The Chaser Report - Charles is now a Global Wanker(nomics expert)

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

Charles is taking his live show to Edinburgh, and Dom tries and fails to contain his jealousy. Plus, we reveal how to make a $weet fortune in kickbacks, as pioneered by some Commonwealth Bank employees recently. 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 Chaser Report with Domain Charles. Oh, hello, Charles. So good to see you now. We're in different places at the moment. You are gallivanting around the country on tour. And it seems to be going very, very well at the moment with your Wankanomics business, which I am both very impressed by and extremely jealous of.

That's the main reason. I do it, is to make you jealous, Don. That's right. You're in Brisbane. Is that true? Oh, I think so. I'll just, yeah, it looks like, yeah, it's Brisbane probably. Oh, suddenly I'm not jealous at all.

Yeah, it's all right. Yeah. If it's at all echoy, it's because I'm literally standing in the atrium of a hotel because everywhere else in Brisbane, they have piped music. Like literally very loud music everywhere so that nobody can. think about the fact that they live in Brisbane. Yeah, isn't it just the Bluey soundtrack? I think that's what, it's Brisbane's one thing.

Bluey and a team that's good at Rugby League, that's the two things that they've got. Yeah, I think actually it's either the Bluey soundtrack, if they're wanting to be modern and up to date, or sort of Triple M hits from the mid-1980s. They literally just sort of... Yeah, there is an album. Yeah.

I remember this one we used to work there. There's an album called Triple M's Great. as trucking songs without a hint of irony. Yeah. I mean, Brisbane is the capital cities of trucking albums. Yeah, that's right. So we'll talk about that,

about the things you've been up to in a few moments. But also, I've found a way to make money in this economy. It's even better than what you're doing, even better than selling out to theatres. It's pretty amazing stuff. In short, you steal money into your bank account. Ooh. That's what's happened from a couple of,

couple of Commonwealth Bank employees, internal investigators discovered mystery, payments into their accounts. And the text message exchange is quite fascinating. One of them texts, dollar, dollar sign landed. And the next one, the next message is, I cannot believe we were this stupid. Right. So it's a temporary high. But who you're stealing from?

I mean, because I quite like this. And I feel like there might be some sort of Robin Hood style. angle to this if it's from the Commonwealth Bank themselves or are they stealing from ordinary people like the Commonwealth Bank itself does? Oh, it's kind of a victimless crime, isn't it? Okay, we'll get into all that after we make some money less illegally. Okay, Charles, so let's talk about your business

because this is huge news. You're taking your Wankanomics project, your latest thing, new shiny toy. You're going global. You're playing in Edinburgh. We've hit the big time. We're going to Edinburgh. Look, I don't even know whether I'll bother returning to Australia, to be honest.

No, this is the hope. We're playing 12, 12 nights in a 300-seater in Edinburgh. I think that'll just catapult me. It'll be a bit like baby Randy. Sure. Not when he goes to Edinburgh, obviously, where he completely bombs in that pub, but where he gets sort of like molested by that promoter. But, I mean, it'll be like baby Randy in that eventually I'll end up with my own seven-part Netflix series about all the stalkers that I attracted over the years.

It could also be train spotting, couldn't it? Oh, yes, because that's Scotland, isn't it? It could be you in the most disgusting toilet in the world, making bad life choices. Yeah. Mind you, I'm in Brisbane, so, you know. Oh, yeah, true, true. The only way is up, really. So, wankinomics is the stage show you've been doing.

