The Chaser Report - Aldi Orgies | Sami Shah

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

Sami Shah is back with Charles and Dom in studio. Sami catches up with the team on how he has masterfully hijacked our podcast review section for his own gain. Plus the classic roster of usual Sami Shah topics like Aldi, swingers parties, crypto scams, and Perth sucking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chase of Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. It is Monday the 11th of July. We have Charles Firth, Dom Knight, and back with us. Sammy, how have you been? I'm good. I just want to apologize before we go in any further. I did not ask my news weekly subscribers to go to your podcast page on iTunes and leave reviews for my podcast on your page, but they've done it themselves. I'm going to actively encourage it. So it's going to get a lot worse. You did it in a way by being good when we have you on. I think that's the problem here.

I went to check it out because one of your interns contacted me and he's like, oh yeah, there's your fans leaving stuff on our stream. And I went and checked out the review section for Chaser on iTunes. And there's like two different comments saying this is good and Sammy Shal's Newsweekly is better. And I'm like, you know what? This sounds like a really cool trolling thing. I wish I thought of it.

So now I'm going to co-opt it and actively encourage all my subscribers to ruin your rating. Yeah, and you know the stupid thing is that we've stopped asking people in our podcast to leave reviews. We used to read them out and stuff and talk about them, but it got a little bit traumatic for some. And so since we stopped doing this incredibly boring thing of saying, oh, leave a review on Apple Podcasts,

make it five stars, will you? People don't. And so occasionally you get an odd one going, oh, where are the interns? Or going, oh, Sammy is much better than you. So please leave a review. Help us defeat Sammy. And also, you know, having listened to some user feedback, we are scaling back the amount

of time that we spend drunk on this show. That was useful, yeah. So we did four weeks of live in the pub, which is why we didn't have you, Sammy, because obviously you've been in Melbourne, there's no pubs in Melbourne, just wine bars. That's my understanding. So we didn't do that with you. Yeah. So Sammy, did you know that for the last month?

We've been every day in the pub. They're drinking. Drinking in front of a studio audience. I knew you were doing that. I didn't realize that there were some sooks who were complaining that you were too drunk. What kind of lunatic complaints about someone being too drunk on a pub-based podcast? In a very, very fortunate series of events, though, Sammy, the drunkest that I was, which was the second record that we did. Oh, yes.

Which was a total catastrophe. It was awful. I'd actually been drinking from about sort of one p.m. in that day. So I rolled in to the record. Literally rolled. Literally rolled. And I think there were complaints even from the live audience about my

ingeherence. Luckily, the roadcaster stuffed up. Yeah, the machine stuffed up. It was a rare buck. Yeah. And so. Failed by the machines. Not only did none of that reach broadcast quality and go out,

no one outside of that room heard it. But we also got. Given by road, this fancy new... Yeah, Roadcaster Pro 2. Which is just fucking incredible, yeah. Hey, can I make us some money for a sec? Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, just a second.

Here are the ads. If you don't want to hear them, go to chaser.com.com.com slash podcast and subscribe to the ad-free version, or listen to this. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. There we go. We've made a small amount of money from that. Anyway, thank you for indulging that.

When people just hit the 30 seconds forward button on the, iPod, or sorry, on their app, their podcasting app, it just jumps the ads anywhere, right? Yeah, that's right. Such, no, it doesn't work. We value our advertisers. No, no, but the point is that wouldn't you pay $9 a month for somebody to push that button for you, Sammy? Yes, you would.

Yeah, that's very true, actually. That is, that is a bargain, in my opinion. We have also, there's a subscriber exclusive episode, which I love to get you to do sometimes, Sammy, called Drunk Q&A, which we take questions from the audience and But the problem is that the drunk applied to the rest of the podcast as well. It's supposed to be a subscriber bonus, hearing us all loose and be out of control, whereas in fact, that became the whole week. Yeah, so we're going to go back to just a normal chaser report.

