2024-05-16_The_Ultimate_Freedom_Machine
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00:00:29.900 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,
00:00:33.900 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial
00:00:37.900 | freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. And today on the podcast,
00:00:41.900 | I want to talk to you about the ultimate freedom machine.
00:00:47.400 | The ultimate freedom machine. When I use the term freedom, let me define it.
00:00:51.900 | I want to include most of the senses of freedom.
00:00:55.900 | I want to use freedom in the sense that allows you to come and go where you want to go.
00:00:59.900 | I want to use freedom in the financial sense as well because here we're continually
00:01:03.900 | talking about financial freedom. Now in my
00:01:07.900 | predominantly U.S. American audience, we have a cultural
00:01:11.900 | perception, a cultural conception that
00:01:15.900 | the ultimate freedom machine is a personal automobile.
00:01:20.900 | Perhaps you've heard of that. After all, if you think about it, having
00:01:24.900 | a car, well, you can come and go where and when you want.
00:01:28.900 | You can go pretty much wherever you want on your own schedule.
00:01:32.900 | You don't have to integrate and wait for a train. You don't have to wait for a plane. You come
00:01:36.900 | and go anytime, anyplace you want. But unfortunately,
00:01:40.900 | while this is a component of freedom,
00:01:44.900 | the personal automobile doesn't actually buy
00:01:48.900 | you freedom. On the contrary, I would say that for many people, it
00:01:52.900 | buys you financial bondage. The
00:01:56.900 | personal automobile comes with a long list of
00:02:00.900 | never-ending costs.
00:02:04.900 | Now some of them are obvious. You have a pretty substantial up-front
00:02:08.900 | purchase price. That's fairly evident. Some people take that fairly substantial
00:02:12.900 | up-front purchase price and amortize it out with a series of monthly payments,
00:02:16.900 | having car payments or lease payments. Those can
00:02:20.900 | be a significant monthly cost, but the costs don't end. If you think about
00:02:24.900 | some of the other costs of an automobile, you have things like requirements for
00:02:28.900 | having automobile insurance. And as long as
00:02:32.900 | you own a vehicle, you have to have automobile
00:02:36.900 | insurance. I found this out myself the hard way. A number of years
00:02:40.900 | ago, I left the United States and I had a car in the United States. It wasn't being driven. I parked it
00:02:44.900 | and decided, "You know what? I'll save some money. Why should I pay for insurance
00:02:48.900 | on that automobile that I'm not using? After all, it's just sitting
00:02:52.900 | there. No one's driving it. I don't need to have insurance on it." So I cancelled the insurance
00:02:56.900 | policy. Then a few months later, I received a rather
00:03:00.900 | not-so-friendly letter from the state of
00:03:04.900 | Florida informing me that my driver's license was
00:03:08.900 | cancelled because I had cancelled the insurance on a vehicle
00:03:12.900 | and I had not turned in the license plate. So word to the
00:03:16.900 | tip for you. You can, with many insurance
00:03:20.900 | companies, I would assume most, but you can, at least with some insurance companies,
00:03:24.900 | purchase a special storage automobile insurance policy, which is
00:03:28.900 | what I subsequently did. A storage policy allows you to keep the
00:03:32.900 | vehicle, keep the plate on the vehicle, but you represent to the insurance company
00:03:36.900 | that you're not going to drive the vehicle and they reduce your insurance
00:03:40.900 | rates substantially while still maintaining coverage for
00:03:44.900 | your legally-mandated insurance requirements. So keep that in mind if you're ever traveling
00:03:48.900 | or storing a vehicle. Don't cancel your insurance, even if you're not driving the vehicle
00:03:52.900 | or you'll have your license suspended, but
00:03:56.900 | you can purchase a storage policy. So the point remains that
00:04:00.900 | you purchase a vehicle and then when you have the vehicle, you
00:04:04.900 | have to pay for car insurance. Then, of course, there are obvious
00:04:08.900 | operating costs. If you operate the vehicle, you have to fill it with fuel, fill it
00:04:12.900 | with oil. There are many maintenance costs. You need to rotate the tires,
00:04:16.900 | replace the tires, change the oil. There are repair
00:04:20.900 | costs. When it breaks down, you have to continually repair it. And it's very difficult
00:04:24.900 | to find a vehicle that isn't going to fall into disrepair
00:04:28.900 | if you just let it sit. One of the biggest problems that any kind of vehicle faces,
00:04:32.900 | automobiles, recreational vehicles, boats, anything like that,
00:04:36.900 | airplanes, if a vehicle just sits, it rots.
00:04:40.900 | It's much better for a vehicle to be continually operating with fuel flowing
00:04:44.900 | through and other fluids flowing through all the rubber hoses and everything
00:04:48.900 | being continually lubricated. You don't want to just let a vehicle sit ever or it quickly
00:04:52.900 | starts to rot and fall apart. And so these are all examples of
00:04:56.900 | continual expenses that you have with an automobile. And for many people
00:05:00.900 | these expenses are far out of whack with their overall budget, with their
00:05:04.900 | overall income. And in many cases, it's the automobile
00:05:08.900 | expenses that wind up sinking you and destroy your
00:05:12.900 | chances of getting ahead. I've had a love/hate relationship with automobiles
00:05:16.900 | for a very long time myself. And I have found that
00:05:20.900 | since I purchased my first vehicle in my teen years, it's been
00:05:24.900 | pretty tough to ever get to zero vehicles. My fleet has
00:05:28.900 | gone from one to, well, I think the most I ever owned at one
00:05:32.900 | time was five. And I tell you, the closer it gets to
00:05:36.900 | one, the generally happier I am. And someday, although
00:05:40.900 | I haven't figured out how to do this with children, someday it's my ambition to be back down to zero.
