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Denver. Always welcome. Plan your trip at visitdenver.com/summer. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

I'm your host. And today on the podcast, I want to talk to you about the ultimate freedom machine. The ultimate freedom machine. When I use the term freedom, let me define it. I want to include most of the senses of freedom. I want to use freedom in the sense that allows you to come and go where you want to go.

I want to use freedom in the financial sense as well because here we're continually talking about financial freedom. Now in my predominantly U.S. American audience, we have a cultural perception, a cultural conception that the ultimate freedom machine is a personal automobile. Perhaps you've heard of that. After all, if you think about it, having a car, well, you can come and go where and when you want.

You can go pretty much wherever you want on your own schedule. You don't have to integrate and wait for a train. You don't have to wait for a plane. You come and go anytime, anyplace you want. But unfortunately, while this is a component of freedom, the personal automobile doesn't actually buy you freedom.

On the contrary, I would say that for many people, it buys you financial bondage. The personal automobile comes with a long list of never-ending costs. Now some of them are obvious. You have a pretty substantial up-front purchase price. That's fairly evident. Some people take that fairly substantial up-front purchase price and amortize it out with a series of monthly payments, having car payments or lease payments.

Those can be a significant monthly cost, but the costs don't end. If you think about some of the other costs of an automobile, you have things like requirements for having automobile insurance. And as long as you own a vehicle, you have to have automobile insurance. I found this out myself the hard way.

A number of years ago, I left the United States and I had a car in the United States. It wasn't being driven. I parked it and decided, "You know what? I'll save some money. Why should I pay for insurance on that automobile that I'm not using? After all, it's just sitting there.

No one's driving it. I don't need to have insurance on it." So I cancelled the insurance policy. Then a few months later, I received a rather not-so-friendly letter from the state of Florida informing me that my driver's license was cancelled because I had cancelled the insurance on a vehicle and I had not turned in the license plate.

So word to the tip for you. You can, with many insurance companies, I would assume most, but you can, at least with some insurance companies, purchase a special storage automobile insurance policy, which is what I subsequently did. A storage policy allows you to keep the vehicle, keep the plate on the vehicle, but you represent to the insurance company that you're not going to drive the vehicle and they reduce your insurance rates substantially while still maintaining coverage for your legally-mandated insurance requirements.

So keep that in mind if you're ever traveling or storing a vehicle. Don't cancel your insurance, even if you're not driving the vehicle or you'll have your license suspended, but you can purchase a storage policy. So the point remains that you purchase a vehicle and then when you have the vehicle, you have to pay for car insurance.

Then, of course, there are obvious operating costs. If you operate the vehicle, you have to fill it with fuel, fill it with oil. There are many maintenance costs. You need to rotate the tires, replace the tires, change the oil. There are repair costs. When it breaks down, you have to continually repair it.

And it's very difficult to find a vehicle that isn't going to fall into disrepair if you just let it sit. One of the biggest problems that any kind of vehicle faces, automobiles, recreational vehicles, boats, anything like that, airplanes, if a vehicle just sits, it rots. It's much better for a vehicle to be continually operating with fuel flowing through and other fluids flowing through all the rubber hoses and everything being continually lubricated.

You don't want to just let a vehicle sit ever or it quickly starts to rot and fall apart. And so these are all examples of continual expenses that you have with an automobile. And for many people these expenses are far out of whack with their overall budget, with their overall income.

And in many cases, it's the automobile expenses that wind up sinking you and destroy your chances of getting ahead. I've had a love/hate relationship with automobiles for a very long time myself. And I have found that since I purchased my first vehicle in my teen years, it's been pretty tough to ever get to zero vehicles.

My fleet has gone from one to, well, I think the most I ever owned at one time was five. And I tell you, the closer it gets to one, the generally happier I am. And someday, although I haven't figured out how to do this with children, someday it's my ambition to be back down to zero.

So we'll see when I'm able to accomplish that. But the point is simply that a vehicle, while it allows you to come and go where you want to some degree, you incur significant financial bondage to that vehicle and it can wind up being a significant component of your overall expenses.

