The Chaser Report - Firth's 14th Birthday

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

Charles celebrates his son's 14th birthday in a way incomprehensible for anyone over the age of 30. Meanwhile Dom has plans for how to launch The Chaser into Web 3.0. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Monday the 15th of August, 22. I'm Charles Firth and with me today is Domney. Yes, I am. Hello, Charles. How are you? Very well. And guess what day it is today, Dom? It is Monday the 15th of August. You just said. No, no, no. I'm saying it's my son's 14th birthday. Oh, wow.

I'm surprised you didn't give him an appearance on the podcast. Is it a child labour themed gift? Actually, what I did get him was a premium subscription to the Chaser report. Did you? $9 a month. You get an ad-free version, plus you get premium episodes every week. So that's pretty good. I can't imagine your child wanting to spend more time with you.

You're listening through headphones. Chastor.com.com, today, slash, podcast, by the way, if you want to sign up. But, Dom, before we do that, we should just get to the topic of today's episode. Yes, no, that was nice to hear about your son's birthday. Which is, I've got some just fantastic news from the world of international finance. Oh, right. This hasn't been an eclectic episode. What's happening?

Which is that SoftBank, you know that Fund of Funds? Yes. It's run by some Japanese dude. Matsahashi-San, I think he's famous, yeah. Yeah, who invested billions into We-Work and lost it all. billions into Uber and has managed to burn that all and all these different

Airbnb I think was another one of his investment as you may know that the tech bubble has burst in the last six months or so and SoftBank it's true to say we're long on those sorts of bets

right? Absolutely. So guess how much per hour SoftBank has lost in the last quarter. Wow. See, I just read this amazing book called Billion Dollar Loser.

Oh, yes. It's about Adam Newman, the founder of Wewer. Because I'm quite fascinated by Weirwark, because I joined one in 2019 briefly. Were you for a month? No, it was hilariously bad. The spaces weren't too bad, but the actual cult side of it was hilariously stupid.

Like, they're all just basically having free wine tasting and beer. Anyway. A drunk cold. It was basically... That sounds like my sort of cold. Yeah, the drinking part. It was fine, but it was the sort of place where you work if you pretend that you have a startup. Basically, people who are paying to pretend they have a startup and basically sit around playing

ping pong all day. Anyway, it was really interesting. So I got interested in that. And I read the whole story about Masa Hashi-San and his investment and all this kind of stuff and how he got the money largely from places like the Saudis. They put hundreds of billions of dollars into this fund of funds. So I'm just remembering, I think the figure of that fund was something like $100 billion all up that he had to invest.

So how much would they have lost, given, I reckon, per hour? Per hour. How much money per hour did they lose in the second quarter? I reckon $5 million. $10 million per hour, American dollars per hour in the second quarter. To break that down into seconds, that is $3,000 US dollars per second. That's an even less successful business than a chaser. I didn't think there was.

worse business than this one. What would you do with $3,000 per second, Dom? I cannot imagine. Why did we not... The Chaser was very briefly part of the tech bubble,

or people tried to buy it in the early days. Well, it's interesting you say that because I got rung up yesterday by somebody who said, Charles, the future is... This is true. This is honestly true.

Charles, the future is in Web 3. Oh, my God. I want you to do comedy stunts and we'll make them into Web 3. Like NFTs? Yeah. I don't know whether it's NFTs. But it's like that because Web 3 is the blockchain. Yeah.

And his pitch was that actually Web 3 is not about NFTs and blockchain. Well, that's a good start to the pitch. Because NFTs, like, they were stupid when they started. And now they're clearly stupid. They're clearly dead, yeah. But, no, his argument was that actually it's about socialism. Oh. That essentially Web 3 is going to decentralise power in the web.

And no longer will Amazon be able to fund all these great TV shows and Sammy Shars. Sorry, Sammy. It's already over. Got to do one. No longer will Apple have a stranglehold over really good television shows and buying up all the latest movies and things of there. No longer will Disney be able to give all this money to movie actors to make movies. Screw the gatekeepers.

