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For The Love Of Watches

Published on Mon, 14 Feb 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Valentine's Day is for lovers (of watches, too).

Synopsis

In this Valentine's Day-themed episode of the Hodinkee podcast, host James Stacy is joined by fellow editors Nora, Jack, and Danny to discuss watches through the lens of romance and relationships. The team explores their Valentine's Day weekend coverage, which included stories about pink dial watches, wedding watches, and timepieces that partners of Hodinkee staff members desire.

The conversation delves into the team's personal feelings about pink dial watches, with Danny explaining he'd choose a Rolex Oyster Perpetual 36 if he were to own one, though he admits it wouldn't be his natural inclination. The group discusses how pink watches have historically been marketed to women through "shrink it and pink it" strategies, while acknowledging some genuinely appealing modern options like the Oris cotton candy dial watch. Danny shares a particularly amusing and relatable story about his wife's silver dial OP 36—a watch she wears daily but refuses to let him borrow, citing concerns about stretching the bracelet. This leads to a broader discussion about sharing watches in relationships and the small tensions that can arise even among watch enthusiasts and their partners.

The episode culminates with Jack presenting his "love letter to watches," inspired by food writer M.F.K. Fisher's work. He eloquently articulates why watches deserve serious attention, explaining them as attempts to solve problems in physics—specifically, creating harmonic oscillators that approach mathematical ideals but can never quite achieve perfection due to friction. Jack emphasizes how watches intersect with numerous fields including history, art, design, navigation, and exploration, arguing that the depth of interest one can find in horology is limited only by one's curiosity. The discussion concludes with reflections on the art of technical writing and making complex horological concepts accessible to general audiences.

Transcript

Speaker
James Stacy Hey everyone, it's me, James Stacy, and this week we have a sweet and cheerful candy coated episode for the holiday that everybody loves. Valentine's Day. So grab your sweetie, open up a box of heart-shaped chocolates, and do your best to keep that giant foil balloon from mixing things up with your ceiling fan, cause I'm asking you to be mine for the next hour or so. Speaking of sweeties, don't worry, I'm not alone. I'm joined by Nora, Jack, and Danny. Hey Valentine's crew. How's it going? It's going great. Going really well. All right. I think in the past, Sodinki's kind of maybe we'd run a story about Valentine's. I don't actually don't know. It's not the story I would have attached my tried to attach my name to typically. But I do believe it's a thing and in in kind of the current format for Hodenkey, we have these uh big weekend presentations, theme weekends, which are going really well. People seem pretty engaged, and it's hard to kind of explain why somebody who's only ever come to the site Monday to Friday should definitely start coming on the weekends. But I think this is this is going to be a show that kind of highlights some of the value there. So this theme weekend, of course, this coming out on the 14th was all kind of Valentine's Day themed, and Nora was the architect of uh of said project. Nora, when you're given kind of a nebulous non-watch topic, like I pi I got value props for mine. So I just had to look into watches that I like, kind of inexpensive watches, not hard.
