The Chaser Report - Getting Our FLiRT On

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Apologies for disappearing, poor Dom caught COVID's newest variant: FLiRT. No, we aren't making that name up. Anyway we're back, leave a five star review and say thanks, cheers! 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 Don Charles. Sorry, Charles. I've been sick, Charles. I've been sick. This is why we haven't been here. I've had COVID-19, even though it's 20, 24, five years late, Charles. I'm five years out of fashion. Yes. And you go here really hard. You were saying that you lack all sort of vitality. you're terribly exhausted you're not very funny at all oh no wait a minute you're barely impacted on me that's what I've always found

punch yourself in the head first before someone else does that's my technique to surviving no it was it was very mild actually oh really oh I just felt crap I just felt tired and exhausted but I didn't have like a last time I got it my chest was really tight and worrying and whatever and this time I just had a running nose and and felt dreadful it's just like a mild flu that keeps you in bed But the point is, Dom, that you're not the only person who's had it. Like, literally everyone I know has had COVID-19 in the last few weeks. It's just ridiculous.

Or it's been going around all the schools. All of my actual friends have got it as well. Who are they? Have I met them? The point is, it's back, and it's back with a vengeance. My wife was down in Melbourne the other day. Everyone in the room was sick. It's just horrible, right?

Yep. And I reckon if COVID's back, then there's other things. that we should bring back from pandemic times. What a good idea. Let's get into that after this. Can I just say, Charles, before we hear your brilliant theory about this, I have a real problem with the current name of COVID. This variant is called the flirt variant.

I can't think of anything with a stupider name. It's capital FL lowercase I, capital RT. So it sounds like a shit dating app. Wow. A curt variant. So flirt, so is that? Is that because it's transmitted by patching people? Like, have you been hitting the apps on?

Is that what's happening? Obviously not, right? Like, that's, floating was always my least strong skill. If anything I've ever tried to do in my life, it's a wonder I ever managed to settle down because I'm the world's worst flurter. Like, either my flirting technique is to make them think that I dislike them or to not notice at all.

So that those are my only two modes. So, but you've been quite successfully loved. By flirting. How did you make your wife fall in love with you without being able to flirt? Probably pity. Who knows? But in any case, yeah, every time I say, oh, the flirt variant, it makes me angry. So that's where I am.

You know, flirt free. But I'm now free of the flirting, so that's good. I'm over it. Oh, great. Just a bit husky, yeah. So I reckon the point is that you were languishing in bed for about a week, weren't you? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, mostly because I didn't want to infect my kids who've never, my, my, Two-year-old's never had it. She's a novit. So back in, like, 2020 and 2021, when we were all laid off because of COVID, even if we didn't have it, we'd get $750 a week from the government for free. Jobkeeper. I think, now that COVID's a wash, a wash across the country, we've got to bring back some of these COVID-era benefits.

What a great idea. Money for nothing. Yeah, because Alba, like, is. If you think about it, in comparison, like, $300 off your yearly electricity bill, just doesn't cut it in terms of, like, compared to what we got back then. Yeah, back in the salad days of Scott Morrison and the coalition government. Yes, exactly. The money tap was just on.

Yes. There was state-based funding as well. And the key to it, Charles, was having a small business. They didn't want to give money to ordinary people at all, except maybe through job keep it for bartenders or whatever. But for people with pathetic small businesses like me, oh, my goodness, I'd never had more money than in that period. It's fantastic.

Yes. And the thing is, no one begrudged, I mean, everyone begrudged Harvey Norman getting JobKeeper and stuff like that. But no one really begrudged anyone getting, you know, like, you know how everyone's begrudging Gina Ryan Hart getting her $300 electricity bonus, right? Because... Hang on. Are you sure?

Did she get it? Yeah, everyone gets it. It's that untargeted? Every single electricity bill gets $300. dollars off, right? And it's because they're basically cheating. They're going to take half a percent off the inflation figure next quarter by doing this, right? Because if you take it off every single electricity bill, it just massively, it like obliterates inflation. And if you're Gina Ritehart, you probably have 50 electricity bills. So she's not getting $300. Yeah. He's getting

$300. She's getting $15,000. But the thing is, no one begrudges. I mean, Harvey Norman under Job gave, we got like $24 million or something, right? But nobody, nobody begrudges there. because everyone was a wash with money. Like, I think the problem is, and the mistake that they've made in this budget that they did last week was that they only handed out $300. It should be like $300 a day to everyone while COVID still exists. Isn't it interesting the way that we think about this thing? So if there's a pandemic, right?

And if we have to stay at home, it's kind of like, oh, my goodness, we really need to get everyone through this. Let's have this welfare. You know, Charles, that they rented motels and put homeless people in them during that period? It actually solved homelessness temporarily. We solved all these social problems, just on a temporary basis, and then things went back to normal. Imagine being the cunt who decided to end that scheme. Imagine being the business.

