The Chaser Report - We Become a True Crime Podcast

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Sick of the news, Gabbi asks the team a question she's been plagued by for years. Meanwhile Aleksa investigates a plane crash in China, and turns our podcast into a true crime podcast. Plus our producer thinks he has a way to give the show more "sizzle". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Friday, the 25th of March. TGIF, am I right? Yep, and everyone's here today. Yeah. Except for Dom. It's never everyone. We always say this, and there's like, except for one person.

I'm a different bald white guy with glasses. Yeah, so we've got John, Alexa and Gabby. Hey, hey. Hey, hey. Hello. Hey, don't see yourself short. And Charles Fir. There you go.

That's it. That's it. That's the energy we're bringing into Friday, you know. According to this rundown, Gabby to prep intro. So Gabby... Yes, I have a segment, and I'm apologising right now for it not being topical enough, because if I'm being honest, the news depresses me. I don't like looking at it. So I decided, what better way to get around this than make up my own news? So I sat alone with no media influencing my thought.

And you know what the first question that came into my mind was? You know those rock climbers that climb cliff faces for weeks at a time? like they hammer hammocks into the sides of cliffs. How do they poop? I'm asking the real questions here. That sounds impossible. How do they poop? Yeah.

How do they poop? Do they just poop on the people below? See, this is what I thought, right? Yes. Turns out, after I did a little bit of Googling here, there's actually a problem. There's a waste problem with climbers shitting off the edge of the edge of the cliff.

So they have solutions. I found these solutions on a climbing website that I don't know the name of because I don't climb. There's that much poo. Apparently it's like a common problem. Like when the next climber goes to climb. There's poo everywhere. There's poo everywhere.

But they're doing it in nature where all the animals poo. I suppose. But wouldn't you, if you were sort of socially minded, wouldn't you poo into your hand and then throw the poo so it doesn't sort of go down the side of the cliff? See, so now I found the solutions. Is it nappies? No. You'd think.

I thought that. I thought it was like adult diapers. I thought of everything. And nothing prepared me for what the actual answer is. So, I'm reading verbatim from this rock climbing website, right? The first is something called a poop tube, which is basically, this is how this sentence starts. After you poop into a bag, first of all, you place the bag into the tube and add some kitty litter to decrease the odor. Gosh, you wouldn't want to confuse your thermos.

Yeah. So that was the first option. The second one was something. Oh, no, no. The second one was wag bag. which is just a bag, but for some reason it's called a wag bag. But it's essentially like a dog poop system. You know how you can carry those little bags on your belt?

That's good. But for people, what could be more fun? So this is the same thing as the first one, but without the tube. Yeah. There are accessories involved. I know, I think somebody really needs to capitalize on these. Like, you know how Frank Green made coffee cups and then they cost like $80? Yes, this would be Frank Brown.

Yeah. And the last option is something called cat holes. Simply put, this is just a hole in the ground. But for some reason, to a rock climber, that's called a cat hole. So that's digging a hole in the ground. But wait, they have to aim for the hole from the cliff. Well, that one's not for clifers. That one's for, like, if you're on a flat area while you're playing.

Yes. That one we can all do at home. So anyway, that's how rock climbers shit. I hope you're all welcome. I wanted to take a break from the news and I decided to find something somehow more depressing. Hey, Gabby, you know that you work for a satirical website. So if you want to make up news, you could like literally just do that. No, I have integrity, please.

Thank you in this company. I like mine. He used to be factual. Coming up on the show, Alex is going to talk about planes crashing. Yes, very fun. Oh, that does sound fun. And, oh, no, Lachlan's got another. He's doing producer notes. Yes, I love producer notes.

All that and more coming up. But first of all, let's go to Rebecca Dana-Muno in the Chaser Newsroom. Hill Song Church founder Brian Houston has resigned this week in order to spend less time with God. When questioned what he thought of Brian's resignation, Scott Morrison asked why everyone keeps associating him with Hillsong when all he did was invite Brian to personally accompany him to the White House. Australia's Space Force has been forced to update their rules regarding call signs after Peter Dutton complained about his title Spudnik.

Following the complaint, use of the term Spudnik is now a fireable offence as well as Minister Asteroid Head, Darth Vader without the helmet, and Galactic Cunt. A family that can no longer afford rent, food or petrol, is glad to hear the country's leaders are focused on debating important issues like who is less woke. With both the Prime Minister and opposition leader distracted with their woke measuring contest,

the family hopes that they might not have to choose between starving or travelling. I'm Rebecca Daynamuno, and that's the latest headlines from The Chaser Report for another woke. A week! Oh, shit. I've got a very, very exciting segment here. I always thought we need a bit more action engineering. I never believe you when you say this.

Go on. I'm excited. You believe me now when you hear this. A plane just crashed in China. Oh. On the route between Kunming and Guangzhou. No, no, well, Guangzhou is. It's like the big city in the south.

It's amazing. I did the same route in 2019, but it's not about me. 132 people died. It was horrific. Oh, my God. So they all died, did they? Well, they haven't found anyone yet, but like the plane nose dived into a hill and it was just all in flame. Like, everything's gone.