Nora How do you even approach Valentine's Day and how it matters to watches? It was a mix of the very literal. We had one really good story, only one really good story, um from last year about watches that partners of Hodinky staff wanted. And I think it's really interesting to sort of yeah. The like people who are one removed from it all, sort of what their dream watch would be. Almost as payment for putting up with all of us, I imagine that's a fair price. Then I got a little a little creative with it. We had this really gorgeous wedding watch story that Daisy put together this summer of this couple sharing the watches they wore on their wedding, where they came from, sort of how the watches played into their relationship, a reminder that these can be celebratory pieces that a couple can do together rather than just like gifts between one another. And then I got a little weird with it. I think my favorite stories absolutely to work on was the Benefer watch and what's more romantic than a watch that is gifted and then resurfaced years later when a couple returns to each other, the height of romance. And then, you know, kind of looking at the statistical end of romance I did uh Danny's Kramer versus Kramer watch spotting. Oh. Just you know to are you sure you've seen the movie? Yeah. Okay. So that's the statistical part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Just to sort of throw in a little curveball in there for people who are maybe not feeling as joyous about uh Valentine's Day as some other folks. So yeah. It was a fun weekend to have to sort of get a little fast and loose with it and also look at the watches that other people consider parts of romance and love and partnershi
James Stacy p. Absolutely. And the we did a we did a story on on pink watches that we like. One of our editor roundups. And I think that might be kind of a fun place to start in more specificity. Outside of being asked to fill in a spreadsheet, do any of the three of you have any interest in a watch with a pink dial for your own wrist? No No., I'd
Danny I don't. When I wrote mine, which was on the OP thirty-six, which this is my second editor's picks in a row, I think, where I'm using an OP thirty-six. He's a one trick pony. I know people are gonna be really, really mad at me. Uh and I know that. And I address that in my my little write-up, so I hope um I'm still on everybody's good graces. But yeah, I I think my my point was if I was gonna go with one, it would it would be that one. You know, the inability to get one at retail, quote unquote, notwithstanding. That'd be my choice. But yeah, no, in like in in my general everyday life, if I'm looking for a watch and I'm gonna spend thousands of dollars on it, is my my brain gonna turn to a pink dial watch? In all honesty, a hundred percent no. A hundred percent. I just I it wouldn't I mean if it it becomes a a a moment where I'm parting with a lot of money and it just wouldn't it wouldn't come down to that. Maybe in you know, in some fantasy world of mine where I've my income is expendable enough to do that. But in my current station, I would say no.
James Stacy Danny and I are of are are of a similar age and I think that we we might carry a little bit of baggage over there was a wave of time where men were wearing pink polos, pink button-ups, like as like a move, salmon or bright pink or as it being like a s almost like a flash or a statement piece. Your
Danny camera on phase? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. I might also be a little bit like you know, my my prom date in high school wore a a salmon dress and so I had to wear a salmon vest and a salmon bow tie. Yeah, that's hard to come back from though. So I think I'm just a little bit uh some scar tissue. I'm working that off. Will we get that in the body of the text? Can we have that photo
James Stacy ? I have the photo. Yes. Let the negotiations begin. The hair's its own thing. We'll trade for three more OP stories. Fair. And negative two space jam stories. That's fine. I'll take it. We'll take two space jam stories away. I
Jack don't hate the idea of a pink dial watch, although I think um I I've been like writing about watches and looking at them for so long that like you know when you do the when you are exposed to something for long enough you eventually start to develop really like kind of like weird eccentric taste and the only thing that that you find it things that you find attractive are things that are like really kind of on the periphery of what's actually popular. I think that's what's happened to me. But I would I don't know. I mean like a a pink dial
James Stacy Cartier tank, I think would be fine. Yeah. Uh in my mind, like I I think the closest I would end up would be something like a rose gold option or or sort of salmony dial. And even then my interest like vacillates wildly between like the the tiny little points of data that I would decide would make something that I like or don't like. Nora, how about yourself? I d uh I mean the the trend in the industry of course is shrink it and pink it so that it that that's how they m have marketed uh watches to women for a long time. Does that have an effect or does that make you hate pink
Nora watches at some level? I don't hate pink watches. I'm I like actually really like that or as cotton candy a lot. I think they're uh it's a cool watch. It's like balanced with sort of being kind of big and chunky. I think it would be farther down my list as someone who is like building their collection. I would have to, I think, get to a certain point of like the basics and then get a little funky with it. But I think I would absolutely end up with a pink watch, probably that Aurus one. Who remembers the uh Rich
James Stacy ard Meal bun bun watches? Oh of course yeah Frank Ocean has one. Speaking of pink. I'm a diehard Frank Ocean fan. It's good to see Frank out there mixing
Danny it up. I mean f here's I mean I don't have many opportunities to call back to the time I hung out with Brooks Shields, so I'll take this time to do that now. Yeah, for sure. During my conversation with Brooks Shields, uh she did have uh uh a pink dial air king. And it struck me cool for brick shields, right? Right. But it's one of the to me, the pink dial watch is one of those, like, oh, that's really interesting. That's very cool in the moment. And it's not necessarily I'm also somebody who's generally wearing steel watch black dial all the time. And I think that's because I have this fear that if I get something that's a little bit too colorful, that I'll love it for some time and then slowly tire of the color. But I have no way of knowing. So maybe I need to have maybe I need to test drive a pink dial watch for a year. Couldn't hurt. And then I'll really know.
