The Chaser Report - The Manhattan Project 2025

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

Elon Musk has just removed all the workers from the U.S's nuclear safety department, yet Charles and Dom are feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. Listen to Schrodinger's Chat and see why they are or aren't alive and well.Watch OPTICS on ABC iview here:https://iview.abc.net.au/show/opticsCheck out more Chaser headlines here:https://www.instagram.com/chaserwar/?hl=enInstall more RAM on your hard drive here:https://chaser.com.au/support/ 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. It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon here in Sydney, absolutely idyllic. Sorry, Melbourne, we're from Sydney, although we do like Melbourne, don't we, Charles? Do you? Not an under daylight today. No, it's beautiful.

Frankly, the fact that we're taking the time through a podcast at all speaks to several things, our commitment to you, the listener, and our desire to take a break from our children. That's really what's going on here. But it is a reminder of just how wonderful the world. Yeah. When I survey the headlines and things, there's nothing wrong anywhere in the world. All is well. Oh, actually, well, I mean, I was sort of more taking in how great the world is

because I think it is fairly likely to end fairly soon. All right. Well, I'd hate for that happen before we play these ads. Okay, by the way, if you're paying for ad-free experiences and still getting the ads, do email and podcast at chaser.com.com. You can tell us because you're not meant to. It's four bucks a month. It's not that expensive and frankly, well worth it.

Anyway. So, the thing is, just tiny little detail. You know how Musk has been going around sacking everyone? Yeah. Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not a department, not part of the government, really, and not necessarily efficient. But other than that. But the of the of part of the acronym is can't argue with that.

No, you can't argue with that. So he sent around a couple of weeks ago, this is ancient history now, sent around a general note to say, hey, federal workers, don't really like you. Oh yeah, this is the fork in the road email, just like he sent it Twitter, yeah. So 75,000 people took that offer out of like 3 million, so a bit of a rounding error. But, you know, people who went, oh, yeah, time to get out. Six months pay or whatever it was. Yeah.

But on Thursday, Musk turned around And as he's been doing with various different agencies He identified some small government agency And he went, let's just sack 10,000 of them, right? Yeah. And so he did. And so they're all de-hired.

And just a tiny little problem Which they've now been trying to backtrack over the weekend Is they've just worked out that those workers are the people who are in charge of looking after the nuclear arms. Right. And not just the nuclear arms, but also the nuclear waste, right? It's a very obscure government agency. I'd never heard of it.

It's called something like the Nuclear Safety Authority or something. Okay. I mean, I don't want to, see, Charles, you're old thinking, right? Yeah. You've figured out what the agency does. That slows it down. It does slow it down. You don't want to know what the agency.

Well, certainly. Basically, you've got to, basically you sack first, and then if you discover that they're in charge of, I don't know, the nuclear weapons that America has, maintaining them and disposing the waste, that's when you hire them back. That's more efficient that way, Charles. It's like when you make the IKEA furniture, you take, rather than following the instructions, you take all the bits out. Yes. And see, because I think you just said there, sack them first and then rehire them later if, you know, it turns out. If it turns out, we need them, yeah. There's just a tiny, tiny little detail, which is, for some reason, which I don't quite understand,

there is no good way of contacting these people that have sacked. So, like, they don't seem to have an email list or something like that. I think probably because they lose their email addresses. Oh, of course they would lose their, at the moment they get sacked. NuclearSafety.com or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a terrible problem. So it's like, it's literally a sort of, it's going to be a manual process of,

you know, dear sir, you know, sending out of the... Go on Facebook. We note that... LinkedIn. They all have updated their LinkedIn saying looking for new opportunities in the nuclear weapon safety. Dear disgruntled former employee who knows how to handle a nuclear weapon.

Would you be so good, is... No, but also the other great thing is they've rescinded the... What Musk is claiming is that he's rescinded the sackings. Right, okay. Which it's very... I don't think you can just rescind. Like if somebody... Sacks you.

