We’re hard at work testing a huge range of bikes and other gear, as always, and David Golay sat down with Zack Henderson to talk about a whole bunch of it, from the Trek Top Fuel to the Marin Alpine Trail, the Forbidden Druid V2 to the Trek Slash+, and a whole bunch more. Plus we get off in the weeds about bike geometry, and wrap things up by issui…

Listen Now to 77 Live from Maui This week we broadcast from Maui with a wonderful selection of friends who clue us in to what’s happening in this Hawaiian paradise. It’s been a year since the horrible Lahaina fires and recovery has been slow and agonizing to many. Ed Ellsworth gives us an update on that situation. To help recover the Aloha spirit o…

More and more women are riding mountain bikes, so why are there so few women-specific bike brands out there? It’s not just about making bikes for everyone — though that’s important, too. Kara Williard and David Golay sat down with Ludi Scholz, the Off-Road Category Manager at Liv, to hear all about it. RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership This Week’s…

Listen to 76 Future Now Show We are briefly back in town, before heading to Maui for a couple of weeks, enough to produce one local show! If the molecule DDL-920 works for humans as well as mice, beyond slowing cognitive decline it may actually restore memories! I you are excited about creating imagery with AI, consider the new Grok-2 image generat…

Gearboxes have some clear advantages for more gravity-oriented mountain bikes — less unsprung weight, the ability to shift while not pedaling, no derailleur to damage, and more — but have yet to reach widespread adoption. Zerode is perhaps the company best known for making gearbox mountain bikes, and we sat down with founder Rob Metz and Ali Quinn …

Irena Cronin serves as CEO of Infinite Retina. Prior to this, Irena was CEO of Transformation Group which advised decision makers on business strategies related to Spatial Computing (AR/VR), Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, and related disruptive technologies. Irena was also the President and CEO of Spout …

Listen Now to The Best of the Futures - Interview Excerpts 1.0 For this podcast we are excited to share with you some of our favorite people we have met over the 15 years of our show, audio clips from our Media Time Machine - Serendipitous choices for this podcast include Pharmacist Ben Fuchs, Psychic story maven Penny Kelly, Physicist Nick Herbert…

Vermont Mountain Bike Association is one of the leading organizations in the country in the assessment, funding, and building of adaptive trails — and in collaboration with Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports, they are creating an inspiring network of adaptive accessible trails. We sat down with Kenzie Brunner from VMBA, and Jeff Alexander from Vermont…

In this month's episode of Reviewing the News on our Bikes & Big Ideas Podcast, Simon welcomes freeride legend Wade Simmons as his guest co-host. Wade gives a recap of Crankworx Whistler and claims he can’t do tricks, then Wade and Simon try to sort out why they keep crashing, and the unfortunate reality of not being as fast as they once were. They…

In this episode, I chat with Jeri Ellsworth, the brilliant CEO of Tilt Five, to explore the future of augmented reality (AR). From her early days tinkering with the Commodore 64 to leading one of the most innovative AR companies today, Jeri shares her incredible journey and the vision behind Tilt Five. Additional Links: https://www.tiltfive.com htt…

Hannah Otto’s obliteration of the Whole Enchilada FKT a couple of years ago was already hugely impressive, but she went much bigger — double the elevation and well over double the mileage — in her follow-up pursuit of the Kokopelli Trail FKT. She came painfully close to pulling it off on her first attempt, despite horrific weather and trail conditi…

Listen Now to Dr. Jonathan Trent Transcript Interestingly Dr. Trent had his start in oceanography and the study of small water-based lifeforms at UCSC back in the 1970’s as an undergraduate. Later at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a post doc in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry he became one of the world’s experts in how…

Listen to Future News #75 Now that US national politics is heating up, so are the cheap fakes being made of the candidates, making them heroic, silly, smart, stupid, you name it. Just for cheap fakes and poltitics and off you go. We discuss this a bit and look at what can be done. And since are politics up, Bobby reveals to us his encounters with K…

The first production batch of the Frameworks DH bike is sold out, but they’ll soon be opening preorders for the Enduro version. So we brought Neko Mulally back onto the show to tell us all about the new bike; the variants of the DH bike he’s been testing; the expanded Frameworks race team with Angel Suarez and Asa Vermette; and a bunch more. RELATE…

Listen to 74 Future Now Podcast Transcript This is the weeked following former president Trump’s assasination attempt, so we start with a few comments on that scene. It was also sad that Space X lost a full payload of Starlink satellites..On a lighter front, we look at how in the ever loving world we could have an AI beauty contest and who won. Bob…

Geometron arguably did more than any other bike brand to kick off the geometry revolution of the late 2010s, but they weren’t content to leave their longstanding G1 alone — even though its geometry still looks pretty up to date five years after it first launched. So we sat down with Sam Robson and Marcel Lauxtermann from Geometron to talk about the…