James Stacy Hodinky if you're listening. That's just ownership, I think, at that point. My year of pink dials. Nora, you mentioned the the cotton candy, which is the watch that I picked. Probably my favorite pink watch, but I even in the text I said like as much as I'm acknowledging the existence of the pink watch, I would buy the blue one if it was my money. I really like a pastel blue dial. Um, I've owned a couple watches with that. We we and we've covered them before. Obviously, there's some popularity to that given uh color range these days. And uh while I may not prefer a pink dial, I do like that it's kind of subversive to put one on a a dive watch that has a hundred meters water resistance and is fully bronze. Like it's it's it's dive watch in form, but it's something else in end effect. That'd be the other thing is I I guess I wear a lot of blue so the pink would work okay with blue. I'd be worried like do I have to start adding pink to my wardrobe, which again takes me back to like university and guys wearing pink polos and like big Lebowski shorts and just looking like complete goobers, right? There was a lot of that when I was in university. That was a look. Everything comes back. Yeah, but I mean, not maybe not for me
Jack . Pig dial watch in a in a bronze case. I mean, that's kind of like the Jeff Kuhn's take on a dive watch, right? Like that dive watches to dive watches as like the Jeff Coons bunny is to actual bunny rabbits.
James Stacy Yeah. I I I can see that. I I think they're I think they're fun things. I think they they look really cool. I I agree with Danny that the OP is probably the kind of like de facto that people would think of for a pink dial that doesn't have a specifically gendered bend, you know, as as a lot of them would. And it is just a bummer because it's tough to write about the Rolex stuff because you you just no no one can get it. It's like it's it's like writing about seeing a concert in nineteen seventy five. Like we're I'm not gonna get to see Pink Floyd. You know what I mean? Like it's just it's not gonna happen. It bums me up I sa
Jack w Aerosmith in nineteen seventy five. How was it? Right. Just random data point. Uh it was pretty awesome. It was at the Farm Shore Arena in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And um yeah. It was you know, it was a
James Stacy big Dream On was out by seventy five, right? Yeah. Yeah. It was on the Toys in the Attic album. God, I'm old. Well, look, part of Valentine's Day is pink stuff and heart-shaped boxes and foil balloons and the rest of it. And the other part is find is acknowledging the fact that if you're in a scenario where you have a partner, to pay some deference to said partner, try and understand them a little better. And I think what we got from Danny's story, which is a story I I really enjoyed, is is a little bit more of an internal look at how a watch can be sort of a tipping point or a balancing point in a relationship, granted in a very zoomed-in way, not in a the grand scope of Danny's relationship with his wife. But Danny, you you wrote this fantastic story about uh why uh your wife won't share one of her watches
Danny . You want to fill us in on this? Yeah, I think of my story as an answer to another story that we have going up that John Buse wrote as well, which is watches you can share with your spouse. And ironically enough, my wife wears a thirty six millimeter OP that showed up in that piece. And so this is this is me saying, well, there's one in my house and I can't I'm not allowed to wear it. And so the journalist that I am, I put on my investigative hat and I wanted to find out from the source, my wife, who has a silver dial OP 36th of the generation that came out 20, was it twenty twenty when those were released, the all the colorful dials plus the silver dial. I think that was twenty twenty. Yeah, the last couple years kinda. Yeah, last couple years. And so this was sort of the unsung hero of that launch because everybody paid attention to the pink dial, as we've mentioned for the last 15 minutes. The red, the yellow, the green, the quote-unquote not Tiffany, Tiffany blue. And then there was the silver one, which ironically was the watch that Rolex advertised the most. It was the was the watch, it press images that we all got to cover the release. It was sort of the face of the launch. And um we ended up uh getting one for her and it's her basically her only watch and she wears it every day and she loves it. And it's awesome for me to see that. It's kind