You can't just then, they can't just then require you to turn up on Monday. Yeah. You know, that's it. It's over. Anyway, so that's why personally, I'm now, I'm at the, in the phase now where, you know, at first I thought, I think it was funny. And then I sort of got really depressed and I thought, well, this is the end of democracy. And then I got really nihilistic and I went, well, what does it matter? You know, maybe actually great art will come out of this.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Although, if the great artists at the Venice, B'anali representing Australia, it might not get there. It might get sacked after five days. Yeah, it'll get sick. And then I think I even went through a period of like, maybe actually this is a great opportunity. Maybe actually through crisis comes opportunity.

Of course, does. And that's a good way to think. But now I'm at the stage of, let's just savour every single second that we've got on this earth. Why on earth are we spending this afternoon doing a podcast? They didn't make absolutely no sense at all. So, Charles, I'm just thinking this is quite like the macro situation, isn't it? The American people, they hired Trump to do a job.

Then they sacked him. Yes. Isn't they? They sacked him. I mean, according to him, it was fraud. But we know that he lost the 2020 election. And then they've hired him back. Yes.

So it can be done. And there's apparently no hard feelings from Donald Trump. He doesn't have any beef with the American people. It's least with the Democrats and trans people and every other country in the world. Yeah. father figures mother figures women

it's fluid it's loose and this is how Elon Musk thinks right are you hired or are you not hired and this is Donald Trump as well has the court

has the court banned you from doing this thing do you have to follow the court order what you're saying is it's a sort of non-binary situation it's a sort of fluid

at the age of quantum computing really it's a spectrum where you can be any state is possible at once You can be both hired and not hired. You can be both the Department of Government efficiency and yet not of the government, not... But I kind of feel like...

There's no such thing as true or false anymore. That's outmoded. If the nuclear weapons start, you know, disappearing, it's not true that you can be both dead and not dead. You think of a nuclear bomb that's dropped on you. Yes. That rhetorical elegance falls apart. Yeah, and ironically, in some ways,

the sort of quantum uncertainty that was revealed through nuclear physics sort of becomes a sort of, it's Heisenberg's certainty principle. But Charles, no, but hang on. Let's say that in a few moments, this podcast ends because a bomb drops on us. Bearing in mind that we automatically back up as we record, as we record to back up to the clouds, it's entirely possible for us to be obliterated. Yes. And yet for the remaining podcast to survive.

Well, it's probably already happened. This is Shreddinger's podcast. That's right. Think of what would happen. We're both alive and not alive. But Charles, if that would have happened, the atoms that constitute us would continue in some form, would they know. Like the remains of us, we would be no Charles and no Dom. But somewhere the matter that we were consisted of us would be re-reelined into something else.

This is Schrodinger's chat, isn't it? Very good. I think he just found the podcast episode title if we want no one to listen to it. Yeah. So in a sense, what is death, but a realignment of the atoms? I think this is the thing. And this is why everyone should relax about the new direction of America or the world or Australia, whatever. Yes, is it forward or is it backwards or is it both at once? Is it good or is it bad?

Does it really matter, at least unless you're one of the workers who loses their job and can't pay their mortgage anymore. So I was predicting that great art might come of this period. Yes, adversity breeds great art. I didn't predict bad philosophy as well. come from this period. Oh, there you go. The Chaser Report,

news you can't trust. So you're saying that the people who are in charge of maintaining America's nuclear weapons have been sacked and that they're not working for the government anymore. Weapons and waste. And waste, yeah. So all the stuff that basically could end humanity. Charles, this is an obvious case for an Elon Musk acquisition.

Right. He's been trying to act to buy open AI. and chat GPT in the recent times. What we need is for Elon Musk to add to his massive portfolio of things he already runs and doesn't have time to do probably America's nuclear weapons and waste. And I think if he could

somehow interface the missiles with Starlink, maybe what he needs to do is attach the nuclear warheads from the weapons to Starlink satellites. We should have to privatise America's nuclear arsenal. Now, he won't run it well.