Numbers drops. Numbers dropped sharply. The thing I do find, though, and Charles, you might be able to attest to this, is day drinking is not something I can handle anymore. Oh, no, no, definitely not. I attempted it very recently, went to a friend's house. It was a very bougie lunch where, you know, there was, some wine and there was oysters and all of these things.

And recitals of Henry Lawson poems? Yeah, pretty much. It was close to that. I mean, we played Dungeons and Dragons, but that's my version of a recital of Henry Lawson. Henry Lawson wrote some amazing poems about Dungeon Masters. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. He's all into halflings.

But the thing I discovered was it took me a day and a half recover from that. Like I had a migraine for a day. I was used to this entire evening. My child luckily had Would know how to cook Otherwise she would have gone hungry that day Because I just took a I took a nap Which started like 5pm and ended at 10 o'clock at night

How much of that though was the booze And how much of it was the Dungeons and Dragons Just walking your brain As an ardent D&D fan and supporter I will blame the wine I also have a lot of wine yes But wine is a thing that gets me This is a thing that I realize

I don't drink white anymore It just knocks me over I feel sick, I vomit It's terrible Just a cheap plonk. Just, you know, red for me or spirit sort of. I can't do white. I can't do fancy Aussie Chardonnay or whatever anymore.

To be fair, although it was Aldi White. So, you know, it's going to have a sharper after effect than most good quality whites would. What was, instead of Chardonnay, were you drinking Bardenay or something? Yeah, yeah, basically. It was, I think it costs nine, no, seven dollars. Al Dio's, which is very expensive. Which is very expensive for the Aldi whites. A greeno pre.

What a great idea. Yeah, absolutely. The wide label, but you actually don't know what it is. Perfect. Outy, there are good things at Audi. There are some good things, aren't there? There are a few products that are not entirely shit. Oh, the dishwashing pods from Aldi.

That's the one thing I buy from Audi. Yeah, a fucking great. Oh, they taste delicious. Wait, no, that's what we're doing? No. I'll tell you what, though, the hangover from those dishwasher boards. Yeah, yeah, brutal, brutal. It's called Binish.

No, I like, I like Aldi products. I will defend Aldi. Aldi does most things pretty well, especially on Christmas time. And I think I've done this rant on your show before. But around Christmas time, Aldi comes out with a lobster special, which is in the frozen food section. Wow.

And it is like a full-on lobster thermidor that you just take home and grill. And it is phenomenal, especially given the fact that it's Aldi. But, yeah, no, I will defend Aldi. I mean, anything that Germans do well, like chocolate, The Aldi chocolate is excellent. And I'll tell you what, the Aldi version of drumsticks, which are called crowns. They're called crowns. And they are good.

And they're so much cheaper. It's like $9 for a four packet coals for drumsticks. At Aldi is like $3.20 for $0.80 per cornetta. Don't think about what happened to the chickens. Oh, no, no, no. This is the crown. Oh, you mean like drums? Oh, like the cones.

Yeah, yeah. Ice cream, ice cream. Right. Oh, yeah. Even I thought it's all the time. Yeah. I was thinking about chickens this all time as well. This changes the entire equation.

Yes. Yeah. And their batter is good. Butterfly? Mm-hmm. Is that really called Butterfly? It is called Butterflea. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. And you can get over the notion that it has insect in the butter. Butterfully. Oh, fully. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, but also I would eat insect like based foods at this point. We're supposed to.

We're supposed to be eating more. People are saying crickets. Oh, give it 10 years. Eat crickets. Yes, exactly. Although, no, except, did you know, this is breaking news, Australia's sole breeder of crickets has gone broke. Oh, no.

This is bad news in your house, Charles. They've shut down operations. You cannot get crickets. And in fact, I went to the pet store the other day to buy some packets of crickets to feed our bearded dragon. To feed your children. Yeah, to children, yeah. Charles has a bearded dragon called Flood. who consumes crickets.

So you go and they think, oh, look at those little crickets. Oh, they're all food. They're all food. So we, but you've always got to stock up, like you breed the crickets, but also you sort of run out after a while.

