The Chaser Report - The Rest Is Uninformed Banter

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

We want to hear from YOU, our dear listener, about what YOU want from this podcast. How do YOU consume it? What do YOU say we should do more or less of? How many starving interns should we force to research YOUR favourite topics? Give us a review on your podcast app, or email us at the link down below.---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.

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Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. And, Charles, today we're going to do something we don't normally do, which is try and make the podcast better, which presupposes that it isn't as good as it could possibly be, or perhaps it is, and it's good to just test one's assumptions. Perhaps we've achieved the best possible form of this podcast. Who knows?

Well, I think also, you know, paradigm shifts. Like, you know, for centuries people thought that Newtonian physics was the one true physics. Yeah. And then, you know, by the late 19th century things, became a little bit inconsistent and, you know, problems opened up in the world of physics. And then there was a spate of, you know, then came Einstein, relativity and all these things that completely transformed the way we understand physics.

Such a good analogy for podcasts. So maybe the point is that we're sitting on a sort of Newtonian level of perfection, but we could actually reconceptualise our podcast in a sort of way where, you know, of quantum states, It's where it both exists and doesn't exist at the same time. And everything in between the two. Yes. It could sort of semi-exist on varying. The schedule recently has been a bit like that.

Everything all at once, all together at the same time, whatever it is. And then it's also worth noting that, you know, once upon a time, there weren't podcasts. And it didn't seem that there was a market for, I don't know, Hamish and Andy just kind of crapping on. Then it turned out millions of people wanted to hear exactly that. Yes. And it became a very lucrative business. So in fairness, they actually put some efforts into this. Yeah, I guess they do.

I guess that is. But it comes off as studied nonchalance. I mean, obviously we put lots of effort into this podcast, just that we're not quite as good as making it seem. I've been preparing all day. Sure, I know you have. All right, it's not like I just had this idea walking up the stairs to record together. All right, so let's canvas some possible models after the ads

and explain as well why we're asking you this question and how to tell us what you think. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at FIS.C. So, look, we've been doing the podcast, what? It started in 2020, so it's getting quite old. It feels like it started in 1970. Yeah, I mean, if you did the number of episodes we've done sort of per week, it would have spanned decades. Well, there was a time there where we'd be doing two a day. I know, that was very ambitious.

Good for numbers, but that was during COVID times. It was crazy. But look, the thing is, the kind of trap of podcast is that that can be any length you want them to be. I mean, you can be Joe Rogan and do three-hour ones, or it can be Chaz and do four-hour ones. And then, just to be clear, we bought him an hourglass. A bunch of friends and bullies put in money to buy him a four-hour-long hourglass, because honestly, it's kind of the point where he wouldn't even stop. after four hours.

Yeah. But he won that one. Do you know how he won it? How did he win it? Started a second four-hour podcast each week. I didn't know this. Two episodes a week, yeah. It's an amazing cry of help.

So the point being, this is usually about 15 to, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes long, depending on how much Lachlan cuts out of a blather, coming out every day, recorded most days, let's be fair. And is that what people want? People want the sort of news-esque ramblings like this. I go to an Einstein-level thinker here, which is, although not at all. Steve Jobs had total contempt for market research, Don.

That's true. Because his whole point was, if you ask people what they want in a phone, you know, in 2005, they would have said something like, oh, I really want to knock here. You know what I mean? Like, no one,

like the whole job of being a creative is to come up with the thing that the slubs who listen to it couldn't possibly conceive of. I'm not sure that's quite the way to refer to you. This is the Wayne Gretzky thing, right? I skate to where the puck is going to be. be ahead of the curve. That's what we've got to be doing. Does that apply to a five-year-old product, Charles?

To a what? To a five-year-old product? What is it? I mean, we could sit here and unilaterally decide to do something different without consulting anyone or. Well, I suppose that's what I'm suggesting. Most likely. Or no, what we do is we give the veil of the, what do you think I'm trying to do? Yes, okay, we give the veil of. And then we go, oh my God, our new format is launched and it's totally based on your feedback. Yeah. Now, first thing to say is it's been a long since we've asked for reviews of the podcast on Apple Podcasts. It's quite a good way to give feedback. Five stars is very

useful, but there's been very few of them recently. Yeah, so we need you to leave a five-star review. That's your way to give feedback. With your comments. With your comments. They can be as bad as you like, it's just got to be five stars. Yeah, that's right. And we won't even, we'll ignore anyone that's not five stars. Yeah, that's right, because they're not sincere.