00:05:44.900 | So we'll see when I'm able to accomplish that.
00:05:48.900 | But the point is simply that a vehicle, while it allows you to come
00:05:52.900 | and go where you want to some degree, you incur
00:05:56.900 | significant financial bondage to that vehicle and it can
00:06:00.900 | wind up being a significant component of your overall expenses.
00:06:04.900 | So a vehicle, a car, a personal automobile, doesn't fit the bill of the ultimate
00:06:08.900 | freedom machine, at least from a financial perspective. I would submit to you also that it doesn't fit
00:06:12.900 | the bill as the ultimate freedom machine from other contexts
00:06:16.900 | of freedom as well. For example, you're required to take care
00:06:20.900 | of the car wherever you go. You have to park it. You have to store it.
00:06:24.900 | You have to figure out how to keep it from being taken from you, quite
00:06:28.900 | literally. A number of years ago, I bought a vehicle in
00:06:32.900 | Europe and I had left Europe and I found
00:06:36.900 | a friend, a listener of the show, who was willing to store the vehicle for me and
00:06:40.900 | after a while the vehicle was stored. It was parked on a public street but the annual
00:06:44.900 | inspection sticker on the car expired because I hadn't been able to get back to Europe
00:06:48.900 | to renew it. And the police just pulled up a tow truck and trucked the car
00:06:52.900 | away and stole the car right off the street because I had not renewed the
00:06:56.900 | annual inspection sticker as the law stated. It took me
00:07:00.900 | quite a while to get it out of the police impound lot. And so you have to take care of it.
00:07:04.900 | And if you're going to come and go among countries, you have to figure out what do I do with these cars?
00:07:08.900 | How do I keep them going? How do I keep it from being taken by the police?
00:07:12.900 | If you go into a city, a lot of times you have a vehicle and you want to travel into a city
00:07:16.900 | but having a car in a city is really annoying. Where are you going to park it? You have enormous
00:07:20.900 | parking fees. You go to a nice hotel in a city
00:07:24.900 | for a convention. Well, now I've got to pay parking fees for this automobile every day
00:07:28.900 | all day and I've got to make sure that it doesn't get taken in that
00:07:32.900 | context. And then even in terms of your overall personal
00:07:36.900 | freedom, a vehicle has the benefit of giving you some isolation
00:07:40.900 | from the environment around. You're not constantly on display
00:07:44.900 | but it also comes with significant legal costs.
00:07:48.900 | One of the very few times in the United States that you can ever be forcibly
00:07:52.900 | compelled to show government identification documents is
00:07:56.900 | when you are driving a car. If you are driving a vehicle, then
00:08:00.900 | the police have a legal right to stop you and compel you with a threat
00:08:04.900 | of force to display your personal identification documents.
00:08:08.900 | That is not the same, at least in most states. Not all states are the same.
00:08:12.900 | That's not the same in any other context. And so you have to have government ID,
00:08:16.900 | you have to carry government ID, and you have to produce government ID
00:08:20.900 | upon command. Oh, and by the way, if your government ID is
00:08:24.900 | invalid or your government ID is not accurate, let's say for example
00:08:28.900 | you moved three months ago and you haven't yet updated your address,
00:08:32.900 | your home address on your government ID, that is a crime and you can be
00:08:36.900 | prosecuted for said crime. And if you live in a police state like
00:08:40.900 | the United States where you can, they're out on the roads, that's where the police
00:08:44.900 | officers are, then that's generally where you're going to have contact with police
00:08:48.900 | officers. You don't have contact with them when you're in your private home, generally speaking.
00:08:52.900 | You have contact with them when you are out in public. And driving around
00:08:56.900 | in your car causes you to be extremely vulnerable to search, to seizure,
00:09:00.900 | to all kinds of bad things that can happen. So on that
00:09:04.900 | dimension as well, a personal automobile doesn't fit the bill of the ultimate
00:09:08.900 | freedom vehicle or the ultimate freedom machine.
00:09:12.900 | So if we don't want to drive a car,
00:09:16.900 | what are our options? Well, obviously we could just
00:09:20.900 | get our feet, we could just walk, or we could take a taxi, or we could do something else.
00:09:24.900 | But I want to imagine a machine or a vehicle
00:09:28.900 | that would make up for some
00:09:32.900 | of these downsides. And I would submit
00:09:36.900 | to you that the ultimate freedom vehicle is
00:09:40.900 | fairly obvious. It's called a bicycle.
00:09:44.900 | A bicycle should be viewed as the ultimate
00:09:48.900 | freedom machine. And everyone
00:09:52.900 | should have one. Now, I'm going to tell you a specific
00:09:56.900 | type of one that I think you should have. But let's first
00:10:00.900 | talk about the bicycle generally.
00:10:04.900 | Let's begin with a financial freedom machine.
