The Chaser Report - A Deep-Dive Into Workplace Bullshittery | James Schloeffel

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

Charles is joined by his Wankernomics partner and creator of The Shovel, James Schloeffel, to talk about their new book, "Wankernomics: A Deep-Dive Into Workplace Bullshittery". Along with shameless self promotion, the pair then recount how back in 2016 they were almost killed on the Donald Trump campaign trail. Twice.Pre-order the Wankernomics book here by August 29 to score a free pen!---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ VOTE OPTICS FOR A LOGIE: https://vote.tvweeklogies.com.au/Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Now, today is a very special treat. Instead of having Dom on the podcast, we instead have the wonderful, the amazing, the incredible. James Schleffel of the shovel and of Wankernomics, James Schleffel, it is such a privilege to have you on this podcast. I don't know how we booked you.

Welcome to the podcast. Oh, my good. And that's such an amazing, uplifting introduction, Charles. Thank you so much for that. Mm, yep. So as long-time listeners would know, James and I, well, we've actually worked together for about 10 years now, haven't we? We have.

And we've worked together for, I think it must be at least 10 years. And the secret to our success, Charles, is that we live about 900 kilometres apart. part, which I would suggest to listeners out there, if you're looking for a good partnership, live as far away as possible. Because what it means is that we don't, you know, we don't get on each other's nerves because we need have to see it once in a while. We never have to see each other except in an exclusively work context. Yeah.

We don't even have to really make small talk, do we? We don't. And this is the thing, because small talk is excruciating. And I'm sure we'll get to this, small talk in a work, setting. We don't have to do that. No, very often. So that's great. Yeah, because the mistake that I've made with Dom, of course, who co-host this podcast with is that he lives literally like, like if I got an AVO against him, he would have to

move out of his home because he's about 40 meters away. So, of course, that's why we hate each other. So there's because we live so close. So, yeah, yeah, no, it's much better with you. So we should probably take an ad break, unless you're a paying subscriber in which case you won't have an ad break. And we'll be back in a sec. Okay, so, James, the thing is, we've done this book.

It's pretty amazing. It's called Wankanomics. What's it called? It's called a deep dive into workplace, bullshittery, Charles. Yeah, that's it, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, obviously this podcast, it comes out tomorrow. This podcast is mainly to just drive sales to that book. So just let's get this out of the way now.

If you're listening to this podcast, you're going to love Wankanom. a deep dive in the workplace bullshit or whatever it is. It's all about, well, what's it about, James? Well, I describe this Charles as a bit of a therapy book, a bit of a self-help book for anyone who has ever had a job. Because one of the things that happens when you have a job is as soon as you walk into the office or you log on to your team's meeting in the morning or go to the workplace, all of a sudden, you start acting a bit weird.

You start acting like a wanker, right? Like, you start saying things like synergize and circle back and moving forward and touching base. Yeah, because that's right, isn't it? Because whenever we have worked Zoom calls, we do, don't we? We just immediately, like, I remember saying to you this morning, we had that work call this morning. And it was all, hi, James, just touching base. Touching base. We had to look at the F-25 deliverables.

And this is what happened. And so the premise of this book is, isn't it awful that we have to work in this world? But also, I'm sorry, but there's no way out of it. So really your only option is to become very, very, very good at being a wanker in the workplace. And this book will step by step show you how to do it from how to talk like a wanker, how to act in a meeting, how to update your LinkedIn profile, all of those important steps. And James, like, you know, I've known you for a long time, but I don't think I quite clocked just how angry. Like, I think at your core, you're driven by this anger.

And it all comes from working in office. when you lived in the UK, isn't it? It's sort of... I think that's partly true. I think I worked in a marketing job and I did work in the UK for a little while. And in the UK, there's this heightened sense of bullshittery, really, in the workplace. And it was the first time that I kind of experienced this thing of sitting at a meeting and everyone in a senior management or middle management position having these phrases that

they would use to avoid taking responsibility and to avoid doing any work at all. So they'd say things like, oh, I'll just take that offline and or, you know, that's more of a Terry Donaldson question. Look, maybe we should check in with marketing on that or, you know, it'd be something like I haven't got the numbers in front of me right now. You know, let's take a deep dive on that later. All of these things that I came to realize were just techniques for delaying and for avoiding responsibility and also for for covering up the fact that you know you're a little bit mediocre and you don't know what you're doing and all of the work filtered down to the junior people and I was a junior burger and I thought this is this is ridiculous this is ridiculous so I made it my mission

Charles at that moment that I was going to come very very good at this myself because I too wanted to earn lots of money by doing very very little and did you succeed no not really no what I did in the end was I started up a concept called Wankonomics where I just tell people about this situation. It's very bad. But we actually experienced, I mean, like I've never really worked corporate much. Like I sort of did triple him for a while, but like I just haven't had your sort of horrendous PTSD inducing experience.