Instead, everyone in the future will have a thousand followers, super fans, who will all be like Patreon-style followers of each creative. and those thousand people will pay for the creative product of each person's, you know, creative ideas. That is a stupid idea I have never heard before. And that also makes me feel, because this podcast has a lot more than a thousand people listening to it. Should we, are we doing the wrong thing? Have we got too many, too many listeners? We've got too many listeners to be successfully with 3.0.

Oh, dear. But the whole idea is that it's going to decentralize. those things because there won't be this agglomeration of capital to be able to spend things on like really high budget good production values things. Instead, it'll all be like shitty little web videos. You know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of the blogging revolution. Remember how it's like, oh, there are no barriers to entry.

Everyone in the world will have a blog. Everyone will start a blog and everyone will become a content creator. And it was true for a while. Everyone had a blog. And nowadays people wear t-shirts saying, I don't want to hear about your podcast. Yes. Particularly people who know us.

But, you know, one of my colleagues at another job has a t-shirt that's very funny. It's like that. But back then it was I don't want to hear about your blog. And the thing that this whole theory doesn't take into account is that unfortunately the vast majority of people did not have interesting insights to write on a blog, which is why Facebook is failing as well. Because Facebook is basically a mass blog of what everyone ate.

Right? And it turns out that's actually not. very interesting. Whereas amazingly creative people making really good television shows, turns out that actually is fairly compelling as a pitch. Well, I mean, well, it doesn't matter, Dom, because that's all just going to be, like, all that. That's all web 2.0.

That's all going to be blown away and replaced with whatever this year, with whatever Web 3 is. Hey, why a thousand? Why is 1,000 the magic night? Like, does that seem sustainable? I don't think he thought I was very successful, to be honest. I know a thousand people, right? During the course of my life, I would have met a thousand people.

But I got to, I hate to say this, but I reckon the vast majority of those thousand people do not want to pay me money for content because I've already asked them. I've written books. I've pictured the books. I think it's like, you know, you get a thousand, you know, it's plausible. If you get $5 per month from a thousand people, that's, five thousand dollars a month that's but if everyone in the world is doing this model where's the money coming from in order to like it might be it just doesn't make me sense i want to be the person

charles this isn't you know what we should do we should centralize all those agglomerations of cash in to say some large organization you can call it like a network maybe a social network Yeah, social network, call it, I don't know, the Facebook or something. And then those central people can take those bits of cash, combine it together, and actually produce something that people actually want to watch. Don't you think that's a good idea? Yeah, but also, we've actually tested everyone in creating content, and it's worth nothing because that's what Instagram and Facebook,

that's what those things are. They're literally sites where everyone produces content pretty much that wants to, and they're worth nothing. They're worth something to the company that owns them, but the users get fuck all. Like, if you make a TikTok. That's his point. That's his point.

That they're all a rip-off because the users don't get paid for their out-of-focused shots. Good luck putting the genie back in that bottle. That's like the newspapers going, hey, we should have got paid for those articles and giving them worth free. You know what I want to be, though, Charles?

This has given me an idea. What? I want to be the person. It steals that idea about the thousand, uses, and sells it to the soft bank kind. You'll not enjoy your funded. He'll give you $3,000 a second for it. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers.

He obviously couldn't have his birthday celebrations today because he's going to go to school. So we had his birthday celebrations over the weekend. Guess what we did all week. Guess what he did all weekend? I don't want to stereotype your son who's a complicated, nuanced individual with a huge range of interests who, you know, I wouldn't want to make assumptions from the fact that he's a teenage boy and the kind of things that, A, teenage boys do now, and B, I know he does, I'm going to guess gaming, Charles.

I'm going to guess something involving screens. Yes. So this is the complications of being a teenager in 2022, right? Which is he's got a whole lot of friends who he goes. games with, right? Yeah. Games with every night. They all get online and they play.