00:10:08.900 | Unlike a car or unlike public transportation,
00:10:12.900 | a bicycle requires a one-time purchase
00:10:16.900 | with no ongoing monthly payments. I guess in theory you could pay for
00:10:20.900 | it with monthly payments, but most of the time a bicycle is accessible
00:10:24.900 | enough for you to simply pay for. That is an enormous
00:10:28.900 | benefit. You can purchase a machine, and that machine
00:10:32.900 | is simply yours. Once you've come up with the initial purchase price, it's yours.
00:10:36.900 | There are very few ongoing costs for
00:10:40.900 | a bicycle, and none of them are mandatory. For example,
00:10:44.900 | there is no insurance requirement for a bicycle.
00:10:48.900 | You're not required to be insured, and so that eliminates a monthly expense.
00:10:52.900 | There are no registration fees. Bicycles don't
00:10:56.900 | have to be registered with anybody. They don't have to have a government
00:11:00.900 | placard on them. You don't have to pay the annual registration fees or the
00:11:04.900 | annual taxes like you do with a motor vehicle. The
00:11:08.900 | ongoing usage costs for
00:11:12.900 | a bicycle are limited to some basic maintenance.
00:11:16.900 | There's of course no fuel costs, unless we want to count the calories that you need
00:11:20.900 | to consume to compel it down the road, but it's more than
00:11:24.900 | that. Even the maintenance cost itself, a bicycle is a fairly simple machine,
00:11:28.900 | can be fairly durable, and a little bit of mechanical knowledge and
00:11:32.900 | a little bit of ongoing maintenance can keep it mostly running trouble-free.
00:11:36.900 | So there's enormous benefits from a financial perspective
00:11:40.900 | to riding a bicycle. At its core though, it's important to just note
00:11:44.900 | that a bicycle massively multiplies your effectiveness as an
00:11:48.900 | individual. If you were a child, and you had a bicycle, and you were going to go over to your
00:11:52.900 | friend's house, there'd be very little chance that you walked to your friend's house
00:11:56.900 | if you had a bicycle available to you. Now I understand that the whole concept of childhood
00:12:00.900 | is changing for many people, but when I was a child, a bicycle
00:12:04.900 | was my ultimate freedom machine. It allowed me to come and go at a range of easily
00:12:08.900 | 10 miles around my house, not too difficult, and you could pretty comfortably
00:12:12.900 | ride for miles and miles on a bicycle without too much
00:12:16.900 | difficulty. It's nice also that there's a bicycle available
00:12:20.900 | for every age. There are bicycles that are appropriate for 5-year-olds, and there are bicycles
00:12:24.900 | that are appropriate for 85-year-olds. When my grandmother was
00:12:28.900 | in her 80s, she had a tricycle, and she would go out, and that was her preferred form of exercise
00:12:32.900 | was to take her big tricycle out, and she would ride several miles up and down the sidewalk
00:12:36.900 | around our house and really enjoy her outdoor exercise. And so
00:12:40.900 | there's a version of a bicycle that's right for just about any age. And because
00:12:44.900 | there's no government requirements, and no legal registration, and no driver's
00:12:48.900 | licenses, they're available for anybody. Anybody who wants one, anyone
00:12:52.900 | who needs one. You don't have to
00:12:56.900 | pass any test if your license was taken away from you,
00:13:00.900 | and you don't have the privilege of driving now. You're free if you have a bicycle.
00:13:04.900 | In addition to the lack of licenses, in addition to not having to
00:13:08.900 | carry government identification documents with you,
00:13:12.900 | you also have a higher level of independence based upon where you can
00:13:16.900 | go with a bicycle. With an automobile, you are
00:13:20.900 | constrained to the roads and the existing car infrastructure.
00:13:24.900 | But with a bicycle, you're not constrained to the roads. You can ride on the roads,
00:13:28.900 | you can ride on the sidewalks, you can ride on the grass, you can cut through the trees,
00:13:32.900 | you can take all kinds of interesting routes from where you are to
00:13:36.900 | where you want to go. And you can do it fairly free,
00:13:40.900 | in a fairly free way, without really bothering other people, without really
00:13:44.900 | causing problems. In a moment I'll talk about electric bicycles.
00:13:48.900 | One of the things that I most like about riding electric bicycles is it gives you all the freedom of a bicycle
00:13:52.900 | that you don't have with a motorcycle. Because while it's similar to a
00:13:56.900 | motorcycle in its ability to propel you down the road at a good rate of speed,
00:14:00.900 | you don't feel bad about sliding through a sidewalk, or cutting through a yard, or doing
00:14:04.900 | whatever you need to do to go where you want to go, where
00:14:08.900 | you would with a motorcycle. With a motorcycle I follow all the same rules as
00:14:12.900 | an automobile, because I don't want to inconvenience other people. With a bicycle,
00:14:16.900 | you're not inconveniencing anybody. And if you need to go on a place where
00:14:20.900 | pedestrian access only, walking access only, is the appropriate thing
00:14:24.900 | to do, you just hop off the bicycle, walk it for a couple of minutes, and back on, and away
00:14:28.900 | you go. So bicycles are enormously freeing from a
00:14:32.900 | personal perspective. When you add to the ability of avoiding
00:14:36.900 | traffic congestion, come and go between the cars,
00:14:40.900 | you can oftentimes go faster in congested areas. You add to that
00:14:44.900 | the ability to find easy parking, you don't have to usually pay for
00:14:48.900 | bicycle parking. The freedom of it is enormous.
