The Chaser Report - Australia's Funniest Home Vacuum Videos | Welcome To The Future

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

For this instalment of WELCOME TO THE FUTURE, Charles and Dom recount the tale of a humble man who used AI to hack into his own humble home vacuum, and AI slightly overproduced.---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ 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 Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the future. Future. This is one of the tech-focused episodes of The Chast Report, which we also published on its own feed, which is sadly neglected. It's a future of neglected podcast feed, sadly. But today, Charles, a cautionary tale for all about the robots taking over.

Yes, this is a. fantastic story of AI, vibe coding, hacking and the surveillance state, and then ultimately one of cleaner homes. All of your favourite things, except for the cleaner homes. I don't even know what vibe coding is that I've been hearing about it a lot, so I'm glad we're bringing everyone up to the future in the present, which we'll do after these ads. You can subscribe, by the way, and avoid the ads if you want to. While Charles is looking up vibe coding, I'll also just point out, we haven't had reviews

for a long time. Please jump on Apple Podcasts and leave us some reviews. You can be as mean as you like, but you have to give us five stars. You don't have to, but vibe reviews, you should. Look, I'm going to be quite honest here. Go on. I was sent by a very

wonderful listener, an article from The Verge talking about this incident where a man was trying to vibe... I don't know, did you use Claude? No, So let's start at the start.

The start is you can program things. You can code using AI now. And that itself is amazing enough. And you've been dabbling into this. As a man who once built the chase of website from scratch with his bare hands. Yes. No longer. So you can literally just now go, I actually, I don't like that.

I'm going to move that. Like just this morning, I was literally going, oh, I think that needs to be about 30 pixels to the left, right? And with the old HTML and JavaScript and things of that, that would take you half an hour. Like, it was so clunky and it would break everything else. Whereas now you get Claude and you can set it up so that Claude actually does all the computer programming in front of you and you just watch it. It's like agentic, right? Like you literally give it a folder on your computer that it can write, you know, files too.

And then it just fucking does it. And it was amazing. And then I'll tell you what happened. Sorry, this is not the story. than we were going to do. But I'll just tell you the most amazing thing the other day, which is, I mean, lawyers are fucked, right? Like, I've been writing all my contracts using AI,

and so far, virtually no one has sued me or spotted all. Well, presumably that's because they're assessing them with AI, and the AI is going, oh, it's fine. No loophole's here. Yeah. But, so the other day, I was drafting this quite important, like, commercial document, right? And normally, I would just write it, right? And I just had to add a paragraph.

It would have taken five minutes, right? Instead, I thought, no, I'm going to get AI to do this. I'm going to get fucking Claude, which is just late last week. Remember when there was a stock market crash about a week ago? That was because Claude introduced this new program called Co-Work. Right? And the whole idea is it's a bit like clippy. Oh, God.

But works. It just works. And it doesn't have an annoying animation. Oh, so it's different from co-pilot in that it was. works. That's why they could call it work. Co-work without getting sued. Yeah. So what it does, co-works. Yeah. And so what you do is you give it, and they say, don't give it access to your whole computer. It's a disaster right. But I just gave it access to this one folder, and I thought, I'll just pop things in there that I want it to work on. And you just set it off, and it just does

in the background all the work for you, right? And I put in a document that I'd written up, and I just wanted to add one paragraph about a very boring commercial thing. It was just like literally, in telling the AI to do it, I'd already half done the job. And what it received was it took the document. It was fucking incredible right. It read the document and then it produced the single most turgid paragraph. It took about half the way up for me to set up. And then it obviously went, oh, I'll replicate, like, you know, I'll replicate the style here.

And it just, oh, my God, it was so embarrassing. I mean, anyway, but it was, it was also incredible that it sort of, you could just go, oh, just add a bit about, you know, making more money in Dubai. What, took him it, right this. Were you buying Neum or something? Okay, we've gotten quite sidetracked. And I love your enthusiasm for that, but I just need to note to listeners that I hear your thought, which is that why the hell is you rambling about some contract without even telling us what

the contract's about? This is a story about vacuums, Charles. We need, let's not bury the lead. So, yeah. So the guy, like, you know, anyone can nowadays, just basically opened up his AI and went, I've bought this robo vacuum cleaner. I can't remember the model. It's like, um, I'm, where is it?