of gotten her into mechanical watches. But ever since she's had it, she's never let me wear it. And it's just been really trying because I love I love this watch. It's a it's and as somebody who loves watches, it's really tough. And and one of the reasons that uh she's told me uh outwardly is that she doesn't want me to stretch out the the bracelet if I put my foot it on. Which fair point, you know. I mean it's not like I have is it though? I probably not. And I think it's kinda BS because I think she just doesn't want me to wear it. It's almost hurtful. Right. I mean, it's it's really hard to stretch out a modern Rolex bracelet. They're specifically designed not to get stretched out. I've told her that. Trust me. I've said it. And the thing is I um what my what my hope was, because the Rolex bracelets, I'm gonna go real real uh micro here, they have the Easy Link extension system and she has it sized for herself when the extension system is open. Oh, that's tricky. It's tricky for me because if it was if it That's like putting the club on your car when you leave, right? Right. If it was the opposite, then I could open it up, put it on, close it up, give it back. This is not the case. Wow, she really doesn't want you to wear that watch, does she? R
James Stacy ight. She's thought about it. She's thought about it. I think you might just
Danny Late to unpublish this story. We went deep, you know. And the thing is, what's in there too is before uh she had this watch, I I sort of gifted her my Seiko SKX 0007 on a Jubilee bracelet, and she wore that for like a better part of a year and a half all the time. And you know a Seiko SKX is not a Rolex OP, but I think, you know, I earned a little bit of a right to test to test drive the car the the watch or just like wear it every once in a while. But we don't really share we don't really share watches that often. And and right now I'm not sharing anything. Trade embargo
Jack . Yeah, you know, it's funny. Um there they're uh when you're in a long term relationship andor marriage, you do kind of have to pick which hill you're gonna die on. Right. And
Danny this is not this is I don't think this one's quite worth it, but it feels like it is. It fe
James Stacy els worth it. Here's my question: is when the value of these things keeps climbing in the secondary market, does this change your your mat kind of at home math? If you knew you could go out and get another one conceivably. Well oh so wait, right, but I can't right. So it so if this was if
Danny this was like It's a commodity. It's it's impossible. Because in in a perfect world, I go get my own just out of spite. I get a sp
James Stacy ite Rolex, you know? Yeah. You've got a highly sequestered marketplace within your own home, and there's there's only you know, there's only so much supply, and sounds like demand is off the charts. Yeah. That's gonna be tough. That's gonna be really tough. Yeah. It's gonna be tough to find an upside in this battle, I think, for sure. The the outlook is the outlook is I I mean I'm I'm I'm betting on Cassidy
Danny . you know, I'm sure commenters are are not going to be on my side ultimately. Or maybe they will. I mean there th th there's not too many in there yet, but we'll see how it shakes out. I'll be paying attention. Years
James Stacy and years and years ago, my my grandmother's one of the wisest people I've ever met. She offered the only advice, relationship advice she's ever given me was she said, you know, just buy two rolls of toothpaste. And the idea was kind of like, you know, don don't't make something small the thing that that becomes like a daily little annoyance to you. The thing about fighting over stuff
Jack like where you squeeze the toothpaste tube is that it it uh it invariably
James Stacy turns into a fight about something else. Oh, sure. A single origin fight is very rare, but it sounds like you could, you know, like maybe the secret here is to is to is to source yourself another OP and just run the tube how you want. Yeah, you can go, you can, you can go
Jack from why are you criticizing me for squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle to you've never loved me, never, never, never in all the years we've been together, you've never really loved me in five seconds. On
James Stacy ly the toothpaste understands me. I would love a
Danny sing a s this is why my Kramer versus Kramer election made sense. It's that's right. And that movie too, if you can look at it a certain way, the ending's not not terribly unhappy.