So a vehicle, a car, a personal automobile, doesn't fit the bill of the ultimate freedom machine, at least from a financial perspective. I would submit to you also that it doesn't fit the bill as the ultimate freedom machine from other contexts of freedom as well. For example, you're required to take care of the car wherever you go.

You have to park it. You have to store it. You have to figure out how to keep it from being taken from you, quite literally. A number of years ago, I bought a vehicle in Europe and I had left Europe and I found a friend, a listener of the show, who was willing to store the vehicle for me and after a while the vehicle was stored.

It was parked on a public street but the annual inspection sticker on the car expired because I hadn't been able to get back to Europe to renew it. And the police just pulled up a tow truck and trucked the car away and stole the car right off the street because I had not renewed the annual inspection sticker as the law stated.

It took me quite a while to get it out of the police impound lot. And so you have to take care of it. And if you're going to come and go among countries, you have to figure out what do I do with these cars? How do I keep them going?

How do I keep it from being taken by the police? If you go into a city, a lot of times you have a vehicle and you want to travel into a city but having a car in a city is really annoying. Where are you going to park it? You have enormous parking fees.

You go to a nice hotel in a city for a convention. Well, now I've got to pay parking fees for this automobile every day all day and I've got to make sure that it doesn't get taken in that context. And then even in terms of your overall personal freedom, a vehicle has the benefit of giving you some isolation from the environment around.

You're not constantly on display but it also comes with significant legal costs. One of the very few times in the United States that you can ever be forcibly compelled to show government identification documents is when you are driving a car. If you are driving a vehicle, then the police have a legal right to stop you and compel you with a threat of force to display your personal identification documents.

That is not the same, at least in most states. Not all states are the same. That's not the same in any other context. And so you have to have government ID, you have to carry government ID, and you have to produce government ID upon command. Oh, and by the way, if your government ID is invalid or your government ID is not accurate, let's say for example you moved three months ago and you haven't yet updated your address, your home address on your government ID, that is a crime and you can be prosecuted for said crime.

And if you live in a police state like the United States where you can, they're out on the roads, that's where the police officers are, then that's generally where you're going to have contact with police officers. You don't have contact with them when you're in your private home, generally speaking.

You have contact with them when you are out in public. And driving around in your car causes you to be extremely vulnerable to search, to seizure, to all kinds of bad things that can happen. So on that dimension as well, a personal automobile doesn't fit the bill of the ultimate freedom vehicle or the ultimate freedom machine.

So if we don't want to drive a car, what are our options? Well, obviously we could just get our feet, we could just walk, or we could take a taxi, or we could do something else. But I want to imagine a machine or a vehicle that would make up for some of these downsides.

And I would submit to you that the ultimate freedom vehicle is fairly obvious. It's called a bicycle. A bicycle should be viewed as the ultimate freedom machine. And everyone should have one. Now, I'm going to tell you a specific type of one that I think you should have. But let's first talk about the bicycle generally.

Let's begin with a financial freedom machine. Unlike a car or unlike public transportation, a bicycle requires a one-time purchase with no ongoing monthly payments. I guess in theory you could pay for it with monthly payments, but most of the time a bicycle is accessible enough for you to simply pay for.

That is an enormous benefit. You can purchase a machine, and that machine is simply yours. Once you've come up with the initial purchase price, it's yours. There are very few ongoing costs for a bicycle, and none of them are mandatory. For example, there is no insurance requirement for a bicycle.

You're not required to be insured, and so that eliminates a monthly expense. There are no registration fees. Bicycles don't have to be registered with anybody. They don't have to have a government placard on them. You don't have to pay the annual registration fees or the annual taxes like you do with a motor vehicle.

The ongoing usage costs for a bicycle are limited to some basic maintenance. There's of course no fuel costs, unless we want to count the calories that you need to consume to compel it down the road, but it's more than that. Even the maintenance cost itself, a bicycle is a fairly simple machine, can be fairly durable, and a little bit of mechanical knowledge and a little bit of ongoing maintenance can keep it mostly running trouble-free.