While you're checking, can I just make one point, which I recently, um. DGI Romo. So what, what recently come up in an interview that I did, Charles? I was talking to an expert about generalized robotics and humanoid robots. And the hilarious thing, I mean, Elon Musk wants all the robots to look like humans, presumably because that was from some bizarre sex fantasy that he had. But the experts on robotics actually say that the human body is not well suited to most tasks. And the thing that they point to when looking at this is by far the most successful form of household robot.

The only one that actually works at all is the robot. vacuum, which is, of course, ironically, the robot vacuum in shape. The robot vacuum is the only robot that doesn't say. Isn't that ironic? The point B, it's exactly the right shape for a robot with one job, which is to vacuum on the floor. And so, therefore, the notion that you would get a humanoid to do that makes no sense.

So the point is, this has been held up as the best example we have by experts of an actually useful robot that people might actually want to buy. I can't afford one, but the proposition is there. I'm a big fan of a robot vacuum tidying up all the crap on the floor. And yet, Charles, it sounds as though there are, well, vulnerabilities. Yes, that's right. So he bought this DJI robot. And then he said to Claude, look, mate, I just want to hack into it.

I want to be able to control my DJI Romo vacuum cleaner using my Xbox controller. Because that would be really cool. Like I could literally just, you know, like, you know, like a joystick. It could be like a video game type thing, but with a real vacuum camera. So I'd be using some sort of game controller or something, and I'd actually be piling it around on the floor. I could see that being quite fun. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, like, and this is where it comes into the Welcome to the Future thing.

Like, the Xbox controller has Bluetooth, the DJI Romo had Bluetooth. And so why not, right? So then the AI goes away and sort of starts hacking into it, right? and then gets it working, right? Like, just actually, this is the brilliant thing about AI. It just knows everything about the world. Like, because they've stolen, all the AIR companies have stolen all the information about everything in the world. Gets it working.

And then, so this guy calls up his friend and says, mate, this is amazing. I know you've got a DJI, Romo. You know, it's working. And the guy goes, oh, yeah, that's really strange that you say that because my DJI, Romo has just started sort of going crazy. Like it just keeps on driving around on its side. Like it's not

behaving normally. It's just sort of doing this weird turning all the time. And they worked out that the friend who'd hacked his robot was controlling his other friend's

robot. Right. So in as long as it was done. As long as one into the joystick, he's hooked in more than one. How many? 7,000 and robots. That's amazing. Welcome to the future.

And then, so then he goes, okay, let's look into this, right? Because the DJI robot has cameras on it so that it can navigate. And the whole idea is so you don't, you know, bump into expensive furniture or try and kill a dog or whatever that's standing there. And so they sort of, he hacks him, does a bit more hacking, you know, sort of, and he can bring up the video feed on any one of the 7,000 devices that that he's hacked into. That doesn't sound, that doesn't sound good. I mean, it's funny.

Wow. I mean, to my mind, suboptimal. But the opportunities for entertainment, I mean, if you can log into anyone's remote vacuum and make it go nuts, I mean, my goodness, that's a TV series, isn't it? World's wildest hacked robo-vaac antics. Australia's funniest home vacuum cleaner recordings. I mean, it's actually, I don't think, I think welcome to the future, Dom. I think this is our future.

We're already here. Like, I don't think, I think it's old school to go, oh, but hang on. You know, what if someone was naked or what if somebody wanted their privacy or, you know, like, I think that's just very generous. X style thinking. I think we're going to move beyond that. Move beyond millennial. Move beyond Jed Z even.

And just go, this is Gen Alpha now. This is no privacy, complete surveillance state. I mean, you saw the ring ad on the Super Bowl, didn't you? Did you see the Ring ad? Yeah. So basically, during the Super Bowl, Ring, which is one of these, you know, doorbells that happens to have a camera on it, announced this new feature that they're rolling out to all the,

ring things. And it's, it's an opt-out sort of thing. It's going to be on by default. And it's called search party, which sounds like a really fun, harmless little idea, right? It sounds very community-driven.

Search party. It's a party, which is fun. It's a search party, which is actually generally awful. It's obviously very stressful looking for somebody's gotten lost or something. But it's important. You want a search party to succeed.

So on this ad, in the Super Bowl, they went, oh, we're going to roll it out for dogs. Because, you know, the one, the big problem facing America at the moment is missing. Yes, lost dogs, yes. We can all agree on that. And I think actually Donald Trump even mentioned in the State of the Union. Oh, the State of the Union is strong, except for the lost dogs. Our three.

