

Everything is getting worse and you know, things are going to fall apart because of this sort of terminal cycle of it should

ification and exploitation and fundamental.

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