Bikes & Big Ideas

By Blister

What's Bikes & Big Ideas about?

Bikes & Big Ideas is the weekly podcast from BLISTER that's dedicated to the most interesting conversations and ideas from the bike world — and beyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Bikes & Big Ideas episodes:

04.25.2024
Norco's New DH Race Bike
The Norco Factory Team has a new DH race bike, and the story of its development is an interesting one. So we sat down with engineers Adrian Ward and Kirk McDowall to hear their take on the goals and design...
04.18.2024
Reviewer Reports: So Many New Bikes
We’ve been testing a massive assortment of new bikes and other gear, and David Golay and Zack Henderson sat down to chat about a whole bunch of them, including the high-pivot Norco Optic and Sight, the new Specialized Epic Evo,...
04.11.2024
Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer, March 2024
March was an interesting month for bike news. There was a dispute at Crankworx Rotorua which resulted in the men not competing in the finals, Scott is having crazy management drama, there are a bunch of interesting new lightweight eMTBs,...
04.04.2024
Brook Macdonald on Fresh Starts, DH Race Bike Design, Moving to Forbidden, & More
Racing World Cup DH isn’t easy under any circumstances, but doing so after a spinal cord injury — and needing to relearn how to walk, much less ride — is something else entirely. Brook Macdonald pulled it off, but he’s...
03.28.2024
Georgia Astle on Racing, Freeriding, & Finding Her Way to MTB
Georgia Astle is one of the many ultra-talented riders to come out of Whistler, BC — but she actually grew up kitesurfing and doing a whole bunch of other sports, rather than mountain biking. Once she fell in love with...
03.21.2024
Dakotah Norton on Finding Consistency, Moving to Mondraker, the State of US DH Racing, & More
Dakotah Norton finished the 2023 DH season strong, with two podiums and a 6th place finish over the final four races, but as he put it, the season started with “near failure.” We sat down with Dakotah to talk about...
03.14.2024
Sarah Sturm on Her Unconventional Path to Gravel-Racing Stardom
Gravel racing has exploded in recent years and Sarah Sturm — who only started racing bikes in college, after burning out on competitive soccer — quickly vaulted to stardom in the sport. So we sat down with Sarah to hear...
03.07.2024
Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer, February 2024
On our second episode of Reviewing The News with hosts Simon Stewart and Ryan Palmer; Ryan may have uncovered what Kyle and Rachael Strait are keeping secret before their big announcement on Friday (March 8th); Simon considers adopting Ronan Dunne’s...
02.29.2024
Norco on their New High-Pivot Optic and Sight
High-pivot bikes are becoming increasingly common but they’re still mostly reserved for longer-travel Enduro and DH models. Given that, Norco’s decision to move their 150mm-travel Sight and especially the 125mm-travel Optic to that layout was arguably a bit of a...
02.22.2024
Ed Masters on Hardline, the 2024 Race Landscape, Pivot’s Prototype DH Bike, & More
The first Tasmanian edition of Red Bull Hardline is coming up, so we sat down with Ed Masters to talk about the event, building and testing the course, and getting prepared to ride it. Along the way, we talk about...
02.15.2024
Continental on Designing, Developing, & Testing Their Overhauled Tire Lineup
Continental’s overhauled gravity tire lineup has had a lot of success, both on the World Cup Downhill circuit and with everyday riders (we’ve personally been huge fans of the Kryptotals). It’s a big departure from their prior offerings, with 5...
02.08.2024
Reviewer Reports: Nicolai Nucleon Supre Drive, Ibis HD6, & More
Blister reviewer Zack Henderson makes his Bikes & Big Ideas debut to talk with David Golay about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing, including the Nicolai Nucleon 16 Supre Drive, Ibis HD6, and Chromag Lowdown (and they tease...
02.01.2024
Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer (January 2024)
Simon Stewart is joined by bike industry veteran, Ryan Palmer, to kick off the inaugural bike-focused edition of Reviewing the News. Ryan and Simon tuck into what happened to Greg Minaar and Santa Cruz; Mondraker’s new focus on the U.S market...
01.25.2024
Rónán Dunne on Joining Mondraker Factory Racing
Moving up to Elite Downhill racing from Juniors is hard, but Rónán Dunne made that leap in 2021, and promptly started getting great results — despite only racing a handful of World Cups as a Junior and never even making it...
01.19.2024
Outbound Lighting on Night Riding, Light Design, & More
There are a lot of good reasons to try mountain biking at night, from simple necessity during the colder, darker months to seeking a new challenge and experience. We sat down with Outbound Lighting’s Tom Place to make the case...
01.11.2024
RAAW Bikes Founder Ruben Torenbeek
When Ruben Torenbeek founded RAAW back in 2016, he had a clear vision for the sort of dependable, no-nonsense bikes he wanted to build. He clearly wasn’t alone in wanting a bike in that vein, because RAAW is going strong...