That's right. The most recent one is CG Wordsmith in March. Loving Welcome to the Future, especially the way I spent half of the show today, waiting for you to get to the obvious punter about your dishwasher watching a movie featuring spooning and forking. So deep cut there. Oh, yeah. And then I love the five-star trolling ones.

Well, this is from December. So we've had very few reviews. Love the summer break. Great to have a break in new episodes. Gives me time to listen to old episodes when they had the interns and were still funny. So thank you for that. So, look, it is a deep archive if you want to delve into it at an important. But, I mean, the numbers say there's still heaps of listeners, which is great.

So I think, I think, look, I've been listening to a lot of other. The podcast, I mean, obviously, I have Jay's a report first. That's your most, yeah, you listen to back episodes, naturally. But when I tire of that each day, I've been listening to a lot of the rest is history. Yes, I have too, and the rest is politics. They've got 750 episodes in the rest of history. I just did the Battle of Hastings one. It was a four-part series.

And what they do is one of them drives it and the other one sort of responds. Based on the exhaustive notes. Yeah, I did the French Revolution recently, which, but we need more killings in podcast sales. They're just not enough death. But what they've done is they've gone home and they've researched weeks each episode, right? Like, they're not, and they have extent, they keep on referring to the fact that they've got notes that they refer to. Do you think that's so many episodes?

Do you think there's a team of people helping them write the notes? I'm very curious, because they're very busy that all these live shows and stuff. But they've always, but they have always, well, maybe, but they also go, oh, you know, and I read this book. And they read books about their subjects, I know. Yeah, for this, you know, for this episode, I read this book, that book and this book. So that's, I think, you know, and to me, that's like the best podcast in the world. Oh, it's wonderful. Did you also read the articles where it says they earn 100,000 pounds a month, those guys?

Richly deserved. Yeah. But there's a reason they're able to afford to put that kind of time into the podcast, which is great. But look, there's something to aspire to. Yeah. I mean, we could do, do you think the thing that our podcast is lacking Charles is research? Well, I'm just saying, Luke, that, you know, look, look, Look, well, I'm saying maybe the point is that it would improve if in addition to having sort of bar, witty, you know, opinion about what we reckon is going on, actually knowing what's going on might lift the podcast.

I mean, I know that that doesn't apply to like Joe Rogan and things like that. Do you think that, do you think that for our Australian politics episodes, people would want a huge amount more research or anything. But you make a good point, which is that they find a great narrative. There's a great story there, and there is research. So we could do longer episodes, and we have in the past, for other things like when we did that Cat's Pajamas or Cat's Piss podcast, which is available, I think, I don't know if it's still around.

We signed a terrible deal on that. Anyway, so it's on a different podcast network. But the point being, one of us went away and actually researched a story. Like I remember looking up different, different ways that the set. The CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro. And I think that's why the Welcome to the Future episodes often work nicely is because there is a modicum of research there where you've gone away and actually had a look at the products and read the reviews.

So we could do fewer longer episodes. Like we're talking two or three per week, say, but making them longer. We could do one very long episode per week like Chaz. I think the finances behind that just don't work. No, because you need more ads, yeah. You need more ads. So, I mean, that's the whole. whole thing.

I suppose we could just interspers it with tons of air. You could cut it up into five parts, I suppose. The other thing is the guest interviews. So during the election, American election, there were lots of appearances. You were busy touring. Yeah. So I had lots of academics talking about US politics. And those were quite straight interviews.

But there was so much interesting stuff going on that people seem to like them based on the numbers. So we can keep doing that. I mean, we can still talk to those. Emma Shortus, who's fantastic, has a new bookout, which I'd love to talk to her about. But it's a bit of a different thing. I like the idea of doing what, say, the rest is history and the rest of politics do, which is they do a couple of episodes where they've done a bit of thinking about the topics.

