The Chaser Report - Q's Day Prepping

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Tired of the doom and gloom in the news at the moment? Lucky you, because Dom has found an article warning about a brand new type of end-of-the-world prediction: 'Q Day'. Plus, Charles explains the mechanics of quantum computer after an amount of beers that is impossible to measure without altering the result.---VOTE OPTICS FOR A LOGIE: https://vote.tvweeklogies.com.au/Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] our caviar addiction: 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 Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, the news is bleak at the moment. So I've found something that is, well, it's not the news, but it's even bleaker. Oh, okay. I like that. Yeah, because, I mean, looking at the Middle East and Iran and Israel and the US potentially joining in and even more war and death.

Yeah, and you've gone, that's not bleak. No, we can go further down than that. We can... Well, it doesn't impact us in Australia as directly as this bit of news, because that's the real thing. Right, so you found a local angle to bleakness. Well, it's more of a universal global bit of bleakness going up. It's a thing...

The Wired article... That's worse than potential nuclear war. Yes. I don't even if you get into the... We'll get into it soon. Yeah, because before we do, I do have to sort of just note... Oh, you've got some listener feedback, because you give out your phone number, haven't you? Yeah, yeah.

So we did the episode last night, and there has been several pieces of feedback texted through to me today, all of which had the same feedback, which was, so your daughter, your three-year-old, made her first appearance on the podcast. She did. She was a wonderful cameo yesterday. And the feedback was that she has provided by far the most insightful and observant commentary to ever happen. in the history of this podcast. I mean, that's probably fair. Track. She's pretty great three-year-old.

Because from memory, I think she said, shut up. She just shouted over and I forget that she couldn't hear her go be stole house. And it was a point well made. It was a stridently argued point. And she knew what she was talking about, which I think was a difference

from most episodes of the Chaser Report. But we're again at Dom's house. So we're going to use our inside voices. Yeah, no, no. She really wants us to use our inside voices. As we talk about the bleakest thing ever, So just to give you this headline, Charles, it's from Wired, and the subtitle is, warning, it'll be the worst holiday in the history of the world.

That's the subtitle. The title is... Is this in the Traveller section of The Herald? No, it's in Wired. Happy Q Day. Now, I know, because you're you, you know what Q Day is, but I suspect not everyone listening. Everyone's worried about Q Day. If they know what it is.

Don't you just bump into people and go, you worried about Qaeda? Oh, yeah, Q Day. Sounds like when I've said I'm her son's children. Anyway, we'll get into what Q-Day is and why it's terrifying after this. So, Charles, Q-Day. Q-Day is, of course, the moment in not too distant future when quantum computing is powerful enough to basically decrypt everything, right? To decrypt, like quantum computing, to be honest,

is not actually that useful for most things that you would want a computer for, Like, typing an essay, not going to work on quantum computing. Because, you know, every time you type the word T or the letter T, you know, there's only a sort of probable, like it deals in probabilities. So it may type the word T, the letter T. I can't wait for you to explain quantum computing after an afternoon on the beers. Go on. I'll just sit back and enjoy it. I've got a little bit of a handicap going on here.

Not that many beers, but... Just a couple. But the whole point is anything that requires certainty is not going to sort of play well. But things that require sort of big brain thinking of putting together all possibilities and trying to work out which one is the correct solution, i.e. encryption, it totally fucking is just the best at, right? Yeah, so just to explain that in an analogy that I've just heard many times, I think we've discussed it on the podcast before. The traditional way of, and I remember this from the earliest days of computing, Do you remember mouse mazes?

I remember programming a mouse maze in basic once upon a time. And basically constructs the maze and then the computer has a little virtual mouse trying to find the cheese at the end of the maze. And it just goes through one path after another. It just eliminates one path, then the next path, and the next path, and eventually it finds the cheese. But it has to eliminate one thing at a time.

So if you think of a conventional computer trying to open a combination lock, it will simply run 0-0-0-0-0-0-1, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But with quantum computing, Because the qubit is not a binary thing, it doesn't, can't just be one or zero, it can essentially, if you think of a maze, it can go down all the possible paths at once, which means that it's very, very fast at solving it. When it comes to trying to crack a combination lock, it can simultaneously try every number at the same time. How that works, I don't understand. I'm fascinated for you to explain it.