I have so many questions when you finish. Continue first. And so I talked to the pet shop and they said, oh yeah, no, there are no breeders in Australia of crickets anymore. So if you find any, you should go and grab them. So I did a dash all around Sydney yesterday

trying to find cricket. Like I would ring up a place and they go, oh, we've got two packets left. And it's like, oh, keep them, keep them for me. I'll be there in 20 minutes. This is the supply chain shortage that no one talks about. But, okay, I just have a question. So, so Aldi drumsticks, a dragon that eats crickets. You're basically at this point one ponytail away from polyamory.

Like, this is literally the direction you are headed in. Be very careful. Because I live very near Charles. When I first moved into the same streets, that's true. Charles took me on the, we sort of stood in the middle of Australia. Charles just did a bit of a tour and said, their swingers, their swingers, just pointed out of different houses. Now, I want to be clear, this is information I have not used as yet

or been invited to use anybody. Charles had a suspiciously good knowledge of where the Pollyamory hotspotswear. It turns out the inner west of Sydney is ripe with people who are born in their marriages. It is true. I think it's something to do with having kids who are in primary school age. Oh, you meet at the school games. Yeah, where you meet all the local parents and then you sort of end up getting drunk together for the next five or six years.

And then they all, they're all bored middle-aged people. And half of them have sort of decided, well, we'll spice things up by inviting other ugly middle-aged people into our lovely circle. I've heard, but I've also heard, I've heard that occasionally the school gate can be an absolute minefield of different affairs going on. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because this is something I'm, my daughter's studying primary school. in January. So I've got to get up to speed on, I need a bit of a math about who's screwing her. Well, you can update me because my kids are leaving primary school.

So you'll need to keep me in the loop. So that means fortunately. I'm sorry, I've been, my daughter is now 13 and in high school. I have not had any such experience. I am now offended. I have never been invited to a swingers party. I've never been invited to an orgy. What vibe am I not giving out?

Attractive. I think it's too attractive. No, but I actually, I must say. I'm quite relieved, Charles, it's a very old friend that because your children are leaving primary school at the same time that mine are starting, we won't have to have a for some. Oh, that's just...

Clearly, this is what's happening in our suburb. There's just no risk now. I think that's a wonderful thing. What a huge relief. But, Sammy, come up to the inner west to Sydney for a few weeks. I just want to reiterate. We're not drunk right now. No, but if I had started...

I mean, it makes total sense. If I wasn't working, And if any other parent said to me at five past nine On any morning Do you want to have some, a drink? Yes. Of course I would say yes. Who they were.

Yes. And then anything can happen from there. It was 905 and you've opened the vodka. That is the tradition. When your kids, when both of your kids finally are at school age, the first thing, you know, my wife and I did was we went to the pub. It was like nine o'clock we went. It was the first time in like four.

forever that we've actually been free. So I used to live in a country town in W.A., know them in Western Australia, before moving to Melbourne. And every morning, not every morning, but frequently I would see the police drug and alcohol testing parents outside the school as they're dropping the kids off. Oh, my God. And it would often be some parents would be testing positive for drug and alcohol. I'm so impressed.

This is 9 o'clock in the morning. I mean, I understand why the school pickup. I aspire to be unable to drive it through. p.m. most days once my kids start school. But 9 a.m. Was this because they got so smashed the night before that they still weren't clear? Or being farm workers, did they start boozing at 5 a.m? I think they started boozing at 5 a.m. I think, I think northern life encourages being hammered all times of the day. No, look, I haven't been to northern. But I imagine if you have enough booze, you're not in northern anymore.

It's right. Yes. And I say, I mean, that was great sympathy for anyone. Sammy, you've gone to the least northern place you could find other than Sydney. You're almost made it. You almost manned out. I did go back to Perth recently for the first time in five years. I was there for a run of comedy shows and some work stuff. Was it like a homecoming? Were you welcomed?

