I've been keen to quiz Dphil student Petter Charlesworth on his cycling adventures since we first met through Wilson's green team sometime in 2022.
If you've seen the Pre-loved bike scheme ox bikes here at the college or elsewhere around Oxford,
which aims to tackle the city's high demand and discard of bikes on a timely basis,
then you'll be pleased to learn that Petr is one of the brains behind the operation.
Pedro, thank you so much for joining us on Pivot Points.
So it's a really interesting moment to have you on the podcast because as you know, we've worked together a lot with you on the green team.
We're really increasing our initiatives around sustainable transport.
So you're you're here for your research, obviously, but somehow alongside that,
you found the time and the space to found your own Pre-loved bike initiative.
So let's start that. Tell me about that. Yeah. Well, first, thank you for having me on the podcast.
It's great to be here. I really like the set up of this.
So yeah, I mean, I guess an introduction to me in Oxford and what I'm doing here is I am meant to be doing a Ph.D. in some point,
and I'm looking at the specific materials like ceramic materials.
So I tell people I'm kind of a glorified potter, but without anything pretty to show.
And I look at these materials for like nuclear fusion applications.
So the overarching theme is kind of this brainchild of physics to produce clean energy and renewable, clean energy.
So that's kind of what I what I do.
So job as a job here, I guess in most of my research and my third of four years studying, not now, but lately, like you said,
I've kind of got involved with initially the and green team and what they do
here and helping with making some maps and just general providing my thoughts
and ideas and trying to try to make wolves and more of a community that's based on sort of these green principles of which it was founded as well.
And and like you said, yes, kind of got spun out from that and from just being in the ecosystem.
Oxford is found someone that had just started up a very small bike company which is selling second-hand bikes.
And so she got in right at the beginning with that and it's expanded over this sort of year and a half that
it's been going from from now having its own website where you can essentially rent bicycles in Oxford.
It's the largest bike rental company in Oxford in terms of numbers of bikes and the traffic through that.
And the idea is that, yeah, it provides love for bikes to sort of get thrown away.
And in Oxford, you know, everyone travels by bicycle and there is this sort of asymmetry.
And when people want to buy and when they want to sell them and you have this constant throughput of students,
thousands of students are coming here, often international.
They realise they want a bike and then buy it all in September or October and start Michaelmas and then they all just leave them in June.
So and I often genuinely do leave them now was a party last week and someone described when they were in Oxford that when
they finished their masters what they did is rode that bike to the ride cam and just let it free and just left it there,
just knowing that someone is going to take it.
And it's very much this ethos of like, you know, students do really care about their pennies, but also when it's done,
a lot of people just leave and on and I don't know what they want to do with their bicycle and I really have time to think about it.
So there was this sort of asymmetry that we saw. And then you have this idea of like, where do you get a bicycle from?
It's quite a personal thing, or everyone's trying to buy at the same time.
So you often buy them from sources, but you often maybe feel a little bit pressured to buy a bicycle when some
older person has come in from Witney and driven for 20 minutes or something,
and you just stood there in the centre of Oxford not knowing anything about bicycle going, Yeah, I think it's okay, I'll take it.
And we hope a lot of this.
So it's kind of come from this ethos of originally it was just you buy bikes from the website and it's just a list of bikes and you don't,
you don't bid for them and there's no messaging. It's just, okay, you pay for that. It's not evolved into having this rental system.
And we've now got this the website is completely automated in that sense.
But to add to that, we're now looking at helping the colleges call their bikes, how we can do that in a sustainable way that we could.
We use some of them and pay them so the students can get hold of them again and kind of complete this bike cycle basically.
And yeah, it's been it's been a bit of fun journey. I'd say it takes up quite a bit of time,
but so far it has been really rewarding and it's nice to see when you do get lots
of people happy with how they how they're doing and how they're finding that bike.
So yeah, it's been a little bit of journey, but hopefully there's a long way to go. Yeah, I can imagine.
And I think that leads us quite nicely into all three of your pivot points really, which centred around bikes.
So I'm curious as to basically where does that love of bikes begin?
