The Chaser Report - Welcome To The Past... Past... Past

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Often when we make episodes of this podcast, we use long-winded extended metaphors to convey a satirical point about a topical story. Let's just assume this episode is one of those cases, and that the metaphor will be explained in a future episode. ---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] 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. Charles, I've discovered something spectacular over the course of the weekend. And I don't think you're aware of it, but I'm going to change your life today. Oh, wow. Did you know that all over Sydney, in basically every street in the whole inner city, there are bikes you can unlock and ride around.

And guess what? They go up hills with a battery. So you don't have to work. I used one for the first time this morning. Absolutely life-changing stuff. Okay. So this is obviously, is this a repeat of a 2017 show that we did, dole of what's going on? I've never used an e-bike of any kind until today.

Are you the type of person who, however, did sort of write to the Herald admonishing the existence of them when they first appeared back in 2019? team? No, that was our radio show where we were constantly complaining about how they were absolutely everywhere all the time. Yes. Including in various lakes and ports. Well, let's hear about, instead of a welcome to the future, this is Welcome to the Past with Dominic Knight. So Charles, have you ever had the chance to try one of these things? It's pretty amazing. You use your phone to unlock them and get, well, so they've actually got, they've actually got a helmet attached to them. I had to use one because I

was running late for an appointment very early this morning and there was no public transport. But there was a bike right there, and I had the app for already on my phone. I thought, well, I probably won't die. And I didn't. Okay, so I'm just struggling. Like, you are literally the last person in Australia to try an e-bike. They literally might actually be. Like, this is, like, like, I know that there's sort of, like,

leaving a bit of time for analysis to sort of come through. And so you don't, you know, because we hate the hot take here at. Oh, we never do. We always, like, a considered. So the thing, but I think this is like, what else do you want to, like, fluoride is good for water? Oh, I don't think RFK Jr's on board with that. Okay. Let's not even get into vaccines because he's got some thoughts on that.

That there might be something in steam to power engines. Apparently we shouldn't actually defecate in our water supply. That seems like a newfangle right here, but no, I can't quite work out why I haven't used them so far. And I also can't quite work out how they're so good. Like, it really was very good. Right. But like, you just pedal. Yeah.

You just pedal up a hill. And it just, it takes over seamlessly. Yeah. Why don't nobody alert me to this product statistic? Well, I wasn't there any signal like a whole lot of people riding around on them upheels. Well, I do recall occasionally after we've recorded podcasts, you've gotten on them. Yeah. Well, I'll never see him again.

But also, Charles, didn't you come off one of those things in? badly injure yourself. Yeah, I shattered my elbow. Yeah, and I feel like that was probably subconsciously the point where I went, yep, not for me. Not for you. Not going to do that. But now, hey, what's an elbow compared to battery powered excitement?

Okay, so where does this episode go, Dom? Like, where does it go? Where does this episode go from here? Like, are we wanting to just sort of maybe make a sharp left turn and, you know, I think this 15 minutes in this topic. I just wanted to update you and our listeners on what I did today over the course of the weekend. And I just, I guess the broader question is, as someone who's used these things, a handful of times more than I have, probably thousands of times.

Well, I own an e-bike. You own, you own, your own e-bike? Yeah. Right. I'm just talking about, are we actually at the point where it's actually not bad? Like, as in cycling infrastructure is actually quite good. We've got bike lanes. This is the broader point here.

Okay, so every time I hop on my bike, I think it's a scam. This is, I reckon, it is, like there's two scams going currently in the world. One is called SpaceX IPO, which we really should talk about. I think we'll talk about on tomorrow's Ebb. Yeah. Because I think that that's the greatest heist on Earth. Mm-hmm. But the other scam is bike riding in Sydney, or indeed in Melbourne, or indeed in Brisbane, or indeed in Adelaide.

You've fortunately toured to all these places recently. Yeah, and the reason is, because it's. point to point. Like, there's no other form of public, there's no other form of transport at all where you can go, oh, I'm going out to the Ivy tonight, for example, not that I am and not that I ever would, but say I was going to, or, you know, I'm going out to some, I'm going to the opera, say, right? Oh, that's made it much more relatable. Okay, no, I mean, which was a cool night club about 15 years ago.

