The Chaser Report - Secretary of Wha?

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Pete Hegseth has scored himself a new title, Secretary of War, which he came up with over a light lunch of 12 rum and Cokes. Meanwhile, Elon Musk just won the first-ever episode of Who Wants To Be A Trillionaire? Plus, seafloor nodules mining = profit. ---Buy the Wankernomics book: https://wankernomics.com/bookListen 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 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. So much news to get through, Charles. From America primarily, Elon Musk has been offered a fairly large pay packet. And I think, Charles, you as the current main force in the Chaser, should be thinking about what you need to do, what deliverables you'd have to hit. To retain some talent. Or me, yeah, to retain me.

To get one trillion dollars in your pay packet, what level of success would really have? Fear to get the big T to be the first trillionaire. Is it only trillion dollars? Yeah, that's all they're offering them, yeah. US, of course, not Australian. It would be, what, 1.5 or something, Australian. No, no, no, it's 600 billion US.

Oh, so it'd only be a trillionaire in Australia. So he's going to move to Australia. So there's that, then, the story of it, apparently, somewhat Australia's Elon Musk. There's someone who, speaking of trillions, thinks that there's $20 trillion just off the Australian coast, ready to be mined. Ooh.

This is an ABC story out today. It's not asbestos, is it? No, it's rare earth. We'll find out a bit more about that. And we can't let the day go past Charles without commenting on Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War. He's changed his social media handles to Secretary of War, which is just perfectly normal and nothing at all to be concerned about.

We'll find out why, after the Secretary of Ads. Well, we start. any stories. I think we should probably start with Tesla, which has, yeah, offered Elon Musk an insane amount of money to try to get him to focus on a job that for anyone else in the world would be more than a full-time job. Like, you don't see Tim Cook simultaneously running three other companies and then going off to just ignore all that and run Doge for a few months. But Elon, he's fairly, I don't know, his focus is quite divided. Then again, you, Charles, do you run many conglomerates?

Yeah, that's true. So how can the Chaser get your time? back from Wankonomics. Well, I'm not sure a trillion dollars would cut it, to be honest, Don. Because, and this is the problem that I have with this whole incentive scheme. I'm not sure. Like, I don't know, what I don't understand, and maybe this is a problem with me rather than Elon Musk, is if you've got, what, a quarter of a trillion dollars, what's the difference between a quarter of a trillion dollars and a trillion dollars?

Like, there's no difference. Like, what, there's nothing. there's nothing that costs. Like, there's nothing, you don't go, oh, God. I just wish I had another 400 trillion. I'm getting half a trillion. I'm really, I can't get out of bed. I mean, you know he has said things like that in the past, though.

So they're just not paying him enough. So he's got to, so Charles, no, it is, it's a trillion U.S. dollars. Let me explain this to you. So in order to, in order to, um, it'll be, it's all rigged, right? Like, he'll hit those marks. I don't know. Can I tell you what he has to do? Okay, okay.

So right now, Tesla's worth just over a trillion. So the company's already worth a trillion. Yeah. He's got to take it to $8.5 trillion over 10 years. Yeah. And remembering inflation is going to go through the roof. Interesting point. So probably it'll be worth about a trillion dollars in today's terms.

So he would go from 16% to 25%. He's just got a level pedal. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So what he has to do, I think it's, he's got to sell 10 million Tesla cars. But that's, that is what the car, like, he should do that now for the current rate of pay. Like that's the job. The job is to sell Tesla cars.

But here are the hard bits. Why does he need an incentive structure for that? Well, you might well ask. But he's got to get, he's got to do one million robotaxies to get there. And frankly, at this stage five is looking quite difficult. But here's the really interesting one. He's got to do one million AI humanoid robots. Oh, yes.