Honestly, it's something that's only happened in the last part of my life.
I grew up not that far away. So between riding in London, I was just playing football like everyone in my school did.
And then I ditched the football to go skateboarding and did that intensely till I was about 18.
It was all I cared about. I then went to university where I kind of just was a jack of all trades and tried everything I was in,
did a bit the cricket and I did a tiny bit of cycling. And you're at Bristol for your undergrad?
Yes, studying chemistry. And it was mostly into electronic music and really enjoyed DJing in Bristol.
So that didn't really bode well. We tried to be in a cycling team because I'd often be out playing on Friday
and then come Saturday morning I was just hanging on the back of the bunch.
So what I would say is the love of bikes came later like it was.
I bought my first bike Second-hand actually from eBay when I had a job video conferences in London.
And this is just going before I went to Bristol and I. Any way I could get to London quick enough was I had to.
I took the bike because I could beat the train there because it took so long for my line to get to another station.
And then I could get into London on time to be able to film these conferences.
So that's why I bought my first road bike, and then I would just use it to explore the chilterns and things like that.
But honestly, my biggest ever ride was like 30 miles or something like that.
It didn't really come about easily. I did one session with a cycling team my first year and then started doing a few my final year.
But what really sparked the interest was between those two points.
In my first year,
I was on a bus in Bristol and I overheard some people talking behind me and they're both students and they didn't really knew of each other,
but they didn't know each other well. But it was kind of the conversation where I went, Hey, John, like, what did you do?
I heard you did something really cool last summer.
You're in Galway, and he was like, Yeah, yeah, I, I ride a bike for ten days in Norway and it's great because the roads are awesome.
The people speak better English than I do, and you can camp anywhere because there's a lot of Scandinavia generally,
generally that you can just company with some private property. And that sparked something for me and I thought, wow, this is this is cool.
I like this idea of something adventurous like that. But I thought, okay, if Norway sounds very hilly, I'm not a keen cyclist necessarily.
I'll go to Sweden. So I booked a ticket to Gothenburg with me and my little rally bike that used
to ride to these conferences and had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
I turned up, I firstly, I brought my bike and bubble wrap.
She's not your mate, apparently. No, no. Say I will.
You know, they can see it's a bike to look after it. So I get to go Thunberg and the airport.
I'm not actually in the city. It's in in the forest.
And I found that the my bike was broken and I couldn't change gear and I didn't really know how to fix it or anything.
I genuinely turned up with a paper map and stuff. I was 18 and I got the bike to the hostel and then found a bicycle shop to get it fixed.
And also in the hostel I'll speak speaking some of the people that I just, you know, what are they doing in Gothenburg and whatnot?
And one guy told me, Oh, there's another group of cyclists here. So I said, Please, can you take me to their room?
Because I was so terrified about what I was going to embark on that I wanted some just knowledge of whatever.
So I went to that room, literally knocked on it and just said, Hey guys, you know, what are you doing?
And I said, Oh, we're cycling from Stockholm to Paris.
There were four American students that had just finished their master's degrees and were going off to jobs, and it was kind of a last hurrah.
So I asked if I could cycle with them from Gothenburg to where my paper map
actually started because BLEEP and I've got the bike wasn't actually on the map.
So I said, okay, can I come with you then? I said, No worries.
So what was meant to be three days became three and a half weeks,
and then we became really good friends and they taught me how to how to camp in my places,
how to couch and took me to all these different parties of friends that they knew in the cities.
We saw Germany win the World Cup in Hamburg and things like that. They just stayed with me ever since.
And CouchSurfing experiences from them really enlightened something in me.
So the next year I did the same again. I worked in a pub for the rest of the summer and then flew to Helsinki and cycled from Helsinki to Berlin.
And that was probably one of the loneliest weeks of my life down the on the east coast of Sweden.
It's just pine forests.
And it just wasn't really much that I didn't have this experience of meeting lots of people in that area naturally, and just found that quite hard.
But I got to Berlin and had a lovely time in again into the hostel,
then managed to catch up with some people in the area coming in and some of those people are now
still some of my best friends and one of the girls is coming to visit from Switzerland next week,
so that's really cool. And not just organised this idea of cycling and why it was interesting.
