The Chaser Report - Zuccing Up to Facebook

Episode Date: February 6, 2022

The Winter Olympics are on and naturally the team is completely apathetic. Meanwhile Charles breaks down why Facebook's record-breaking loss marks doom for our company. Plus Gabbi has written a song which has (according to us) already been awarded first place in 2022's Hottest 100. 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 Monday the 7th of February. I'm Charles Firth and with me are Dom Knight and Gabby Bolt. Hello! Hello and happy Winter Olympic season! It's so exciting! Oh, when do they kick off? It started last week. What?

The opening ceremony was Friday night, but not only that, the curling began days early for some reason that makes no sense. Maybe they don't think it's a legitimate enough sport to fit into the actual Winter Olympics. So, you can be in it, but just, like, just do it before the opening ceremony. Look, I'm not a particularly sports-invested person, but I do like to think that I'm aware when, like, the biggest sporting event of four years is happening. And also, didn't we just do this? Didn't the Olympics just happen?

I'm they supposed to happen every four years? Every two. But, yeah, no, this is bizarre. We had Tokyo last year, we kind of all paid attention to that, and now trying to sell us on another Olympics in Asia that's in Beijing rather than Tokyo. That's like a few months later, it's just hard to feel invested in this. This is very odd, right, because we're boycotting this Olympics, right, don't we? Diplomatically.

Yeah, we're diplomatically boycotting, which means our athletes still get to go, but the foreign minister and people like that don't get it to go. Wait, so it's a boycott without actually... That no one notices. It's like if a boycott happens in a diplomatic circles, does it happen at all? The boycott is to raise awareness about the Uyghurs, isn't it? Well, they've done a great job. I knew it was happening in the first place.

Sure did. Instead of our diplomats, going to China and saying, like giving speeches outside the front of the venues, saying we really think that what's happening with the Uyghurs is terrible. They've just decided to not turn up and not talk about it. So, brilliant job. Awareness raised. Yeah. And so it's on at the moment.

Where is it being brook? It's in Beijing. So Beijing is the first city to host the summer and the winter Olympics. And they've done it by virtue of huge amounts of snowmaking. So it's an environmental disaster. But who's broadcasting? Can we watch it? It's on Channel 7.

Oh, no wonder I didn't hear about it. I've been pulling a little boycott of my own, actually. And it's just Channel 7. Anything they broadcast, I go, oh. I'm making a statement. Did they hear that the snow was white and they thought, oh yeah, that's our brand. Yeah, it was really odd that they got Pauline Hansen to anchor the coverage. But no, it's the deal.

Channel 7 have this unfortunate deal whereby to get the ratings from the Summer Olympics, which were massive, they've also got to broadcast winter and just have two weeks of nobody watching their station. So we can't really give a recap of the weekend's highlights because no one's been paying any attention to this at all. And when's the luge? Because that's the only, like, I will watch the luge. And the skeleton. Yeah, the things where people might actually die. Is that the one where you, like, just yeat yourself down a tube?

Yeah, the skeletons head first. Oh, fuck no. Absolutely not. You would be too young to remember this, Gabby. But I reckon when we're about 20, so you would have been zero. I'm 25, so I would have, wait, no, when you were 20, that's not how maths works. Right, yeah, I would have been a thought. Zero, yeah.

Somebody died in the, was it the luge? Remember when somebody died? And it was the most exciting thing that's ever happened in the Winter Olympics. I've got to be honest, the only thing I remember from the whole Winter Olympics is Stephen Bradbury. Yes. Surely the most memorable... No, I'm sorry, I wasn't alive for this either,

but surely the most memorable thing that's ever happened at the fucking Winter Olympics was either Eddie the Eagle or Nancy Garrigan. Wasn't the whole Tonya Harding thing at the Olympics? But also the Jamaican bobs, it slid to... Oh, cool running. No, I'm aware of that one. Yeah. That's not what they called.

That was a movie. That was a movie. Yeah, no, I know. Well, Disney gave me all the education on them. that sporting feet, didn't it? Like most things. The premise of the Chase Report, as I understand it, is that people listen to us on a Monday morning and get it just a quick little hit of what happened in the news and our take

on it. And so they don't have to listen to other things. And I think we've saved you a lot of time by pointing out that you just don't need to worry about the Winter Olympics at all for the next two weeks. Are we going to cover it every day? No. Absolutely. Why would we?