That's the bit where it starts to get hard. The optimist Tesla bots. So you may not quite make that level. But as you say, he'll get most of it. But also, no, no, but also, if you were going to make a trillion dollars, wouldn't you, and you just went, okay, I need to make a million AI humanoid robots? Wouldn't you just do it even if there was no business model there? You'd just go, okay, you'd just pay, I don't know.

You'd probably buy them yourself. You'd pay a million midgets, $10,000 each. Well, didn't they have an event where people were dressed up as the robots? Yeah, to dress up as robots and go, there you go, there's your million. Wouldn't you just do that? Also, if he can't double the value of Tesla in the 10 years, which he probably can, he gets nothing. But he's got some skin in the game. He doesn't get nothing.

He's got like a quarter of a billion dollars already. He doesn't get any extra shares at the point. So, yeah. So it's pretty interesting. But it made me think, what have we got to do? What have we got off of you? You got off of me. To get your attention back from Wankanomics.

Oh, yes, you're right. This is the thing that's troubling me. Whencanomics is going really well. Yes. And it's like your sort of space Xing or dozing. Yes. And the chase is the original thing. Okay.

And, you know, frankly, you know, the updates have been a bit slow recently. There was a pretty big news story today. I don't think there's any headline been published about the mushrooms yet, has there? Oh, yeah. It's a pity because I haven't known what to be appalled at in the past few hours. That's it. So what are we got to do to get your head back in this game and not that game? Yeah.

Look. It's going to be quite hard, isn't it? I think. I think $2 trillion. Oh, really? Yeah. And the outputs are that I've got to produce 10 more chaser annuals over the next 10 years. Yeah, wow.

Each one of those is worth about 100 bill. Produce, oh yeah, and maybe get our number of downloads up to like 10 million. That would be pretty easy. We were probably on 9 at the moment. You'd have to outperform Batuta. That could be quite hard. And the shovel for that matter. A sort of like...

Get the chaser back to number one. Laf's per density. Like get the... Live. The gag density up. And you'd need... By employing a million Tesla humanoid robots.

To write the comedy. Yeah, that's right. Well, you'd need to do some sleek work on this, on this podcast, Charles, I think. Yeah, well... I think you'd need to replace both of us. Yes, that's a very good idea. Well, that's the first decision. I mean, look, I wouldn't take it to...

I wouldn't take it personally. I mean, if you're saying... saying I've managed to secure, you know, smart list to do the chase report. But I imagine, if you've got a trillion dollars, say it's only one trillion dollars, I could get, I don't know, Russell Crow and, I know, who would you, who would you want, to Barack Obama? No, who would you want to do this podcast? You'd get John Stewart and Chris Rock. Yes.

Am I at Chris Rock? Uh, I doesn't matter. There's no analogy, neither of us. It's just, yeah. You'd also get gender diversity. Yeah, Tina Faye. Tina Faye, it'd be very good. Chris Rock, John Oliver.

Get a whole team. And actually, no, they're our servants. They're the gag writing. They're the people at the back. That's so funny. We get them. Get them on a cameo. Hey, Chris Rock, what do you think?

Yeah. No, no, but I reckon off mic. Off mic. Yeah. There you go. That's worth the way to do it. Wow. Yeah, it's good to know that our arrogance remains.

Our fallen heroes, like Bill Cosby. I mean, some people, even Bill Maher would be. be cheap, you know. Everyone's cheap at that product. You know who Bill Maher interviewed in the past couple of days? And you've got to hand it to him for just a completely ignoring cancellation. Woody Allen. He'd be available. He could run errands. I don't want him going near the shops. Sorry. Oh, yeah, look, I like this idea. Because also you could get things like, you could pay Gina Reinhardt to be

your receptionist, couldn't you? I mean, with that much money. Like, you could get everyone. We could get... I mean, not that you'd want to have Gene Ron had, is you? But I'm just saying... It wouldn't be done well, I don't feel. It would... You get Lachlan Murdoch to be your shoe shine.