It was more of a vector to travel and to meet people.
And what happened on that trip is I read this book, which is one of the points I talk to you about, which is the future joys valleys of Humphreys.
And whilst I was doing that trip, obviously this is just it was just three week cycles.
There's nothing big compared to what other people have done.
And this this guy, Alister from Yorkshire writes a book about how he cycled around the world four and a half years.
And he never takes a plane. He always sails across and goes to some crazy situations like Siberia in the winter and all sorts of things like that.
And that kind of ignited this idea of maybe there was people would do bigger things and it was a community out there.
And these three week trips that kind of just nudged me in that direction sort
of started the snowball going that when it came time to finish university,
I didn't know whether or not I wanted to do a PhD and hadn't found anything that I was incredibly passionate about in chemistry at that time.
I felt that maybe I'd just be walking into a Ph.D. without sort of thoughts or direction,
and the direction just seemed naturally to be pulling me to go and try to explore.
So I'd spent the third year of my degree working and doing lectures in the mornings and evenings are just part of this like special course I was on.
And that meant I left university with enough money to potentially go travelling for a little while.
I wanted to with friends, but didn't have anyone that really wanted to ride a bicycle definitely for a period of time, which is fair enough.
And then yeah, so that's kind of where we're ended in terms of, you know, that's how the bicycle sort of came into my life really.
And then I decided and it was literally five.
Years ago, if you'd like. A few days ago? Yeah.
On the 18th of January 2018 is when I decided I was going to try and ride a bicycle originally to India and then Sydney and then it kind of,
I don't know when a little bit crazy I guess. And I think COVID got in the way of that trip as well, right?
It did. But I count myself incredibly fortunate because my idea was to try to ride a bike from from London to Sydney and do that in 12 months.
And I was very much locked in that. Okay. I was working in 12 month periods because my my thing was that I'd done one year
working and I'd done got a four year degree essentially with one year's working.
And at times if I took a year off, I would be at the same place, I guess, as everyone else, which is looking back at it now.
It kind of maybe just epitomises how my thought process was.
Everything was kind of blocked and planned out and but basically when I got about six months into that trip.
And I was cycling along what is the ancient Silk Road, I guess through through the stones in Central Asia.
Just a few things happened there that really sort of changed my mindset to why I was doing this, what was important,
and then why did I have to come home at this time and why they planned everything out to such an extent.
I guess I know people that involved in that that really sort of helped shape, I guess, what I wanted to do beyond just cycling.
Yeah. Yeah. And it also really strikes me as you talk through that journey,
how kind of how how much of a student experience some of those moments are because especially as an undergrad,
you have long periods of holiday and the workload is a lot less intense than it is as a postgraduate.
So I'm curious about how cycling shaped your experience then compared to how it shapes or
how it's involved in your student and academic experience now as your lifestyle changes?
Yeah, I think that's that's an interesting question. But for me, undergrad was so packed full of things.
I would say that cycling was just kind of a quick release and then it was something that really gave me headspace and it
always has given me headspace when I used to play music and do my undergraduate the Sunday morning going out with the club,
even though I was not anywhere near the team desiring back, I was just hanging at the back.
I was having a great time because I just I just cleared myself out of the city.
And I do love I love being in cities, but I do need to have my headspace at some point.
So it was always been kind of this release for me in every sense.
So from from then and then taking it through the trip and then honestly became this,
this sort of promise I gave myself was when I came back after it was I ended up being
over two years that I wanted to keep cycling ingrained in my life in some way,
in some way, shape or form.
And I was passionate about potentially energy and the two things sort of fused together and some of the interests I have now.
But I would say there was no real direction involved in pre meditating.
This definitely the ox bikes thing,
but I decided I'd join the cycling team here at Oxford because I knew that having cycling almost every day for two years,
those are the happiest two years of my life. And I genuinely felt that being outside helped that.
And I think it's important to sort of paint a picture of what it looks like
maybe cycling around the world and that there are these incredible times that
you never forget the for the rest of your life and the people and the landscapes that just genuinely take your breath away and sort of inspire you.