Great way to start a segment. But the interesting thing is that we don't know what's happened, which means we can do a little crime scene investigation on the podcast. Oh, yes. We turned it into a true crime podcast. Our ratings are going to soar. This is brilliant. I reckon I know who the culprit is. Look, we don't know much about the accident,

but we do know a lot about Boeing. And the plane was a Boeing 737. Was it a 737 max? No, no. But let's go into the 737 maxes because we need some context for what this company does. So they had some big crashes since 2016. I don't know if you guys have tried to build a plane really expensive.

Yeah. It's so fucked. That's the only thing that stopped me, actually. I gave up very quick. But Boeing's never given up. And they came out with this really cool new engine in 2016 called the Leap 1B engine. It's super powerful and massive.

Yeah. There's this big issue, right? They were too big for Boeing's existing planes. So if you try to retrofit it on an existing fleet, the plane would be unbalanced and it would pitch slightly upwards. Did Boeing know the size of their own planes? How do you fuck that up? Well, you fuck it up because you want to make money, right?

You've got two options. You either build an appropriately sized new plane for the cool new engines. No. Or you just roll the dice and put them on already existing. And I'll just add a little context to this, which is that the bigger a jet engine, the more efficient it is. Right. That is the rule, right? And the whole point is that the way you sell planes is to say that it's more fuel efficient.

So there's a whole, the whole of the capitalist system is geared towards having bigger engines on small planes. Great. But they invented this thing to make up for the fact that this was incredibly dangerous to put these giant engines on old small planes. and they invented the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, which is fancy engineering talk for like a dodgy fix, I guess. It's an automated system that just like corrects the pitch of the plane. So it's like the engine's making it pitch up. We're just going to have a little robot that makes it turned down.

So your plane's constantly like pointing down a little bit. Is this like the landlord special of plane places? Yes, yes. It's like it's the plane equivalent of painting over a light switch. Exactly. Yeah. Makes it so much harder to use but makes a problem slightly less obvious at the same. start.

Great. And the problem is they didn't train a lot of people on their horrific new cost-cutting system because it would make them look bad, obviously. Yeah, but also training costs money. Exactly. Yeah. And so no airline wanted to retrain all their pilots. Also training.

Oh, well, we won't retrain. Yeah, they're like, here's a perfectly normal plane for you to fly. It's still called 737. Max. To the max. But then, yeah, sooner or later, pilots got into it, and they noticed that their planes were pointing down. And you couldn't override it.

Like the system was just like, no, I know what I'm doing. And then in 2018 and 2019, you have these horrific crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia where like 346 people died because the planes just pointed not in the air, but it's at the ground where they can't go. And the reason that happened was because they had one sensor to work out whether the plane's pitch was correct. So if the sensor sort of got some wind in it or something or, you know, stuffed up, It was no redundant other sensor to go. The plane just went, oh, well, no, no, I should keep pointing down.

Oh, wow, there's the ground. I can't believe they made a system that was automated. I can't believe this system was automated, not manually over-ridden. It really broke all the basic rules of good engineering here. I can't believe that, like, we were here last week making fun of the submarines that can be beat by jellyfish. But planes get beaten by wind is like if the submarines couldn't handle water. Look, there are different kind of engineers out there. I think it could have just been a classic mix-up, freaky Friday situation

because Boeing is the world's largest maker of missiles, right? So maybe the engineering departments were just like, oh, we've got to have them fly directly into the ground. That's the only way they work. It's the best way to have a lot of confirmed casualties is if casualties on the missile. On the actual inside the missile. It was pretty fucked up, though. Like, it was a horrible incident.

But what was worse is like Boeing's response was like, blood-curdlingly racist. It was so good. They were like, because you don't want to admit that you've designed these faulting machines and because they were super lucky because it happened in Ethiopia and Indonesia. And they were like, well, look,

these countries aren't used to flying. Like these backwards, these backwards people don't know how to fly planes. Like it's, um, are you kidding? Yeah, that's how they saved face, um, gaslighting a tire. So did they have to pay out?

Their fix was they put on a second sensor. Yeah, double sensor. Um, but the good thing about, well, I can't say the good thing about the crash in China. But it is pretty interesting that it happened in China because Boeing can't pull the same shit because they need that market really bad. They can't be like, these Chinese people don't out of fly planes. They have to actually own up to the fact that something fucked happened with their plane.

Yeah, fuck. Because they're trying to deliver 140 737 max jets built for Chinese customers and like, obviously people are already super anxious about this plane because... Because they're made in America, aren't they? So it's the problem that they keep on trying to send them over to China and they keep crashing before they. Yeah, right. Exactly. He just can't get them there. But yeah, they can't pull the same shit in China. Now they're actually worried, like, oh, this crash might actually impact our bottom line. Well, I think that what, instead of sending them to China, we fix two birds of one stone.