I think that... Yeah, but what's Lachlan ever done well? I don't know. Yeah, he'd have one tell our shoes. You'd have scuff your shoes. What if we got one million? Just hear me out. One million.

Because, I mean, the test the robots, if they actually work, but we'll be half decent. But what if we make one million humanoid craigs? Oh yes. And get them to go and, you know, actually Take over the... Take on the war on waste. Like actually, actually do something about it. Yes.

I can knock on every door in Australia. Oh, I see. And get them to recycle. So we actually do... I can nag them into recycling. So you're saying use our resources for good. Oh, we obviously charge for it. Yeah.

But I'm just imagining an army of Craigs roving constantly across the country. Yes. If anyone tried, someone just thought about having a disposable coffee cup, they have lasers, wouldn't they? And what you could do is, lobby for using all the money, lobby for AI robots to be given the vote. And then you'd just basically wrap up democracy in Australia.

Would they vote for Craig? No, no, well, I suppose they would. Yeah, they would, wouldn't they? And then we'd end up with Craig as a sort of... Probably happen anyway. We might as well own the process. All right, so that's not a bad idea. Is it?

No, it sounds like a terrible idea. What other performance targets have you got to meet? I'm very concerned. You're sipping a... soft drink. I know. I feel like you should probably move on to something hard of it. Yeah, I'm drinking zero sugar, blood, orange and

mango mineral water. This is just like, I've given up. All right. Okay. We should move on. So that's Elon. That's Elon. Well, I think that's solved. We'll take a quick break and then we'll get on to, I mean, the Department of War is

very special. The Chaser Report. More news. Less often. Okay, so, Charles, America's gone woke. We all know it. Yes. They've gone soft.

And, I don't know, 50 years ago or so, they decided that they wanted to, that they wanted to rename the Department of War and there were some other military departments as well. They renamed it the Department of Defense. Yes. And as Donald Trump so rightly points out, that just means being defensive. Yes. Doesn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, it just makes you think, the American military, I've always thought that they're soft because of their name. Yes, exactly. Like when they were committing all those massacres in Vietnam, it was under the name Department of Defense. And you go, well, it wasn't a, the Vietnam War wasn't even a war, was it? It was a Vietnam defense. I mean, they were for a time the Ministry of Losing, weren't they? Yeah, well, no, that's his point, though.

His point was it was called the Ministry of War or the Department of War up until 1945 or 47. Yes, when they won the World War II. And they'd won World War I, World War II, arguably they'd lost the Civil War, at least Trump's side, arguably it was. But, you know, like, and then as soon as they changed the Department of Defense, it's like Vietnam, Iraq, Korea, like everything. It's just been complete. So they had a war department all the way from 1789 through to 1940. Yes. And you could argue they got out of the war business.

And, I mean, they got into the Cold War, the Staptitious War. The Peasnick business, yeah. So, I mean, look, Charles, we've talked about this before, but notionally, you can't just rename a department. No, no, it's like a sub-brand. It's got to go through Congress. Yeah. But they've chipped off the title Department of Defense off multiple buildings now. Yeah.

And all of Pete Hicks says signage now says to Secretary of War. And I kind of feel like, you know, laws and everything, a little bit pass-up. No, they don't do that. We've talked about this on the podcast recently. Yeah, we don't need to follow a press on. You don't need to formalise it. And I just imagine Pete Hanksett's going around going, you know, I'm the Secretary of War. Like I think what a big man he is now that he's the war guy.

And I just want to, Charles, the notion is that, you know, America's enemies, Canada. Yeah, yeah, Greenland. Greenland will sit up and take America more seriously. Definitely. And some people have made the point that this follows on from the military parade in Beijing and Russia and North Korea going along there. So you don't think it was years. years in the pipeline. This was a impetuous decision made over the weekend.

Right. Or do you think this is one of these things that's rankled at Trump for years? Like, you know, the fact that you can't call a football team after a racist slur anymore. Yes. The Washington. What do they call them? The Redskins. No, they don't call them that anymore.