And so we were saying to him, for weeks, we've been saying, why don't you invite them around and you can hang out together? And he goes, but I don't want to, I don't want to hang out with them. I want to hang out with them online. All their computers are at home. I don't want to have a party because then they won't be online gaming. Right. So, because he only enjoys talking to them.

them while they're simultaneously physically distant playing a game together, but not a kind of game you'd play in a room, like not a board game or an imaginative game, only a computer game. So this has been going on now for like basically two and a half years, right? So this crucial stage of his social development has happened when most of the time it was illegal for him to catch up with his friends. So it's totally understandable the way that he would prefer to interact.

with his very good friends. He's very social. He's a very pro-social character is to not actually see them. So we had to force him. He said, no, no, we insist that you have some sort of physical catch-up. So on Saturday night, we went to his favourite chicken place down the street. All his friends came along for about an hour and a half,

and they'd been playing games all day together. They caught up IRL. In real life. Yeah. And then all. pissed off back to their houses so that they could then get online and chat and catch up some more

but in their own way. Charles, good on you because that is the one thing that you can't do while you're gaming is that you can't enjoy a delicious meal of chicken. Yes.

The one thing you could possibly have loved them, oh, I'm going to take so they picture this when I'm going to take a brief break from the gaming to eat. Yes.

We'll just be in the same place. It'll be a bit weird. It'll be a bit weird. We'll do it anyway because we'll all like the same chicken, I know the chicken you mean, it's very good chicken. Yeah, very nice. And then we'll go back home and normality will reassert itself.

This is a bit, I can't work out whether this is just more evolved than we were as teenagers or if it's a bit sad because I'm remembering what I used to do, you know, school, holidays, weekends, whatever. Yes. When I was, I would go and meet my friends, including Chas from the Chaser, at the town hall steps. Yes. Because you wouldn't be able to choose a time.

And you'd wait. You'd wait for hours. Because you didn't know if they were late or if they were sick or whatever it was. There was no way of contacting you. And then you'd go and see a movie down the road at the multiplex. Yes. And you'd have McDonald's. Yes.

And every aspect of that experience, pretty much, is shitter than playing a game with your friends at home. Because the games are far more stimulating. Like, you can actually do things. You're just sitting there looking at some sitcom, some comedy. And it's called five stacking. The way they're, because there's five of them, right? And when all five are online, they have this team and they go out into these multiplayer worlds and they know each other's moves and then they've got whole strategies for

killing people they've become very proficient at killing a whole lot of other people and we never did that right as teenagers i never killed anyone not even at virtual digital asset i never killed anyone i was just looking at a screen passive i mean occasionally we'd go to the games arcade right we'd go to the the time zone or there's a thing called west world back then and it was basically a pedophile grooming salon. It was a grooming salon for pedophiles to groom kids. And it was very expensive. It was much worse than sitting at home with a nice, beautiful, fast computer.

Yes, exactly. And I don't know about you, but when I was a 14-year-old, you know, you'd sleep in, wouldn't you? It'd sleep in a lot. You'd be a bit mopey and dopey and, you know, have a bit of angst and sort of thing. Hardly has never been like that. Like, the other day, Apex. which is one of the games that they play, Apex Legends,

updated their season. So they got a whole lot of new things in the world. And it was a weeknight, but he asked, you know, he said, look, they're updating. It'll come live at 5am. Can I get up to be one of the first people in the world to see this new? No way. A teenage boy wanted to get up at 5 a.m. voluntarily.

He got up voluntarily. He did it all himself, got up at 5am. Like this, like I think it's just best. Don't take this the wrong way, but can you send Hartley next time? And obviously, like, dialing in remotely. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're fine, but I can't five-stack with you. Or if we did, we'd be cancelled immediately.

Can you, that's true. Could you imagine how awkward it would be for Hartley if you and I both just popped into his game, like, hi. I have done that on occasion. He thinks it's hilarious when I come in, because I always go break a break, because you're on the can. You're on the head phone. And you sound a bit like you're over.

a helicopter headchair. To us, because we're old. And where you go, break a, break a, break a break of it. And it's like, Dad, you don't need to say that. It's like, I know I don't need to say it. But congratulations, Charles, for keeping up with your son's hobbies and working out a way to be incredibly embarrassing in the digital space. Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, you've got to keep progressing these things as a parent. What do you reckon? Should we briefly go for chicken and then go on the stard our screens? Yeah, definitely. You go to your house. I'll go to my house. Yep. Yeah, see you online.

Our gears from Road. We're part of the ACAST, Creative Network. We'll catch you tomorrow.