It's observations about terrible corporate language. It's a gift that keeps giving. It's like a recurring email. You know those annoying emails you get every single day from the staff and who can't bother trimming the email distribution group? That's what this is like. It just keeps delivering. Yeah, and most people who come to see the show

and then write to us to sort of thank us for it, to admit that they really didn't like the show particularly, that it was incredibly painful to watch, that it was far too close to the bone, that it felt like being at work, and that it leads most people to sort of several weeks of self-examination about how cliched and horrible and passive-aggressive they are at email

and just office communication. That's just a wonderful thing. We've tapped into the sort of self-hatry. You know, in those later episodes of The Office, with Ricky Jave, where they were sort of unwatchably embarrassing. That's right. That's right. The comedy of cringe. Yeah, that's what we've managed to unleash. I mean, what a great, what a great service that is. Yeah. To make people really look at what they've done in life and realize it's not very much. Which until you had

produced this stage show, it was arguably true of you as well. I mean, you should probably, you should probably have a little disclaimer at the start of the show that says, if you feel terrible about the state of your life after this, you should talk to us about what our lives were like a week before we started this. So it's a refreshing thing. But I mean, I must say, I remember I briefly worked for an American sort of management consulting firm and I could not believe on day one of that job the way that they kept using the word around.

What do you mean? I've been doing some thinking around this. Oh, I see. Which means that actually means I've been thinking about everything but the thing that I need to. I've been procrastinating. Why don't you try thinking about the thing? You're going to have sort of fuzzy feelings about, you know,

I'm going to think not sharply, not precisely about the thing, but just sort of around the general topic area. Yeah, yeah. I'll be circling around the topic and never getting to it. That was one. People, they also used the phrase, we'll be addressing that in a going forward manner. Oh, this is great.

It's just, this is 22 years ago. They were so far ahead of their times. But these are all just commonplace in Australia now. Yeah. Like around, Everyone says around. We've been doing some work around this. We should touch base, Dom, later in the week,

and maybe just circle back to some of these conversation topics so that you can... I'd love to circle back around. You can upload them. Oh, no, you can download them. I can download them from me and upload them to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although, I'm not sure I have the bandwidth at the moment for that, Don. You're very well trained.

So this is what the show is like. If you want to go and see it, you should. I mean, I haven't managed to make it yet, possibly because of the cringe factor. Mind you, so on Friday night, we had sold out performance at the M Moore, second show, sorry, not sorry. Anyway, halfway through the show,

we're just a bit before halfway through the show, the entire theatre blacked out. We look outside, the entire suburb has blacked out, so is the surrounding, suburbs, huge blackout, and so we just had to tell everyone to go home. We've got to do the fucking whole show again next Wednesday, yes. Oh, I might come then. You should come on Wednesday, yeah, yeah.

Although it won't make much sense because we're going to pick the show up from where we left off. Because we've got 1,600 people who have seen half a show. It's actually a disaster from our objective because we're going, how are we going to pat out an hour having already burnt through? Q&A. Half a Q&A At the end And collect some new examples

So you'll be literally circling back Yeah I love it You'll be you'll be circling back That's fantastic You know it's also PowerPoint You had a PowerPoint surge I know yeah

And you blacked out the whole suburb So this is what happened was We realised we were fucked Because the whole show is based on this massive Powerpoint presentation that we put together And

And it was like Could we do this just from my laptop. So I brought the laptop out on stage and sort of asked everyone whether they could see the laptop well enough to keep going. And, yeah, no.

I suspect the answer was no. No, no, well, the actual answer was what happened was they were worried that they only had half an hour of emergency light. I didn't know this. You know, when they black out. Yeah. And the sort of emergency lights come on.

You've only got half an hour to then get everyone out of the building. I mean, that does make sense that you just have enough battery power to get people out of there rather than needing to continue with the show. I know. They then had some Tesla batteries. Yeah.

Well, because what I was... A rare situation where a Tesla product would have been useful. We got everyone to use their phone torches to light us up. So we actually could be seen on stage. But, yeah. That's bizarre. Yeah, it was quite fun. So that's on.

And you've got more gigs coming up later in the year. Well, I mean, the thing is, Charles, with this comedy of the cringe being too real, we've just had the 30th anniversary of Frontline, and it is extraordinary how true all that still is. So if you do the TV version of this, front line is like the Bruce Lerman trial, as people have been pointed out, the spotlight revelations about all the lunches and the hookers and all that, it's just straight out of Frontline 30 years later.