Unless Paul Ian Hanson fronts a rock climbing segment, apart from that, I think we're fine. actually sending her hurdling down the bobsled slope probably without any vehicle, just chucking down it. Now there's an Olympic coverage. I think we should. Let's send Zander to the Olympics and he can cover it. And he can also cover the Uyghurs. We'll send him to a prison camp and see how that works. I mean, to be fair, Charles, that will be more coverage than most Australian media.

Giving to the part of the Uyghers, let's face it. Coming up on the show, I'm going to talk about Facebook. Last week it lost over three. $300 billion in market. Billion? I thought it was million. A billion. Fuck.

That'll teach and to sponsor the Winter Olympics. We'll be looking at that. And we'll have a pile on on Gabby in the last segment. One day that'll be a positive thing. But first of all, let's go to Rebecca Day and Emuno in the Chaser Newsroom. Barnaby Joyce has been caught in an embarrassing

situation after it was revealed a text message he sent to a copy. was not a lewd sext, but instead an accurate assessment of the Prime Minister. Mr Joyce offered to resign over the text, but Scott Morrison refused to accept the resignation, saying that sending a non-sexually explicit text was totally out of character for Mr Joyce and that he was sure it would never happen again. The Labour Party is in the box seat to win the upcoming federal election on the back of a massive swing to labour, mainly from disgruntled members of the federal cabinet.

The polling shows the Prime Minister's approval ratings are particularly low amongst people who have ever met him. Scott Morrison has warned that prices of petrol, bread and milk will go up at the next election if Labour is elected. The Prime Minister said he had no idea what the price of anything was at the moment, but he was sure it'd go up if he wasn't keeping such a keen eye on it. That's the latest Chaser News you can't trust. Please subscribe to us on your podcast app of choice.

I'm Rebecca Dayunamuno. Now, last Thursday, Facebook released their quarterly results. And in the aftermath of that, they lost over $300 billion worth of market value. That is absolutely fucked. Which is the world record. It's actually more than 460 of the top 515. companies in America are worth. So is that like, did Wall Street guys lose their minds at that?

Or is it more the NFT bros? Well, I think everyone, everyone in the world lost money. Because everyone, you know, is somehow tied to Facebook. Could this be related, Charles, to the increasing realisation from absolutely everybody that Facebook is a horrible company run by monsters? Yes, yes, probably. Although I am going to get to that because I actually think that everyone should support Facebook. But I just want to run through some of the interesting little stats that arose out of this crash.

Way to suck up, Charles. The one thing that was interesting is that Mark Zuckerberg might have actually seen this coming because he actually sold a billion dollars worth of stock in the lead-up to this crash. Hang on, hang on. Is it that he saw it coming or is it that by dumping a massive amount of his personal shares, everyone went, oh no, we've got to sell Facebook. Zuckerberg knows something. No, because there was actually no material changed the amount of Facebook he owns

by selling a billion dollars worth of the cheats. That's how rich he is. He went from owning 13% of the company to 13% of the company. Big Short 2, Zuckerberg Bugaloo. Yeah, plus a billion dollars in his hand. So that was good. And look, I'll run through some of the reasons why it's all been a bit of a disaster. First one was...

Sorry, aside from the fact that it's $300 billion. But the reason why is because the stock market, thought that they were going to have 1.95 billion users, right? And they fell short. They actually didn't have 1.91 billion users, right? Right. And you sort of go, oh, well, that's suddenly missing by 0.04. What's that?

And then say, that's 40 million people then miss, right? But it shows you the sort of, like, that's more than the number of users in Australia. Bit of a blip. Yeah. And the whole point is that it's actually declines. For the first time ever, Facebook now has less users than it had last quarter. Really? And this is the whole problem, right?

So, you know, the whole point about these companies is that they depend entirely on growth. And if you stop growing, you suddenly, like very quickly become like MySpace or Friendster. So I think, you know, this is the beginning of the end. I have waited 12 years for this. And I read this really interesting analysis which said that basically Facebook now owns old people, like old people still log in to it. Yep. And maybe a few middle-aged people were using Instagram.

A lot of parents. But essentially, it is the Alan Jones slash 2GB slash Sky News. Yes. Of the world. And TikTok is where it's at, man. You could have asked any person under 30 and gotten that exact same response rather than researched it. Because it's, yeah, that's exactly right. I love that this has happened because what Facebook did was they completely uncompetitively bought

Instagram and WhatsApp, trying to basically own every popular social network and they're still out of date and finish. I don't know if you can put WhatsApp in popular networks, but uh... It is. It's got... WhatsApp is one of the biggest in the world. But, but, but...