Listen Now to 73 Future Now Podcast Transcript This is our first broadcast from the new Santa Cruz Voice studio in downtown Santa Cruz! We discuss the martian habitat sim and its recently released inhabitants at NASA, the saintly geek, and a discussion of a current court case involving our friend Monica McGuire and her Soverign defense in case of t…

Listen Now to Katrina Vaillancourt on QAnon Rabbit Hole Transcript A professional mediator trained in Nonviolent Communication and a dedicated Bernie Sanders supporter, she found herself unexpectedly spiraling down the rabbit hole of QAnon, triggered by watching the “Fall of the Cabal” series, about how a cabal of Satanic cannibalistic child molest…

In this month's episode of Reviewing the News on our Bikes & Big Ideas Podcast, Mike Ferrentino and Simon Stewart debate the polarizing topic of bikes in Wilderness areas. There's plenty of bike racing to talk about — including the biggest one in the world, the Tour de France. And they’re excited to talk about Red Bull Rampage including a women’s c…

Listen Now to 72 Future Now Podcast Transcript Recognizing World UFO Day is a fun part of this week’s show, exploring some of the more interesting recent cases recently in the field..Did you know there were 138 UFO sightings in California alone in the last 6 months? And in our explorations of space, the Polaris Dawn Mission is about to take place, …

We’ve been testing a big spectrum of bikes from the XC-race-derived Specialized Epic Evo to big Enduro sleds including the RAAW Madonna V3 and Marin Alpine Trail, so David Golay and Zack Henderson sat down to chat about a whole bunch of them, and along the way we take a deep dive into tire design & a variety of options we’ve been testing; discuss t…

Listen Now to 71 Future Now Podcast Transcript of show Something for everybody this week, from Mars popcorn, Assange’s freedom, a great report on what was happening at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach with Nick Venden and Greg Panos, who blew away the conference by an introduction to his virutal immortality talk made by his deceased mother in…

Bryan Hance is a bike enthusiast and web developer who combined those two interests in co-founding Bike Index, a database that tracks ownership to help recover bikes that end up stolen. Through that work, Bryan uncovered a sprawling bike theft and trafficking operation, which he traced back to one man, operating out of Jalisco, Mexico — and the sto…

Listen to 70 Future Now Transcript of 70 Future Now It’s Summertime and living is fun, unless you are on a deep space mission. Turns out our kidneys are particularly sensitive to radiation in space, failing after only two years..oh no, what now? Any solutions? We think so! Harvard Cryptoterrestrial GradAnd finally, top academics are suggesting to t…

Bike companies file a lot of wild patents, spanning from “nearly released product” to “outrageous pie-in-the-sky idea.” Dan Bacon of Wheelbased chronicles many of the more interesting ones, and we brought him back on the show to talk about some recent highlights, from Bilstein’s proposed fork damper to Shimano’s multiple electronic brake concepts, …

Listen to 69 Future Now Podcast Transcript Big announcements from Apple at this week’s World Wide Developer’s Conference, and we have our very own Apple analyst, Taylor Barcroft, to cover the latest and greatest, and Bobby Wilder to discuss just what is “Apple Intelligence.” We think it is particularly exciting that developers will be able to emplo…

Bobak Tavangar is a co-founder and CEO at Brilliant Labs where he works alongside a small but mighty team of hackers, engineers, and designers who are building an open-source platform for embodied AI. A graduate of Cambridge University, Bobak is a life-long technologist having founded several companies in computer vision and graph search before joi…

Mike Ferrentino is back again as co-host for this month’s iteration of Reviewing the News, and Simon is delighted to have him in the studio to help try and make sense of the Red Bull Hardline drama. There were two exciting DH World Cup races to talk about, as well as an XC World Cup in Nova Mesto to cover. And in a fun change of pace, they get into…

Listen to 68 Future Now Show Transcript Long time friends and colleagues Drs. Sideroff and Lufkin recently organized an online summit on the topic of human longevity, featuring many of the leading researchers and thinkers in this cutting edge field. And this week they both published a new book on their latest professional work. In today’s show we i…

We’ve been very impressed with the EXT Storia V3 on a whole bunch of different bikes over the years, but EXT is launching a new V4 iteration soon, and they’ve found a lot to tweak. So we brought EXT founder, Franco Fratton, back to Bikes & Big Ideas to give us a rundown on the new Storia and Arma V4; talk about the potential for truly “active” susp…

Listen Now to 67 Future Now Podcast View Transcript Though we covered a fair number of topics in today’s podcast, we kept coming back to discussing the health benefits of fungi, from how they assist the ATP Kreb cycle in generating bodily energy to memory enhancement and longevity. We also had the priviledge of once again speaking with Gabrielle Ci…

Yanpei Cao is the Head of Research and a founding team member of Tripo (https://www.tripo3d.ai/). Previously, he was a principal researcher at Tencent ARC Lab (https://arc.tencent.com/en/index) and Tencent AI Lab (https://ai.tencent.com/ailab/en/index), where he led research in 3D digitization, generation, and immersive content creation. Before joi…