But there's also a lot of industrial estates and there are lots of camping next to border towns and truckies.
And I have great times in truckers, but, you know,
being woken up by some stinky camels truck I mean you go is back is not the most fun place to be and you do see the warts and all of everywhere,
which I think gives you a really good and fair representation of of what you're seeing.
The bicycle is a really humble way to get around. People interact with you differently because of it.
And I just think that is a vehicle to sort of shows you sort of what it is this.
But I was still happy. There were lots of times that were tough. They don't get me wrong.
And and some lonely stretches like hugely lonely stretches especially honestly, though I never felt was lonely as that first trip.
That second trip. Yeah. But but they were point was not because it was new or.
I think so. Yeah, I think so. And also being in an environment where you're so overstimulated to really strip that back to to just a road in some,
some pine forests is, is quite difficult.
And I found the same when crossing some of the deserts, especially through through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
You just go for days the sort of sensory deprivation,
just not really seeing anything other than sand and camels and in Australia in the outback was maybe less so like that.
But you know, it was just you chocolatey food on your bike and it's 300 miles to the next petrol station kind of thing.
But, but what we wanted to say is that, you know, during all those times,
even when it was tough, I still really was happy with where I was and what I was doing.
I just felt like I was really doing whatever it was I needed to be doing in my life right now.
And I think that it was just more the outlook of those places that you get from being on a bike
and having given yourself this arbitrary goal of having to try and ride a bike to Sydney,
which actually doesn't matter at all right there. What matters is I feel like I'm engaged in what's going on and the bike gave
me that so that even when your days in industrial estates are still finished, they feeling happy and content.
And I knew that if I had more of that in my life, I would still be able to look at the grey January days, hopefully with a little slice of sun.
When I was doing something that was potentially less adventurous or adventurous in a different way, which could be a job or not my day.
So that was really important for me to to bring the bike into my life. And it has become in some ways slightly an identity.
I think I can see that. But but I think it's important to just sort of say that it was not something I grew up with or I'm,
you know, I write for the team folks who my race for them. But I was not doing this when I was seven years old or was incredibly good when I was six.
You. He just wasn't doing it at all. And it's just something has come about a new your mode of cycling is very much an endurance sport.
It takes a lot of perseverance and kind of long distance thinking.
And that also really just reminds me of how people approach kids and academic research.
Do you find anything useful in in that type of thinking that helps you push through in your academic work, for example?
Yeah, I think that I think that's a good point. Definitely. I think there's so many parallels and in many ways I feel that I have self doubt,
one mode or project for another one in that this is just as an overarching thing.
And yeah, I think, I think planning definitely in what I was doing, especially at the beginning, trying to work out things like that.
But it's more just kind of having a yardstick to compare other things to.
And I think that's just so refreshing that, okay, things are going bad if my materials or I don't know what I'm doing with it,
but just kind of having some sort of yardstick of one,
a comparison to what people's lives are actually like, you know,
and understanding of how privileged that even I'm too cool to university and be here and kind of just see what other people have been going through.
If you just do a small sort of lens of cycling through and talking to people, I think that perspective is massive.
That's motivation for just trying to appreciate what's going on and take that most that walk around Oxford and go, Actually, life's pretty good.
My material was just not working. But that's just that, right? It's not my it's not everything for me.
I think that perspective is great.
And then there are, I guess, sort of more personal qualities in terms of just trying to be a bit more patient with things.
My golden rule in life at the moment is to try not to break things.
When you write, when you rush things, you you can break things.
That's a lot worse than taking your time over something. Yeah.
So I guess there's a little bit of that in there as well. Yeah. I mean, you can talk about mental toughness and all those kind of things,
but I think just the perspective on this isn't everything in my life and I'll be okay without it.
And if it all goes horribly wrong, you'll find me somewhere in the Andes or the tent.
Well, speaking of remote places,
tell me about this moment where you found yourself in Montana and you met some young kid who somehow had a very big impact on your life.
Yeah. So Jake. So Jake was from Montana and it was all part of that Silk Road experience.