So there's enormous benefits from a financial perspective to riding a bicycle. At its core though, it's important to just note that a bicycle massively multiplies your effectiveness as an individual. If you were a child, and you had a bicycle, and you were going to go over to your friend's house, there'd be very little chance that you walked to your friend's house if you had a bicycle available to you.

Now I understand that the whole concept of childhood is changing for many people, but when I was a child, a bicycle was my ultimate freedom machine. It allowed me to come and go at a range of easily 10 miles around my house, not too difficult, and you could pretty comfortably ride for miles and miles on a bicycle without too much difficulty.

It's nice also that there's a bicycle available for every age. There are bicycles that are appropriate for 5-year-olds, and there are bicycles that are appropriate for 85-year-olds. When my grandmother was in her 80s, she had a tricycle, and she would go out, and that was her preferred form of exercise was to take her big tricycle out, and she would ride several miles up and down the sidewalk around our house and really enjoy her outdoor exercise.

And so there's a version of a bicycle that's right for just about any age. And because there's no government requirements, and no legal registration, and no driver's licenses, they're available for anybody. Anybody who wants one, anyone who needs one. You don't have to pass any test if your license was taken away from you, and you don't have the privilege of driving now.

You're free if you have a bicycle. In addition to the lack of licenses, in addition to not having to carry government identification documents with you, you also have a higher level of independence based upon where you can go with a bicycle. With an automobile, you are constrained to the roads and the existing car infrastructure.

But with a bicycle, you're not constrained to the roads. You can ride on the roads, you can ride on the sidewalks, you can ride on the grass, you can cut through the trees, you can take all kinds of interesting routes from where you are to where you want to go.

And you can do it fairly free, in a fairly free way, without really bothering other people, without really causing problems. In a moment I'll talk about electric bicycles. One of the things that I most like about riding electric bicycles is it gives you all the freedom of a bicycle that you don't have with a motorcycle.

Because while it's similar to a motorcycle in its ability to propel you down the road at a good rate of speed, you don't feel bad about sliding through a sidewalk, or cutting through a yard, or doing whatever you need to do to go where you want to go, where you would with a motorcycle.

With a motorcycle I follow all the same rules as an automobile, because I don't want to inconvenience other people. With a bicycle, you're not inconveniencing anybody. And if you need to go on a place where pedestrian access only, walking access only, is the appropriate thing to do, you just hop off the bicycle, walk it for a couple of minutes, and back on, and away you go.

So bicycles are enormously freeing from a personal perspective. When you add to the ability of avoiding traffic congestion, come and go between the cars, you can oftentimes go faster in congested areas. You add to that the ability to find easy parking, you don't have to usually pay for bicycle parking.

The freedom of it is enormous. In many cases, if you need to lock up your bicycle, you can lock up your bicycle, and as long as it's not stolen from you, you come back a week later, it's still sitting there. And you didn't incur a daily fee of $30 a day to park your car.

So these freedoms are real. They are palpable. They can be understood. They're significant. And then of course you add other benefits. The physical exercise, the fact that you'll probably feel better because you're moving your body, getting some sunshine, being outdoor, you probably have a better outdoors, probably a better mood overall.

You're going to be really appreciating the bicycle as a freedom vehicle. It is the ultimate freedom machine. The ultimate freedom machine that pays off enormously in terms of much lower cost per mile, can free you from the burdens of car ownership, and it can open up your lifestyle, allow you to come and go where you want to when you want to.

Now, what are the downsides of a bicycle? What are the things that, what are the reasons not everybody says, "Well, obviously a bicycle is the ultimate freedom machine, and that is the machine that I should obviously commit myself to." Well, there are a few that are pretty common and consistent.

The first one that's rather obvious would be that a lot of cases it's just a long distance away. And if you have a 25 mile daily commute to work and back, that's going to be a significant time commitment for you on your bicycle. When you compound that with the fact that many of us live in places with very poor bicycle infrastructure, where it's unsafe for us to ride on the public road, then now you start to think about, "How do I protect my life?

How do I make sure that I'm actually physically safe and I don't die on this thing?" Because one of the first rules of being free is not to be dead. So let's avoid unsafe places. Avoid places with bad cycling infrastructure, if at all possible. And let's be careful that we're not committed to excessively long rides.

