The Chaser Report - Who Wants To Be A Ten-Quintillionaire?

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

Late stage capitalism has gone galactic! In this episode Charles and Dom discuss a new asteroid with expensive taste, delude themselves into thinking print media is still alive and thriving, as well as theorise their own answers to the age-old question, "what would you do with ten quintillion dollars?" 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, Dom, you're looking very happy today. Oh, I am. I am because I've just discovered, Charles, there is something out there which can solve not just my financial problems, not just yours, not just the chasers. Oh my goodness. But everybody, there is an asteroid out there. It's shaped like a potato.

And it is worth $10 quintillion dollars. Charles, $10 quintillion dollars. So trillion is a thousand billion. A quadrillion is a thousand, thousand billion. So quintillion is a thousand million billion. I'm not sure if that's right. To make it easy to understand, just think of 10,000000-000-000-000-000-0-000-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0. Why is it worth that much?

Keep listening. So, Charles, this is apparently worth 70,000 times more than the whole of the world economy, disaster. You know that that doesn't make sense. Well, if we go and get it, then the world economy will grow. Do you think this is why Elon Musk has decided that space is the final frontier? But actually, the whole Mars thing is just a mcuffin. And the actual reason he's going up there is because he found out a bit of disaster.

He wants to fly a tester up there. And it'll solve Twitter's financial problems. Actually, I don't think it would be enough for that. But hilariously enough, the people who do actually want to mind this thing, can you guess who it is, that want to go up there and genuinely mine this asteroid? It's called the Psyche asteroid, by the way. Well, let's go through it. I presume Twiggy Forest has a share.

Yeah, Gene Reinhardt. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure they're interested in it. But presumably it'll be someone incredibly evil. Is it Saudi Arabia or something? Oh, you'd imagine they'd be pondering how they could get up there. Well, what is it? It's fucking NASA.

NASA, what a launch of spacecraft to mine this thing. To mine it. So what's on it? Metals, precious metals in vast size. Basically, the theory here is that... Oh, I see. It's 124 miles wide. They think it might have been a core of a planet

in its early development. Basically, yeah, it's not entirely sure what's in it, but it's mostly iron and nickel, they think. So basically if you just imagine an absolutely giant amount of metal rather than digging it out of the ground. But this is bad news for Twiggy Forest and Gina, they're both heavily into iron ore. What if the world gets flooded with cheap iron ore from an asteroid?

That's why Twiggy Forest's building a giant magnet somewhere in the Pilbara, isn't it? It's absolutely enormous. It doesn't sound like a very glamorous set of metal. Like, I was thinking you were going to say it was like lithium. And also things like beryllium, which actually can solve all the world's problems. Or, you know, like those obscure Einsteinium. The thing I like about this mission too, and I'm reading this from earth.com, is that Nest has come up with all of these supposed scientific objectives.

Like, if 16 psyche is indeed the exposed core of an early planet, that would help us understand how planets form. Yes. Work out how old it is. Investigate the topography. study the elemental composition and then mine the fuck out of it. I think that's basically the own. But what would you do with all that iron? I mean, build more space bar.

Build more rifle towers. Everyone can have their own rifle tower with that much iron, couldn't we? Well, a hundred and twenty-four kilometre sphere of this. Of iron? I mean, that's absolutely massive. That is quite a lot. I presume that the only fair way to do it would be if we just all get a share. You think that's what they'll do.

They'll just share it out. They'll go, okay, everyone on planet Earth gets an equal share. this. Yeah, because that's the way humans always share spores. Like, if you're out walking in the woods or something like that with your friends, yes. You find a $10 note, the only fair thing to do is to split it up. Yeah, no, that is true.

That is how it works. But I feel like if you're out walking in the woods and you found a 124 kilometre sphere of iron and nickel, you probably wouldn't split it up evenly. You'd murder your other friends. You would actually murder, yeah. The hope here is to reach it in, I don't know, 2026 or something. How do you get the metal back? Is this literally the plot line of deep impact where they send miners up into space?

I mean, there have been different valuations. There's another valuation that's 10,000 quintillion. I did economics, Dom. I can tell you a little bit about this. Price is governed by supply and demand, right? First of all, the supply is going to go through the roof, which will place downward pressure on prices. So no one will want iron because we all have our own little bit of iron.

And there'll be no demand for iron because there'll be fucking iron. Everywhere. At least everyone who takes iron tablets will be able to get them cheaper. EconomicTimes.com says if the asteroid is divided equally, everyone becomes a billionaire. Yep, that's how it all totally work. Well, look, I'm wondering whether the chaser should get involved in this enterprise. I would have thought we'd be the natural partners. That's how you truly make a loss-making exercise.

I don't know how you turn a $10 trillion nest egg into a deficit. Yeah. But we'll find a way. I think we'd find a way. Probably by launching some sort of publication. I mean, imagine how big the publication would be that we could produce with that amount of money. Yes.

We'd probably wrap the entire earth in Chaucer newspapers from space. We could go back into print. That's the only way we could find going back. By the way, if you think we should go back into print and you have vast amounts of money that you want us to burn to do that. Just email a podcast at chaser.com. Because we'd love to bring the newspaper back. Just that it's very expensive and we don't have the money to lose anymore.