When it comes to rear shocks for mountain bikes, there are tons of options for both air- and coil-sprung versions, but the Cane Creek Tigon is both — an “air-charged coil shock,” as Cane Creek describes it. So we sat down with Cane Creek’s Will Hart to get the rundown on the Tigon, including why Cane Creek decided to make it; what its pros and cons…

Listen to 66 Future Now Podcast Trimtab Times View Transcript ‘Twas a busy weekend for us, with back-to-back dinner parties, and a visit to Whiskey Hill Farms for a tour by David Blum, author of the best seller, “Alcohol Can Be a Gas.” Besides his innovative alcohol distillary, his experimental farm is growing a number of unusual crops that could s…

Listen Now to Gabrielle challenging the AIs View Transcript This show takes the cake when it comes to more unusual content for us. It started with our correspondent Gabrielle Cianfrani asking Meta.ai a ‘simple’ question before bed, “I’ve been thinking lately that we are just pure consciousness experiencing itself, what do you think about that?” And…

We’ve been testing a huge variety of bikes, from the E-Gravel Scott Solace to a bunch of high-pivot Trail bikes (including the Deviate Highlander II), plus several new forks, some new tires, and a whole bunch more. So we sat down to chat about all of it; recap the World Cup DH season opener; recount being repeatedly heckled on the local trails; and…

Carbon fiber bike frames have become ubiquitous in the high-end world, but metal bikes are making a comeback — and the number of steel full-suspension bikes we’ve reviewed in the last few years is a testament to that. So we sat down with Daniel Yang and Nick Neuhaus of Neuhaus Metalworks to chat about the case for metal bikes; hear the story of the…

Listen Now to 64 Future Now Podcast View Transcript Our very own Taylor Barcroft gives us the update on the latest from Apple, with particular focus on the new M4 processor based iPads. These are Apple’s last offerings before their big World Wide Developer’s Conference next month, and loo quite tasty, if you find the pad format to be your fav form …

Listen Now to Avi Esther View Transcript We had the pleasure of meeting Avi Esther last month when she was in town from the UK for speaking at the Discovery Sessions, the Bay Area’s annual gathering of the psychedelic community. The topic - “DESTIGMATIZING AMANITA MUSCARIA.” Amanita Muscaria is that cute archetypal red mushroom with white dots. It’…

Simon welcomes guest co-host Mike Ferrentino to go over a busy, weird month in the bike world. Of course, they have to talk about what happened to Kona, which leads to a discussion about the negative effect Venture capital and investment companies seem to have on the bike industry. But there’s also fun stuff going on with companies like Gates, and …

Listen now to 63 Future Now Podcast View Transcript It appears we may have some new lifeforms on the planet, ones that can take Nitrogen from the air rather than the ground; makes sense considering that 78% of the atmosphere is Nitrogen. Scientists are fascinated, and see this as a big deal, up there with the creation of plants and animals! Also am…

Listen Now to 62 Future Now Podcast View Transcript A promising future lies in potential symbiotic relationships between our tech and nature. A example of theat lies with the use of algae in the generation of energy from solar panels. And…how might the climate change gas of methane be actually useful in making things better for us and our planet? T…

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 intent of the bike; what they learned from the development of the existing Enduro bike, the Range (and its modified DH version); the original te…

Sean is a co-founder of Zephr.xyz Inc. Previously he was an Engineering Manager at Snap working on mapping and visual positioning systems (VPS). Before Snap he was the CEO of Pixel8earth, a crowdsourced VPS system for AR. Prior to Pixel8earth he was the Head of Technical Product Management at Maxar helping build GBDX and next generation machine lea…

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, the newly-mulleted Yeti SB165, and more. RELATED LINKS: BLISTER+ Membership BLISTER+ Real World Testimonials Blister Labs …

Listen to Future Now #61 View Transcript I couldn’t believe it when I read about a geoengineering project changing the reflectivity of clouds in our home, the SF Bay Area, in Scientific American, a mainstream science publication! Maybe there is something to all the airplane trails we see these days that will be discussed to major forums. No such lu…

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, and Simon had a recent trip to ride in Tuscany. In our third installment of Reviewing The News, Ryan and Simon g…

Listen to Future Now Podcast View Transcript Hope you all enjoyed your eclipse experience, be it partial, full, or virtual! Our fav visuals were from the ISS, where you could see the eclipse, appearing as a dark cloud-like 115 mile diameter shadow cast onto the planet’s surface, speeding across the continent, southwest to northeast. Moving at 2400 …

59 Future Now Show Listen Here View Transcript We are still on the road this week, this time in magical Mt. Shasta, where we introduce you one of it’s residents, Mt. Shasta is rumored to house the Lemurian city of Telos within.Mary Donnelly. A New Englander trained as an RN in pediatric oncology, she learned of Mt. Shasta via an alternative healer,…

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 also struggled with bike setup, burnout, and more over the last couple of seasons. For 2024, though, he’s got a new team, a new bik…