Look, yes. Meeting some of my friends was great. A lot of comedians and stuff who haven't seen a very long time. It was wonderful to see all of them and to discover that none of them have written new materials since I left. Perth, but things don't change. That's the beauty of BDWA. It's still the 90s there. And they Mark McGowan helped them out

by locking everyone in so that everyone had to go to their comedy shows regardless of the material. Genuinely, it is a time warp. It is the same like I saw people getting drunk and punching on in North Bridge who I saw

doing the exact same thing five or six years ago and I don't think they've aged. It's like to be able to a time cocoon around North Bridge is the only place I've ever been out in Australia I think other than Fortitude Valley at 3 a.m. in Brisbane

where I've genuinely felt worried about getting bashed or getting lost I was the only place that actually felt Northbridge. Absolutely. I call it the king hit capital of Australia. That's W.A.'s second largest import export other than mining goods is king hitting. But

it's the same strange thing. So when I was in northern, going to Perth used to be a joy for me. Yeah, the big smoke. It's better than northern. Now, going to Perth from Melbourne, I realize Perth is now my northern. Like, that is, it was grim and depressing to be back there. Well, people breathalising at 9 a.m. in the streets of Perth. I don't think, I think the cops have given up over there.

I don't think, I think that's a battle. They lost a long time. I mean, that said, Sammy, I think we might have mentioned this previously. Perth audiences are some of the best anyway, at least for us. they're always happy there seems enormous gratitude and now I know why if the comedians there

have updated their material in five years they're going you can do comedy that's not about glee can you well it was it was funny because you're right

they always are the best audiences they buy tickets to everything they support the arts amazingly but while I was in Perth I did about four five shows I got invited

to two different events to be like corporate gigs You know, where they're like, hey, we're opening a restaurant or opening a hotel. We'd love you to be a comedian there. And each person who contacted me said, we saw you perform comedy. We haven't seen anyone doing what you do here. We'd love to have you come on board. And I realized because in Perth, like being me is unique.

Whereas in Melbourne, I'm just another hack struggling to make get by because there's 1,500 other people doing what I'm doing here. Which aspect of it is, Sammy, that cuts through. Is it about your cultural journey? Is it about your relationship journeys? Is it the pletting of satire? I think it's the fact that I didn't spend 10 minutes on stage just calling Amber Hurd a bitch

is what they really appreciated about my comedy. How have they heard of Amber Heard in Perth? Admittedly, I'm quite curious to know. I think they still think of her as the actress from Aquaman 1 and they just saw that and they hated her performance in that. Should we do this? Should we do a podcast show over there? Do you think having just slag them off for quite a long time?

If we did a row of podcast shows there and got Sammy along, well, I mean, the people love Sammy in Perth. They probably would come. Yeah, yeah, no, they would come. The problem is we would go to afford a plane ticket. They're the only ones who if you slag them off, they have a good sense of humour about it. They're man, one guy in Brisbane who always treats me.

I guess they're across the idea of Perth being a long way from everywhere, given that they have to live there. Well, look, if anyone in Perth is listening, and wants to put a lot of money on the table to get us over there. We'll do it, won't we, Charles? We'll go. Yeah, sure. Has that ever wanted?

Have listeners ever said, hey, we will fund your holiday fashion? We're going to some festival in Adelaide in the Adelaide Hills, some wine festival. And they're paying for us to go over there to do a podcast. At a vineyard. At a vineyard. It's in the cellar room. Like literally we're going to broadcast in front of booze. Yeah, in front of booze.

Yeah, this will be a drunken mess, which you'll be hang on to the broadcast. So we'll record it again. Imagine, Perth, this too could be yours. Middle-aged men hanging on about how dissatisfied we are with our lives. Booze adjacent. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. So, Sammy, did you ever make the mistake of investing in cryptocurrency? Oh, God, again.

You know, so here's the thing. I never did. And the only reason was because I knew that anything I'm interested in will automatically tank. I don't do well with investments. Anytime I've ever tried anything investment related, if I put $10 right now into Apple, all of Apple somehow. A sinkhole will open up under Cupertino and the whole building will disappear. And everyone will go, what the fuck happened? So I was like, oh, I'm interested in Bitcoin.

that means it's probably not a good thing and I should stay away from it. Yes. And I did and my my own advice to myself paid out. I didn't lose any money. By the time this goes to air on Monday, I'm pretty sure the entire cryptocurrency universe will have collapsed. I don't know a single person who bought crypto and is now hemorrhaging money that I am not happy that there's something. Like yeah, like every single friend of mine that who's losing a shit ton of money on crypto, actively deserves it. I can honestly say. Well, I mean, Elon Musk, it's quite enjoying to watch the world's richest man.