Lots of things will break. But he'll do it quickly. But that's the whole... What good shape Twitter is in now, X. But also, as long as he admits that that's what he's doing, like, he's coming in and said, look, I will break things. Mistakes will be made, but, you know, I'm only human, right? That's fine.

Yeah. So I think privatisation of, and this is what this is all about, he's full of, he's full of problems, he's full of conflicts of interest, but he takes things over quickly and he breaks them and then, you know... I'm thinking it might be quite a profitable area of business to go into. sure sort of being in charge of all the nuclear bombs Yes and the nuclear waste Because like let's just say you were

I don't know coals or something And you ran supermarkets obviously In Liquorland and Kmart But you also ran The global nuclear stockpile For the United States That would probably end up being Your most profitable line of business

It would be much more profitable than just selling cheese Because even if you're in a duopoly situation like Woolworths also ran some of the nuclear weapons. Yeah, you could. You'd still, like, I can just imagine petting out the invoices. Like, if you added to the invoice, oh, we need to charge an extra 10% this month because, you know, safety. Yeah.

No one's going to balk at that and go, oh, I don't know, well, do we want our nuclear weapons to be handled safely? I'm going to correct you there, Charles, because the person who would balk is ill on must. He would see an agency with the name safety in it and go, we don't need that. Safety's for wimps, Charles. Look, he came into Twitter And he immediately got rid of all the people Who were supposed to make it safe And get rid of the fascists

He got rid of the safety department This is what they're saying They're saying Doing the same thing It was the exact same thing at Twitter Where he hired a whole lot of engineers He fired a whole lot of engineers Who were mission critical

And had to hire them back The difference was He was able to contact all those people Who he'd fired at Twitter Because they kept their Twitter account Because they kept their Twitter accounts But he literally they've put out a notice Saying look if anyone knows

How to get in contact with the, if you could please send me their people's, this is honestly what the notice said. If you can please send me people's personal contact emails that once you get it, you know, send it on to me. That would be great. This is from the, no, this is the agency, it was from the agency saying the termination letters for some NSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch to those personnel. Please work with your supervisors To send this information once you get it To people's personal contact emails

That's hilarious And get them to contact me back Charles, can we end this on a very positive note But it's just It's incredible what it manages Like it manages It's a 25 billion dollar Little agency

Tiny little 25 billion dollar agency It manages all the nuclear warheads And the safety and reliability of them But also Los Alamos where they developed the Pantex plant in Texas, I don't know what that is. Sounds important. And what's a year 12 national security complex in Tennessee? Is that where you go?

You don't know where you go for your formal. I don't know. It sounds like, I mean, Charles, you're, again, I want to understand all the sources of enriched uranium nuclear weapon components. If you can't understand why it's important in less than one second, just get rid of it. That's the mask way. But how did he do that? Surely that would have been on in the... Like, if you just asked ChatGBT, GBT, it would have been able to tell you that.

There's no time for that. I've got to move quickly. Move quickly about stuff. Charles, look, there is a good point to be made here. Okay, okay. For weeks, we've had people saying, oh, oh, Elon Musk and his team, they're messing in all everyone's personal records, all the safety, you know, the Treasury records, they're violating everyone's privacy.

This is unconstitutional. It's a disgraceful. Elon Musk's team clearly has nobody's personal contact details. The information is safe. Yes. They might have the records. They clearly can't read the records. Or they could have just looked up and found all these employees details.

So Americans, you're fine. Elon is not violating your privacy. Yes, he may have access to your data, but he's too stupid to read it. But I do love that we're depending, you know, on the future safety of humankind on people checking their hot mail accounts. That's right. Yeah, it's like their GeoCities accounts. Yeah, yeah.

It's just like the email you used 20 years ago when he started your job. So I feel reassured by that. It's a lovely afternoon. It's beautiful. Let's go and, you know. Enjoy it. Enjoy it. And if due to some administrative error in Elon Musk's business, we all get blown up tonight,

well, at least we will have had today and this final podcast in the Chaser Report. That is my sentiment, too. We are part of the Iconiclass Network. Catch you tomorrow. Or not. Or not. Probably not.