00:14:52.900 | In many cases, if you need to lock up your bicycle, you can lock up your bicycle, and as long
00:14:56.900 | as it's not stolen from you, you come back a week later, it's still sitting there. And you didn't
00:15:00.900 | incur a daily fee of $30 a day to park your car.
00:15:04.900 | So these freedoms are real. They are palpable. They can
00:15:08.900 | be understood. They're significant. And then of course you add other
00:15:12.900 | benefits. The physical exercise, the fact that you'll probably feel better because
00:15:16.900 | you're moving your body, getting some sunshine, being outdoor, you probably have a better
00:15:20.900 | outdoors, probably a better mood overall. You're going to be really
00:15:24.900 | appreciating the bicycle as a freedom vehicle.
00:15:28.900 | It is the ultimate freedom machine. The ultimate
00:15:32.900 | freedom machine that pays off enormously in terms of much lower cost per
00:15:36.900 | mile, can free you from the burdens of car ownership, and
00:15:40.900 | it can open up your lifestyle, allow you to come and go where you want to
00:15:44.900 | when you want to. Now, what are the downsides
00:15:48.900 | of a bicycle? What are the things that,
00:15:52.900 | what are the reasons not everybody says, "Well, obviously
00:15:56.900 | a bicycle is the ultimate freedom machine, and that is the machine that I should
00:16:00.900 | obviously commit myself to." Well, there are a few that are
00:16:04.900 | pretty common and consistent. The first one that's
00:16:08.900 | rather obvious would be that a lot of cases
00:16:12.900 | it's just a long distance away. And if you have a
00:16:16.900 | 25 mile daily commute to work and back, that's going to be a
00:16:20.900 | significant time commitment for you on your bicycle.
00:16:24.900 | When you compound that with the fact that many of us live in places with very
00:16:28.900 | poor bicycle infrastructure, where it's unsafe for us to
00:16:32.900 | ride on the public road, then now you start to
00:16:36.900 | think about, "How do I protect my life? How do I make sure that I'm actually physically
00:16:40.900 | safe and I don't die on this thing?" Because one of the first rules of being free is
00:16:44.900 | not to be dead. So let's avoid unsafe places.
00:16:48.900 | Avoid places with bad cycling infrastructure, if at all possible.
00:16:52.900 | And let's be careful that we're not committed to excessively
00:16:56.900 | long rides. Pretty easy to ride 5 miles, not so easy to
00:17:00.900 | ride 55 miles. It's doable, but it's a much more significant investment
00:17:04.900 | of time. In addition, while a bicycle
00:17:08.900 | is easier to store, it's easier to deal with, the fact
00:17:12.900 | remains that it's kind of dirty, and it may not fit everywhere.
00:17:16.900 | If you live in a small apartment, you don't have a bike storage facility at your
00:17:20.900 | apartment complex, where are you going to put your bicycle? Are you going to drive the thing inside?
00:17:24.900 | You can, but now it's hard to get in and out of the front door because you've got this big
00:17:28.900 | old bicycle sitting there. And then, what do you do if
00:17:32.900 | the bicycle isn't appropriate? Meaning that
00:17:36.900 | what do you do if you can't quite reach it on the bicycle? Well, now
00:17:40.900 | you need an automobile, and you have to put a bike rack on the back or on the front
00:17:44.900 | in some way and transport your bicycle, and
00:17:48.900 | it's kind of a hassle. It's pretty much your choice
00:17:52.900 | to either drive or ride the bicycle in most cases
00:17:56.900 | because of the hassles of transporting a bicycle on the top
00:18:00.900 | of your car or on the back of your car where it's subject to the weather, vulnerable
00:18:04.900 | to theft,
00:18:08.900 | to damage, these kinds of things.
00:18:12.900 | There are two solutions that have developed
00:18:16.900 | that I think are important for you to consider that solve many of
00:18:20.900 | these issues. Two solutions are
00:18:24.900 | e-bicycles, or battery propelled or battery assisted bicycles,
00:18:28.900 | and folding bicycles. And I think
00:18:32.900 | the combination of these two solutions, either individual solutions or
00:18:36.900 | put together, is really magical. And that's where
00:18:40.900 | I want to talk now for the rest of the podcast because when you put
00:18:44.900 | these two solutions together,
00:18:48.900 | again, you create magic. Let's start with e-bikes.
00:18:52.900 | As battery technology has advanced and we have gained
00:18:56.900 | access to very high capacity batteries, powerful
00:19:00.900 | small electric motors, and we have developed
00:19:04.900 | battery technology that is much less expensive and yet has
00:19:08.900 | high capacity, we have been able to fit small electric motors
00:19:12.900 | to our bicycles and get an even more powerful
00:19:16.900 | machine. This was possible in the day and age before
00:19:20.900 | battery technology. Even around the world, there are small
00:19:24.900 | motors that you'll see people fit to their bicycles that basically turn them into a small
00:19:28.900 | sort of slow, loud motorcycle. But e-bikes
00:19:32.900 | are a real sweet spot. If you've never ridden an e-bike, I would
00:19:36.900 | urge you to go and ride one. If you have a friend who has one,
00:19:40.900 | go and do it. If you have a friend, if you have to rent one, go and do it.
00:19:44.900 | Or just buy one and try it out. E-bikes are magical.