Oh, well, pandemic's over. Let's stop paying those motel bills for the homeless people. How you get. See ya. Bye-bye. Back to the curb, Johnny. Yeah, exactly. And, oh, my goodness.

But whereas, you know, everyone's feeling the pinch, the cost of living is a total nightmare. The government's being told this. constantly. Like Jim Chalmers did a session with people in his electorate last week and they were all hammering him about the cost of housing and cost of living and how worried they were. He's going, look, we're a Labor government. We do more than the others, but I can't tell you that we're, you know, I'd like, no, you'd like me to do more. If it was Scott Morrison back in the day, they all would have left there with thousands of dollars. Yes. And, you know, from Scott, it's sort of weird, isn't it? Admittedly, it would have been a whole other schemes that then

increased the price of houses. Like, yes. Under Scott Morrison, it would have been like, Okay, you can use all your money and all your parents' money from your super and spend all your retirement savings on boosting housing prices. But that was their scheme. Oh, yeah. That and all the massive payments, people who even like, if you went to the Morrison government back in today and said, by the way, I've got a mate who can get cheap rats in from China. Like, I've got a mate who's, they're falling off the back of the truck.

I promise you they're okay. You would have got $300 million at the end of that conversation. Yeah, no, I mean, there's some great corruption and sort of the auditor general just released their report for the 2021-22 financial year. And there are some fucking hilarious over-expendages in that one. There's one where they authorised the acquisition of some extraordinary, like, it's only 900,000 liters of hand sanitizer from somebody who'd never imported hand. sanitiser before and then it like it wasn't wrapped in some sort of safe way and so they had to

dump they dumped over 99% of it was just dumped in landfill yeah lots of great examples like that yeah I remember warehouses full of all these products the other thing was we had amassed all these stockpiles of PPE like personal protective equipment and then shipped it all off to China and then we couldn't get it back and we had absolutely no PPE I don't know if you remember But at the start of the pandemic, because we all thought, oh, that, that COVID bug, that's not going to come here, let's definitely give all of our special masks and face shields and stuff to China, because they definitely need it. And do you remember we couldn't even get an N95 mask during the bushfires?

That's right. We'd send them to California for their bushfires, isn't it? We sent them all over the, if anyone wanted it, just us. We're the ones like, we'll never get bushfires here in Australia. You know, I don't think we should do. What we should do is next time, something bad happens, we should send our subs to China. Oh, very good.

I love your assumption that we're going to ever get them. I know. Just to briefly divert onto our favourite subject, Charles. I don't know whether you saw the news in the past week. Can it try and keep the Collins class subs going for longer? Have you heard this? Oh, really? Yeah.

They're the ones that can't turn left, aren't they? Yes, that's right. Then even the Australian says here, high risk to breathe life into old subs. It's going to be $5 billion. for the life of type extension, it's called. Yeah, what's it called when you throw good money after bad? What's that? A college-class submarine.

Yeah, giving $5 billion to... The chat tells the expression is throwing good money after bad. You had it. Oh, that is the expression, right, yeah. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Because I think World War III, do you reckon it's getting closer? Like, you know, with the Iranian president dying and everything like that, surely is, is that more instability or do you reckon that's not going to have it?

I'm just mainly interested because I'm assuming there'll be some sort of, you know, how we had the pandemic payments. Yeah, you know, like once there's a World War III going on. World War III payments, that's actually a good point. We'll be able to get some World War III payments. So you think possibly we should, we should prompt China to attack Taiwan? Like, we should actually bring that conflict on together. get some sweet welfare.

Yeah, yeah. Or, I mean, isn't it more likely to happen in the Middle East, though? Quite possibly. I mean, once we're in the fallout shelter, we'll have to have some sort of jobkeeper then. Well, they'll have to. I think our happiness was much greater during the pandemic, because even though we couldn't live our lives, we could at least get paid. We were at least, we were getting paid and we were all in it together.

Like, we were suffering through the same thing. Yes, yes. Even if you were rich, even if you're a megastar or whatever, you're still. You still had to start at home. It was the great leveler. And we just got drunk and depressed. Yes, that's right. But we're all doing that together.

You've got, like, I think what's happening now is, like, the actual talented people are really succeeding. Yeah. The rest of us are sort of just languishing behind. But there's no free payments for everyone where it doesn't matter. Like, I think in some ways we've sort of created a society where envy and jealousy flourishes because talented, skillful people get all the good jobs. Yeah, I completely agree.

Totally unfair. During COVID, everyone's social life was totally destroyed. I remember having some Zoom dinner parties, the saddest thing ever, sitting at home. I think I might have been on one with you at one point. Sitting at home, you know, on Zoom, eating a meal and looking at other people on a screen who were also sitting at home, having a meal. But that was actually the highlight of my past five years social life.