I'm going to the ballet. Right. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. And then you just leave your home, hop on a bike. and then you go right up to the entrance, like literally outside the door of the IV or, you know, literally to those steps of the opera house

or wherever it is you want to go. And then you just find a pole and you can just lock your bike there and you just walk in. So I have literally been to posh restaurants in the city where, you know, I've left, you know, 20 minutes, you know, ride in, beautiful, you know, it's always beautiful, you know, stunning skyline and everything like that. And you just literally park outside the door.

The bounces go, oh, yeah, I go, in you go. Because you can't do that with anything else. You can't do that with anything. Car parking is, if you can forget car parking anywhere in any CBD. Yes. It's not only is it incredibly expensive, but I mean, for very good reasons, which I brought me indoors. It made it very hard.

It should be a pedestrian area. Yeah, or public transport. Everything is a one-way street. Everything is complicated. And then when you get to the car park, it's $60 an hour or something like. But in addition to that, since I really started e-biking, which would have been about 2018, 2019, right, since then, every single regular bike route that I take, like, has been built out with actual proper cycling infrastructure.

Like, literally, it feels like they're monitoring my own cycling habits and going, oh, well, hang on, Charles often uses that street, Murray Street, isn't like that. With the apps, though, they are. Let's build a bike lane in that thing. So literally, I've gone from having to ride through the roads for half my trip to work to literally just being on a bike route the whole way. Yeah, on a bike path. And this is the thing that the journey I had to make earlier this morning.

I hadn't thought of using an e-bike. One was just there. Yeah. I went, oh, that entire thing is a bike path. And then I thought ahead and the one, actually, this entire 20-minute walk that I was about to do, there's a bike path the entire way. Yes. So I figured out how the e-bike worked, unlocked it with the app, which I already had,

which, by the way, was the Uber app, not the bike app. Oh, really? Oh, wow. I didn't have any bike apps on my phone because I've never used them. Right. I went, oh, okay, I've already got that app and my payment stuff set up already. How bizarre. So you can use Uber to catch an e-bike?

You can. And it just went from there. And then I just... And does it come with like a smelly man? Bizarrely rapidly. Well, I didn't have random delays, and I had to make a little bit. other deliveries before I got to. Does D.D. Does D.D. have cheaper bikes?

It probably does. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of brands and that's, it's very confusing. Have you tried Hello Ride yet? No. They should have a lot of different. They should actually surely all speak to each other's app, but they don't. No, they don't. Hello Ride is hilarious. It's the sort of Chinese, I think they're probably all Chinese by now, but it's the Pounder one. But I think it's only available in, in Melbourne as well, but it's predominantly

Sydney. And the seats are really soft. Oh. And it's just a genuinely more comfort. Yeah, I noticed about four different brands around today. Yeah. Yeah. So, so no, and then there I was, I left the bike there. And by the time I needed to leave work, it was still there. Yes. Which was really very convenient. I mean, it was a public holiday. No one had taken it. But yeah, it was actually really good. And also what it allows you to do, because yesterday I decided foolishly to go for a walk. It was a beautiful No, that's outdated. Sydney winter day, right? So we went for this long walk, and then I realized, oh, fuck, I don't want to walk home.

Too far. And there's just a line bike there and just hopped on the line boat, went home. Yeah, that's, you just ran out of patience. And the thing I like most about it, I think, Charles, actually reflecting on it. Yeah. And I haven't looked at the stats on my kind of fitness tracker yet. But I feel like it gives the illusion of exercise. Yes, without.

While actually doing any, because I have. And you watch counts it as cycling, right? Yeah. But it's not cycling. Because I remember I got a bike and I used it for several months. Yeah. And basically you saw, you see a really big hill of the sort, which there are quite a lot around. And your heart kind of sinks a little bit.

There's a really big hill in between here and slow the way. It's flattened out Sydney. Because Sydney's, the whole problem with Sydney is it was always hilly. It is hilly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, it's kind of like the e-bike goes, right, let me get stuck into this.