01.04.2024
Vorsprung’s New Coil Shock & Development Process
Vorsprung Suspension has been making a wide range of suspension upgrade products for quite some time now — and we’ve been very impressed with a number of them — but they’ve yet to offer a full standalone fork or shock....
12.28.2023
Gear of the Year (2023)
We got the gang back together to recap a whole bunch of the bikes and other gear we tested in 2023, and Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay picked a bunch of our favorites, including bikes across the travel...
12.21.2023
Forbidden Bikes Founder Owen Pemberton
Forbidden might be *the* company most closely associated with high-pivot bikes, but Owen Pemberton didn’t set out with that goal in mind when he founded the company. We sat down with Owen to hear all about his journey through the...
12.14.2023
EXT’s Franco Fratton on the History, Basics, & Details of MTB Suspension
EXT founder Franco Fratton has more experience working on suspension than just about anyone, and today, we’re revisiting our first conversation with him that kicked off our “Very Deep Dive on Suspension” series, where we discuss all the details when...
12.07.2023
Tool on Their Radical Machined High-Pivot Bike
William Boisvert made his first bike frame — a machined front triangle for a Devinci Troy — in just seven weeks for a college project, and despite the challenges that arose (and the fact that that first frame didn’t survive...
11.30.2023
Albatross Bikes on the Super-Adaptable Apogee Module
A lot of companies have offered bikes with a degree of adaptability in their geometry and travel configurations, but the Albatross Apogee Module is a very novel design that opens up a much wider spectrum of options than most. We...
11.23.2023
Katy Winton on Burnout, Recovery, & Returning to Racing
Two races into the 2022 EWS season, Katy Winton hit a breaking point and pulled out of the rest of the series to give herself the time and space she needed to get her mental health back on track. Having...
11.16.2023
Cornelius Kapfinger on Founding Intend, Inverted Forks, and Doing Things Differently
Founding Intend (2:18) Fork design & the first Intend offering (5:24) Why inverted? (7:09) Selling inverted forks & market acceptance of things that look different (8:52) Designing a full fork (17:16) Damper design (20:16) The Infinity EN (24:42) The Bandit...
11.09.2023
Neko Mulally on Selling the Frameworks DH Bike, Signing Asa Vermette, and More
Neko Mulally’s Frameworks project has drawn a lot of well-deserved attention, and now he’s opening pre-orders for the production version of his World Cup DH race bike. So we sat down with Neko to hear all about everything that’s gone...
11.02.2023
Lachlan Morton on the Tour Divide Record, Bears, Payday Bars, & More
The stats of the Tour Divide route — 2,670 miles and 192,000 feet of climbing, mostly on dirt — are imposing, and Lachlan Morton just covered it in a record-setting 12 days, 12 hours, and 21 minutes. So we sat...
10.26.2023
Contra Bikes on Making the MC a Reality
The Contra MC — a US-made, steel, high-pivot Enduro bike — is an ambitious project by any measure, and designing and prototyping the bike is just half the battle. So we brought Evan Turpen, the driving force behind Contra, back...
10.19.2023
Privateer Bikes on the 141 and 161 V2
Privateer has been working on the second-generation versions of their 141 and 161 bikes for three years now, and Dan Hicks, the engineer behind the project, has a ton to share about the thought process behind the updates and bike...
10.12.2023
Casey Brown, Vaea Verbeeck, and Hannah Bergemann on Women at Rampage
When it was announced that Red Bull Formation wasn’t happening in 2023, there was a lot of hopeful speculation that, in its place, there would be women competing at Rampage for the first time. But that didn’t happen either, so...
10.05.2023
Reviewer Reports: Contra MC vs. Trek Slash, Santa Cruz Heckler SL, REEB Steezl, & More
Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay sat down to talk about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing lately, from the short-travel Cannondale Habit to the very not short-travel Canfield One.2 Super Enduro; some eMTBs including the new...
09.28.2023
Archibald Cycles on Canadian Manufacturing & the Wild AC1
High-pivot bikes are having a moment. Mullet bikes and steel full-suspension frames are too. And while gearbox mountain bikes haven’t achieved widespread popularity (yet?) they’ve got their ardent supporters. The Archibald Cycles AC1 brings all those elements together in a...
09.21.2023
Sklar Bikes: A Custom Builder’s Shift to “Mass” Production
It’s rare for a small but well-established custom bike builder to make the leap to overseas-built production bikes, but Adam Sklar has done just that. While it might be easy to romanticize the idea of a custom hand-built bike made...
09.14.2023
GEAR THERAPY! (Session #1)
We recently launched Gear Therapy over on our GEAR:30 podcast and now we’re bringing it over to Bikes & Big Ideas, too. For our first session, we chatted with Blister Member Andy Majewski about his bike quiver and the ways...