Make a lot of money on Tesla on the one hand, but then fuck it all off on Dogecoin simultaneously. But the one thing that I must say I picked, and I'm a terrible investor as well, Sammy. I'm probably a parallel to you, is I did pick that NFTs were bullshit. Right, yeah. Because I'm doing all these interviews about it and explaining,

so what is an NFT? Well, I was like, you can buy the original version of the Nyan cat, that annoying shift that sounds like this, You can buy the original one And you kind of go But there isn't, it's digital There's like a million of those on servers around the world And they're like, no, no, we're going to authenticate one of them

On the blockchain to be the original Nyan cat And that's what you can buy And so all these idiots have created all these NFTs It's gone, it has, it has tanked It's something like 90 something percent of the value of the NFT market It's gone down the toilet And the great thing is It's the one investment in history that I have

that was so stupid that I picked it in advance. My younger brother was obsessed with it and I knew it was bullshit because he liked it and because his judgment is worse than mine even when it comes to anything and everything. And so therefore, I knew right at the moment he said, you've got to check this thing out. It's a terrible idea. What about there's a firm in Singapore that just lost 99% of its investors money? Wow.

But its thing was, it was quite interesting because it got an AI to do market analysis. And the AI went, the one sure bet at the moment is to short cryptocurrency. Short everything. Yeah, to short cryptocurrency. Right. So they shorted cryptocurrency. But then they let the AI execute the trades. And every time the dip, it went back up as the, I think they were, you know,

they were shorting Ethereum or something. Every time it went back up, the AI would sort of go, oh no, I've made a mistake and would cut the trade short. And so they made it, even though they were attempting to short, as the currency dropped, they lost all their money.

Right. The AI was like a sort of nervous investor. At this point, it's just nice that the AI didn't do something racist because it turns out every single AI that Silicon Valley develops for some reason can't recognize black people or whatever. So, yeah. Well, I think actually the reason why the AI wanted to short cryptocurrency was because there were too many Asians involved in this.

Yeah, there we go. Yeah, you know, yeah. So the AI and Pauline Hansen had the exact same approach to their life choices. Probably. That's true, because we've all spent collectively through those stupid captures, which are apparently about to be made obsolete, fortunately. We've been training all of Google's, you know, image recognition for generations on what's at truck. What's a level crossing? What's a traffic light? But we've never actually gone.

What's this person? This is a man or woman. It's quite complicated. Google should have, Google should have been asking us what's a good company to invest in what's a bad company. Yeah, yeah. It's part of the capture process. What's a good human being? of different people like a poor person and Elon Musk. Yeah. Because their old motto was, you know, don't be evil. Oh, that they were bad in that. They could have actually asked users to say, is this thing that We're planning to do evil or not. But no, they didn't want to know. So did you buy any Bitcoin shows?

I did actually at one point. Sad story. Well, no, but I used to mine it. Like back in 2012, back when it was 40 cents per Bitcoin, we set up... As you stroked your dragon, is this part of your evening at home?

No, no, but it was just a joke back there. It was like the doge coin of its era. And we just, we had like 30 computers in the top floor of our office at that point. And it was back when you could actually mine it using your own computers. And so we just hooked them all together. And every night, it would mine a few bitcoins.

And I think it was like, you know, five or six a night. And it was ridiculous because we were going, oh, that's great. It's produced $2.40 worth of Bitcoin. There's six bitcoins. Great. Let's go and buy one third of a pizza. And then? And then, and then the company collapsed, right?

Like, we just, you know, wound up the company. And I have, I have literally about 100 hard drives in my basement, one of which would have a Bitcoin wallet with presumably millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. But I can't find it. Like, I keep, you know, every few months, I go, okay, I should probably go through it. And, you know. You've got interns in the office with you right now. Yes.