And then, in addition to that, there's an interview episode where, yeah, and it doesn't even need to necessarily be both of us. No, no. It could be just one of us, one-on-one, with somebody. And that way, we sort of squeeze a little bit more out of the lemon. But the other thing is a subscription. So for years, we've had the subscription options, and they're quite cheap. It's $4 per month.

But we haven't offered amazing value for that because it's supposed to be bonus episodes and ad-free. I'm not even sure if Lockland's uploading the ad-free version. Sorry, if he's not. No, no, he does. There's a new system for that that will actually improve. There's a technical reason why on Apple Podcasts, it doesn't work very well, which we can get to. One of the things I want us to do is actually for paying subscribers. The episode's live the moment we've edited it rather than waiting until every morning.

I thought that that was the guy. Maybe it is, I don't know, anyway. Acast Plus is finished, by the way. So we need to change. So we're doing Supercasts. We're switching to Supercast and Apple Podcasts. And this is a good moment to sort of reconceive some of these things. And it will hook in with Patreon to and other things, I think, potentially.

You can't guarantee that. But there should be more ways to get it as there is a podcast like that. So we can still do emergency episodes. Yeah, exactly. We could do. So what we could do is we do sort of like, we have a cadence of a couple of times a week. A bit longer. Do you reckon bit longer?

I don't know. I really like the interview is a... I really like the fact that we don't go on too long. 15, 20 minutes. It's not a bad length. I mean, most people do 40. And I think the valuerre to this is that we do it every day. Like, I know that we're talking...

This is what happens every time we're meeting about this. This is why we're asking your thoughts. Because we keep going in circles because we quite like that they're short hits. And it's quite nice catching up with you, you know. Oh, that's the nicest thing he's ever said in five years. No, it is lovely. It is lovely. We've known you've a very long time.

So we're just kind of working out. what to do to take it to the next level. Really? And I mean, how could you improve on perfection? One thing we could try is marketing. Another thing we could do is video, which is what everyone's doing

and putting it on social media and whatever and doing it on YouTube the way Chaz does. That wouldn't be hard to do. We should do it. And we can just do exactly the same thing but with better marketing. That would be fine. If you tell us you like the way it is,

that's good to know. Yeah, in fact, you can give six stars and tell us you like it. So the best way to tell us, look, you can put it in the reviews if you want in Apple, podcast by all means leave a little comment there we do like being trolled to be clear in the reviews so go ahead as long as it's five stars yeah um but email podcast at chaser dot com

i you it does come straight to us and we do reply yeah um mostly yeah um but we'd like to know because it's sort of hard to hard to know exactly what to do we've been doing it for so long the numbers are okay it's very nice when you bump into somebody and you do all the time you bump into people who listen to the podcast and you sort of there's a simpatico like you It doesn't feel like you know them. Yeah, I know. So we don't want to change that. But I think to be fair to say also, there's a kind of a catch 22,

whereby, I mean, just being really frank about it. If the podcast did better numbers, we could spend more time on it. Yeah. But we don't spend as much time on it so it doesn't do. I mean, the numbers are amazing by Australian podcast analysts. To be clear, the amount of this we have in a week for this thing, we kind of... Yeah, is ridiculous. It's great.

But it's not quite enough to make enough money to... It's probably less if we do self-indulgent episodes like this too often. Yeah, this is going to get terrible ratings. But, um, or we could, we could make a man cave, Charles, Joe Rogan style and have this three-hour-long episodes with guests. Well, we've got the studio. We should use the studio. I think we should commit to videoing. Yeah. And I think, yeah, and what you're saying, the problem is, I don't know about you, but my attention span, I don't know how anyone stays interesting for three hours. No. You know, and I've never got to the end of any of those long.

I listened to the whole Trump one for research purposes for three hours. Yeah. But I had to break it down over three or four. different days. Exactly. It's for people, and I think it's for a slightly different market.

It's for commuters. I mean, Chaz's one. Chaz's one is like that. Chaz's one has indexes that tells you. I've told him he should break it up into smaller ones and get more numbers, but he's committed to what he does. Anyway, so we want to know what you want to hear.