Yes, you're right, the checkbook journalism. Yes, you're right. Which is, I don't know, I can't work out whether it's more impressive and whether they should feel proud to have produced an enduring piece of comedy or whether it's utterly depressing that you can completely take apart an entire genre of television and mock it so brilliantly and make absolutely no impact on the art form itself. Like, clearly, no one gives a shit if it's like front line at all.

Yeah, I think that is the lesson that art has no impact. Yeah. I mean, Rob Smith-Sitch is constantly getting people saying to him, oh, my job's just like utopia. Yeah. But it doesn't change. No. The jobs don't get any less like utopia.

No. Just because they've, again, accurately satirized real life. In fact, if anything, people incorporate art and use it as sort of how to go about, like, I'm sure people walk out of our show, sort of thinking about all the language that they use. then incorporating some of the new jargon that they've learned as well into their lives. Yes. You'll have taught them new terrible jargon that they'll then go and use in their in their careers. That's shocking.

That's truly shocking. So when are you in Edinburgh? When's that all happening? So that happens on the, like mid-August. I don't imagine we have a huge number of Edinburgh-based listeners to this podcast. But if you do happen to be the Edinburgh Fringe, we'll be there. I think we're playing from the 12th of August to the 26th of August. Playing at Pleasance 1 at 6pm.

It's pretty nice. Well, I've never been there, but apparently. Very good. Everyone says it's a good venue. Oh, but I'll tell you what. Yeah. They're incredibly conservative. So we can't call it.

None of our posters can have the word wankanomics on it. Oh. We've got to blank out A-N-K-E. It's got to be W-O-Nomics. Oh. It's so dumb. So you won't sell any tickets because no one will get the joke. Yeah, I know.

Yeah. Oh. Oh, well. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Charles, we've done the podcast for a while now, and a lot of people have come on who've actually played Edinburgh, and every single one of them has said that you lose money doing it. So I look forward to that conversation at the end of it.

That's right. Well, it'll be a great experience. Maybe I could pick up some tips from these geniuses at the Commonwealth Bank. about how to make back my money when I arrive home. You could. So this is the story we're going to talk about that's in the news that I've just said. I don't quite have the bandwidth at this point.

This is Sunday afternoon. Quite late in the evening we're recording this. I don't know if I've got the bandwidth that's actually processed to download the learnings from this particular news article on the City Morning Herald. Let me try and explain it as best as I can. This is Christmas Eve 2014. Two people were sacked from the Commonwealth

bank after internal investigators discovered a series of mystery payments into a guy called John Waldron's account. He was general manager of IT infrastructure engineering and just found guilty of taking bribes over many, many years. And basically the way that it seems to work, what was alleged by the prosecutor was that a California-based cloud computing startup gave software services to the bank from 2009 and that this guy'd kind of smooth the way for those deals, right? So they paid this guy more than $2 million US dollars for introducing the deal.

And this wandering guy got the money. He didn't declare it to the banks, so he's getting a little payola on the side, supposedly, is what's going on. So that doesn't sound as easy to do. It's not as easy as a normal bank robbery, though. Because you've got to be an employee of the bank, I presume. I guess, oh, yeah, you'd have to work for the bank and be knowledgeable, wouldn't you? Yeah.

The thing that worries me is this went on for years without them noticing. Yeah, and the strange thing was they only found out, they only found out about it because they looked into his use of a corporate credit card. So if he'd actually managed to, it would have been very easy for him to do this and stay clean. See, this is the thing you've got to learn, Charles, from this is you become world famous and, you know, flight of the concordes went to Edinburgh and got discovered there and all this sort of stuff. That could be you. Were you more talented?