So I was actually in Kyrgyzstan, in Tajikistan, and it was England playing in the World Cup.
And this kid from Montana, Jake, came around.
And what's really interesting is that Charlie Boorman and Ewan McGregor did this motorbike series with a motorbike across the world to Mongolia,
and it inspired generations of overland, as they call themselves, people.
They drive cars, motorbike cycle to some extent, and they all do this trip.
And it's kind of for a lot of people, and understandably so. It is a once in a lifetime thing.
They save up loads of money for it for often, you know,
decades and then decide to do this trip and they spend ages choosing their right
bike and go off with a partner or a couple of friends and they ride these roads.
And if you go into Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, it's extremely mountainous regions.
It's something like 96% mountain in six months. They really struggle to grow like agricultural crops.
But the mountains are incredible and you've got these plateaus at 4000 metres,
you can sort of look down to the south across the Punch River and see the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan.
And then you've got the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan, and it's a really some really crazy regions around that.
But they also revolve around this record, the Pamir Highway. And the mayor is the name they give to the mountains.
The mountains. And it's sort of this journey that people do to Mongolia on on motorbikes.
So they come in, you know, if we're going to stereotype, having done all of this research and have just got everything mapped out to the nth degree,
and even though I talked about planning there, I very much kind of just drew three roads that I wanted to ride.
The premier highway was one of them. The one is the Karakoram Highway through Pakistan.
And then it's been all L.A. Highway in India, in the Himalayas.
And I said, I just want to ride these three roads and then whatever else would just make sense from that.
And what seems interesting. But these people come along with all this equipment and I've I've really planned this out properly.
They really know what they're doing. And I met this kid, Jake, in a hostel who had been motor biking around this area for about six weeks.
What do you say, kid? How old is he? He was 17 and he had he was there on his own, on his own.
And he had flown from Montana, having worked on his parent's farm to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan,
had gone into a market and bought a motorbike for 1000 US of a Scottish guy and had said he'd
only written a motorbike three times and had written some of the gnarliest roads around.
And not only that, he'd gone back and forth through these remote valleys.
So often people would just ride one of them because it doesn't make sense to zigzag, but he just decided to ride all of them.
And it just it just really took a step back for me because he he didn't know how to fix most bye at all.
And I said, well. What happens if something goes wrong?
You had one spanner with it. Show me the Spanish. It wasn't even adjusted.
Justin Bag. Or is it a rucksack? Rucksack? A little rucksack, not a leather jacket.
There was no biker, so he was just this kid and he had this motorbike people for a thousand us and a spanner and that was it.
And he'd done all of the most remote valleys in the premier highway basically that all these people were talking about and you know,
saying in hushed tones about how scary nervous they were with their crazy nice bikes and whatever.
And I just love that mentality of he was just saying, Well, I'm going to work it out.
If it goes wrong. I'll just wait until someone eventually comes. And I'm sure I would just just survive.
I think he had a tent, but he was he was mainly just trying to go to hostels.
But I just love that, that he was just saying, no, no, I'm just going to put myself there and I'm going to work it out.
And I had done some of the craziest trips of anyone I'd heard or talked to in this valley, and he was 17.
And it was just such a mentality that he had that revitalised my sort of whole revitalised me to try and not plan as much and just,
okay, I don't need to be here, there and everywhere. And it was a combination of meeting him.
It was two of the things that happened there actually. One was actually quite tragic, but the other was this.
I met these Swiss bankers in again the hostel just on from the want to make Jack.
And they were just saying, well, we know what are you doing?
And I explained my trip and, you know, I was going to go home and study this great scheme potentially.
And they just asked me why I why did I want to do that?
And he said, look, I'm with where they were pretty like 40, 30 years older than me at the time.
They said, you know, we've worked all our lives to be able to afford to do this and take this time off work.
If I was you, I would just keep going until you can't beg, borrow or steal any more money to keep to keep doing this.
And those two things really changed things for me.
I ended up not taking the route I pre-planned and ended up just doing a massive loop around Southeast Asia.
When I got to Sydney, I decided I didn't want to end the trip there and just carried on and ended up cycling through New Zealand in South America,
which is where I had some of the most enjoyable parts of my life.