I know. It's the commanders or something. Oh, I don't know. The woke lefties. Yeah, the wokeies. That's right. Yeah. The losers.

He's trying to get them to go back to using that slur. The team doesn't want to do it. The fans don't want them to do it. But Trump is determined that they're going back. Well, that's a long, proud history of colonialism is you do make people do things that they don't want to do. That's right. It's a very on-brand. That's kind of what happened when, you know, America was settled to begin with.

But I feel like, at least it's consistent. We're in a good position in Australia now buying all our stuff from the Department of War. Sure. Because, you know, we're in the business of buying their submarines and their F-35s and things like that. And what do you want to buy, like, what do you want to buy your shoes of? Do you want to buy them off loser or winner? Woke shoe. Yeah, woke shoe.

They're not even making shoes. They're apologising to our feet, really, aren't they? Yeah, exactly. And then who do you want to buy your submarines off? Do you want to buy them off? Good at making war, not good at making defence. Charles, we're both of the ones from America, and then we're buying them to Britain. Oh, fuck.

And it's fair. It doesn't matter what Britain calls their department. No, yeah. They're not going to strike fuming or anybody. on his heart. They'll be probably called Thomas.

Can you, like the tank engine? It'll be called submarine face, isn't you? Can you imagine the fear that just will...

Sinky McSink face? Can you just imagine the terror that will circulate around the Pacific once they hear we've got British submarines? Oh, don't mess with

Australia. They've got the latest from the Royal Navy. We've got Sebastian the submarine. We've got Giles. Or peers. The submarine.

All right. So finally, Charles, I promised you in Australian Trump. Have you ever heard of Gerard Barron? No. No, I haven't either. I hadn't either. But there's a report from Four Corners.

It's going to be on tonight. He's sitting down with Mark Willissey, and he's sitting there, and he pulls out what Williscy described as fossilized dog turd from his pocket. And this is apparently his big sales pitch is the fossilized dog turd. But what it actually is,

is a lump of, of what's called, polymetallic nodules from the bottom of the ocean. Oh, wow. Apparently, it's full of critical minerals and rare earth. If I look at it, it looks a little bit like an off avocado, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in the hand.

Potato size and so on. But they're millions and millions of years old, and they're six kilometres down at the bottom of the ocean. Yep. And so the theory is they estimate, says Barron, I don't know who they is. There's 20 billion tons of these nodules and that they're worth maybe 20 trillion, he thinks.

It's got manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and so on. There's so many of them on the seafloor. It's like golf balls on a driving range. Look how many of them there, those nodules. There are a lot. Don is showing me a photo of a lot of nodules on the seat floor. The ground's kind of carpeted with it like pebbles.

Are these near Australia, are they? Yes. Apparently they're right near Australia. Okay. So this is going to be a tricky one, isn't it? Because how do we set up a scheme where those nodules can be mined, without Australia getting any advantage or royalties or tax cut out of that? Because I assume it's within our economic zone.

Like we will have the right to get mining companies to give us royalties for it. So how do we avoid that? Like that's going to be very hard. Yeah, it is. Because presumably there'll be a whole lot of left liberal woke department of defence types who want Australia to somehow be advantaged over these nods. Well, some of these things actually, it turns out, are not in Australia. We don't want a nodule tax.

They're in international waters. So we need a way of getting them out. We've got to do a deal because it says he that they're the common bounty of humanity, which is that sort of thinking doesn't work anymore. Yeah, no, that is. They're the common bounty of this, like, Gerard. Privatise. Okay, so this is very fascinating, right?

Okay, so I know something about this. Oh, yeah. Which is, so deep sea mining used to be governed by a UN body, right, up until about three seconds ago. all the laws and you'd get a license for deep sea mining in international waters using this UN body ride. Yep. And recently, just literally a few weeks ago, Trump went, no, no, no, no, no. What we're going to do is America is going to take over that role.