It's because of all the drug dealing. But we should not gloat. We should not be happy about this. We want to support Facebook. That's my business. Because, no, because our company, the Chaser, has been using Facebook advertising

for the last few years. Oh, fuck. And we depend almost entirely on it. Oh, shit. To sell tickets to our live shows, which is like... The only thing that gives us revenue. Yes, exactly. Yeah, fuck.

And it is amazing. Like, up until about six months ago, you could literally tell Facebook to just track users around the web and just bug them until they buy a ticket, right? And it costs a bit of money. Like, you spend a bit of money. You say, oh, I'm prepared to pay. You spend money to make money, as they say?

You say to Facebook, I'll pay you $10 to follow this person around the web and force them into buying a ticket to the Chaser Show. And then it works. It totally works. And then what happened was Apple went, oh, that's a bit creepy. We're going to turn off the ability to be able to do that. To be able to do that. So anyone who has an iPhone, which is basically everyone in Australia, now it doesn't get tracked.

It's made it almost impossible to sell tickets. So you're going to go broke. You're disappointed that you're no longer allowed to cyber. stock people and hassling them into buying tickets to your live shows. Yes. So this is my message to you, to everyone out there, is if you own an iPhone, go to the privacy settings, turn them all off, and let Facebook track you so that I can tell you some fucking tickets.

Well, it's over. It's clearly over. It's finished. Facebook is finished and alongside them the chaser. But I want to welcome our wonderful new overlords TikTok, by which I mean the Chinese government. as creepy as Mark Zuckerberg is and now we get the warm embrace of Xi Jinping monitoring everything

that young people do forever. What a brave new world. Dom, I've been on TikTok and there is nothing to monitor like my son has TikTok and you just go, this is just a piece of fucking shit. Actually, that's a good point. Like, what I'm assuming, like the Chinese government set up this new social network

to just try and surveil everyone and take over kids and it worked, but all they saw was pictures of kids doing dancing. You guys, I've got to be honest with you, you have a completely unnuanced take on the fucking horrific shit that happens on that app. Oh, well, what happened? Because the thing is, that is exactly how it works. It tracks your every movement and every video you like

gives it information of, oh, if they like this one, they might like this one. All it's told me is that I must be fucked in the head with the videos that I'm getting. I got people, I got people like Somebody was just making mashed potato It was just making mashed potato And I was like, yeah, I guess I do like this

Incredibly boring Yeah, they were like you like snacks, swear words So wait a minute, did TikTok sell ads? Yeah Oh fantastic Okay, well that's great And if you act like a wholesome dad You'll go off on the app

People will just think you're a really wholesome dude Dads go off on the ad Dads go off on the app As to quote the contact Tracy's They totally go off on the app For many years the Chinese government has basically tried to convince people within China that people in the West were just decadent idiots

who did nothing useful and just wasted all their time. And TikTok finally, it's proven that they're absolutely right. Completely correct. But I will say, you wouldn't have me working for you without the fucking thing. So, you know, no more song parodies. Oh, what a travesty. So Facebook have now changed their name to META. Hate it.

To try and ride the next wave. Because the idea is so TikTok, TikTok is now. But you've got to look to where the puck is going, right? And it's not going to be TikTok. That's just like sharing a bit of it. Who cares? It's about the metaverse, right? It's not, who is it?

And it is about the metaverse. It's totally about the metaverse. And this is why, you know, like Microsoft bought the makers that make Fortnite, like the games company that actually designed the Fortnite game. And that's because Fortnite is the next social network. It's the place where you hang out in. You can buy skins. they put on events.

They put on music events. You could go and do an event in Fortnite universe if you had like a billion dollars in marketing budget to spend. I can't wait. I've got to say the more time I spend in this real world, the more attractive just putting on a headset and exiting looks. Like there's no COVID in the metaverse, right? This is a, no, this is nightmare fuel.

This is a black mirror episode. This is several black mirror episodes. I don't really care because it's going to happen anyway. Whether you like it or not, Gabby. There's joy in being a flawed person. That's the thing. You're just talking like an old TikTok user rather than a new photo.

There's a generation beneath you, Gabi, and they're coming through, and they're the future. Or are they just fake babies that we make up on the app? So Facebook wants to be the company that brings you this whole metaverse. But the thing is, Facebook was started as a sort of photo sharing app where it was like, rate these women. Yeah. Yeah, hold on not at the Harvard school. And then it turned into just a very large photo sharing site, right?