But the Chaser is in print, Dom, because we print a vast number of. of Chaser annuals each year. Yeah. And it's going to press today. Oh, that's fantastic. I love the Chase Manual, but it's the newsprint. We did, I mean, you and I did most of the way up.

We did a newsprint edition last year. That was so much fun. You know that that's how we remember it. But I talked to John Delmenico a few months ago because I thought, oh, maybe we should bring back the newspaper. Yeah, because he was in the office at the time when I finished the 100th edition last year. And he said, Charles, you actually said to me at the time, you finished that, to remind you to never go into print because he said you knew enough about yourself that you knew that you would get enthusiastic about it,

that actually at the time you were incredibly distraught about how much effort the whole thing had taken. Yeah, but that's because you always try and do it on top of 600 other jobs. If someone wants to pay us properly, to run a newspaper as a close to full-time endeavour, we'll probably probably do the podcast as well. You know who could afford to do that. Who? NASA. NASA good. That's good.

More in a moment about this extraordinary asteroid. The Chaser report. More news. Less often. Yeah, or the Murdox. They could fund us to do print. But are the Murdox interested in print? It would be tough too because what we write about if we weren't making fun of the Murdox.

But yeah, look, I'm just putting it out there. If anyone has, how many millions of dollars would we need a quintillion dollars to go back into print? Yeah, just one quintillion. Because you were there all weekend working on the layout. I came in and did a bunch of it. But you did the vast majority of it. And it was. It was a miserable backbreaking work, almost as bad as mine an astro.

But I remember it is really fun. I remember it as very enjoyable. It's just that at the time, I told a junior employee remind me that I hated this. It's amazing the human capacity to block out the sort of... The dull aspect of trying to make all the text fit on a page. Because what I want to do is I want to actually launch a shot newspaper, which is our sister site, which is more serious. And have the chaser, like at the back of that. It could be double-sided.

Like, I think that would work. Because we used to have back pages and you just have the shot stuff in the... I don't have the satire on the front cover, don't you? I don't know. We're doing a business meeting on the podcast now. Well, I think the thing is, because the shot is so much more successful than the Chaser now. Like, it is embarrassing.

The shot has twice as many numbers as the Chaser at every turn. Because angry people share the articles. And it's because it's really high-quality content. I think we've gone down the wrong part. I know. Well, I think part of it is that the Chaser website is geared towards. really short form ADHD content that takes about five seconds to consume. And that's not the way the world is shifting.

Like, actually, if you're that sort of person, you don't read anymore. Oh, you're post-reading. I see. You go into the TikTok. Yeah. So either we've got to sort of develop a bit of cleavage and get into the TikTok or go longer form satire. That's my thinking. Lots of good ideas there for how we're going to spend this asteroid money, Charles.

Well, what would you personally, if you had, what was it, seven, quintillion. It was once thought to be 700 quintillion, by the way, that was. 10 quintillion to the current... 10 quintillion dollars. If you had 10 quintillion dollars... I think there might be some gold in there, too, by the way. What would I do?

Yeah. I would buy every single thing that Elon Musk has, and I would just shut it down in a very stupid and clumsy way. Or I'd just bring in new management that fucked it up. I'm just trying to think of how to make him feel the pain that he's caused me before he did to Twitter. I would buy Tesla, and I would work out how to make it run. not on petrol, on coal.

So you don't have a coal burner in it that basically did giant emissions. You'd immediately become evil then, Dom is what you're saying. It'd be worth it. Because Elon Musk, I didn't realize how awful he was until he bought Twitter and his crazy views about the, as he calls it, the woke mine virus came out and basically Twitter became a cesspit.

So that would be quite fun. Space X, how would we ruin SpaceX? I'm imagining, rather than the spacecraft, actually being, you know, amazing cutting edge spacecraft. We make rides. They're just rides at Disney that go up on an arm about five metres off the earth

and then settle back down again. And you name them all after Elon's children. So that would be quite fun. And the boring company, I just leave that exactly the same as you can't get any more ridiculous than that. I found out this fascinating thing about, you know how SpaceX is launching all those satellites that you can now, like Starlink.

Darling, yeah. So I went up to the Dane Tree, bleakful time in the Dane Tree, except the sort of camping ground that we were staying at in their kitchen had access to Wi-Fi. Oh, dear. So it completely ruined my holiday because we just spent the whole time

gathered around the kitchen. On devices. On the Wi-TRA. You're serious. You really did. Well, it meant that you weren't actually out of contact. Like, for the first couple of days, I didn't realize they had Wi-Fi.

And I just felt every stress in my body just evaporating. That's so good. The moment I found out there was Wi-Fi, it was just like, oh, well, I better find out about that. But the thing I found out about Starling is the carbon footprint of every bit that is delivered, using Starlink, is 30 times the carbon footprint. By cables?

