The Chaser Report - Trump's Garbage Island

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Dom and Charles unpack the roast comic's joke that could spell the end for the Trump campaign. Plus, Google has been fined a bonkers amount of money by Russia, and we have some ideas what that money could be used for. 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 Dom and Charles. A giant island of garbage in your podcast feed. That's right. Well, look, we've got a lot to talk about today. There's a few elections going on. Yes.

It's an Australian one that hasn't formally started yet, but dear God, there's a lot happening, I suspect, in Canberra. There's the little business in America, which we might touch on. And the joke that apparently may seriously hurt Donald Trump Of all of the things to cause consequences for that man at last Not that I believe that it will A stand-up comedian like a roast comic Making an off-color joke Compared with all the things Donald Trump has said

Since 2015, all thereabouts Yeah, it's very strange And Charles, you have an amazing update I can't quite believe Even though I saw the news story I'm a bit baffled Okay, well let's have some ads and get into it Oh, great ads.

I mean, assuming you haven't paid to remove them. That's still a service we offer. Before we get into it, I think on, was it yesterday's podcast, we predicted that Trump would win an... You called it. I called it. You called it for Donald Trump. And you did it bit, minute by minute.

And we have had some feedback from listeners about that calling. You know, essentially, mainly, well, 100% of them disagreeing with that call, right? Listener, Kamala Harris has some thoughts. One listener has written in, with quite an interesting comment, I thought, although completely disqualifies themselves from commenting with the opening line, which is, although I respect your opinion. No, no, that's some. That's lost me.

I really think, what's the point? Fucking, like, it just basically says, I'm completely wrong. And because. So the gist of the argument is. The concept is that Kamala Harris, there's lots of fans amongst Republicans who aren't admitting it. Yes. But is so appalled by Donald Trump that they won't vote for him?

Do you mean people like Liz Cheney who held an entire event for Kamala Harris? Yes, like Liz Cheney only silent. Silent, silently, proudly putting on events for her. Now, Charles, you've lived in America and I haven't for quite some time. Yes. But let me ask you this. My observation of Americans, just broadly, if I were to generalise about them, silence is not a thing with them, keeping them an opinion of themselves under their hat.

Not part of the culture. Like, they have large and loud opinions about blueberry bagels. You know, they have opinions on absolutely everything that they make known at every turn. Anyway, but we should talk about the latest twist and turn in the cycle. As you said, an amazing story where this stand-up comedian got up at Madison Square Garden and told a hideously racist joke. Now, a lot of people are entering this as a sort of pivot point in the election. A lot of people are desperate for there to be an October surprise that ends Donald Trump's career and claiming that this is it.

And to be fair, the Trump campaign did disavow the joke. Yes. That basically Puerto Rico was a floating island of garbage as one was said amongst other off-color jokes. There's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico.

And look, I think the misinterpretation here is simply that, yes, it absolutely will impact the Trump campaign. But the thing that people are missing is that it was a racist joke, right? And so people are thinking, oh, that must be bad for Trump. But actually, I think that, you know, just gauging the mood of the electorate, a racist joke might be exactly the sort of October surprise that Trump needs to get him across the line. And the points that's being made is that hundreds of thousands of people in Pennsylvania,

the V-Kee-Swing state are Hispanic or Latino. In fact, many, there are hundreds of thousands apparently of Puerto Ricans in that state. But yes, Charles, the biggest problem with this for me is the notion that suddenly American voters will wake up and go, what? Was it? Was it? Donald Trump is racist? Why did nobody tell me this before? He started his campaign coming down a golden fucking elevator in Trump Tower and talking about how Mexicans are criminals. Like the person who, is there one person? Oh my goodness, Trump doesn't like Latinos? I was trying to explain to my 13 year old why he was going to have such a large

impact. And I think part of the problem is the delivery of the joke, whatever you think of the joke, the delivery of the joke was quite good. Well, this is the John Stewart response, which is the most surprising response of anybody. John Stewart went, that guy's actually really funny. I find him really funny. He's a roast comic.