09.07.2023
Trek on the New High-Pivot Slash
Trek’s new sixth-generation Slash has changed a lot from the prior-generation bike — including a high-pivot suspension layout, some big updates to the geometry and suspension kinematics, and a default mixed-wheel size setup — and we sat down with Matt...
08.31.2023
D3O On The Past, Present, and Future of MTB Armor
D3O’s non-Newtonian materials are used extensively in mountain bike protective equipment from a lot of different brands, and David Golay recently sat down with their Senior Vice President of Marketing, Kevin Franks, and their Head of Product, Kevin Fleer, to...
08.24.2023
Chromag’s Full Suspension Bike Development
Chromag has been doing things very differently from most bike companies for decades now, helping to pioneer modern hardcore hardtails — and doing so in Whistler, BC, in the shadow of the legendary bike park — not exactly classic hardtail...
08.17.2023
Reviewer Reports: Chromag Darco, Pivot Shuttle AM, Commencal Supreme, & More
David Golay, Dylan Wood, and Simon Stewart sat down to chat about a whole bunch of the bikes we’re reviewing currently, from the Chromag Darco to the Commencal Supreme, with a ton of other ones in between, including the Pivot...
08.10.2023
Story Time With Ryan “R-Dog” Howard
Aptos, CA is a small beach town that has produced an incredible number of world-class mountain bikers, and Ryan “R-Dog” Howard has a lot of great stories to share about the scene that gave rise to him, Cam and Tyler...
08.03.2023
Prevelo founder Jacob Rheuban on Designing a Better Kid’s Bike
When Jacob Rheuban founded Prevelo in 2017, he had no engineering background and no experience in the bike industry, but identified a need for better kids' bikes, and set out to fill it. And now, more than six years later,...
07.27.2023
Miranda Miller on DVRGNT Minds, Burnout, & Riding All the Bikes
Miranda Miller has done a lot of different things in her career, from winning DH World Champs to racing the EWS (and now EDR), but in the last few years she’s branched out more than ever and is having more...
07.20.2023
Lal Bikes on Making the Supre Drive a Reality
When we first had Lal Bikes founder and Supre Drive inventor Cedric Eveleigh on the show about a year and a half ago, he’d just announced the Supre Drive — a wild take on reinventing the mountain bike derailleur —...
07.13.2023
Gear of the Year (So Far), 2023
Summer is in full swing and we’ve been testing a ton of new bikes and gear, so I sat down with Simon Stewart and Dylan Wood to chat about some of the things that have stood out to us the...
07.06.2023
Deviate Cycles on High-Pivot Bikes, Onshoring Production, & the Lowlander Prototype
Deviate Cycles is well known for their high-pivot Trail and Enduro bikes, and that concept has gained a lot of traction in recent years, but getting consumers to accept new ideas can be challenging. Deviate co-founder Ben Jones has a...
06.29.2023
Anna Newkirk and Abby Hogie on Beyond Racing, the Contra DH Bike, & More
Beyond Racing started as a pipedream of Anna Newkirk and Abby Hogie: wouldn’t it be cool to have a World Cup race team that you run and race for with your best friend? Few people have the skills or determination...
06.22.2023
Reviewer Reports: Commencal T.E.M.P.O., Tons of Suspension, & More
We’re testing a ton of new bikes with more on the way (stay tuned!) so David Golay recently sat down with Dylan Wood and Simon Stewart to talk about the Revel Ranger and Commencal T.E.M.P.O.; offer more thoughts on the...
06.15.2023
Wyn Masters on his Privateer Program, the 2023 DH Race Landscape, & More
Making it as a World Cup Downhill racer is hard and, as we discuss in this episode, the new rule changes to the series for 2023 just might make it harder. So we sat down with Wyn Masters, whose incredible...
06.08.2023
A Very Deep Dive on Suspension with EXT’s Franco Fratton, Pt. 3
EXT Suspension founder Franco Fratton is a wealth of information when it comes to all things suspension, and in the third installment of our deep dive on suspension series, Franco and I cover everything from the tradeoffs between air and...
06.01.2023
Forge+Bond on Envisioning, Designing, Testing, & Refining a Carbon Fiber Wheel Design
Designing, prototyping, testing, and refining a carbon fiber wheel is deceptively complicated. Things like weight, stiffness, vertical compliance, and durability are the standard buzzwords for talking about a new wheelset, but how do you strike the right balance between all...
05.25.2023
Jesse Melamed on His 2022 EWS Title, “Near Death” Save, Moving to Canyon, & More
Jesse Melamed won the 2022 EWS Overall, and then, despite that success, made the move to Canyon from longtime frame sponsor Rocky Mountain. So we sat down with Jesse to chat about what he changed with his mental approach and...
05.18.2023
Bikes vs. Skis, 4th Edition (2023): Part 2
After tackling broader questions like “which bike and ski brands are the current holders of their respective ‘Cool Kids Belts’” in Part One of Bikes vs. Skis, 2023 last week, we’re diving into the head-to-head comparisons: which bike company is...

