For our fourth episode, we’re tackling COVID. We hear from three folks who tried to find themselves a new bike during the great bike buy-up of 2020. Todd Cravens of QBP talks to us about the collapse in the bike part supply chain, and a bike shop manager details how both of these changes – a heavy increase in demand coupled with a collapse in supply – impacted the shop’s ability to serve its community.  Featured in this episode:  Lena Tibebe, Alex Strickland, Cat Weichmann, Brian Bonham, Hannah Simon, and Todd Cravens For show notes, visit <a href='https://www.frictionshift.org/'>frictionshift.org</a>.

Episode 1: Authority Figures

This bike-focused series seeks to examine how modern-day power structures, and the standards built within them, influence the personal agency of all kinds of cyclists in a changing world. The last three years have been incredible in so many ways: they tanked economies, collapsed supply chains, upended governments and educational structures, and brought social justice and systemic racism to the forefront of our cultural conscience. All of this has us examining the structures and systems that ushered in this unique moment in our collective history.Across six episodes, we will investigate those structures both through the story of one woman’s experiences as an activist as well as a journalistic dive into their foundations. We use cycling as a lens to focus these stories around a common theme and provide listeners with a new way of viewing themselves as recreationists within a larger cultural landscape; full of systems that define our lives and have been revealed as fragile or inequitable throughout the tumult of the last several years.For show notes, visit frictionshift.org.