And I just think that sort of idea that you work out is really important.
But if you don't put your name in the ring or put your name in the hat to go in the ring, then you you'll never be that right.
And I just loved that, that he was he was doing that.
And it sat amongst this backdrop of what was quite a crazy emotional time, because riding the Silk Road, there was a lot of sort of desert regions.
There's a lot of really incredibly friendly people.
And I would say to anyone who's travelling in Muslim countries that just the door is always open to them because it's just so,
so friendly and welcoming. But the sad thing to happen to kind of frame this and.
Just in a more poignant way was this road, the premier highway. It borders Afghanistan.
So we generally would cycle along the road ten metres away from Afghanistan, across the Pines River, and you could talk to the people there.
Not that I could really say very much, but it was just this great connection.
But unfortunately, in previous years.
It had been a prime opium smuggling route for the Taliban and people had had warning shots fired at them and those types of things in years gone by.
But there had never been any trouble because generally the people are very nice and there's been a huge crackdown from the Turkish army on the border.
But also this was a time where the UK, the states and other countries were present in Afghanistan,
but there was the rise of ISIS and there were some radicalisation that went on
and unfortunately there is now unfortunately there's a strong cycling community,
but there was a couple called Lauren and Jake who I got to know through Instagram who was cycling in Africa when I was doing my trip,
and we became just sort of friends through that and would write to each other.
And then I found out when I was cycling along the road that whilst I was there I didn't have any internet connection.
They had flown to Kyrgyzstan and started cycling on the road back and we met in this valley on a plateau, having had no idea each other were there.
And it was a very amazing experience to just finally meet them.
And we kept messaging because I'd written the road that they were riding and likewise they'd done the same.
But unfortunately I still getting messages from them about a week or two after this.
And what happened was a tragic event where some young teenagers had been radicalised by ISIS across Afghanistan, one assumes,
and had come and run them all down, including another couple and another guy behind them and had come out with knives and killed them.
And it became this huge story in Tajikistan and something that really rocked the cycling community.
And I had quite a lot of journalists asking me for more details.
I didn't I didn't have. But I ended up reading a lot of the things that Lauren AJ had spoken about and written on their blog.
And I just thought, Oh, really? So give this sort of zest for life that, you know, that I was morbidly thinking, if I'm going to go next.
But but more just like, you know, right here, right now,
I really feel like I'm doing something that for me is makes me really happy and is really important and that they probably,
if there's any way to go, is doing something like that for them.
And I think that combined with this that these as in from Jake's just with his Spanish going off and writing
after and the last episode of Jake was him going into Afghanistan on his bike to ride up to some like,
you know, it was just incredible.
And then and then these bankers that kind of gave that sort of elderly perspective on everything and that combination was so great,
genuinely did change, I think me and my perspective on what I wanted to do and,
and to try and just just live a little bit more and you know, you come back to the UK and you appreciate so many things,
but you also have perspective on maybe sort of social structures that are in place and where they often push you to do things in this.
BLOCK Yeah, grand scheme kind of thinking. I'm not saying I've broken the mould I definitely fall straight back into when I'm here,
but hopefully have some perspective in those three events in that place,
combined with just the incredible friendliness from people where, you know, for instance,
I was sick and stayed in someone's garden for three days, you know, like I.
Can you imagine someone doing that here and knocking on your door in southern Oxfordshire where I am anyway,
and saying, Hey there, or if I can be in your garden and I just like that is incredible.
And I genuinely happen many times and I think that whole sort of melting pot of
riding the Silk Road was just this incredible point of perspective for me that yeah,
I can hopefully I can draw on hopefully in the future. Yeah.
I find it so interesting that we do live in such a well, well-structured and comparatively safe community.
But the amount of fear that we have between strangers is like incomparable.
And then if you think of an experience like that,
the fact that you can come away with it and you don't feel deterred from having these kind of out of the box experiences is great.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think what we do.
Really well, always we adjust to our surroundings and I think there is this sort of level of
background fear that people have and it would just be applied to something else.