Yeah. And so you're not getting any of the energy. So I'm assuming it's considerably worse exercise-wise than walking. But you might actually use it. No, because my, like, I was getting a bit suboptimal. Yeah. And we figured out that the reason why it was sub-optimal was because I was riding my bike everywhere, my e-bike everywhere.

And so I literally wasn't getting any exercise done. And the prescription was, get off your bike and start walking to places. That's so funny. Yeah. E-bikes are now, like, bad for your health. So which is at the point of which I'm probably going to embrace them. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. So I feel like the other advantage of e-bikes that nobody really discusses

is the ability to whisk past old people at high speed. Oh, and scare them. And scare them. Yeah, I actually did that today. Yeah, oh, right. Yeah, yeah. And young, lovely people, parents with strollers. Yes, yes.

That's like basically me from about six months ago. My child grew out of the stroller. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's genuinely harrowing. And I wished I had a loud bell to ring at them or something. Because before you ride a bike, there's two type of people on the road. There's normal people and there's the cunts who ride bikes. And then once you start riding a bike, there's two types of people.

There's normal people who ride bikes and the cunts who don't ride bikes. So now the people I hate, having now just done this e-bike thing a couple of times today, is the people with fast, really fast air bikes. Mainly the delivery drivers. Oh, yeah, no. They're going at stupid speed levels. We've got to outlaw them. Yeah, they look like they're having far too much fun.

Yeah, they're going. They were overlapping me. Yeah. And they don't even press the pedals. They're completely illegal. They're dead motorbikes. Yeah, yeah. Basically, well, the government in New South Wales has actually recently banned.

Yeah, yeah. No, I heard that. And then I was looking up the app, and there are actually areas where the, the, the, the, bike will actually slow down based on the GPS. Have you seen this? Yes. You already knew about that? It's only been happening for like the last, like this whole episode is like this is something

that everyone listening knows about. You know what the downside is Charles? Let me lay this on you. If you parked in the wrong place, the app gets very annoyed. I was parked it. I parked it on several occasions today next to other e-bikes that were sitting there. Yeah. And it just said, no, you can't park there.

And I was like, it's next to another bike. And it was like, no, you can't do it. Move it to another spot. That's annoying. We've got to go back to the Halcyon days where you could park your bike in a river and the active care. So, I mean, what we're with injured is just put a massive pile of them outside, you know, the town hall, making a giant pyramid of them.

Yeah. I don't know they've changed the rules and let this park anywhere. I'm on team e-bike. Is this the point where we whinge about kids with hot-ed-up e-bikes doing 60 and threatening people? I just think like it's the latest moral panic. Yeah. But it is true because I ride across the harbour bridge. quite often. Oh, that would be really fun.

And, yeah, and there's a bike line. I used to do that with my legs. Can you imagine what idiot? I was using my own muscles? Oh, and it is, it's beautiful. But although actually one of the apps, they don't power it. Like, if you get up there and you start riding along the thing, then cuts out, it's so fucking painful. Maybe you can't go.

No, you deactivates and then I'll short. Yeah, I think that's probably right. Because there are boundaries. That's sort of all geo-fenced. Yeah, because you're going back to the 1950s. All right, can you tell me, please email a podcast at chaser.com. Tell me if you're aware of this amazing new e-bike fat. No, but where's the good place to ride?

Where are the good rides? Where are the best rides in Sydney? Like, the bridge. I love the bridge. The bridge is one of the great rides out since I had a BMX. And there's now a ramp on the north shore side leading you off the bridge so you don't have to get out and walk down the stairs. I saw a, and yet very effective ramp.

But there's a girl, I mean, I rode out to Bondi today with Missa. Yeah. On an eBay. Yeah, yeah. It's basically bike lane. the whole way to Bondi. To Bondi. Gosh, I feel like, it does feel like as though while I wasn't really paying attention

because I was in a sort of parenting bubble, these major issues have actually been resolved. I'm quite shocked by this. There must be some floor. Dom, wait until you hear about smartphones. Actually, you know what? There's another technology. I haven't tried it yet. Everyone tells me it's going to be very, very good.

Oh, yeah? It's got a weird note. It's called Bluetooth. We're part of the Iconicless network. Catch you tomorrow.