What's Bikes & Big Ideas about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Bikes & Big Ideas episodes:

Norco's New DH Race Bike

Reviewer Reports: So Many New Bikes

Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer, March 2024

Brook Macdonald on Fresh Starts, DH Race Bike Design, Moving to Forbidden, & More

Georgia Astle on Racing, Freeriding, & Finding Her Way to MTB

Dakotah Norton on Finding Consistency, Moving to Mondraker, the State of US DH Racing, & More

Sarah Sturm on Her Unconventional Path to Gravel-Racing Stardom

Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer, February 2024

Norco on their New High-Pivot Optic and Sight

Ed Masters on Hardline, the 2024 Race Landscape, Pivot’s Prototype DH Bike, & More

Continental on Designing, Developing, & Testing Their Overhauled Tire Lineup

Reviewer Reports: Nicolai Nucleon Supre Drive, Ibis HD6, & More

Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer (January 2024)

Rónán Dunne on Joining Mondraker Factory Racing

Outbound Lighting on Night Riding, Light Design, & More

RAAW Bikes Founder Ruben Torenbeek

Vorsprung’s New Coil Shock & Development Process

Gear of the Year (2023)

Forbidden Bikes Founder Owen Pemberton

EXT’s Franco Fratton on the History, Basics, & Details of MTB Suspension

Tool on Their Radical Machined High-Pivot Bike

Albatross Bikes on the Super-Adaptable Apogee Module

Katy Winton on Burnout, Recovery, & Returning to Racing

Cornelius Kapfinger on Founding Intend, Inverted Forks, and Doing Things Differently

Neko Mulally on Selling the Frameworks DH Bike, Signing Asa Vermette, and More

Lachlan Morton on the Tour Divide Record, Bears, Payday Bars, & More

Contra Bikes on Making the MC a Reality

Privateer Bikes on the 141 and 161 V2

Casey Brown, Vaea Verbeeck, and Hannah Bergemann on Women at Rampage

Reviewer Reports: Contra MC vs. Trek Slash, Santa Cruz Heckler SL, REEB Steezl, & More

Archibald Cycles on Canadian Manufacturing & the Wild AC1

Sklar Bikes: A Custom Builder’s Shift to “Mass” Production

GEAR THERAPY! (Session #1)

Trek on the New High-Pivot Slash

D3O On The Past, Present, and Future of MTB Armor

Chromag’s Full Suspension Bike Development

Reviewer Reports: Chromag Darco, Pivot Shuttle AM, Commencal Supreme, & More

Story Time With Ryan “R-Dog” Howard

Prevelo founder Jacob Rheuban on Designing a Better Kid’s Bike

Miranda Miller on DVRGNT Minds, Burnout, & Riding All the Bikes

Lal Bikes on Making the Supre Drive a Reality

Gear of the Year (So Far), 2023

Deviate Cycles on High-Pivot Bikes, Onshoring Production, & the Lowlander Prototype

Anna Newkirk and Abby Hogie on Beyond Racing, the Contra DH Bike, & More

Reviewer Reports: Commencal T.E.M.P.O., Tons of Suspension, & More

Wyn Masters on his Privateer Program, the 2023 DH Race Landscape, & More

A Very Deep Dive on Suspension with EXT’s Franco Fratton, Pt. 3

Forge+Bond on Envisioning, Designing, Testing, & Refining a Carbon Fiber Wheel Design

Jesse Melamed on His 2022 EWS Title, “Near Death” Save, Moving to Canyon, & More

Bikes vs. Skis, 4th Edition (2023): Part 2