Pretty easy to ride 5 miles, not so easy to ride 55 miles. It's doable, but it's a much more significant investment of time. In addition, while a bicycle is easier to store, it's easier to deal with, the fact remains that it's kind of dirty, and it may not fit everywhere.

If you live in a small apartment, you don't have a bike storage facility at your apartment complex, where are you going to put your bicycle? Are you going to drive the thing inside? You can, but now it's hard to get in and out of the front door because you've got this big old bicycle sitting there.

And then, what do you do if the bicycle isn't appropriate? Meaning that what do you do if you can't quite reach it on the bicycle? Well, now you need an automobile, and you have to put a bike rack on the back or on the front in some way and transport your bicycle, and it's kind of a hassle.

It's pretty much your choice to either drive or ride the bicycle in most cases because of the hassles of transporting a bicycle on the top of your car or on the back of your car where it's subject to the weather, vulnerable to theft, to damage, these kinds of things.

There are two solutions that have developed that I think are important for you to consider that solve many of these issues. Two solutions are e-bicycles, or battery propelled or battery assisted bicycles, and folding bicycles. And I think the combination of these two solutions, either individual solutions or put together, is really magical.

And that's where I want to talk now for the rest of the podcast because when you put these two solutions together, again, you create magic. Let's start with e-bikes. As battery technology has advanced and we have gained access to very high capacity batteries, powerful small electric motors, and we have developed battery technology that is much less expensive and yet has high capacity, we have been able to fit small electric motors to our bicycles and get an even more powerful machine.

This was possible in the day and age before battery technology. Even around the world, there are small motors that you'll see people fit to their bicycles that basically turn them into a small sort of slow, loud motorcycle. But e-bikes are a real sweet spot. If you've never ridden an e-bike, I would urge you to go and ride one.

If you have a friend who has one, go and do it. If you have a friend, if you have to rent one, go and do it. Or just buy one and try it out. E-bikes are magical. You can use an e-bike in various ways. But one reason many people don't ride a bicycle is they don't have the physical stamina to ride for long distances at high speeds.

Now that can be developed, but a battery-operated bicycle, a bicycle with a motor, an electric motor and a battery, makes the bicycle much more powerful, which can help many people to use it who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it. The motor is enormously useful when facing hills. If your physical condition doesn't allow you to easily ride up hills, the motor will give you an assist that will make those hills much more accessible to you.

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Learn more at CDW.com/HPPSG. It allows you to cruise along at a high speed with only a little bit of input from your actual pedaling. And you can take rests when you need to and just simply let the battery do the work. And as I said earlier, the power of an e-bike is that it's still a bicycle.

It's not a motorcycle. It's a bicycle. So you don't have the ultimate top speed. You don't have the ultimate power that you would have with a full-fledged motorcycle. But you have all the benefits of the bicycle, but on turbo, on steroids, just really easy and really wonderful. And so if you have a slightly longer commute and you say, "Ah, that would be uncomfortable to ride every day," or you have a very hilly commute and you're not conditioned enough to face it, or the places that you ride are just not awesome for a standard bicycle, then I would strongly encourage you, try out an e-bike.

Today, the market is awash in options. And they're fast, they're powerful, they're silent, they're inexpensive in many cases, just an amazing piece of technology that can really expand your horizons. So if there are issues that you're concerned with that are related to distance or to speed or to physical capacity, an e-bike might provide a solution that will allow you to gain access to the ultimate freedom machine in a way that's suitable for you.

The second set of issues related to a bicycle can, in many ways, be solved with a folding bicycle. No doubt you've seen this at some point, but if you've not looked at it deeply, then I would encourage you take another look at folding bicycles. Back to some of those issues that I described before.

A bicycle is big. It's hard to transport on your vehicle. You need a special rack. It has enormous wheels. Where do you put it if you don't have parking? What do you do if you need to integrate with something else? I want you to picture in your mind a bicycle that's just basically about that folds up into a package that's about the size of a carry-on suitcase.