00:19:48.900 | You can use an e-bike in various ways. But one reason many people
00:19:52.900 | don't ride a bicycle is they don't have the physical stamina to ride
00:19:56.900 | for long distances at high speeds. Now that can be developed, but
00:20:00.900 | a battery-operated bicycle, a bicycle
00:20:04.900 | with a motor, an electric motor and a battery, makes the bicycle
00:20:08.900 | much more powerful, which can help many people to use
00:20:12.900 | it who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it. The motor is
00:20:16.900 | enormously useful when facing hills. If your physical condition doesn't allow you
00:20:20.900 | to easily ride up hills, the motor will give you an assist that will make those hills
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00:20:56.900 | you to cruise along at a high speed with only a little bit of input from
00:21:00.900 | your actual pedaling. And you can take rests when you need to and just
00:21:04.900 | simply let the battery do the work. And as I said earlier,
00:21:08.900 | the power of an e-bike is that it's still a bicycle.
00:21:12.900 | It's not a motorcycle. It's a bicycle. So
00:21:16.900 | you don't have the ultimate top speed. You don't have the ultimate
00:21:20.900 | power that you would have with a full-fledged motorcycle. But
00:21:24.900 | you have all the benefits of the bicycle, but on
00:21:28.900 | turbo, on steroids, just really easy and really wonderful.
00:21:32.900 | And so if you have a slightly longer commute and you say,
00:21:36.900 | "Ah, that would be uncomfortable to ride every day," or you have a very hilly commute and you're not
00:21:40.900 | conditioned enough to face it, or the places that you ride are just
00:21:44.900 | not awesome for a standard bicycle, then I would
00:21:48.900 | strongly encourage you, try out an e-bike. Today, the market
00:21:52.900 | is awash in options. And they're fast, they're powerful, they're
00:21:56.900 | silent, they're inexpensive in many cases, just
00:22:00.900 | an amazing piece of technology that can really expand your
00:22:04.900 | horizons. So if there are issues that you're concerned with that are
00:22:08.900 | related to distance or to speed or to physical capacity,
00:22:12.900 | an e-bike might provide a solution that will allow you
00:22:16.900 | to gain access to the ultimate freedom machine in a way that's
00:22:20.900 | suitable for you. The second set of issues
00:22:24.900 | related to a bicycle can, in many ways, be solved with
00:22:28.900 | a folding bicycle. No doubt you've seen this at some point,
00:22:32.900 | but if you've not looked at it deeply, then I would encourage you
00:22:36.900 | take another look at folding bicycles. Back to some of those issues
00:22:40.900 | that I described before. A bicycle is big. It's hard to transport
00:22:44.900 | on your vehicle. You need a special rack. It has enormous wheels. Where do you put it
00:22:48.900 | if you don't have parking? What do you do if you need to integrate with something else?
00:22:52.900 | I want you to picture in your mind a bicycle that's just
00:22:56.900 | basically about that folds up into a package that's about the size of a
00:23:00.900 | carry-on suitcase. Quite literally a carry-on suitcase that you can take
00:23:04.900 | on an airplane and stick in the overhead bin. You can purchase bicycles that are
00:23:08.900 | about that size and that are about the weight of a carry-on suitcase.
00:23:12.900 | In many cases, much lighter. About 25-30 pounds. You can get them down to about
00:23:16.900 | 20 pounds or less, but about 30 pounds is widely available.
00:23:20.900 | And so a bicycle like this gets you the best of both worlds.
00:23:24.900 | You can ride the bicycle whenever you want, but when it's inconvenient for you to ride
00:23:28.900 | the bicycle, you can just simply fold the bicycle up and take it with you.
00:23:32.900 | If you want to get on and off a bus, you just grab the bicycle and if the front bike rack
00:23:36.900 | is full, you fold it up and you take it and you stick it next to your seat
00:23:40.900 | or in the bin on the bus. If you want to ride the train, you take it
00:23:44.900 | and you stick it underneath your seat. If you want to ride the plane, quite literally, you can travel
00:23:48.900 | around the world with a folding bicycle that will either go as checked
00:23:52.900 | luggage without excess bicycle fees or in some
00:23:56.900 | cases, be able to go into the overhead bin. If you want
00:24:00.900 | to take your vehicle and you want to drive your own personal automobile,
00:24:04.900 | well if you have a bicycle in the trunk of your car, you now have the best of both worlds.
00:24:08.900 | You can park in the place that's convenient for you, hop on your bicycle and finish the last
00:24:12.900 | mile or three miles in and out of the town. If you don't want
00:24:16.900 | your bicycle to be sitting outside or in a public storage rack where it's getting dirty,
00:24:20.900 | you just fold your bicycle up and you bring it in, you stick it in your closet.
00:24:24.900 | A folding bicycle is a marvelous invention. In my opinion,
00:24:28.900 | it is the ultimate freedom machine.
00:24:32.900 | Now you can integrate these things. You can get a folding bicycle that has
00:24:36.900 | battery power, it has an electric motor or you can get one that doesn't.
00:24:40.900 | I would say that some version of this, as far as I'm concerned, is what I call
00:24:44.900 | the ultimate freedom machine. You get every benefit and advantage
00:24:48.900 | of a bicycle and yet you take away the significant
00:24:52.900 | majority of the disadvantages.
00:24:56.900 | Bicycles don't have to be one size fits all.
