So, Could you give us a little peek behind the curtain about how knobs are developed or how you arrive at these patterns?

Yeah, yeah.

It's so funny.

Before the show, you were talking about talking to Gary Fisher next week.

And I remember Tom Ritchie, you know, he'll wax poetic for – two hours about carving every different pressure face in the knob and then Gary Fisher was always like, I could write my name in the tread and it would work the same.

It's like it really is a dark art and people so disagree.

I'll tell you the way we kind of approached it.

I just want to know what kind of reactions slash blowback have you been getting from existing tire brands?

Ooh.

Um, I really had projected, I think as had so many people, we would be through the ugly by now.

You know, a couple years ago when I talked to Wade about this, you know, I, I, I think me and probably a lot of the people were like, "Yeah, it's been, it, it's been bad, but next year will be better, you know? Next year we'll be out of it." And I still, I, I was j- actually just in Germany with, uh, a bunch of media with a event one of our distributors had, and I couldn't believe, I mean, multiple bike brands, the bike brand representative from the distributor, and then someone from kind of the German equivalent of, like, bicycle retailer all made comments to the effect of, like, "Yeah, this probably won't be turned around until mid '27 or '28." And like, "Oh, shit.

I, I was expecting everyone, you know...

Can't, can't we all agree it's gonna be turned around in '26?" [laughs] You know, and it, and it's certainly much worse for some than others.

The, um, the e-bike brands, particularly in Europe, uh, I mean, I, you know, I'm not naming names, but I mean, people are saying, "Hey, we, we're sitting on 24-plus months of, of inventory." Um, or, or people who have e-bike factories or assembly factories they built in Europe where, that they're just uing- using as storage.

That is darn expensive storage, right? That is a wild swing.

[pensive music] Where you sit now, maybe you have a better view, but what are your thoughts on, in the bike shop retail space, what's structurally different now than compared to, say, before COVID in 2019? Is there anything that stands out to you?

Yeah

... had an awesome hour-long conversation with Paige Jonwiler at the, uh, at the wind tunnel on, on this because she does tons of her own field testing, and she's like t- kind of telling me or asking like, like, "Yeah, I've, I've seen that the rolling resistance improves at..." I won't give her number away, but X number of hours.

And so like, "I, I pre-wear all my ti-" You know, I'm like, "Yeah, that's 100% true." [laughs] Um, but the, the reason is a little different from sort of the, the mental model he's created here.

I think the, the model he's proposing is sort of a, as you start to flat spot the center of the tire, um, it's presenting more surface area to the road with less casing deflection.

Th- the, the effect of that is incredibly subtle.

Um, the, the real effect that's happening is that as the amount of material is wearing away, there's just less material to have the hysteresis losses.

Um, this is why, you know, tires that are thinner are pretty much always faster.

Second, is there a middle ground, though, Josh, to, you know, now that they are out of the picture, um, to making steering and handling behave while also getting narrow and aero?

What would it mean to be 5 pounds lighter versus 10 pounds lighter? How much does it actually matter in this, you know, essentially climbing 29,000 feet?

For this particular thing, you know, I generally am a big, like, weight guy.

isn't everything or doesn't matter all that much.

But for this particular activity, it's huge.

And I would have to pull my spreadsheets and do the math on it.

But again, I mean, there's a simple energy calculation of, you know, say it's five pounds.

You're to – you know, it's potential energy into kinetic energy.

So yeah, clearing the road the day before, that's a great

but let's forget about all that.

It must be this thing we can tell people not to do.

But yeah, I mean I think they're in a tough spot and I think – I can certainly understand their worry about certain amateurs writing that because I think there's definitely a level – I would say from what I've seen in my – I don't know.

history of this from both the pro athlete side and the consumer side, quite often the consumer taking some of the most extreme risks is the consumer who's least prepared to take those risks.

Back in my Zip days, you'd get people called.

They'd be like, I just don't understand why you have a weight limit on the 202s.

I'm 280 and I need to do as much as possible to make my bike as light as possible because I'm so big." You're like, oh man.

Very