Quite literally a carry-on suitcase that you can take on an airplane and stick in the overhead bin. You can purchase bicycles that are about that size and that are about the weight of a carry-on suitcase. In many cases, much lighter. About 25-30 pounds. You can get them down to about 20 pounds or less, but about 30 pounds is widely available.

And so a bicycle like this gets you the best of both worlds. You can ride the bicycle whenever you want, but when it's inconvenient for you to ride the bicycle, you can just simply fold the bicycle up and take it with you. If you want to get on and off a bus, you just grab the bicycle and if the front bike rack is full, you fold it up and you take it and you stick it next to your seat or in the bin on the bus.

If you want to ride the train, you take it and you stick it underneath your seat. If you want to ride the plane, quite literally, you can travel around the world with a folding bicycle that will either go as checked luggage without excess bicycle fees or in some cases, be able to go into the overhead bin.

If you want to take your vehicle and you want to drive your own personal automobile, well if you have a bicycle in the trunk of your car, you now have the best of both worlds. You can park in the place that's convenient for you, hop on your bicycle and finish the last mile or three miles in and out of the town.

If you don't want your bicycle to be sitting outside or in a public storage rack where it's getting dirty, you just fold your bicycle up and you bring it in, you stick it in your closet. A folding bicycle is a marvelous invention. In my opinion, it is the ultimate freedom machine.

Now you can integrate these things. You can get a folding bicycle that has battery power, it has an electric motor or you can get one that doesn't. I would say that some version of this, as far as I'm concerned, is what I call the ultimate freedom machine. You get every benefit and advantage of a bicycle and yet you take away the significant majority of the disadvantages.

Bicycles don't have to be one size fits all. After all, we don't look at automobiles and say that one vehicle has to be able to do everything. We don't look at automobiles and say that it has to be really fast, it has to carry ten people and it has to be able to haul a two ton boat.

No, these are different vehicles for different applications, which is why we have small cars, big cars, big SUVs, big pickup trucks, big vans, we have all of the above. And bicycles are similar. If you'll get out of your head the idea that one bicycle has to do everything and be open to building a stable of bicycles with different applications, then I think that you'll be able to put together the bikes that you need that will help you get all the benefits of a bicycle.

But if I'm only going to own one bicycle, then my choice is a folding bicycle. And I would encourage if you haven't looked into them to look into them. Here are some interesting applications of folding bicycles. The first one has to do with just simply world travel. If I could go back and be 19 years old again and take a gap year, here is what I would do and how I would do it.

I personally am not generally attracted to the idea of long range bicycle travel. I've read the stories of people that get on a bicycle and ride from Alaska to Argentina or go and ride from London to Singapore and I think they're awesome. I've met people in my own travels who are doing this and I think it's a really cool way to travel the world.

After all, you have very low expenses, you interact with people wherever you're going because you're visible, you're public, you're part of everything that you're doing. I think it's fantastic. It's a really, really great way of traveling the world. And it's never appealed to me. It's never been something that I have wanted to do.

But I have admired the independence of bicyclists. Now I've been into overlanding. I've enjoyed overlanding myself and overlanding defined here is just the idea of taking your own personal automobile and driving it where you want to go. But the costs of overlanding are pretty significant. The cost of acquiring a vehicle, maintaining a vehicle.

It makes travel out of sight for most people who are younger, who are getting established. So what most people do is they wind up using simply public transit. Which is great. You can fly here, take a bus there and walk to your final destination. Public transit is really, really great.

Until it's not. Until the walk is really far. Until the transit is really annoying or it doesn't go where you want to go. And I think that the perfect travel accessory that is significantly underutilized is a folding bicycle. Because with a folding bicycle you can outfit your bicycle with the same basic gear and equipment that a long range bicyclist would use.

You can have a small tent, small sleeping set up. There's amazingly experienced people that can give you advice on how to set it up. But you can do all that with a folding bicycle. And the folding bicycle allows you to take advantage of transit or transportation whenever you want to.

So if you want to hop from one country to another, you just pull your pack apart, pack up your bicycle, jump on an airplane and fly four countries away. Done. If you get bad weather and you don't want to be out in the bad weather, then you just post up at a hostel or a hotel somewhere.