Well, we have this this this thing of, you know, what is suffering is the wrong word necessarily.
But I think maybe for lack of a better one, it kind of fits in there, too.
But but in terms of fear, I think we always fear things, but the repercussions of which could be vastly different depending on where you grow up.
But the thing is, you will adjust to that so that if you were going somewhere probably now in Tajikistan,
that area probably is going to be a prime opium smuggling route and there probably will be a lot more dangerous for the people that live there.
They may now fear genuine, not being able to afford anything for their children and the welfare of their kids.
And that fear would take up a huge amount of of their time.
And that's, you know, fear with the repercussion is really high.
And then we or, you know, there are probably people here that fear other things, maybe not to that degree,
but to a disproportionately high amount, which may be looking silly in front of a class or, you know, and, you know, you can't legitimise them.
They are if you feel like that, you feel like that. Yeah. I think we just appearance is disproportionate to what the repercussions are.
Right. You know, you know, social structure. I think that's really interesting to see.
And and the same with sort of putting yourself through some sort of hardship and maybe hardships a better way.
And and for me, one of the reasons I really liked cycling was that you could go out for even
here in the winter for two or 3 hours and feel like you're on death's door,
you know, because you're so cold and genuinely disgruntled that when you come back, just a bit of warmth and a cup of tea makes you feel amazing.
Yeah. And I think that is a healthy reset to what is living in the most incredibly privileged place,
studying amongst amazing people and just being safe day to day.
Yeah, it to some extent can help. Yeah, certainly.
And just bringing things kind of close to home again. I can imagine that that that sort of.
Attitudes towards risk and safety also plays into how you might approach your own, you know, your own company, your own initiative like ARX Bikes,
because obviously there are, you know,
there are risks and things involved in that and it's maybe disproportionate if you compare it to something else.
But it's still I can imagine at least that you still have the same attitude of like, well, if I don't try it, then I'm never going to know, right?
Hundred percent. Yeah. And it's now become hugely successful for you guys.
Hopefully it's, it's going in the right direction, but, but for sure and it's putting yourself out there in a different way.
You know, there's generally a fear of it failing. Yeah. And and also just the fear of offering something that's bad.
And every time there is an issue with the bicycle is something that, you know, genuinely makes me sad and I want to try and help and fix that.
And we're trying to make better systems for it.
But for sure, there's, there's definitely this element of of trying and failing or the fate of fear of failure.
But it's almost putting yourself in. Well, kind of.
Why not? This is taking is it was kind of like why not like see why not just put yourself in a situation.
Yeah. So then talk me through your third and final pivot point of being in London.
And you had this moment where all of these messages just started coming into you, and that's when you knew that ox bikes was really onto something.
Yeah, it's maybe not as exotic as the other two points is the crazy story behind it, but.
But essentially, yeah, to put it in context, I got involved in those bikes back in my second year in Michaelmas then, and it was just,
you know, we literally had got some bikes from Trinity College and were kind of just checking them over and then selling them.
And then in June we started to have this website, but it still didn't have any proper code behind it.
And I just scrambled together a piece of code that stopped us selling duplicate bikes because that's a real pain.
And when you sell the same bike five times that it's always one bike is better than the others.
So that's kind of the level we started at was really, really basic.
We just decided and then and then yet we went on to having having, you know,
Hungarian families coming and renting out with these bikes and this fear of like it being, it being a bad product, I guess.
But in the last few months I went and did a a collaboration project up in Lancaster, and at that time it was a crazy period.
The Queen died. And then we got a call from someone saying, Hey, I've seen an advert on Facebook, I'd like to invest in OCS bikes.
And we were just, oh my goodness, really? Like someone wants to invest. And we had a few calls and he gave us some money for it.
And at that point, you know, the goal was to try buy 100 more bicycles, do them,
make sure they're in good functioning order, and then start to sell them and rent them basically.
And this is, you know, tripling our fleet at the time and really going somewhere more professional than we'd ever been before.
And we've managed to get someone from Imperial to help programme stuff.
But what happened on the day of the marathon was I was on the bus and I get notifications.