Hour three. A golden. I love that this is the one moment, the one mention of an actual news story that comes into this conversation, this supposedly topical part. We won't talk about the State of the Union except to note, as a joke which isn't in fact true. No mention of lost dogs. No mention of lost dogs.

It's the golden age. Charles. I've found dogs from what I understand. Well, no, it's because Ring has invented this thing that has solved the lost dog problem. So they announced that, yes, we're going to roll out search party. Now, whenever anyone loses a dog, you can now search your entire neighbourhood for that dog. You just upload a photo of that dog.

and it'll look at all the footage it's got from your neighbourhood from all the rings, right? And what an amazing thing. A lot of people sort of claim that this was somehow, you know, the heavy-handed surveillance state finally coming to sort of thing. But I'm sure it'll be used very responsibly. Find the doggies. Admittedly, a few weeks later, the ring CEO did admit that it would be rolled out to beyond dogs. Well, I also note, Charles, that routinely now law enforcement will call for video from cameras. I mean, that's just something that they just do routinely now.

I mean, in some cases, that's probably good. Like if there's a footage of a serious crime being committed, great. But how long until the police can just remotely access that? Probably not long at all, I'd say. Well, I also think, what about the rights of criminals? Like, what about the rights of people who want to commit? No one's looking out for the privacy of criminals. That's true.

Of criminals. I know. But I think, you know, like, it's one of those things who, it's just, like, not to be a contrarian, but I kind of feel like even hardened criminals deserve their rights too. I know that it's sort of not. It's an unpopular view. It is an unpopular view. It's not a popular view, but it's like, I don't know, like.

And it, and it, it's. actually, you know what? Wouldn't it be a boring society? Your whole argument is undermined. It's wrong. And do you know why? Have you seen those videos where people steal Amazon packages from out the front of houses and then the packages explode?

Yeah, porch pirates. Yeah, and they've got like a coloured dye in them. Yeah, that's Mark Robber does that. They're very funny. And I just say that the right of criminals not to have exploding Amazon packages covering them in die. Yes, it's a violation of all kinds of fundamental rights, you could argue, but it's funny enough that it doesn't matter. Surely the exception to any human right is if vision of it is funny. That's it. Which is where the vacuum's come in, which is, it's not a

breach of privacy because it's likely to result in lots of funny TikTok. But also, imagine all the people having affairs who are going to be exposed by the robo vac. I mean, this is the sort of Coldplayed Jumbotron times a million. Instead of the release the Epstein list, it's going to be released the DGIRomo. Yes, and I think the ring footage, I think, could have various ambiguities in its meaning as we move into this phase of privacy invasion. Oh, my God. So can I just adding a little bit of detail to this guy who hacked the devices, right?

It's actually over 10,000 devices now that we managed to get access. And they can't have sold many more. Wasn't that, by the way. I mean, they're very expensive. By the time he realized that he'd done this, he already had over 100,000 messages from 24 different countries downloaded from the DGI power portable. Oh, this was another device.

So not just the vacuum things, there's a portable power station, which powers your home phone. Oh, that's right. So that's how he got the messages. There were phone messages that got down. downloaded to his computer from all around the world. What a treasure trove. Look, I tell you what.

I feel like we should probably start just for content. You're going to use Claude to hack and do all things you can. There's no, I'm sorry, vacuum cleaner-based content. I think, I mean, yeah, I think we set up a podcast, special podcast of just exclusively vacuum. I mean, I reckon it's the next YouTube. It's the next, the next year. It is, Charles, I'm. And I have to say, I'm very worried about this invasion of privacy, I think.

And ironically, it won't suck. Let's use that joke again. I'm really troubled by this, this invasion of privacy, the cameras that are connected, what this means for the intrusiveness in the surveillance state creeping into everything. But I will say my concerns might be lessened slightly if this guy could just hack into my neighbour's vacuum, get it to roll into my place and clean the floor. Because frankly, my three-year-olds have to a massive mess under the table. There are ants.

I could really use a bit of robot vacuuming. Well, I reckon, Dom, we don't need to leave a message. He's probably already got this message. Oh, yeah. From me just having said it. Yeah. Okay. Well, Robo Vax assemble.

That's all I can say. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. Would you call this a podcast network that doesn't suck? Hey! Third time's a charm, Dom. I think we're just proven. The rule three in comedy. I'll catch you next time.