Send them into the basement. Give a 10% cut to justify their work. But Sammy, like, if you, like, there is a problem with that method, right? If you're an intern and you discover something that's completely untraceable and your own, if you've discovered it, why would you go, oh, yeah, I'll hand it over, honestly, 90% of it to, like, especially if it's worth, like, a quarter of a billion dollars or something, you're not going to do that.

You're just going to. I also think part of Charles's brain, is actually not wanting to find it on purpose because it worries about what will happen to Charles if you find it. I don't want to change. Just more dragons, more school swinging parties.

It just becomes a mess from there. I mean, Charles, clearly there's a vacancy for a cricket breeder. Yes. That's going to be my next big play. Investment. The cricket industry. I've heard that the price of lettuce,

because you feed them lettuce, of course. Oh, is that why? That's gone out of business. That'll be a great business decision. Yeah, all right. Well, I'm very excited to be on the Chaser Empire when you have your own yacht from the cricket industry. Well, normally in this chat,

we rip through most of the sort of big political stories of the week. I think at this point, we've covered none of them. So it's probably time to stop. Well, we should actually probably start the record. Are we recording? Oh, we already started. go. Yeah, that was all preamble. All right. All right.

Let's start the steering inside of political satire. How about Boris Johnson, eh? Yeah, he's a, he's a cad. That's being the bitch said, isn't it? What's Peter Dutton done today? Oh. Well, here's the thing.

It's kind of bizarre. Because I'm like, you know, like I do a news satire podcast as well. And it's really hard to make fun of the government when they're not doing anything ridiculously outrageous. They're doing silly shit, but it's not enough, like, mock-worth, mocking-worthy. Well, you've got to, no, but yeah, I think we just got so used to the easy task of, oh, you know, Scott Morrison's.

I have to research more now. I have to think about context when I'm thinking about, is the Labour government's decision on this a bad decision? And it just takes the fun out of writing these jokes because they're harder. This same thing happened with the transition from Abbott to Turnbull. And my friend Andrew P. Street wrote a very high-selling book about Captain Abbott. And then he tried to do it again with Malcolm Turnbull. And the punners were kind of like, no, I don't really need to read a book about.

Like, I'm just mildly disappointed. I'm not angry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So you're just got to change your side. So we'd have to, you just have to make comedy out of Albo being mildly disappointing and Labor sort of reverting to its, its underwhelming ways. and it's not as much fun as hypothetical car parks. But Labor will get there, give them a few years.

They'll build those hypothetical car parks. They'll announce hypothetical car parks and not build them. I have every confidence. I like a hypothetical car parks is probably the most complicated sentence we've ever said on this podcast in terms of like a tongue twister. Well, that's why they didn't build them. Too hard to people can see. It was 600 million.

Yeah, but you see, the thing that you don't have, which you at least had under Rudd was, remember the Craig Thompson and all those people who use their credit cards to go into brothels and all that sort of stuff. It doesn't seem to be anyone like that. I mean, yet, yet, yet, yet. But the other problem is in Rudd, you had someone fantastically ridiculous with his language and his, and disappointing from day one. From day one, yeah, our bow is just not at the Rudd level. And I think also part of the problem is it's now basically a plurality between men and women. The more women you have in politics, the more sensible and just sort of, like, there's no wank desks when there's kind of plurality of women.

I miss the wank desks, good old days. Oh, we know Labor by now, right? Somewhere in head office in Sussex Street, there's a very, very dirty, a desk or it's a brown paper. bag full of cash. It's also been soiled. I'm not entirely sure what's going on. Hopefully it's full of cash and not a bank bag. Still labour.

Should we leave it on that note? That's what the guy said with the desk after all. Okay. Let's just walk away from this. Go away. Someone else to clean it up. See you later, Sammy. Yeah.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Sammy. Nice to have you back. Bye. Our gear is from road microphones. We are part of the ACAS Creator Network. Catch you tomorrow. Charles, what did you do to the desk?

Oh.