I think, you know, the world is your oyster. All the big scouts go to Edinburgh. And they won't know what your show is called, but they might be interested. But what we're going to do is we've got to work out how to, like, what is in our world something that we can then corruptly offer, you know, the contract for? You know what I mean? Well, you just, you get a corporate credit card. Maybe if somebody wants to advertise, we could help them. You know, you just pay us $14 million over five years.

Yes. And we'll get you a good deal on advertising on the Chaser Report. That's right. That's right. Is that the sort of thing? Yeah, I really think just the rivers of gold in podcasting, we could very easily just sort of smooth people's entree. You work at a university.

Don't they just throw money around to academics to do stuff? Not in my experience. No. But I think what we could do, you know the people we know who we could do these sorts of deals with. I think I've figured it out. Okay. The people we could introduce, we know some media lawyers. And if there's one group of people in recent years who've done very, very well, it's media lawyers.

Not the people, not the plaintiffs. No. Not the defendants. Because I don't know if you saw a child. The other news story that came out on Friday was that the costs order in the Lerman trial. Yes. was what came down and um the costs were given on an indemnity basis meaning that channel 10 would have had 95% covered by Lerman if Lerman had any money at all yes so 10's still going to have

to pay probably because he doesn't he doesn't have any money his deal was on a no no win no fee yes so those lawyers are out of out of pocket big time but the other lawyers have done really well they've done millions so we just need to run kind of like a corporate dating service for media lawyers and idiots who get sued or who sue people. And no, and what we can do is we can have a little back channel. This is where the corruption comes in. Yes. We have a back channel where we suggest defamatory jokes and statements to journalists

and stuff like that. And then we go to the people who they're defaming, point it out. And tip them off. And then stoke the sort of fires of defamation and just... It's vertical integration. It's a one-stop shop, Charles. Yes, and actually, if the Chaser got sort of, I assume you can get some sort of defamation insurance.

Sure. It could be like an inside insurance scam. We could defame. We could be brokers for defamation insurance. We could suggest the defamation, sell the insurance, set up the lawyers. Yes. Do we need to bribe the judge? Should we do that as well?

Perhaps we should. You might as well. I'm sure you can't bribe judges these days. But just it's worth asking a question just to be comprehensive. And then I think we've got to go further. We've got to provide the Coke. Yes. So when if there's a one of those sorts of situations,

we've got to have the restaurants, get a cut there, get a cut of the Coke deal. Karaoke machines. Karaoke machines. And then probably the therapy that they're all going to need. So the final step is just introducing them to therapists. Yep. And oh, but also when they're on the inside,

those who eventually get convicted, if that happened, not for defamation, but those who go to jail, we should make sure that when you pay the big guy in the yard so that they don't get stabbed, we'll get 10% of that. I love it. It's called an end-to-end service provider offering, Charles, end-to-end. And so what's the name of the firm? What are we...

Oh, I think Lerman Brothers. That brand's not being used, is it? Yeah, and we're not just bankrupt. We're morally bankrupt. Like, it's perfect. That's great. Did you see that amazing play? The Lehman Brothers, the Lehman Brothers trilogy,

there was this play with the history of Lehman Brothers for when they started out making money out of basically slavery and then went broke in the GFC. I think it's a perfect brand, the Lerman Brothers. The Lerman Brothers. We're going to set that up. That's great. Well, that'll pay off my Edinburgh deeds.

I think that's done. All right. Well, congratulations. I'm genuinely excited for you. um having uh you know created this this wankonomics thing that can't be mentioned in in the UK no and uh I've will always say that I worked with you before you moved to the UK and became famous yeah that's right before I start I'll accuse you of stalking that's what will happen oh that'd be classy of you yeah this is evidence in the the lawsuit between me and Charles this whole

episode when it's that all goes down our gear is from road we are part of the iconocles network catch you tomorrow will you still be here no Probably not. I'll be in some other glamorous city, like Adelaide or Hobart. Launceston, if you're lucky.