00:25:00.900 | After all, we don't look at automobiles and say that one
00:25:04.900 | vehicle has to be able to do everything. We don't look at
00:25:08.900 | automobiles and say that it has to be really fast, it has to carry ten people
00:25:12.900 | and it has to be able to haul a two ton boat. No, these are different
00:25:16.900 | vehicles for different applications, which is why we have small cars,
00:25:20.900 | big cars, big SUVs, big pickup trucks, big vans, we have all
00:25:24.900 | of the above. And bicycles are similar. If you'll get out of your head the idea
00:25:28.900 | that one bicycle has to do everything and
00:25:32.900 | be open to building a stable of bicycles with different applications,
00:25:36.900 | then I think that you'll be able to put together the bikes that you
00:25:40.900 | need that will help you get all the benefits of a bicycle. But if I'm
00:25:44.900 | only going to own one bicycle, then my choice
00:25:48.900 | is a folding bicycle. And I would encourage if you haven't
00:25:52.900 | looked into them to look into them. Here are some interesting
00:25:56.900 | applications of folding bicycles. The first one has to do
00:26:00.900 | with just simply world travel. If I could go back and be
00:26:04.900 | 19 years old again and take a gap year, here is what I would do
00:26:08.900 | and how I would do it. I personally am not
00:26:12.900 | generally attracted to the idea of long
00:26:16.900 | range bicycle travel. I've read the stories of people that get on a
00:26:20.900 | bicycle and ride from Alaska to Argentina or go and ride from London
00:26:24.900 | to Singapore and I think they're awesome. I've met people in my own travels
00:26:28.900 | who are doing this and I think it's a really cool way to travel the world.
00:26:32.900 | After all, you have very low expenses, you
00:26:36.900 | interact with people wherever you're going because you're visible, you're public, you're part
00:26:40.900 | of everything that you're doing. I think it's fantastic. It's a really, really great way
00:26:44.900 | of traveling the world. And it's never appealed to me. It's never been something
00:26:48.900 | that I have wanted to do. But I have admired the independence
00:26:52.900 | of bicyclists. Now I've been into overlanding. I've enjoyed
00:26:56.900 | overlanding myself and overlanding defined here is just the idea of
00:27:00.900 | taking your own personal automobile and driving it where you want to go. But the
00:27:04.900 | costs of overlanding are pretty significant. The cost of
00:27:08.900 | acquiring a vehicle, maintaining a vehicle. It makes travel out of sight for most
00:27:12.900 | people who are younger, who are getting established. So what most people do
00:27:16.900 | is they wind up using simply public transit.
00:27:20.900 | Which is great. You can fly here, take a bus there and walk
00:27:24.900 | to your final destination. Public transit is really, really great.
00:27:28.900 | Until it's not. Until the walk is really far. Until the transit
00:27:32.900 | is really annoying or it doesn't go where you want to go. And I think that the perfect
00:27:36.900 | travel accessory that is significantly underutilized is a folding
00:27:40.900 | bicycle. Because with a folding bicycle you can outfit your bicycle
00:27:44.900 | with the same basic gear and equipment that a
00:27:48.900 | long range bicyclist would use. You can have a small tent,
00:27:52.900 | small sleeping set up. There's amazingly experienced people that can give you advice
00:27:56.900 | on how to set it up. But you can do all that with a folding bicycle. And the folding
00:28:00.900 | bicycle allows you to take advantage of transit or
00:28:04.900 | transportation whenever you want to. So if you want to hop from one country to
00:28:08.900 | another, you just pull your pack apart, pack up your bicycle, jump on an airplane
00:28:12.900 | and fly four countries away. Done. If you get bad weather
00:28:16.900 | and you don't want to be out in the bad weather, then you just post up at a hostel or a hotel
00:28:20.900 | somewhere. You fold up your bicycle, you bring it inside. You have perfect protection for
00:28:24.900 | all your gear and you stay in a hotel or hostel until the bad weather passes.
00:28:28.900 | If the bad weather continues in the place that you are, well then you just hop on a bus
00:28:32.900 | and go a state over or a country over or go to the next solution.
00:28:36.900 | Next place you want to go. If you want to go in
00:28:40.900 | and out of a city but you find that the expenses in downtown are
00:28:44.900 | pretty high and you'd like to be able to go in and out
00:28:48.900 | but be in that city but not stay downtown, the bicycle may be
00:28:52.900 | your ticket. You ride a commuter line out of the city center,
00:28:56.900 | ride the commuter line out to one of the furthest stations, hop on your bicycle, pedal
00:29:00.900 | a couple of miles further out into the countryside and set up a camp. You can camp
00:29:04.900 | very inexpensively, probably for free, be completely unbothered by
00:29:08.900 | anybody else because you're not in a highly built up urban area because
00:29:12.900 | of the access to the train. Set up your camp there and then go
00:29:16.900 | in and out using the commuter train into downtown New York City or downtown
00:29:20.900 | Tokyo or downtown wherever you happen to be going. And that
00:29:24.900 | bicycle gives you a much bigger range than you would have if you were on your
00:29:28.900 | feet. As far as I'm concerned, it's the
00:29:32.900 | two of these things together that makes a bicycle magical.