The metaverse is based on basically being a bit like, creating an environment like a party. And do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to be able to come up with a good party vibe? All I am saying is that this wouldn't be happening if Andrew Garfield's character from the social network got control of baseball. I don't remember his name because he's not useful to the story. But I just, anyone do Andrew Garfield portray us I'm with? the metaverse you can live out your dreams you can make life however you want it to be i mean imagine

in the meta in the metaverse you could have bathist but good no but here's the thing it's like playing sims with cheats because you can just there's no sat at everyone is just going to be i mean we're already a bit fucking depressed but everyone is just going to be constantly depressed probably pissing in a bottle somewhere and no one's going to be talking about it because if you can just achieve everything you want straight away. There's no success anymore. Nobody can enjoy anything. It's communist. It's communism.

It's literally communism. Oh, well, maybe TikTok is the right company to do it. And I didn't get paid by that for the CCP. They only pay me for my song parodies. The Chaser Report. Less news. Less often. So before we go, Gabby, I hate you.

News to me. I didn't know. You ruined my weekend. Why? What do I do? All weekend, I've had that bloody earworm that you released on Thursday in my ear. Yeah. Press club.

I know, right. Like, I think the thing is... We should explain what are you. Yeah, so, you know, the biggest thing of last week happened, didn't it? The biggest news anyone can think of, the national press club address. Wow, it's just... Quiet week. Fucking worldwide news.

But Scott Morrison, where he managed to avoid every single question. Yeah, and I guess at this point, I guess no one's surprised. He's very good at avoiding questions, but I think I just let my love of a pun go far too far. And I just, every time I heard the words press club all week, I just thought, it sounds like S Club, and then it was like a light bulb went off,

and no one could stop me. I probably should go through some sort of editorial process, but not this time. If you haven't seen it, you should go to the Chase's social channels because it is, I mean... It's chaos. It's very stupid. I think you released it saying,

this is the dumbest video we've ever done. I think that's definitely true. But there's, I love your dance moves. I think you and Alexa, really, like, the way you sort of do that. We said, what is the two most niche things that we can blend together and hope that there's an audience for? And we went politically engaged S Club 7 fans. I feel it's really hitting the targets.

I mean, that's all of us. Isn't that all of us? But anyway, yeah, we made it and it went off. Well, we thought we should. One at your triple J, Hotus 100, whatever you want. We thought we should. subject all the podcast listeners. Great.

To the same misery that I had all weekend. Yeah, this is going to be great in the reviews, isn't it? So I think we should probably do a bit of a listener advisory at this moment, which is we're going to play the clip. If you've got kids in the car, block there ears. Oh, yeah, yeah, because it's got a few swear words, like shifty cunt or whatever. Yeah, oh, well, great. Yeah, but also don't listen to it because you'll be humming it for the rest of your life.

It's horrible. It's actually, there's a subliminal message lying within it. I don't know what it is yet. I'll come up with that afterwards. Let's listen to it. Please join me in welcoming Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Well, thank you very much. It's great to be back here at the national press club.

There's no party like press club. Party. We're journalists holding them accountable. Call press club. There's no party like press club. Party. Finally, press club day Ask about rat testing if we have to pay

Gonna ask about the N-D-I-N-D-I-N-S And that whole bushfire mess But I can see He won't answer me He won't answer me Either I don't know Who you're referring to

Um Well, I just reject the premise of the question Well, I'll just answer our Well, he made my comment Well, I've already answered the first question on several occasions. Well, I don't know, but I obviously don't agree with it. The Australians of the winners, thanks very much. What is the price of bread?

Now, I'm not going to pretend to you that I go out each day and I buy a life of bread and I buy a liter of milk. I'm not going to pretend to you that I do that. do that. Well, there you go. Yeah. The rest of your day is now ruined. Congratulations, Gabby.

Who would have thought S Club 7 and the National Press Club could be blended seamlessly together? I hope that you get to perform that on the stage in Canberra. They're already talking about it as a hottest 100 for next year. Oh, yeah, look, it'd be great. Well, if the Wiggles can get number one. I mean, anything's possible, isn't it? All I know is that the words press club aren't words anymore.

Our gear is from road microphones. of the ACAST Creator Network. Catch you tomorrow. And our intellectual property is stolen from S Club 7. I don't think they'll be coming back for it.