Yeah, by cables. Well, you'd think so, given the amount of rocket fuel that was used to put thousands of satellites up there. Yes. And the thing is, as listeners would know, we talked to that French guy, you weren't there, but we interviewed this French guy who talked about the carbon footprint of the cloud

and stuff like that. And he said it's a real problem. Like, we think of the internet as not physical, but it's actually incredibly damaging to the environment. And Elon Musk's little satellite fucking network, makes it 30 times worse. Yeah, we should run that on coal as well. No, it's true.

It is terrible. It's actually the amount of power that's being used for data centres now is absolutely shocking. I mean, the Bitcoin mining is the worst thing and that's also something Elon's into. Gosh, this has been a wide-ranging conversation. But no.

But what else would you buy with, like, I think you're down to about... You're literally at a rounding error. You're basically at about $100 billion. Which is nothing. I would buy almost everybody's land, starting with the boomers. I just buy all the...

the land. You'd become like the royal family. And I'd buy the forests and just sort of leave them. And I would work out who the biggest polluters were in the world. And I would bulldoze their houses and build trees on them. I think that would be, wouldn't that be enormously enjoyable? So Al Gore was on the radio over the weekend. Do people still paying attention to Al Gore?

How quaint. I know. It was very nice. He was on the New Yorker podcast. Of course he was. The really fascinating thing about what he was saying is, so all the models until now have had some sort of assumption that if you cut off coal and gas and petrol, that basically you'd still have rising temperatures.

The sort of working rule of thumb has been, and we're going to have this fucking lag. Yeah, because we've sort of got all this locked in carbon that's... Yeah, you know how they took sulphide out of the... Yeah, we talked about that in the podcast a few months ago. I learned so much from each other. And it sort of, and what it did is it immediately increased the average temperature by about 0.5% Yes. Across the globe, it's a complete disaster.

But that's made them readjust their models, and they've actually discovered that if you cut off all the carbon emissions from fossil fuels now, the temperature of the planet would just stop rising. Oh. It would be almost instantaneous. Literally within a couple of months, boom, it would stop rising. And then you'd have to start the process of sort of reversing your problems.

I mean, that's a great prediction, Charles. Yeah. Because there's no way that's going to be tested. You can say you'll stop the carbon production. now and the temperature would drop by 20 degrees and we'd have another ice age. We'll never find out. There's not a chance. No one's going to do a single thing to make this happen.

Hear me out, though, because if you've got 10 quintillion dollars... Oh, hello. I'm thinking revolution on the streets. Like, instead of having to get shitty little stickers and homemade placards, you'd be able to properly fund a revolution. Well, you wouldn't even need to do that. You'd be able to get proper bayonets and guillotines and... I know that's what you want to do, Charles.

I know you enjoy that. Destroy the Anseon regime. Why couldn't you just can't you just can't it? They're all public companies. Can't you just buy them all? Guess who the worst fossil fuel emitter in Australia is according to the government ratings that are linked to the RET? It's AGL.

AGL. Yeah, that's why didn't, isn't that why he wanted to buy it and shut it down? That is why he bought it, right? And now it's the worst emitter. It still is. Because I was thinking, oh, you know, must have shifted in the last couple of years because I was looking at these figures that were like 2019, and they released the 2022 figures just recently.

Still, ADL. Wow. Their business is running power stations that have coal-fired. Like, you expect them to be up there. Anyway, Charles, the important point is that this asteroid could solve all the world's problems. It could end money, basically. But do you think that would bring in a global utopia?

It would just not be like that. It would just be like that three people who happened to buy NASA shortly before this discovery was made would benefit. And nobody else would. We know that we're in a sort of post-democratic capitalist state. Well, also, Charles, if NASA succeed in reaching the asteroid, there were some forecast at say 2029. But if it's 2027, Donald Trump will be president of the United States.

And he will personally figure out some way to own the asteroid person. Yes, he will. And so... It'll be the Trump asteroid. It'll be plated in gold. And you'll be able to win a bit of it, just some very fine casinos and hotels. Yes, so Donald Trump will find a way to basically... But the fascinating thing is he'll also find a way to lose money on my own venture.

Actually, that's true. That solves the problem. He will own the asteroid. It will immediately be worth zero. And probably the Justice Department will make him pay a $250 million fine somehow, as it's probably going to happen in New York. There you go. So that's the asteroid that's going to solve, but not solve all the world's problems.

Do we have to actually turn around and do the heavy lifting to make the world better, sort of incrementally? Is that a better model? That doesn't matter. It's not going to happen. No, the whole Al Gore thing suggests that it's not so much a crisis in climate. It's actually a crisis in democracy because actually we know how to solve the climate problem. The thing that we're having trouble with is dealing with all the fucking billionaires who get in the way of it.

But Charles, you've forgotten the most important aspect of all of this, right? Just to sort of end up. To solve that problem, that very actionable problem where the results would be immediate and totally worthwhile, it would have to listen to Al Gore. Yeah. Not a chance. Our gear is from Road. We are part of the Iconiclass Network.

Catch you tomorrow. Don't forget to email podcast at chaser.com. Today, if you want to give us... I reckon we could run the newspaper again for 10 or $20 million a year. Not that much. Not that much. No.

Maybe even less. Maybe even eight or nine. Let's find out.