Currently, Ukraine doesn't have enough fighter jets. Yes. We send the Boeing 7-4-7 maxes to Russia, and then all of a sudden we have weapons to use there. I mean, it's not the first time a plane's gone down in Russia. The Chaser Report Less News More often It's Lachlan for Charles's favorite segment

Lockland's coming in Charles Producer Notes I love it about 20 minutes ago Guys before you start I've actually prepared a little something Of course you have So why do a normal intro When we can do this

Producer Notes It's the segment Love it Producing Outs It's really good Produce notes It was for hours Sal out, so now, so now, so.

Producing notes. Well, I'm going to tell you. Who's the voice is it? Yeah, I was going to say it was amazing that Clive Palmer actually had time in his day to come and record that for you. That is a great voice. You should become a Muppet. That is a good intro for your segment

because it does feel like it goes for hours and hours and hours. I was up very late last night, preparing a lot of things for producer notes this week. But I talk to other podcast producers about how to improve their podcasts, and they said that what you need, need to do is add more sizzle. Right.

So I figured like we need some sound effects, we need some really sort of radio things. The first one, of course, would be canned laughter because sometimes we have jokes that fall flat in here. Not very often. And it has nothing to do with the quality of the joke writing. No, no, it definitely doesn't. Now, if anyone delivers a really lame pun, Charles, do you have any prepared? Oh, I'm... The last time Charles was prepared, it was not.

it was 1967. That doesn't make you feel good. That's amazing, I mean, I didn't ever realize you were this funny.

But what I realized is that, yeah, you can only get so far with canned laughter. What we really need we need tinned laughter. Tinned laughter.

It really proves the vibe. This is the best thing you've done on this podcast. Stop, I'm begging. Let them out of their misery. Where are you holding these people? I won't press it again. I won't press it again.

But we need more than just a tinned or canned laughter. So, and I was very late last night, making everyone their own original sting or intro for every time that you guys want to do a segment on the podcast. Are you worried that he's taking your job, Gabby? Not at all, honestly. I've been looking for an out for like a month. I've got to really get everyone to the core of their character. Oh, yes, a character. Charles.

You're our fierce leader, you're the host of this chaser brand. You are one of Australia's most topical, newsy satirists. So you really needed something that was newsy. Yes. What's going on in the world of third? Nice. Probably something about his kids. Oh, yeah, great.

Is that work? I don't know. I'll run it by my kids and find out. I think they'll love it. Dom's not here, unfortunately, but I've been really listening to Dom's stuff. And I will never get over the fact that in one of his most recent episodes,

he, with his daughter on his lap, started talking about how the world is hopeless and everyone's going to die. And then looked her in the eye and said, it's your future we're talking about. So this one's for Dom, if you're listening, mate, all the best. Now for something sad as fuck with Dom. So I think we can

That is great The children at the end really solidify You should just give that to his family So that when he does bedtime stories, they know We'll play that at his funeral Well this is good that you're thinking long term I was also I'm not thinking long term

I can't know I take it back I was also thinking long or short term when I was making Gabby's. Gabby, you are our rising star. And so it's not long until you're gone. So I've got to have something in here that really just sort of goes. I make jokes about quitting all the time, but you know I can't actually afford to do it, right? No, well, you know, when Gabby can't afford to leave and people listening back on this podcast 10 years from now,

it'd be nice to have something so they could remember Gabby Bolt was on this podcast. It's a segment with Gabby Ball. That made me, shut up. I feel like I just joined a cult. Are you trying to make her leave the podcast? Yeah, this will do it. That was about 12 a.m. and I was trying to learn harmonizing at the same time.

It was messy. It got real messy. I get it. That's okay. I appreciate you. Look, at this point, I was absolutely knackered. But John, thankfully, you were the only person who actually requested an interesting

Well like two weeks ago I don't like your tone John I was a very long He's done a whole lot of work for you John He's done a whole He's got incredibly late But Watching the shit

There's nobody else wants to watch It's John It's John's cringe binge The Airhorn The Airhorn makes it It's John's cringe binge He's reading all the segments None of us really want to address.

Can I still cringe binge in like 20 years if I ever get an autobiography? I reckon that's the name of it. Finally, Alexa, you know. Was this the end of the night? This is right at the end of the night. You got the best one. There was only one intro that would do justice to our favourite Chaser member. Oh, favourite.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Alex's going to talk about it's a penis again. What is with Alexa? Bling, I couldn't find a crack. Where do you get that recording of your penis from? It hasn't gone, boing. Great falling.

Ever since the great accident. Anyway, what's your grievances this week, though? Normally your producer notes are full of shit that we've done wrong. How much you hate us. Kind of at the moment, like I've got one sound effect that I'm sitting on the back of because you guys aren't complaining enough. And you've kind of... Is that because you failed this segment?

You've set it up so that we would fight against you. As the producer, you should be able to set up segments, and you've completely fucked it. You know what, John? I just can't be bothered. Whoa, someone complained about producer notes. No way, that's amazing. Give a shit. Shut the fuck.

It's 113 a.m. Oh, Locky. Locky, you know what? Sometimes things aren't good. And that's okay. Our gear is from road microphones, and we are part of the 18. podcast creator network.