James Stacy Yeah, and it's uh like the movie, the movie is the is what it is. I would say that even unhappy or happy, I wouldn't say it's a deeply pessimistic film
Danny about about the idea of relationships. No. I will say as a quick aside, that was the absolute hardest watching movies watch spotting I've ever done. There was nothing out there. I was standing, you my wife was watching me standing like a five year old in front of the television, like like inches away, pausing, playing, pausing, playing. A movie from nineteen seventy nine uh doesn't have you know that great of quality so when you do freeze frame it's very grainy. So uh you know it was a it was a tough a tough uh tough call. And still she loves you
Jack . She deserves that watch. Right, exactly. You go out and you actually buy a high-resolution remastered Blu-ray disc of a movie that you want to cover just so that you can identify the watch.
James Stacy I mean, yeah, I've actually gone as far as getting the highest resolution cut that I could find, doctoring the image to give it the highest amount of contrast possible, and then using a T-I reverse image lookup to see if anything close to that exists as a photo otherwise. This was to try and find the watch that Anthony Hopkins or the other guy wears in the movie where the popes are the two popes. The two popes. There you go. And it it turns out was some sort of weird fitness tracker. I never actually
Danny figured it out all the way. Yeah, I mean luckily for me right now, like iTunes, which is usually my go-to, a lot of the movies have been upgraded to you know, 4K UHD. But still, what you get with some of these older films is just like enhanced grain. Because there's really nothing you can do. And and which is fine. I mean, like The Godfather is famously getting yet another remastering and and they're ret return they're bringing it back to theaters for I think a night or two. I'm interested to see what that will look like. Because there is a watch in the Godfather part two that I'm that will eventually be featured on watching movies
James Stacy . Well on that Godfather note, we can move on to kind of our our final chapter of the story here, uh, with uh a letter that Jack wrote that we can't really refuse. And that's uh a love letter to watches. And and I I think yeah, I like this even if it wasn't pegged to a Valentine's Day thing. I just like that especially for you, Jack, but I think it's something that we should all consider, even writing and not publishing. But I just think being able for me to be able to read a thousand words about literally what you think your role in this is and and why you like it. And it's very clear that what that there's a certain part of your personality that enjoys complexity and and the navigation through therein and and I really enjoy that as well. Take us through the the kind of you know elevator pitch for for this story. When you're when you're given a like write a love letter to watches, I think you made something that's both like kind of general and accessible, but still very personal to your perspective, which I appreciated quite a bit. Because I think mine if I tried to do this, it would come out deeply personal to the point of being almost opaque.
Jack Um I was sort of inspired well, I was inspired to write this because I had to come up with something for Valentine's Day, but it's kind of something that I've you know sort of wanted to write for a while because um it is kind of a strange thing, you know, on the face of it, to spend your entire professional life writing about watches. I mean, it seems less weird now than it did ten, fifteen, twenty years ago when watches were a much more uh you know sort of niche interest and niche hobby. And I I was kind of inspired by um something that one of my favorite food writers, I I should say one of my favorite writers, MFK Fisher wrote um is the preface for her autobiographical uh book, The Gastronomical Me. So she was one of the first Americans to sort of like go to Paris after the first world war and start eating her way around France, and she and her husband lived in Dijon for a few years and um you know it was revelatory to her to eat for as it was for a lot of Americans to actually like you know eat French food. And this was when already you were st starting to transition away from the sort of like really, really heavy escaufier style brigade cooking to um you know more like I would say regional French cooking and appreciation for you know cooking in different parts of the country. And you know, but like to be a food writer was a weird thing for a while. It wasn't anything that anybody took seriously. And she despite the fact that she was a fantastic writer, she wasn't really taken seriously as a writer for a pretty long time. And this despite the fact that people like I think it was W. H. Auden who actually um you know said at one point that uh he thought she was the best writer writing in America. I read that book for the first time when I was uh when I was a kid. I think I was