But we did experience the sort of English level of incompetence and passive aggression. last year when we're over in Edinburgh. Do you remember how, like, all the, because, and the thing is, you know, when you're working, you know, in a theatre and stuff like that, all the sort of tech crew and stuff like that, like their jobs actually matter, right? Like, it's not like, oh, this quarterly report's going to be like, you know, nothing's going to change if that happens. You know, like, you actually need to get the lights working that night and the screen working.

And I just remember we were there for, you know, two and a half weeks. And I don't think we ever once just had a smooth setup where it just worked. Like every single employee was so desperately incompetent that they had to get somebody else to help them and it would just stuff up every single night, right? But the wonderful thing about it was they were so passive aggressive about it and they were so apologetic about it. Like every sentence was started with, oh, sorry, yes, sorry. So you couldn't, you couldn't sort of be an asshole and go, this is your job.

Just do your fucking job because they were all just like, oh, sorry, sorry, yeah, sorry, I don't know how to do my core responsibilities. And I think, like, I just get the sense that the reason for the decline of the English impact, like some people say it's the First World War, some people say it's the Second World War, some people say it was, you know, vast economic, you know, forces, you know, leading to the rise of American hegemony. But I'm saying, I think it's just English people are shit at their job. But has that always been the case?

Because I remember we had this conversation about, you know, it's also their strength, right? Like, I mean, the entire British, you know, British Empire was based on passive aggression and being, you know, perfectly polite. It was like, oh, sorry, sorry, I invaded your country. Now, would you just go and get those spears for me to use against you? Yes, yes, great. Yes, and I think that is a gift from the English that has now transferred down with a bit of Americanism throwing in now to the modern workplace. Yeah.

So anyway, go out and buy this book. Let's not dwell too much on, because I also want to talk about our working relationship, James. Oh, okay. Because not in a bad way, but I'm not going to bring up all the stuff we'll turn back yesterday. The Chaser Report, less news, more often. I want to go back to 2015 or, no, it must have been 2016, right,

when we'd first start working together. Do you remember, I was just thinking, this morning, could give us some money because the Trump election was on. And we went and we did a whole lot of videos and stunts and, I don't know, I think we wrote some articles and stuff like that over in the US. Do you remember that? Charles, how could I forget that? Just to put some flesh on that story, because you've just grown it away as if it was

just something we did on a weekend on a whim. Although it was a little bit on a whim. You said, Donald Trump had just emerged as the presidential candidate. day, and you said, why don't we go over to the US and go to some Donald Trump rallies? That looks like fun. That's right. Yeah. That looks like fun.

And so we did. And we thought, we'll just document this. Because at the time, it's a bit hard to remember this now. At the time, it was a bit of a joke, right? Now, then, obviously, it's become very dark and fascist. But back then, it was kind of a bit of a joke. This guy's not going to win. But these rallies look ridiculous.

Let's go to a couple and let's shoot some video of people at these rallies. And that's what we did. I got a tip just before we left from another Australian who had also decided to go over to the Donald Trump relics just for a bit of fun. And he said, not surprising really, he said, look, these Republican Donald Trump supporters, they're a little bit full on. And look, they'll love you, but only if you support Donald Trump. They'll be very skeptical if they think you're media. They'll be very skeptical if they think you're, you know, trying to intrude on them, which is exactly what we're trying to do. And so I thought, well, okay, well, we're going to have to pretend.

that we are Donald Trump supporters. And so I've got some t-shirts made up, as you remember, Charles. I do. I've still got it. You're always Aussies for Trump. Utterly ridiculous idea. We went into these rallies wearing Aussies for Trump t-shirts. Look, I felt like I had a target on my back.

I thought this is so obviously bullshit that they will work this out within seconds. But of course, we totally underestimated the naivity of a certain genre of Americans. And not only did they not cotton onto the fact that we were taking the piss out of them, they embraced us. They thought it was fantastic. They thought it was almost inevitable that, of course, there would be Australians who would travel all the way across to America to support Donald Trump. And so in that way, we managed to get into these rallies. We got, you know, very, very close up. The rallies weren't quite as big back then as they.