But no, no, but I think the point is that even people who are doing quantum computing don't really understand it. So they're doing analogies. But the point being that encryption currently, your password, your banking, all this stuff, it all relies on your browser, your porn addiction, it all relies on incredibly 24-bit security, isn't it? Like incredibly long numbers. 256. 206, yeah, yeah. So it's incredible, used to be 24.

Very, very, very, very, very large numbers that it would take many, many, many lifetimes to try and crack using that one-at-a-time number method. Or instant-taste. on Q Day, because what happens is they invented a computer that probably is not that big a quantum computer in terms of compared to, say, conventional computers. Yeah, it's not huge. It just works in a different way. Yeah. But it's got the capacity to sort of test out all the encryption on basically anything. Like, yeah, all the internet traffic, all the financial data, and that's it. And hilariously enough, that includes cyber cable. right so yes so the blockchain's finished at that point so the blockchain i think the bitcoin is based

on 4,096 bit encryption right which when you were Satoshi what's it what Nakamura Nakamura you're setting it up in what 90 you know 2009 or whatever you probably thought well no one's ever going to decrypt 4,096 bit encryption but the whole blockchain is based on that level of encryption. And the answer is, no, no, no, like that'll be like a walk in the page. It's like sort of, I don't know, asking a conventional computer, what's two plus two? Yeah. The point is Q days is the sort of moment that that happens, right? So there's a lot of people who think that perhaps that moment has already happened. And even if it hasn't, we won't know that it's happened because imagine you're the only person in the world who can decrypt everything. And we're talking about

government actors here like the only people with the resources to build a quantum computer that good is probably what's probably there's Google meta yeah probably Elon Musk the technology is happening in universities but they're probably not at the scale and then and then you know military industrial complexes like CIA PLA that's it so just to give the the scary version of this this is from the wide article it's saying well I mean for for most of us you wouldn't be able to tell when it was Q day. But some strange things might happen. So, for instance,

Yes, exactly. It says London's energy grid could go down on an election day, plunging the city into darkness. A US submarine on a covert mission's surfaces to find itself surrounded by enemy ships. Embarrassing material shows up online. There's more and more classifying intelligence cables, presidential cover-ups. And it says here, billionaires dickpicks.

So there's an upside to this happening. But this sounds like a Tuesday in terms of the news. But then it says, maybe the holder of the universal picklock, so the effective quantum computer refers the disaster movie outcome, everything everywhere, all at once destroy the grid, disable the missile silos, take down the banking system, open all the doors and let the secrets out. But the thing that that scenario doesn't take into account is that on the whole,

across history, nation states, who are essentially going to be the people who come up with it first, tend to be rational actors. And the one thing that they like to do is keep in control. If you unleash chaos across the globe, it's not in your interest to do that. What you're better off doing is keeping it completely secret that you've unlocked everything and then just slowly exploiting that for years. But there's some lovely sort of side hustles that you could do on the way through. Like the whole Bitcoin thing, right, like nobody needs to know that you can...

No, of course. It's better if they don't. You just scoop up all the money. you could do is you could just start sort of very quietly monitoring wallets that you don't think so over the currency of wallets that aren't being actively monitored and then just start draining them yeah in the way that nobody actually knows is happening that's certainly what north korea would do you can certainly and you can just start you know listening in to what's going on in the oval office say it's not a numeric, you know, like, and just, and have title, like, it's sort of like a movie style sort of thing where, you know how they always go into the computer room and they go, you know, zoom in, you know, now resolve, now listen in to that person's, yeah, yeah, get up on the piece of information, like all that stuff will come true.