And the point is, all those roast comics, they all make off-color jokes about everything. Like, all their jokes are racist. Yeah, oh, yeah. And he's one of those things where you hear them in isolation, and I'm not going to defend the joke. I think as John Stewart also pointed out, super dumb thing. And given that it was on the teleprompter. Like, it wasn't a surprise.

They cleared the joke. But that's what comics like that do is the point. And every time I've been to stand up comedy gigs in America there's, like half the bill at least has been just comics who run through every single racial stereotype one after the other. I was thinking, you know, like we could totally

adept that joke too. Or have you heard that there's a huge pile of rubbish in the ocean? It's called Tasmania. And it would totally work, wouldn't it? Unless you're trying to get Tasmania to vote for you. Or New Zealand. or something. Actually, New Zealand would be better. I mean, or Hamilton Island, I don't know.

That doesn't really work. Anyway, the irony is that there is actually a Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a genuine problem. Anyway, all right, so that's what's going on in the campaign. And it's called Hawaii. Whereas Kamala Harris gave, like, the most touchingly naive thing that she did. She went to the ellipse, the place for Donald

Trump had the rally that unleashed the January 6th mob, the QAnon Shaman, among others. She went to the same place to make what she called her closing argument, the idea, and sort of like this prosecutorial idea that if you get up and give a speech, voters will listen to your logical case and actually endorse you based on cogent arguments. Now, it's just happened. I haven't only had the chance to review the content, but the concept, isn't it just sort of sweet and touchingly, like, is she too naive to be

president if she thinks that actually cogent arguments are going to win it for her at this stage? Yes, yes. Well, that's what I said yesterday as well. It's such a pity. Unless people get so bored. They get bored into voting for her. It'd be fair to say Fox News is unimpressed. Rachel Maddow said it was a damn good speech. So, you know, it's the same reaction as always. Okay. So, but this brings us to the top story of the day. And I think the story that's, you know, dominated the headlines, certainly on the subreddits that I So this is a little bit of a left turn in today's podcast content. But I think it's a good

one. My jaw actually kind of metaphorically hit the floor here. And it's not to do with Donald Trump being racist. Because this is genuinely. surprisingly surprising. But Charles, it is Russia, Russia, Russia. Yes. So, Russia, like a court in Russia has fined Google 20 decillion dollars. Sorry, what now? 20 decillion dollars. Decylion. Which is 20 with 33 zeros after.

So it's not gajillion. That's actually just a genuine number. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's like, you know, you've got billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sexillion. All the way up to decilion. So in other words, I'm going to come right out there. I'm no economist, Charles, but I suspect that is more than all the money in the world by a very large margin. I think the entire global economy would be like, I don't know, $15 trillion or something

of there. It's a rounding era. I mean, it's not even close. He's Russian courts. Yeah. I'm sure there was a due process that they followed and they had a trial and let Google respond. Well, it's quite an interesting case, which was, well, originally YouTube, I think, banned RT from

Russia today, the propaganda network. Yeah, from broadcasting clips on their YouTube network. By the way, $100 trillion is the GDP. So yes, you're right. It's a rounding error. Right, yeah. And I like how I got it wrong by sevenfold.

It didn't matter. It ended up with Google banning 17 of these basically TV channels in Russia from being able to post their stuff up on YouTube. And The Russians went, you know, ordered Google to not ban them. To unbanned them, yeah, yeah.

To unbanned them. Free speech, basically. And Google didn't agree. And so therefore, I think it's something like a thousand roubles for every instance of every clip that could have been posted by every sort of, like, it's literally this calculator. Like, it's, there is a due process to the calculation. I love that they went through a mathematical process to come up with 20 decillion. Because you wouldn't want to do 10. It's got to be, and 30's too much.

No, no, exactly. 20's about right. But the question that I want to pose to you, Dom, and maybe we should take an head break before we, you know, sort of come to this question, which is, what would you do with 20 decillion dollars? Okay. Let's get paid much less money while we think about it.

