Bikes & Big Ideas Podcast

Conversations with the pro riders, product designers, & others who are shaping the sport and bike culture.

Recent Episodes:

Pinner Machine Shop on Self-Taught Machining, Making Parts in a Kitchen, & More (Ep.136)Pinner Machine Shop on Self-Taught Machining, Making Parts in a Kitchen, & More (Ep.136)
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Emilie Siegenthaler on the New Downhill Rider’s Association (Ep.135)
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Vaea Verbeeck at Proving Grounds 2022 (photo: Lear Miller)
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Dillon Osleger on Historic Trails, Changing Climates, & Evolving Communities (Ep.133)
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Reviewer Reports: Bikes, Suspension, Brakes, & More (Ep.132)
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Reynolds on the Environmental Footprint of Bike Manufacturing (Ep.131)
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Speed & Style on Dirt & Snow with Dillon Flinders (Ep.130)
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Rae Morrison on 8 Years on the EWS, Race Strategies, & Forging Her Own Path (Ep.129)
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Crestline Bikes on Adaptability, Collaboration, & Founding a Bike Brand (Ep.128)
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We sat down with the crew from Over The Edge to talk about trail building & the development of MTB towns; traveling to ride; servicing Rampage bikes; & much more.
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Eric Olsen just returned from bike touring between the first three rounds of the EWS, so we sat down with him to hear where he got the idea in the first place; how it all went, including encountering golf-ball-sized hail and a flock of schoolchildren mid-race; the notion of bikes as transportation & European bike touring culture more broadly; and much, much more.
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Trinity MTB V2 Prototype
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Reviewer Reports: Santa Cruz, Pivot, Kavenz, & More (Ep.124)
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Betty Birrell riding the North Shore (Photo: Travis Rummel)
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Hope’s new Tech 4 brakes got a big bump up in power, but there’s a whole lot more that goes into designing a brake than just turning that dial to 11. So we sat down with Hope engineer Sam Gibbs to talk about all of that; the tradeoffs that go into brake design; the new Tech 4 lineup in detail; and a whole lot more.
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REEB does a lot of things differently, from their founding in a brewery, to how they think about bike design and manufacturing. So this week on Bikes & Big Ideas, we spoke with REEB’s Jeff Lenosky and Adam Prosise about all of it, including the equally-interesting stories of how they both got involved with REEB, their current (and future) MTB lineup, & a whole lot more.
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RockShox has released a crazy amount of new suspension in the last few months, and we’ve been spending time on both their Flight Attendant electronically controlled setup and the new ZEB and SuperDeluxe. So on this week’s episode of Bikes & Big Ideas, we give the rundown on all of it, plus updates from our testing of bikes from Santa Cruz, Orbea, Rocky Mountain, YT, and Antidote.
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Jess Blewitt (photo by Dominic Blissett)
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Contra production bike
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Kavenz had been working on a high-pivot Enduro bike long before it was cool, and the VHP16 and new VHP18 that came out of the project have a lot of unique design features. So this week on Bikes & Big Ideas, we sat down with Kavenz founder Giacomo Großehagenbrock to talk about the founding of Kavenz; the design philosophy behind their bikes; starting and growing a business; and much more.
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