The other thing is, yeah, so video, thoughts on video, and then we're also thinking about, should we go back to doing live shows? Because we did it in a very weird way, doing it every single week, which was a bit intense. But I think it would be fun to do live shows If you want to hear that And we've got a great setup in the office

Yeah, yeah So we actually have the space To actually experiment with live shows So what would you want to hear in a live show Would you want to hear And last time we had sort of us chatting And then one or two guests coming out Kind of thing

I think the welcome to the future that we did last year With Vic and Jenner That you weren't at all sick for At South by Southwest Did that ever go up on the feet? Yeah, I think it did. Yeah, you go up on the feet That was an excellent episode

If you're wanting an episode that's really genuinely excellent and quite well prepared. Without me, yes. No, but Vic and Jenna are great. He had Angela up here too, who's... Yeah, who is fantastic. And there was a real sense of... I mean, it wasn't a huge crowd, but it was a beautiful... And we're not doing it at this.

We didn't bother to put back in for it this year. But, no, I mean, and regular guests are good too. I mean, David Smith's been on a lot. We had Chaz a couple of times. Emma Shortest. I like the idea of it sort of... friends of the podcast. And the thing is,

we can actually get quite good interview at these. We had quite big politicians last election. We didn't even bother this time. So we can put the effort into getting high-profile guests. And that might choose to know. And that's where you go. That would make it more interesting to do as well because you suddenly. And what that is about is working our producers harder.

So we don't have to do the work. That's exactly right. So the thing is basically we're talking about doing lots of different kinds of things. Yeah. But should the. base should the base format just be us chatting

about the news for 15 to 20 minutes while... I think... Well, yeah, no, it's not prejudiced the... Yeah, see what you think.

But, I mean, that's something we've done a lot of and that's a format we're quite used to. And what we could do is we could train an AI to do that base load.

Yeah, yeah. Perfect. So let us know, I mean, does it actually matter, particularly the couple of times a week versus daily? I mean,

if there are people out there who are actually listening to every daily episode, then great. But if what's actually happening is that people are dipping into a couple a week, and it doesn't actually make a difference. And so there's a large number of people listening to fewer episodes versus a small number of people listening to every episode. That's the thing I would most like to know.

Yeah, that would be really interesting. And the other thing is, I think we're going to change our name to the rest is Chaser, isn't it? We actually should. We should do that. We should actually do. Or the rest is the rest is uninformed banter. The rest is Uninformed Bander.

Yeah, that's actually not a badder. They'd sue us and we get publicity. Also, Gary Linnaker's been in the news. One moment we'll talk about the news this week. Gary Linneker, the founder of Goalhanger podcast, this massively successful UK group. Yeah, it's a good time to get him while he's down. Yeah, look, lots of questions.

We love doing it, but I think it's fair to say we could probably organize it in a better way. Or maybe we are on the final, the platonic ideal of what a podcast can be. But also, like, my tour, the Australian leg of my tour ends this Sunday. Yeah. So I, the next couple of months, I'm keen to. Yeah, it's a good time to try some new stuff. Yeah, exactly. And anyway, thank you for bearing with this.

If you made it to this point in the podcast, what's the code word to put in the review or to email us, just to prove that you bothered to listen to it this time? Oh, yeah, okay. Mention the debonair good looks of the host? No, okay. Okay, that's terrible. The rest is something, should we think? Oh, yeah, the rest is uninformed banter.

The rest is uninformed banter, yeah, okay, okay. Let's get the SEO up on there. Yeah. It wouldn't be Tri-I-U-B. Triub, it just rolls off the tongue. The rest is chaser is actually quite funny as well. Although people will be wondering where the rest of the chaser are. By the way, final point, if you want to hear some more of them,

We sort of don't do that anymore If you want to hear from them Or if you want it to not Because the other thought I had was Should we stop branding at the Chaser? Well, that's a bit not That's the thing I mean it wasn't when this version of the

When the Chase Report started There were more people involved But we've just essentially gone Well, it's easier to do with us Yeah Because we have time, live near each other And can be bothered So yes, I mean the rest is

Charles and Tom, I don't know Anyway, we'll figure it out Please give us your feedback We will genuinely consider every little bit of either review-based harassment or feedback that you send our way. Thank you for listening. We don't quite know why you do, but the stats say that you do, so we'll believe them. Hi, Mum. Hello, people I work with.

See you. Well, we're part of the Iconocles Network. And more later this year, by the way, about what on earth that is that we say at the end of each episode. See you. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes.

Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.