You fold up your bicycle, you bring it inside. You have perfect protection for all your gear and you stay in a hotel or hostel until the bad weather passes. If the bad weather continues in the place that you are, well then you just hop on a bus and go a state over or a country over or go to the next solution.

Next place you want to go. If you want to go in and out of a city but you find that the expenses in downtown are pretty high and you'd like to be able to go in and out but be in that city but not stay downtown, the bicycle may be your ticket.

You ride a commuter line out of the city center, ride the commuter line out to one of the furthest stations, hop on your bicycle, pedal a couple of miles further out into the countryside and set up a camp. You can camp very inexpensively, probably for free, be completely unbothered by anybody else because you're not in a highly built up urban area because of the access to the train.

Set up your camp there and then go in and out using the commuter train into downtown New York City or downtown Tokyo or downtown wherever you happen to be going. And that bicycle gives you a much bigger range than you would have if you were on your feet. As far as I'm concerned, it's the two of these things together that makes a bicycle magical.

The multiplication of the fact that you can now go miles and miles and miles on your bicycle very comfortably but yet still have easy access to transportation options, to the bus, to an Uber, to a taxi and you don't need any special equipment. You can just place your bicycle in the trunk of the taxi.

You can even do this with hitchhiking. You're going to hitchhike, you can put your bicycle into the trunk of the person who's carrying you. You don't need special bike racks. You don't need to only go with somebody who has a truck. I think this is the best budget based travel option for people who want to travel widely, extensively, inexpensively and putting these two things together is magic.

The folding bicycle is a magical freedom machine. And remember if you want and gain benefit from the battery, you can have all those benefits as well. The battery adds significant weight so it would be less likely that you would want to transport that battery around on a continual basis.

But it does allow you to get all the boosting benefits of an e-bike but in a small foldable machine. As far as I'm concerned that's the ultimate travel setup, the ultimate camping setup for a budget traveler that will allow you to go much farther than somebody who exclusively has his feet to travel on and yet see much more interesting things than someone who is entirely dependent on transit, entirely dependent on private taxis, private transportation because you have your own private transportation.

And the world is enormously open to you. If you can ride a public bus and then do the last 3 or 4 or 5 miles on your bicycle fairly quickly, you're going to have amazing travel experiences that are not open to anyone else. Another application I would like you to think about is that I believe that a bicycle is one of the ultimate preparedness items that you should have established for yourself.

If you work away from your house you commute from your house to your office, one of your first aspects of preparedness in terms of preparing for a disaster scenario of some kind, should be to think about how you would get from your job to your house if you weren't able to get there with the normal means and method.

Imagine that you work in downtown New York City, downtown Manhattan and you need to commute to your home in New Jersey or wherever it happens to be and then something happens that causes downtown Manhattan to be an entire jam. There might be a terrorist attack, there might be a power outage, a train outage, any number of things.

How are you going to get from your office to your home? Well, if you spend any time on YouTube as I do and you search something like "get home" you'll quickly find that everyone suggests that you have something called a "get home bag" which I think is a great idea.

The idea is you should have in your office a bag that has some basic supplies and provisions. It might include things like a comfortable pair of shoes. Maybe you wore fancy dress shoes to the office today but you keep a comfortable pair of broken in shoes that are good for walking in your bag.

You might have some extra food, some snacks, some water, a jacket or a coat so that you can just simply leave your office and you can walk home. But if you're settling in for a 10 or 15 mile walk that's going to take you a significant amount of time and be quite difficult for you to accomplish if you can't just take your car.

Well, what is a machine that can multiply your efforts? The answer is a bicycle. A bicycle can turn that 15 mile walk into something that takes an hour or two and you're done. Instead of it being an all day affair for you to make that 15 miles home. And yet why doesn't everybody have a spare bicycle parked at his office or in his car?

It doesn't fit. The thing is big. Unless it's a folding bicycle. And so if you are thinking and making a plan to get from your office to your home in a disaster of some kind, then I would encourage you that a folding bicycle should be step number one. Every commuter who is intelligent and forward thinking, even if you're using your car every day, the first accessory you should purchase for your car is a folding bicycle that goes in the trunk.