And since the pandemic is ended. I still don't go out, but now I know everyone else's out. And I don't know whether it's because I have very young children or because I'm just completely unpopular. There's no way of knowing. I haven't even tested the theory at this point. Well, this is the thing. Yeah, I still don't go to any parties or

anything. But at least you knew nobody else was going to parties. Yeah. I mean, I'm not even aware if there are parties. But back in university days, I was at least aware of parties I wasn't invited to. Yeah. There was this brief moment where legally you weren't not being invited to parties.

We're all losers. And, you know, if you had parties like Boris Johnson, you got into a massive scandal and lost your job. It was fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so all the popular kids who wanted the whole parties, like suck shit, man. Tuck shit. Yeah, yeah. Go to jail.

What we should do, though, Charles, just thinking about this is, I mean, the Chaser, you know, we haven't done so well with this consistent podcasting business, as much as we've been trying over the past few years. What we really need to do is get into the medical devices business and the medical supplies. What we really need is a vaccine. Not a vaccine, just a vaccine candidate. Oh, well, I mean, you've had a very good vaccine against flirting, I've heard. The flirt variant. Yep, yep. People are welcome to take my antibodies if you want to work out how to end flirting forever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, you know, take some of my DNA. That's probably, it could be a DNA vaccine. Instead of an MRI vaccine, it can just be a DOM DNA vaccine. That'll be great. Okay, so we get into the vaccine business. But what's the vaccine against? Oh, it doesn't matter.

I think you can just say, like, You can just say it's against radiation poisoning for the future. You can say it's for a new variety of COVID. It doesn't, this is the whole great thing. We've been talking about how the government promised all these things and didn't do them. Yes, it's an announceable. It's the same we've met it with pharmaceutical companies. And what we do is we say, look, it's urgent.

Urgent. It's urgent. So you can't do any of the testing. No testing. You didn't test it, you know, properly anyway. It's like Trump's Operation Warp Speed. Just give us the money right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like no bid contract. No, you know, you take all the risk. If it doesn't work, it sucks to be you. I love it. Yeah, it's definitely a good idea. Look, what could we find a cure for? I mean, I think flirting's as good as anything. Yeah, it's on brand.

We can do multiple things at once. We can release N95 masks with my face on them. And I just think that would be so effective. Yeah. You could probably source that from China from the avocado pool toy factory, can't you? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's how crazy those times were. I could import inflatable avocado pull toys from China and not go broke.

That's how much money we had? I know. I don't know. That was JobKeeper. We were making massive losses. It didn't matter. That's right. We had all the interns, didn't we?

We had it so many interns. And now the point is you can't do anything. Like, everything's being replaced by AI anyway. That's true. Did you see the thing about Scarlet? Yes. I mean, exactly the plot line of what you would expect if you're a conspiracy theorist about what happened, which is creepy Sam Altman from Open AI, rings up Scarlett in October last year and says, hey, can we use your voice? Based on the dystopian movie, Her. Yeah.

Which, of course, they watched and thought, oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. Missing the entire point of the movie. Yes, exactly. And so, you know, they wanted their own sort of Siri or Alexa or whatever, And it would be Scarlett Johansson, right? Great idea. She said, so they talked about it for a few months. And then she went, nah, not going to do that. And so they just released it anyway with her voice. All her family went, hey, have you heard the new open AI voice?

This has happened a couple of weeks ago. Here's a clip, actually, of the new open AI voice that there is. Hey there. I see you're rocking an open AI hoodie. It's going great. Yeah, so it was called Sky, right. Sky, very similar to Scarlet, yeah. Yeah.

And then yesterday morning, they had to remove that voice because Scarlett-Johans is now going to sue them. Because without her consent, they just went, oh, well, you don't want us to use your voice, sucks to be you. Which is the exact whole point about the whole problem with AI, which is, and everyone who's not worried about AI goes, oh, well, I'm sure it won't be used by creeps, you know, like, but the people who are running the AI companies are the creeps. They're the fucking creeps. Yeah. And the great thing is that all those large language models will be trained on us saying that their owners are creeps. People can control, they're all creeps.

I assume every episode of the podcast has now been ingested for that. And so what we really need to do is to try and stop that. That sort of poisons their data set. Yes, you poison the data set. I feel like, you know, generate a podcast in the style of Chaser Report. It would spit out a terrible, terrible podcast. It was very unreliable and, you know, didn't come out every day.

And didn't come out. It basically just featured us complaining about the pandemic. Wow. Is this actually us? Oh, wait a minute. There you go. This is not, Dom still has COVID. Yeah.

This is, this is all been just AI generated. Actually, if we're going to be honest about it, Dom's dead. He didn't make it through the COVID. Mind you, he's still better at flirting than when he was alive. And seeing. Our gear is from a... See, Charles wouldn't have. come up with that. It's definitely AI.

Our gears from Roe, we're part of the Icona Class Network, and maybe the real Dom and Charles will be back tomorrow. The next generation of AI will not be able to make that joke because it'll be a more accurate version of Charles. That's true.