Yeah, like in the Batman thing where it somehow monitor all the phones at once. Yeah, yeah. So one thing, so this is the RSI encryption and this is the, this is the genius thing that we've been using since the 70s, it says. is this whole idea that you can have this encryption where you've got a private key these very large prime numbers that are just your private key. Yes. And unless you have because you're multiplying the private

key by the public key, which is on the internet say, unless you have that the private key you can't just encrypt because it's impossible to work out. It's impossible to sort of do that level of multiplication with these huge prime numbers. But with quantum computing you can. And this is an example of the freakiness of quantum computing. So in

2019, Google claimed they'd achieved quantum supremacy, and they could, in 200 seconds, they could do something that would have taken 100,000 conventional computers 10,000 years. That was a 53-cubit chip, and then this new one of theirs, which is called Willow has 105 cubits. In order to hack into RSA, you would need thousands or millions of cubits, but that may, as we say, already be a thing that happens. And what that means is extraordinary numbers of things. So, yeah, it says here, because cryptocurrencies aren't secure anymore. The U.S. government security isn't secure anymore.

Online casinos are going down. Well, you know, whatever. VPNs that let activists talk in safety. Does this mean? Wi-Fi won't be secure. If you've got a little quantum computer, that means you've got the keys to an orchard submarine. Like, you could literally, you know, use a little cubic device to go, beep, beep. And then take the submarine for a bit of a run.

Charles, I think that's very far-fetched. Not the quantum computing, the orchestra submarine. Yeah, do you then. It's one. Actually, the submarine's been provided. Presumably, QDA will happen well before the 2040s, won't it? So, wait a minute. And what is this for, like, nuclear security?

Like, presumably, you can just hack in. Yeah, there won't. There's no security. So, I kind of feel like, there's no scenario where I feel like this disadvantage is me. So this is a fascinating. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, oh no, because online casinos won't be secure anymore. Yeah. Charles, but hang on.

Oh, no, the military industrial complex will be, you know, exposed. Oh, well. It says here one possibility, one way of dealing with this is going back to Cold War methods of data. Yes. So you've got a hard drive, like, handcuffed to someone's wrist on a plane type thing. It's all, you know, physical USB drives. It's very much been large. near the podopad.

Yeah, yeah. Techniques. But Charles, I'm not a scientist. I'm not smart about this stuff. Maybe someone can email a podcast to chaser.com. com. You and someone else can hack into it and tell it if it's right,

using their quantum unlocker. But Charles, couldn't we use the quantum? Couldn't they're really sensitive things? Couldn't we use quantum computers to come up with that much more complicated in encryption? Like if you use the quantum computers to encrypt the stuff. Yes. Or maybe that doesn't work with that sort of computer.

I don't know. Maybe they don't do. encryption because there wouldn't it be then infinitely more complex to try and hack into if they are the ones providing I don't know the public security keys or whatever yeah you're sort of right aren't you and then it becomes just an arms race but using quantum computers isn't it because the same as it is now because my understanding is essentially especially using the sort of method the problem is I think it I think the the current methods of encryption are all based around this prime number thing

and for quantum computers the that prime number encryption is not just easy. It's like fucking 101. Trivial. The trivial sort of thing. So you have to actually come up with a whole different method. Yeah, so maybe there'll be a quantum-based way of encryption. Because the thing we know about technology, Charles, and...

So what you're saying, this is a nothing, but... It might be. This is a Y2K day. I hope not. But Charles, the thing we know about... Well, I hope not, because I quite like the idea of QD. The European Anacus saying... Let's take a little moment.

You can just have another beer. Dickpicks of the billionaires. Well, I've got a thought about that, about Dickpicks, actually. So Charles, what do we know about the whole sweep of technology going back to at least the VCR and probably the printing press before? All technology, the cutting edge of any technology developed in the past century or more, has been for porn. The reason the VCR took off in the US is because of porn. Yeah, because VHS out bid beta because you could get porn on VHS, but not beta. The, you know, web browsers, I think there's some line about like graphics cards and computers

that could actually show photos rather than weird sort of bitmap things. Oh, really? All these things are porn-driven. And I presume that also includes the Apple Vision Pro has been such a darts because Apple doesn't allow porn in its app store. So whoever does that first world will win. So what I'm saying is that, that. there will be a very strong corporate interest in porn being secure. Yes, I think what we need is quantum commuting for only fans.