So if your car stops working or there's a terrible traffic jam and you can't get through in traffic or the bridges are shut down, you open your trunk, you unfold your bicycle, grab your backpack with your comfortable shoes and a little bit of extra snacks and water, hop on the bicycle and get yourself home where your family is.

And then we have all the benefits of a bicycle being able to come and go throughout traffic, being able to fold it up, jump on a plane, jump on, excuse me, hopefully not a plane, jump on a boat. And if you remember in a day like 9/11, there were all kinds of boats that were ferrying people from Manhattan to New Jersey using the boats.

And so with your bicycle you can take your bicycle on any form of transportation as well. And so at the very least you should have a bicycle at your office folded up, sitting in a closet somewhere for you and/or if you're using your private car every day, then you should have a bicycle in your trunk.

If you're a commuter and you just always commute on the train or using transit of some kind, great! Keep a bicycle under your desk at work so that if there's something happening with the trains, trains are broken, blocked, shut down, non-functional, that you have an option to be able to get yourself home to be with those that you love.

Now in terms of specific brands and things like that to consider, I don't have any particular insight for you. I would say that if you're just looking for one that is probably the best, the most popular and the best seems to be a brand called Brompton. It's a British brand that has a very long-running design and they're a really good middle-of-the-road option.

The price for a Brompton folding bicycle, a new one, is probably going to be somewhere around $1,200 to as much as $5,000 for a battery-operated, top-of-the-line, titanium, super lightweight, that kind of thing. I've seen some guys that accessorize theirs to be a $10,000 bicycle, but basically looking at somewhere around $1,200 to $2,000 for probably a pretty good Brompton brand new.

There are other ones, I think one of the largest ones globally is Eihon. Tern is another competitor, Montague, Bike Friday, Riese & Muller, A-Bike, Oyama, Citizen Bike. I don't know enough about this field to tell you the pros and the cons of all of them. I think again, your best straightforward one is Brompton.

If you're just looking for probably the standard, the high-quality Toyota of the space, I think it's Brompton. Now, there is another brand that probably makes the smallest one. I think that brand is Quiggle. So if you want a super, super compact one, then there's this one called Quiggle that is a German company that makes this tiny one that folds up into something that's smaller than a carry-on, probably more akin to a personal item size.

It's not as rideable as a Brompton is, but it's certainly much smaller and much more lightweight. So if the absolute smallest package is necessary for you, then I think that one is probably the absolute smallest. Remember that all of this is a trade-off. If you were going to get set off and ride from Alaska to Argentina and you wanted to never take transit and you didn't want any of the benefits of a folding bicycle, you wouldn't ride a folding bicycle.

You're riding a folding bicycle because it's not quite as good as a fixed bicycle, but it's almost as good and yet gives you all the benefits of the folding mechanism. And so there's a range between large size and smaller ones, and there are less expensive ones available as well.

There are a number of brands that are a good bit cheaper than Brompton, but I'm not skillful enough to tell you that you definitely should have this brand or that brand. You have to figure that out for yourself. What I want to emphasize to you is quite simply this.

Machines enhance our power and enhance our lifestyle and we should use them in every place that they make sense. Sometimes we just automatically accept certain machines and we don't pay attention to the downsides. So a personal automobile is a powerful and amazing machine that has a whole bunch of downsides.

So let's pay attention to those downsides and not get a big machine or an expensive machine where we don't need one. And let's not try to make one machine do everything. If you're looking for the ultimate freedom machine, the ultimate freedom vehicle, it is a bicycle. It's not a car, it's a bicycle.

And the ultimate form of a bicycle that gives you most 80 to 95% of all the benefits of a bicycle but gives you a whole bunch of benefits that the standard fixed bicycle form doesn't give you is a folding bicycle. And if you are looking for magic, look for one of those.

Look for, if you gain benefit from having an electric assist, look for an e-bike. And if you have not paid attention to this marketplace, look around and see if these new and really good technologies might help you to have an ultimate freedom machine that allows you to save more money, go more places, live a cooler and more interesting lifestyle, accumulate more interesting experiences without the heavy costs of other kinds of machines.

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