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Riding with @Primoz in Slovenia was awesome. Northwestern Slovenia is beautiful, he was a great tour host, great trails, great people, great food, lots of nerding out about bikes, and Primoz and his friends are very strong riders. They put the hurt on me on the 8 km or so road climb to the top of the trail, twice. My feelings are still sore from that ride. Since we're doing namedrops, Greg Minnaar laughed at one of my jokes on instagram. Another top 10 highlight of my life:

I got to ride with SAM MF HILL

"I actually kept up with Sam Hill" should be the headline. That's resume material. Who cares how many practice laps, still counts in my book.

I've ridden Santa Cruz trails with Matt Hunter, followed by burnouts and donuts in his rental car. I threw up a little trying to stay on Ned Overends wheel on a climb. I rode a pump track with a 14yo Troy Brosnan. I damn near made Curtis Keen The American Dream throw up staying on my wheel up a climb, and was then smoked by him on the descent. I unfortunately saw Christoph Sausers junk when he dropped trow in the middle of the room. I hung out with Sam Hill and Jacy when they were in the states being...

I was in Morzine years ago and shared a lift ride and rode an unmarked trail with Miranda Miller. She was very cool and super fast down a terrifying trail. I had a beer with Kelly McGarry after my drunken pal was yanking his curly hair - he was incredibly nice, good humoured, and seemed such a genuinely good person. I'm sure he is still missed by many.

Looks like @TEAMROBOT gets around considering how many people name dropped him... And look at me, so late to the party. But plot twist, he came to Slovenia!

this is a fun game... I'll play. -I used to do miata track stuff with @Dave_Camp when he lived in socal many moons ago... he's fast in a racecar too btw -I got (basically) run over by Leigh Donovan while I was climbing San Juan Trail on a weekday... It was a blind corner and she's fast af. It was fun getting run down by someone you think is rad. -Once, on a red-eye I was inline to use the bathroom, and Joel McHale was in front of me in line. We had a quick conversation and then it was...

Back in my motocross days, I passed Zach Osborne. He then picked his 80 up and passed me on my 450 shortly after.

Lopes yelled at my son and his friend to "put their helmets on" during a transfer at an enduro once.

Oh, and @TEAMROBOT once gave me crap about my Race Face wheel review.

ben cory has a nickname for me.

Whenever I see something like this bike, it gives me horrible Proflex flashbacks. Leave it to some motorcycle engineer to come up with this because his bro with a E bike asked him to do it. Nobody’s even mentioning how the geometry of this thing is completely buggered now. Remember when 29er forks all sucked because they had the trail measurement/crown offset completely wrong? Also, dual shocks?

"There are CEOs, CFOs, fund managers & capital allocators that have built their entire career on a net-zero interest rate environment." This is well said, and pretty scary to think about. People who have only ever thought in terms of high risk, long-runway projects and now have to learn to live within their means and make money the boring, slow, old fashioned way- selling physical products to actual customers. Makes me think about Silicon Valley, where seemingly any and every idea was getting funded and the revenue model was "sometime we'll make tons of money, somehow, in the future." I...

Isn't it an 8t? Also, not a pulley, it's the electric motor drive sprocket! A whole different thing 😜 Also sprag clutches are spongy due to their design, the forces in the sprags are high and they deform quite a bit. And because of the leverage ratio that's very noticeable on the pedals. Kinda like the sponginess of the front brake vs. the rear brake (a longer hose in the rear takes up more lever throw to deform).

I never thought I'd get to talk about the interest rate environment, capital allocation & what the past can teach us about the present/future in a mountain bike forum. First, Robot is right in the big picture that its not business Armageddon and rates have certainly been higher most of history. Funny enough, I think BofA released a chart showing the history of interest rates from ~3,000 BC to now (or at least it was circulating on Twitter/X recently). Turns out, for most of the period following the time of Jesus & the Roman Empire to now rates were somewhere...

I'll be damned, cause I never thought I'd see an historical fed funds rate chart in a mtb forum. The point is spot on. Rates aren't "high," they've just returned to historical norms after being suppressed for way too long. Or put another way, and not to minimize anyone's individual economic struggles, the cost of borrowing money isn't anything to get upset about - it's about what it's always been, setting aside the insanity of continuing Great Recession policy way too long.

The "free money machine" is turned off, kinda, but it's not like it's business armageddon because the Fed raised the interest rate. The current Fed Rate is 5.5% and, historically, that's not crazy. For reference, Paul Volcker bumped the fed rate all the way up to 20% in the 80's, which really is rough. For anyone who cares, I've included a graph below of the fed rate since 1954. For about half of the graph the fed rate is at or above 5%. The fed interest rate has been bananas since 2008 when it dropped all the way down to...

LOL. Fair. But its better than the company ceasing to operate. Plus, if you read between the lines here I'm obviously just hoping a google search brings this thread up and they reach out to hire me to run the portfolio of bike cos they are rolling up...

This is a good synopsis of "how did we get here" if anyone doesn't want to parse through a bunch of other posts. I think the fun part is to look to the future being I can broadly agree with Dave's recap (few quibbles, but not important for this conversation). Here are the keys to consider when peering into your crystal ball/magic 8 ball. 1) Mountain biking went through a phase of increased demand during COVID. This demand is better thought as "pulling future demand to the present". This means higher than average demand was followed by lower than average...