None of the medical advice contained in the Chaser report should legally be considered medical advice. The Chaser Report. Okay, so can we just get the easy gags out of the way first, which is, I think I might be able to get a two-bed, room apartment in Surrey Hills. There you go. You think two, as many as two bedrooms?

Only one and a half. Renovators divide. One bedroom and study. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, the obvious answer here is you'd buy Twitter, which would love any of, surely X, surely X, like, not only welcomes Russia today content, but actually, like, doesn't X pay its worst content producers? Isn't that Elon part of Elon's model?

Like all the people who are spreading the most heinous misinformation from what I recall have come out in this campaign and said, oh, yeah, Elon pays us to bring us to produce this content. So you'd buy, well, you'd buy Twitter, but you'd still have some money left over. I'm thinking, why not buy Puerto Rico? Yes, yes. You could. What do you think?

Surely it's worth a lot of money, though, Charles. What are you saying? What would you do? I would buy a country. You'd buy a country. I think I'd buy a country. But you wouldn't want to buy America, would you? Like, you'd want to...

Oh, no. America's soiled. America is shop soiled. Yeah, I reckon one of the Nordic states... The problem is they'd probably have some sort of... rules and constitutional due process, the men that wasn't even worth buying. And also, you'd be then taxed at that rate. Someone with a good climate.

They'd have like 90% tax rate. You'd have to pay 18. In Scandinavia. 18 decillion dollars. Oh, that'd be terrible. And then they'd be able to afford free health care. They'd be terrible. Could not buy Richard Branson.

Something like Richard Branson's island on a much bigger scale. A tropical island. You could probably buy the earth. Because it's a hundred trillion dollars is what the annual GDP. So we're talking several thousand years worth of... You know it would be great is buying out all the royal families. Just buying out King Charles, buying out the Emperor of Japan.

Yes. And basically just going, come on, okay, you can have the money, you've retired. Doing this sort of succession thing, just taking everything off their hands. But isn't the whole point that they're not for sale? Like, isn't the whole brilliance of them that you can't buy? Like, has anyone ever offered them a decillion dollars? And you still have 19 less? Yeah, I don't.

And the great thing is, I mean, I could be a very inflationary thing to have. It would be. I mean, admittedly, that would be enough money to start another monarchy, probably. So I could shut down their monarchy's, Charles. Or I could be the monarch of all those places. I don't know which I'd choose. Maybe you just buy the militaries. Like, you don't really need to buy the nations, do you? You just need to buy the hardware.

So I just need to, I mean, but on the Australian model, that amount of money would get me for submarines. Before submarines to be delivered by 2060. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And build not in Australia. Not built in Australia. And not builds at all. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

And I have to pay for them now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. What I might do? Would I start a sort of space exploration thing? What would I do? What about building a fast train between Sydney and Melbourne?

Couldn't afford that. 20 decillion. No, that's a silly talk. I could fix the NBN. I could make the NBN actually fiber optic the whole way. I could de Malcolm the NBN. It could be fibre to the home. Okay, that's worth it.

Fiber to the home and like to, even the hard to connect homes. But you'd have to then be able to provide Russian TV channels on the NBN. That's true. That would be part of the deal. Or I could just buy Starlink off Elon because isn't that going to render all that stuff obsolete anyway? And you can't tell me he's going to block any Russian propaganda channels. It's probably making new ones. No, well, there's a whole lot of allegations out right at the moment about...

His secret meeting to Vladimir Putin. Well, lots of secret meetings with Vladimir Putin, and also Starlink equipment keeps on turning up in Russian drones. Whoops. And they're sort of like, how did they get here? How did they get there? And you're just going, how possibly did they not know that that was happening? Because they would know which unit is connecting to it. Like, the network's big, but it's not huge.

It's like. Are you suggesting that someone involved in an Elon Musk company actually takes due care of their network? And you'd go, oh, wait a minute. You'd bother to check that? This drone has just booted up and it's accessing our satellite, you know, inside the Russian border. Oh, look, it's heading towards Ukraine. There's no way they'd check that. Like, Elon Musk, anyone with the job, like, safety or compliance, get sacked for it.