00:29:36.900 | The multiplication of the fact that you can now go
00:29:40.900 | miles and miles and miles on your bicycle very comfortably
00:29:44.900 | but yet still have easy access to
00:29:48.900 | transportation options, to the bus, to an Uber, to a taxi
00:29:52.900 | and you don't need any special equipment. You can just place your bicycle in the trunk of the
00:29:56.900 | taxi. You can even do this with hitchhiking. You're going to hitchhike, you can put
00:30:00.900 | your bicycle into the trunk of the person who's carrying you.
00:30:04.900 | You don't need special bike racks. You don't need to only go with somebody who has a
00:30:08.900 | truck. I think this is the best budget
00:30:12.900 | based travel option for people who want to travel
00:30:16.900 | widely, extensively, inexpensively
00:30:20.900 | and putting these two things together is magic. The folding bicycle
00:30:24.900 | is a magical freedom machine. And remember
00:30:28.900 | if you want and gain benefit from the
00:30:32.900 | battery, you can have all those benefits as well. The battery adds significant
00:30:36.900 | weight so it would be less likely that you would want to transport that battery around
00:30:40.900 | on a continual basis. But it does allow you to get all the boosting benefits
00:30:44.900 | of an e-bike but in a small foldable machine. As far as I'm concerned
00:30:48.900 | that's the ultimate travel setup, the ultimate camping setup for a budget
00:30:52.900 | traveler that will allow you to go much farther than somebody who exclusively
00:30:56.900 | has his feet to travel on and yet see much more interesting things
00:31:00.900 | than someone who is entirely dependent on transit, entirely dependent
00:31:04.900 | on private taxis, private transportation because you have your own private
00:31:08.900 | transportation. And the world is enormously open to you. If you can
00:31:12.900 | ride a public bus and then do the last 3 or 4 or 5 miles on your bicycle
00:31:16.900 | fairly quickly, you're going to have amazing travel experiences that
00:31:20.900 | are not open to anyone else. Another application I would like you
00:31:24.900 | to think about is that I believe that a bicycle is one
00:31:28.900 | of the ultimate preparedness items that you should have established
00:31:32.900 | for yourself. If you work away from your house
00:31:36.900 | you commute from your house to your office, one of your first
00:31:40.900 | aspects of preparedness in terms of preparing for a disaster
00:31:44.900 | scenario of some kind, should be to think about how you would
00:31:48.900 | get from your job to your house if you weren't able to
00:31:52.900 | get there with the normal means and method. Imagine that you
00:31:56.900 | work in downtown New York City, downtown Manhattan and you need
00:32:00.900 | to commute to your home in New Jersey or wherever it happens to be
00:32:04.900 | and then something happens that causes downtown Manhattan
00:32:08.900 | to be an entire jam. There might be a terrorist attack,
00:32:12.900 | there might be a power outage, a train outage, any number of things.
00:32:16.900 | How are you going to get from your office to your home?
00:32:20.900 | Well, if you spend any time on YouTube as I do
00:32:24.900 | and you search something like "get home" you'll quickly find
00:32:28.900 | that everyone suggests that you have something called a "get home bag"
00:32:32.900 | which I think is a great idea. The idea is you should have in your office a bag
00:32:36.900 | that has some basic supplies and provisions. It might include things like
00:32:40.900 | a comfortable pair of shoes. Maybe you wore fancy dress shoes to the office
00:32:44.900 | today but you keep a comfortable pair of broken in shoes that are good for walking
00:32:48.900 | in your bag. You might have some extra food, some snacks, some water,
00:32:52.900 | a jacket or a coat so that you can just simply leave your office and you can walk home.
00:32:56.900 | But if you're settling in for a 10 or 15 mile walk
00:33:00.900 | that's going to take you a significant amount of time and be quite difficult for you to accomplish
00:33:04.900 | if you can't just take your car. Well, what is a machine
00:33:08.900 | that can multiply your efforts? The answer is a bicycle.
00:33:12.900 | A bicycle can turn that 15 mile walk into something that takes an hour or two
00:33:16.900 | and you're done. Instead of it being an all day affair for you to make that 15
00:33:20.900 | miles home. And yet why doesn't everybody have a spare bicycle
00:33:24.900 | parked at his office or in his car? It doesn't fit.
00:33:28.900 | The thing is big. Unless it's a folding bicycle. And so
00:33:32.900 | if you are thinking and making a plan to get from your office to your home in a disaster
00:33:36.900 | of some kind, then I would encourage you that a folding bicycle
00:33:40.900 | should be step number one. Every commuter who is
00:33:44.900 | intelligent and forward thinking, even if you're using your car every day,
00:33:48.900 | the first accessory you should purchase for your car is a folding bicycle that goes in the
00:33:52.900 | trunk. So if your car stops working or there's a terrible traffic jam
00:33:56.900 | and you can't get through in traffic or the bridges are shut down,
00:34:00.900 | you open your trunk, you unfold your bicycle, grab your backpack with your
00:34:04.900 | comfortable shoes and a little bit of extra snacks and water, hop on the bicycle and
00:34:08.900 | get yourself home where your family is. And then we have all the benefits
00:34:12.900 | of a bicycle being able to come and go throughout traffic, being able to fold it up, jump on a plane,
00:34:16.900 | jump on, excuse me, hopefully not a plane, jump on a boat. And if you remember in a day
00:34:20.900 | like 9/11, there were all kinds of boats that were ferrying people from Manhattan
00:34:24.900 | to New Jersey using the boats. And so with your bicycle
00:34:28.900 | you can take your bicycle on any form of transportation as well.