No, we went to some really quite small rallies as I really. Yeah, you know, a few hundred people kind of thing. and look, we can talk more about this, but just one story that comes to mind in terms of our relationship, Charles, which is where I got a real sense of you and perhaps the differences between you and me. I put this into context, we were there at our first rally. I think I just, I think I was 24 hours, less than 24 hours. No, I'd come straight off the plane.

We've gone straight into this rally. And this was in the context of Donald, those tapes had just been released where Donald Trump said he was going to grab, you know, people by the pussy, etc. And that was the biggest story of that particular week. And we were standing in this rally. We had video cameras and stuff. We were standing probably, what, 15 meters from Donald Trump? Like really quite close.

It's hard to imagine it now because there's so much security. I mean, there was obviously security around him, but there wasn't many people between us and him. And you said to me, you turned to me, and you said, let's go and rush Donald Trump, grab him by the genitals, and we'll say, oh, no, no. It's okay. Donald Trump allows this. You know, it's okay to grab people by the genitals. And then wouldn't that be hilarious? You know, that would be a really funny social media moment?

I laughed. I said, yeah, that's really funny, Charles. And then you turned to me and said, right, are you ready? Let's go. And I said, what? You're serious? No, no, absolutely not. Had we done that, we would not be here today, Charles.

We would not be alive. Had we done that, we would have very, very quickly. been shot. And I don't mean that, like, metaphorically, I mean, literally, we would have been shot. And we would have made the news. It would have been a social media moment, but in a slightly different way than perhaps what you anticipated. And so it was then that I think our relationship kind of started, you know, the difference when I started to kind of show themselves, you absolutely crazy, ridiculous ideas, man. Me, the slightly more sensible, let's not get. shot kind of guy.

And if you had to look back over the last 10 years of our comedy relationship, it's been the perfect tension. Yeah, I think that is. I think that's right. Because do you remember we did that stunt where we pretended to be Trump's campaign team? Yes. And we went to a little Trump campaign office in like this tiny town in Ohio. Ohio, yes.

And we walked in very confidently, I think dressed in sort of suits or whatever we could afford at the time that passed for suits and went, look, we're the Ford team for Donald Trump. He's going to make a surprise visit here later today. So we just need to prep your office so that it fits in with Donald Trump's aesthetic. And we started posting a whole lot of nude photos of women all around the office. And it took them a little moment to realize what was going on, didn't it? It went from zero to 100 in about eight seconds, my number. If that is, we walked in there, you said we're the four team of Donald Trump.

And I remember this, and you can probably still find this on YouTube. They said, oh, well, I wish you'd given us more notice. So the first few seconds, they were brought into the concept that we were actually this part of the Donald Trump team, Donald Trump team preparing his office for his visit. Only a number of seconds later, though, when I started pinning up these nude pictures on the wall, did they very, very quickly change? And I do remember there was one of the gentlemen. There was two men in that small office.

One of them was wearing an NRA hat. And so one of them went to call the police. The other one tried to physically detain us. Yes, that's right. And then we ran out and we hopped in the car. I distinctly remember this part. And I think he tried to blog us, but we eventually sort of got free and then drove down. And we were sort of going quite far.

Could I just pause on that bit there? Yeah. Because that was, you kind of understood that. That was a very impressive piece of driving at your part because we had the higher car parked out at the front. We got in the car. The guy ran out, stood in front of the car. Yes. Try and stop us from moving.

And it was, you know, it was quite a busy street. And so you wanted to stop us from leaving so that the police could come. And you very, very kind of carefully but brilliantly managed to drive away without hitting this guy. Because how do you hit this guy? Just knowing even slightly. We would no longer be here today. You might be here today, but you wouldn't have any money because you would have been sued for like, you know, a chance of dollars. So you managed to drive away for a little while.

Yeah. And then I just remember we turned the corner. Yes. And then, you know, coming in the other direction is this police car. Yes. And so we just sort of slow down and we stop at this traffic light. Yes. And we're just facing the cop car.

Can I just set this scene? Because this is like, this is like a movie. So we stopped at the traffic lights on the, on the, at the front, on the front of the other traffic lights coming in the opposite direction was the police with sirens blaring. Now, for some reason, I don't know if it's in all of America, but certainly in this state, the cars don't have number plates at the front. It's only at the back. That's right. Because they had our number plate. We know that, right?

They had a number plate. The person, you know, took it down and, and passed that information on. We found that out later. We'll get to that. So we're just sitting there for what was probably 15 seconds, but felt like about 12 hours. Yes. With the police just literally like five meters away looking at us and us just trying to look kind of normal. And then we just slipped past each other in opposite directions as they went, you know, to the office where we just come from.