Oh, that's great. Just all the deep sea mining. You have to go through us, and it's like on what authority, and it's like on the authority of we can fuck you up using all our fucking submarines and everything. That's really good. If you don't go through us. Well, the great news is, this. It's just a unilateral power. Gerard Barron is actually relying on Donald Trump to let this happen.

So this is one of the benefits of all this. He's gone already to talk to the US government about going and doing all this mining. So it's already underway. So I think we can assume that no Australians other than this guy will actually make the money out of it. Oh, right. Okay. So Gerard is the person to talk to. Yeah.

And so his pay bagger will be way large to the knee of the money. If it's $20 trillion, you'll probably get all of it. it. He testified before the US House committee. I've just come up with the incentive structure for the chaser. Oh yeah. Which is for me, to incentivise me to get some nodules. Get some nodules,

yeah. You know the nodules. No one owns it technically. We can claim them. We should become a satirical nonchal. Deep sea diving company. And we can call our submersible the Titan two. I'd use submersibles. So this is a great little line here from this

ABC article about this. So the ocean law specialist, a guy called Duncan Curry, went up to talk to the US House Committee on Natural Resources about this mining. And so Mark, he went to talk to this international law expert. Oh, yeah. And he said to him, is this Jared Barron a green energy visionary or a corporate mercenary who simply wants to cash in on deep sea mining? What do you think he said?

A visionary? Absolutely the latter. Absolutely the latter. Absolutely the latter. He's a corporate actor trying to make money. If you're damaging the deep sea, you're damaging the marine environment, you're damaging the entire planet. As against that, Charles.

As against that, 20 trillion dollars. $20 trillion, absolutely. I think the deep sea is so overrated. I don't need it. No one's using it. No one. And it's so boring. You can't even see.

There's no sunlight down there. Yeah, there's just a whole bunch of weird. Nodules. There's nodules. everywhere. Well, they're going to be our nodules. Yeah. Finders keepers, losers go whining about international law, which doesn't mean anything.

I feel like this is a great podcast community thing that we could set up. The nodules. I feel like this is the first idea we've had where if everyone combined forces together and we all brought our skill sets. Yes. Chaser report listeners could become extremely rich. That's great. by sort of we crowdsource all the sort of equipment that we need.

Oh, that's great. To create a submersible. Charles, we could do that. That would be one way to do it to actually build a submersible, get the joysticks. And we just don't tell Craig what we're doing because he'll object. No, he'll object. Oh, no, we just say, oh, we're going to go and use this submersible to clean up the ocean.

Yeah, there's all these yucky nodules down. Clean away the nodules, the war on nodules. And what we do is, um, so we could go and do that, submers. actually go and get the nodules, or the 2025 way to do it, Charles, would be to release a meme coin to fund it. Yes.

And we say, oh, this is nodule coin. Yes. We're going to use this, you know, everyone who buys it will get a nodule. It's baked by the nodules. It's got to be a national nodules seal of approval. Yeah.

And then we just pump and dump. We just walk away. I love it. And leave people at hot, you know. With a sinking feeling. A bit like, hey. A bit like Donald Trump's, um, uh, meme coins.

The people who set it up. are the ones who make the money. It's a fantastic system. Okay, well, this has been a very productive podcast, Don. We've made a lot of money, I feel. Yeah. Yeah, it's about time. I feel like everyone should subscribe to the premium edition of this podcast.

Well, we gave them a taste of it yesterday, so I presume they're all kind of, you know... Well, I haven't checked the numbers, but I'm sure they've skyrocketed. Yeah, yeah, no, it's absolutely inevitable. Okay, well, we're part of the Icona class network. Let's just go off and count our money. Yeah. Oh, imagine the tax bill, though. That's not worth it.

It's international waters. Oh, international waters! Oh yeah, and also mining royalties. We're a mining company. We don't pay tax. Of course.