Whenever someone makes it we make it a rental or sale.
And I was only a ten minute bus journey and I think all of the people seem to culminate in one bus and my phone, which is buzzing the whole time,
I just couldn't believe what happened,
that this many people were actually interested in this funky little website that we made that they wanted to sell from us.
And then at that point it was evident, okay, we didn't have a good website and you know, we really weren't advertising it any way.
Marketing was nil. We just had this little website called Ox Bikes. It's called ox bikes because someone took ox bike.
And and it really was like like that.
It was just kind of us pulling things together.
And by the end of that journey, it was we sort of sat down, we got this well, this is now something, you know, because before that point,
talk about taking the risk is I was worried this, you know, initially that this investor was maybe wasting their money in some senses.
You know, why were they coming in and doing this? And I think completely vindicated at that point.
If we could just hold things together, make it work, like we would be able to get somewhere with it.
And hopefully it does help students. And I'm genuinely helped by wastage in Oxford to keep things.
I think it does. So what's next for ox bikes? What's next?
Strokes bikes? Yeah, that's a great question.
Well, actually, when we were initially doing this podcast, I was pitching at the side business school here,
Oxford, for some more funding and there's a few ways you want to go with that.
We're trying to get into more colleges. So at the moment we've we've got quite a few more depots coming, which is great.
And the idea is to go to Cambridge by the by the end of this academic year is we are setting
up at the moment in Cambridge to go because you're going to have to change the name.
Yeah. So the actual overall company now is called bike B Wiki.
Nice. And that's going to so have we have a bike and then owns bikes is going to be part of that.
Yeah. And then we're going to have it equivalent Cambridge bike bikes.
Yeah, exactly. Right. So so yeah.
That's kind of the idea is to do those things. But, but you know, if I was to think and wish in the future is I love this idea of.
Nailing down Oxford and Cambridge and really supplying what is a good service for students,
kind of by students and having it be this ecosystem where people can learn about how to be part of a company and how these small,
small enterprises work and get skills that are not available endemically when also in some money.
But that's so useful because I feel like that's the kind of thing that you just don't learn in an academic setting and there's no way to learn it.
Exactly. Exactly. And just doing it is really nice.
You know, I've just come from the Wolfson workshop at the moment where I got really good
friend and colleague Tom and another person who's just started Tilghman,
and we just talking through these things and they're really excited in the moment helping us check bikes.
And we can hopefully get them doing a bunch of meetings and setting up things like is exciting and that's hopefully going to be the sort of note.
But if I was to to wish for what it could be in the future,
it would be sort of like an Airbnb of bicycles where you're going to a different city and you know,
the classic ones, Amsterdam to Copenhagen or maybe even Barcelona. And you're going there and you want to rent a bike not just for an hour or two.
You want to rent it for a day or a week or something like that.
And anyone who lives in that city can post their spare bikes on this app in a very much same way as Airbnb.
The good people get rewarded with good reviews kind of thing, and you can go there and say,
okay, and they just drop their bike off Iraq with a good lock on it a couple hours before,
and you can pick it up and then bring it back and then kind of have this exchange of I do travel by bicycle in different
cities and not just a city bike where you have to drop off of the depot or you can have your bike touring company,
you've got your bike shop that has rental bikes already, but how even to find them?
Often the websites are clunky and you know, it would be great to connect those people up in that sort of way.
So that's kind of maybe an overarching dream of what it could be.
Yeah, but at the moment we're just trying to provide a good service for students.
I think that's such a great idea. And it's always one of the one of those ideas that's so great and so good that it's like, has nobody done that yet?
Yeah. And I think the main thing is people focus on short term transport.
Yeah. And like drivers and the voice and stuff and that's, that's how they generally will be.
Yeah. So yeah, we will see that at the moment it's just trying to try and somehow get it.
Yes. Keeps keep cycling and yeah. Make sure works place does and how much longer do we have you here.
Awesome. So I'm I will have to finish it right up in October 24.
So I still got quite a bit of time. Yeah. Yeah. So if you need it needing a bike, Femke, we can we can have got.
Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you very much. Better. Thank you very much for having me.