And we left. Yeah, we made our break. And we got away. That's when we made our mistake. He had to drive at the speed limit out of the town because we didn't want to be caught for speeding or something like that. And I just remember driving, it was so slow. It was like 25 miles per hour.

And we just had to sort of creep out of the town not wanting to raise suspicion. But then, yes. Yes, well, that's when we made the mistake, didn't it? Because we're quite relieved to get out of there. We kind of, you know, adrenaline levels were up. They then subsided. We're like, okay, we've kind of dodged a bit of an incident there. We're just going to drive out of this town.

we'll be fine and then we said to us why don't we just why don't we just do what we would plan to do that day we'll just get on with our day and what we have planned to do that day was to go to a Mike Pence rally yes what is it like a one hour drive away maybe a 45 minute drive away in another town we'll go to the Mike Pence rally and we'll just go and we'll you know we'll video people there like we've been doing with the other Trump rallies and everything will will be okay and so we got to the to the Mike Pence rally get in there parked the car walking someone greets us and says, oh, you look like you're in with the media. Would you like to go into

the media section? Up to that point, when we'd gone into Trump rallies, we hadn't gone in the media section. We just wanted to be in amongst the people. But we said, yeah, okay, why do we do something different today? Why don't we go and join the media pack? And she said, well, just wait a moment. I'll just get you accreditation. It won't take a moment. Just wait there. And then minutes and minutes and minutes passed and and she didn't I remember I read the wind yes I read the wind because it was just taking too long taking too long yeah back at one point she gets oh just a few minutes more sorry it's taking so long I'll be back in a few minutes and that's when you said something's up here and I said we just have to leave now said we had to leave and I said oh come on Charles you're being

paranoid and then you said no we're leaving we are out of here and we left went back to our car and we were greeted by was it two or three policemen. Yeah, state troopers. State troopers. And they made it, and, you know, they had a discussion with us and, you know, took our details and everything like that.

And then they said, and this is not the first time in my life that this had happened. They said, you need to leave the state. Remember that? I remember that very well. You need to get in the car and you need to leave the state. At that point, when I saw those beliefs, I thought my life might have been over.

Like I had the images of being held in a US prison cell. But no, they were quite, they were quite good about it. I think they were worried that we might have been terrorists. They pretty quickly clocked that we were just idiot Australians. Yeah. And they said that we should just leave the state immediately. Yeah. And then I remember we got followed for so long by a black, unmarked car,

which would have either been Secret Service or local police until we reached the city, limits, remember that? And then, and we thought, oh, we're fucked. This could actually be, like, because one of the things is, yeah, they say leave the state, but it could also be to just get us out of the sort of, you know, media area, the area where tons of national media are, and then fuck us out on the interstate or something like that. That was plausible. I remember, we were quite paranoid about it, because it was just very conspicuously following us the whole way. But then at one point, we sort of had got on to some interstate highway and it was clear that we were leaving the state and it was later. See you later.

So that's a nice origin story about our relationship, Charles. Yeah. Almost getting killed twice. Yeah. We should go back. We should do a 10-year retrospective or something. I'm sure dozens of people would be a bit later. for that.

Look, James, we're out of time, but we should, how do you buy the book? How do we go? Well, you buy the book from bookstores.

So you just go to whatever bookstore you usually buy a book from. I'm not going to name any because, you know, because you can choose the one that you like, but they're available. And is there a free pen offer? Yes, there is.

That's a great thing. But to get your free, so there's a free pen. It's a fantastic little thing that I publishes put together. In order to get it, though, You need to pre-order the book before the 29th of July, which is Tuesday. Tomorrow, which is tomorrow, yeah.

Okay, so you need to do it now. You need to do it today. Yeah, you don't really. Yeah, so if you pre-order the book and then there's a form you can fill in, upload your receipt and stuff, and then you'll get sent this pen. And how do they find out about that deal? Like, we're online. Look, that's a great question.

The best place to find out about that deal is, you should put it up on the website, shouldn't me, but you can find out about it. There's a post on Instagram on Wayneconomics. Instagram at Wankonomics, and you'll find all the details about that free pen. Yep, that's great. Okay, perfect. Well, Wankonomics, a deep dive into workplace bullshittery, is out tomorrow. James Schleffel, thank you very much.

I hopefully won't see you very soon. Thanks, Charles. Always a pleasure. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. Get you tomorrow.