00:34:32.900 | And so at the very least you should have a bicycle at your office folded up, sitting in a
00:34:36.900 | closet somewhere for you and/or if you're using your private car every day, then
00:34:40.900 | you should have a bicycle in your trunk. If you're
00:34:44.900 | a commuter and you just always commute on the train or using transit of some kind, great!
00:34:48.900 | Keep a bicycle under your desk at work so that
00:34:52.900 | if there's something happening with the trains, trains are broken, blocked, shut down,
00:34:56.900 | non-functional, that you have an option to be able to get yourself home to be with those that you love.
00:35:00.900 | Now in terms of specific brands and things like that to consider, I don't
00:35:04.900 | have any particular insight for you. I would say that
00:35:08.900 | if you're just looking for one that is probably the best, the most
00:35:12.900 | popular and the best seems to be a brand called Brompton.
00:35:16.900 | It's a British brand that
00:35:20.900 | has a very long-running design and they're a really good
00:35:24.900 | middle-of-the-road option. The price
00:35:28.900 | for a Brompton folding bicycle, a new one, is probably going to be somewhere around $1,200
00:35:32.900 | to as much as $5,000 for a
00:35:36.900 | battery-operated, top-of-the-line, titanium, super lightweight, that kind of thing.
00:35:40.900 | I've seen some guys that accessorize theirs to be a $10,000 bicycle,
00:35:44.900 | but basically looking at somewhere around $1,200 to $2,000
00:35:48.900 | for probably a pretty good Brompton brand new.
00:35:52.900 | There are other ones, I think one of the largest ones globally is
00:35:56.900 | Eihon. Tern is another competitor, Montague,
00:36:00.900 | Bike Friday, Riese & Muller, A-Bike, Oyama,
00:36:04.900 | Citizen Bike. I don't know enough about this
00:36:08.900 | field to tell you the pros and the cons of all of them. I think
00:36:12.900 | again, your best straightforward one is Brompton.
00:36:16.900 | If you're just looking for probably the standard, the high-quality
00:36:20.900 | Toyota of the space, I think it's Brompton. Now, there
00:36:24.900 | is another brand that probably makes the smallest one. I think that brand
00:36:28.900 | is Quiggle. So if you want a super, super compact one,
00:36:32.900 | then there's this one called Quiggle that is a German
00:36:36.900 | company that makes this tiny one that folds up into something
00:36:40.900 | that's smaller than a carry-on, probably more akin to a personal
00:36:44.900 | item size. It's not as rideable
00:36:48.900 | as a Brompton is, but it's certainly much smaller and
00:36:52.900 | much more lightweight. So if the absolute smallest package
00:36:56.900 | is necessary for you, then I think that one is probably the absolute smallest.
00:37:00.900 | Remember that all of this is a trade-off. If you were going to get set off and
00:37:04.900 | ride from Alaska to Argentina and you wanted to never
00:37:08.900 | take transit and you didn't want any of the benefits of a folding bicycle, you wouldn't
00:37:12.900 | ride a folding bicycle. You're riding a folding bicycle because it's not
00:37:16.900 | quite as good as a fixed bicycle, but it's almost
00:37:20.900 | as good and yet gives you all the benefits of the folding mechanism. And so
00:37:24.900 | there's a range between large size
00:37:28.900 | and smaller ones, and there are less expensive ones
00:37:32.900 | available as well. There are a number of brands that are a good bit cheaper than Brompton,
00:37:36.900 | but I'm not skillful enough to tell you that you definitely
00:37:40.900 | should have this brand or that brand. You have to figure that out for yourself.
00:37:44.900 | What I want to emphasize to you is quite simply this.
00:37:48.900 | Machines enhance our power and enhance our lifestyle
00:37:52.900 | and we should use them in every place that they
00:37:56.900 | make sense. Sometimes we just automatically accept certain
00:38:00.900 | machines and we don't pay attention to the downsides. So a personal
00:38:04.900 | automobile is a powerful and amazing machine that has a whole bunch
00:38:08.900 | of downsides. So let's pay attention to those downsides
00:38:12.900 | and not get a big machine or an expensive machine where we don't need
00:38:16.900 | one. And let's not try to make one machine do everything.
00:38:20.900 | If you're looking for the ultimate freedom machine, the ultimate freedom vehicle,
00:38:24.900 | it is a bicycle. It's not a car, it's a bicycle.
00:38:28.900 | And the ultimate form of a bicycle that gives you
00:38:32.900 | most 80 to 95% of all the benefits of a bicycle
00:38:36.900 | but gives you a whole bunch of benefits that the standard
00:38:40.900 | fixed bicycle form doesn't give you is a folding
00:38:44.900 | bicycle. And if you are looking for magic,
00:38:48.900 | look for one of those. Look for, if you gain benefit
00:38:52.900 | from having an electric assist, look for an e-bike.
00:38:56.900 | And if you have not paid attention to this marketplace, look
00:39:00.900 | around and see if these new and really good technologies might help
00:39:04.900 | you to have an ultimate freedom machine that allows
00:39:08.900 | you to save more money, go more places, live a cooler and more interesting
00:39:12.900 | lifestyle, accumulate more interesting experiences without the
00:39:16.900 | heavy costs of other kinds of machines.
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