Steve Crandall is the founder of FBM, the BMX brand he started as an inside joke and an art project that turned into a bike company. Today he runs RadShare, a grassroots nonprofit out of Richmond, Virginia that gets kids on bikes and keeps their heads safe.

This one is personal for me. Crandall is one of the people who taught me that BMX was never just about the bike. It was about building your own thing, making zines, making art, and pulling people together when no one was going to invite you in.

We get into starting FBM as an outsider looking in, why the best stuff he ever made happened with a group of friends and not alone, the ripple effect of getting one kid stoked, and why something you can hold in your hands still beats anything that gets a second of your attention online. We also talk about bike events as art projects, what RadShare is really trying to do, and what it looks like to keep making your own fun thirty years in.

Go give Crandall some love and check out RadShare. They sell coffee to fund the whole thing, so go grab a bag.

— Crandall & RadShare —
RadShare: https://radshare.org/
FBM: https://www.fbmbmx.com/
Steve on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crandallfbm/

— Outside Is Magic —
Hosted by Christopher San Agustin, founder of Broken and Coastal.
Website: https://www.brokenandcoastal.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brokenandcoastal/

If you're enjoying these conversations, the best way to support the show is to subscribe, leave a comment, and share it with a friend.

outside is Magic is hosted by Christopher San Agustin.
Produced by Broken and Coastal.
Follow us on Instagram @brokenandcoastal
Help spread the magic. Hit follow, drop a review, or share the episode with someone who gets it. You never know who it might inspire.

Meesh and I have known each other a long time. Mutual friends, overlapping rides, the kind of friendship that started by crossing paths in the same places and got real once we both landed in Portland. We come at this work from the same spot too. Two people who spend most of the day alone behind a screen, then go looking for the exact opposite. A trail, a group ride, something printed you can actually hold.

There's a tension we both keep circling. We love the outdoors, and we're also being pulled deeper into the digital tools that make our work possible. Knowing where to stand in the middle of that is harder than it sounds.

We get into building community through bikes, the burnout that comes with organizing and learning to share the load, teaching yourself to code as a bike courier, the pull toward tangible things in a digital world, and why she's been chasing the feeling of being bad at something new.

Michelle Wilcox is a web engineer who taught herself to code while working as a bike messenger in San Francisco. That path took her to Strava, and these days she builds the tools that help public transit agencies keep cities moving. Outside of work she's an organizer at heart, the person who builds the rides and races that pull a whole community together.

outside Is Magic is a podcast about the intersection of creativity and the outdoors, hosted by Christopher San Agustin, founder of Broken and Coastal.

Subscribe for new episodes. If this one hit, share it with a friend who needs a push to go be bad at something.

#outsideIsMagic #CreativeLife #Cycling #CommunityBuilding #DesignPodcast

outside is Magic is hosted by Christopher San Agustin.
Produced by Broken and Coastal.
Follow us on Instagram @brokenandcoastal
Help spread the magic. Hit follow, drop a review, or share the episode with someone who gets it. You never know who it might inspire.

Max Young and I came to this conversation from the exact same spot. Two senior creatives, a decade-plus in, standing at the same crossroads and asking ourselves the same questions. What kind of work do we actually want to be doing now? What should we be focusing on? And is the path we're on still the right one?

That crossroads can feel isolating. You build something up, get excited about it, and then there's this voice that quietly tries to pull it back down. Turns out Max deals with it too.

We get into self-doubt, the leap from designer to creative strategist, coming up through punk and DIY culture, the pull toward physical objects in a digital world, and the slow work of untangling your identity from your job title.

Max is a designer and art director who spent years in the sports world, most recently at the Seattle Mariners. He runs Love Machine, a gravel cycling project rooted in Vancouver.

Follow Max:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dmaxyoung/
Website: https://www.dmaxyoung.com/
Love Machine: https://www.lovemachinecycling.ca/
Love Machine Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lovemachinecycling/

outside is Magic is hosted by Christopher San Agustin.
Produced by Broken and Coastal.
Follow us on Instagram @brokenandcoastal
Help spread the magic. Hit follow, drop a review, or share the episode with someone who gets it. You never know who it might inspire.