Actually, that's a good thing. You just buy out all of Elon Musk's businesses. Forget just Twitter. You'd buy them all out. Yeah. You could buy Tesla. Fix Tesla's, like, brand. I don't know.

It just seems like a lot of work. Like, all these ideas entail them administering things. That's true. Don't you just want to have a holiday? Yeah. Don't you want to just... Bye. It just seems like the whole concept of owning that much money would be very stressful.

Like what if you lost it or, you know... Well, knowing you, you'd put it on a fucking... You'd put it into Bitcoin and then lose the hard drive. No, I'll tell you what would happen is you'd get hacked. You know, like you'd get... You know... It'd be linked T would send you a bill. And then you'd have linked toll pass.

Oh, whoops. For $20, you could tell you it. I thought I better pay it right now. Charles, you could end crypto. You could actually buy all the crypto and just fuck it off. Oh, wow. Wouldn't that be great? It's all, we're driving it all down to zero.

Don't do this anymore. This is a bad thing. Isn't the slight problem with this model, Charles, that as the Russian court is likely to find, that amount of money is not only impossible to pay, it doesn't exist in any meaningful sense. Like, what do they expect Google to do from here? Well, if I were Google, I'd go, you know what, you've got us dead to rights. Here is a check for 20 to a trillion dollars. That's so funny.

You know, go to the bank. You know, like, where are you going to deposit it? Also, because there's all these currency bans. So you could just be like, we've got the check here. As soon as you're allowed to pay money to Russia, it'll do it. Oh, by the way, the fines can get, if they don't pay, it'll be bigger. What's the interest on that? Like, even at, like, 5%.

What would you be able to get? If you borrow $20 to $1,000, you'd be able to get a good interest rate on that. Imagine the loan shark that had come after you would pay $20 trillion. I suppose Google will find out from Russia, won't they? Because it'll be, like, if you borrow a million dollars, you'd pay about 6% at the moment, don't you? I reckon you'd be able to get, you know, if you went to borrow $20 trillion, they'd probably lend it to you 5%. Russia is trying to seize Google's assets. Which means, except that they've already, they've already moved.

They, like, they exited Russia after they invaded Ukraine. Oh, no, they're coming for our crap search engine that doesn't work anymore. Russia's... Well, I mean, yeah, the best way they could destroy Google's power is let Google do what it's doing right now. I wonder, like, what will happen to all the... So the Russian state owns Google. What will happen to all the Google Plus pages? Google wave.

Google declared that this was likely to happen in its last earning statement, and here's the quote. Oh, yeah? We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect. They don't think that they're telling you by the mere Putin, you can't get their money. He's not going to get his money. Oh, well, luckily for Vladimir, there's more than one way to Skinner Cat, or at least put Novichok in their underwear. Yeah.

I mean, do Google's founders and employees have kneecaps? I believe they do. Oh, this has been a terrible episode. I'm tending to agree with the listener who wrote into complaint. The silence. Maybe we need to do a silent podcast for the silent Kamala voters. We just don't talk. Would that be better?

Do you listen? Oh, yeah. Maybe that is better. We've realised what you want from us. And today we're just not going to say anything. There you go. Tomorrow on your feet. Oh, like for tomorrow.

Well, no, because tomorrow we've got David Smith making his final argument. Oh, okay. Kamala Harris style. I don't think you should like that. That would be far too boring. It's not really boring. Yeah. We're just going to ask him who's going to win like always and he will say,

I don't really know. but it's been in a very, extremely convincing and well-informed way. Yeah. Stay tuned for that. Okay. Well, I'm off to the races. I've got a bit of money in my pocket that I want to bend. I'm thinking...

Don't you owe me at least one decillion back pay for this podcast? We're part of the iconocles network. I don't even know what we need ads if we've got it $20 decillion. No, we should make the podcast ad free, really, shouldn't we? That's what we do. Just all we need to do is crowd fund, just like one decillion from our audience. Then we'll do it. Yep.