And for Porn Hub. What I think will happen is that Porn Hub will develop the first quantum computer in order to keep this, or whatever those things, Red Tube. Yes, you're right. So the banking system will have to come, cap in hand, to the porn industry and just say, can you please let us use your quantum computer or whatever it might be? So perhaps there is hope in porn. if in nothing else.

But it's one of those things where, and this is the most shocking thing about the internet, is that this is why news went to hell, because the internet captures how we actually behave and what we actually like, rather than what we pretend we do, like the high-minded stuff and the national public radio stuff,

the people's animal disgusting, dirty truths are all on the internet. Not disgusting, lovely. Sex positive, sure. They're beautiful. Whatever it might, or whatever it might be objectively disgusting. And if you're, that's fine, don't want to kinksham, you do you, et cetera. But it's kind of like the true humanity has been captured by the internet in a way never before.

Why isn't that my PhD thesis? That would have been a much better, theaer page thesis. That makes it even more urgent that we have Q-Day, because I want to see it all. Yeah, on a live stream. Only chaos.com coming soon. So where is this left us? This is a thing that might happen down the track, and it might. But what you're saying is it's a dialectic, right?

Like, the whole point is... Well, that sounds really smart. Yeah, like, the whole point is, yes, this thing will happen. It may be problematic, but then almost immediately something else will happen that fix that thing that happens. Well, I'm saying that child. It's not some sort of, you know, free roll, which makes a bit of a nothing burger and a bit sort of boring in a way. But, but what I would say is almost every quantum commuting and quantum physicist that I follow on TikTok. Yeah.

Which is the place to find quantum physics. Actually, maybe TikTok are the ones or first crack Q-D-A. I think they probably will. You know, like, link the developments in quantum computing to this almost conspiracy theory around why there must be a multiverse. Oh.

Like, because the whole point about... It's very multiverse of the idea of quantum computing, isn't there? Yeah, when you say... Inferte number of possibilities. It can go through an infinite number of possibilities all at once. That's very multiverse, isn't it? It doesn't go through... Yeah, like, it's not.

like it's trying every single thing it's like everything all at once all at the same time together right like isn't there literally a movie called everything yes yeah which is about a multiverse right and that's why as they've learned more and more about how you know entanglement all these quantum effects happen they're going it it is simply not true that the dimensions that we sort of perceive is the only thing that's going on like it must be the case that you can sort of fold our universe that it in on itself or or the entangled particles can pass through because the thing is you can it must pass through some other universe to remain entangled across such a vast sweep of space in our own universe so are you telling me charles that there is

another multiverse out there where camilla harris is president of the united state or is that too implausible i think that's too implausible actually no that that would mean there's a universe where Biden has a second term. It is in great mental shape. The universe where Joe Biden is currently the dancing with the stars champion of America. And on porn hub. Anyway, I think we've now reached the point. We should potentially get someone really smart to explain this to us on one of the bonus episodes.

I just did. Sorry, someone really, really smart. Someone who makes your very smart brain look like a quantum, a conventional computer. No, look, this is really fascinating stuff. I don't know whether we've enlightened anyone or anything here, but all I'm going to say is if you've ever raged against the banks and thought I wish someone would take those bastards down, hey, there's a bunch of nerds who are on it.

Yes, and look, if you have any concerns about your own personal security, just text me your credit card details over 192 at 2.1 at 8, and I'll keep them safe for you, okay? Very chat to receive you. Hang on a sec. Remember to include the CVC We've reached a very strange point in the podcast Which is that I'm I've now come full circle

On all manner of things Firstly, I kind of want to also have drunk three beers I think you've actually done well there I might go and have them after this But the second thing is Charles If banking systems are insecure If it's possible that all that security and encryption And all that stuff might just disappear soon

All the cookers who are going on about cash they're right they're right they've actually got a point I've got to go back to using notes rather than just tapping for everything yeah and I've got to well it's lucky I've got this hard drive change my arm

can you go and buy some more beers just with like cash he's got any cash I don't have any cash we're part of the iconoclast network hack my bank cat there's nothing there Yeah.