probably you know eight or nine years old. And you know, you write about watches. It's a really it's a it is a it s doesn't seem strange today because watches are so popular and there's so much of a part public discourse. But it's certainly kind of a niche subject, I mean, no question about it. And uh so I kind of like rift off of M K M FK Fisher's intro to her book, you know, with this one, where I s you know, I said, uh um like, you know, people ask me me, Ian, and they do, like, how can you spend your entire professional life writing about watches? I mean, you know, it's like, doesn't that seem like kind of a weird, freaky, undignified, um, hopelessly niche, uh possibly juvenile thing to do. And I uh you know I've it is all of those things a little bit. It is actu
Danny ally that out when he stole the mic from you on an opening of Heyho Dinky the other day. Yeah, that's if I remember correctly. That's actually that's I mean that
Jack that whole thing kind of um spun out of a conversation that he and I had, it was years ago, you know, and I was like like neither of my sons are interested in watches. My wife's not interested in watches. And I was talking to Zach, who's n the older of my two boys about it. And um kind of tried trying to talk him into being interested in watches. And he just sort of at the end of it, he just sighed and looked at me and said, I don't know, Dad. I just find the whole luxury thing unbelievably juvenile. And I was like, oh, okay.
Danny And you know it's That's so sad, Jack. I kind of imagine you have this Gollum Smeagol situation happening. If no one in your house is talk to you about watches, what happens?
Jack Yeah. But but so you know, uh w what I the love letter to watches is really it's it's an argument for taking watches seriously and an argument for why they're actually worth writing about and why they're why they're interesting. And um, you know, one of the most basic things for me is that watches are really they're kind of an attempt to solve a problem in physics. So like I look at a watch and I see a lot of different things, but you know what a watch is fundamentally, like really fundamentally, like you strip away everything else, and what it is is a harmonic oscillator that's uh an oscillator that has a uh a frequency that it wants to oscillate at. And what makes watch a harmonic oscillator is the balance spring. So it's a harmonic oscillator and a way of counting the oscillations of the harmonic oscillator and where they add up to a minute, an hour, twenty-four hours, the hands move. And there's a really, really simple in classical mechanics, there's a really, really simple mathematical characterization of a harmonic oscillator, like it's not a complicated equation, but it's an idealized representation of a harmonic oscillator. Right. And uh what a watch is trying to do, if you can s you know, use the expression trying about an inanimate object, what a watch is trying to do is get as close to the ideal mathematical representation of a harmonic oscillator as possible. And it's um it's kind of moving to me in a weird sort of way. I don't know, maybe this is you know another sort of manifestation of the bizarre way that your brain starts to work when you cover a subject for long enough. But there's something almost, you know, beautifully tragic, almost in a Shakespearean way, about the fact that a watch can get like it can it can get closer and closer and closer and closer to the idealized mathematical representation of a harmonic oscillator, but it can never actually get there, right? Like you will always be defeated by by friction, basically, by the fact that there's you know, you can you can reduce it, but you can never produce a physical system uh that has no friction at all. So every time a you know, a component of the watch moves, there's a little bit of friction and uh a little bit of energy is lost to the environment is heat. And they can be minute irregularities, but this introduces irregularities into the uh behavior of the oscillator. And so you can get like you can get to within plus two seconds, minus two seconds a day in a mechanical watch, which is what Rolex does with every watch they produce, but you can never actually produce a perfect watch. You know, Brigade is supposed to have said, give me the perfect oil and I'll build make you the perfect watch. I think you unpack that. What he was really saying was if I can make a if I could make a watch in which there was no friction, I could make a perfect watch. So there's that. And then there's the fact that, like, you know, with watches, you know, you've got five hundred years of people trying to get closer and closer and closer and closer to this uh mathematical ideal. And, you know, there was so much ingenuity. I mean, some of the greatest minds of their times, some of the greatest scientific minds of their times, you know, engaged with this problem without accurate clocks and watches. A lot of what we think of, you know, in the broad in broader terms in human history, you know, would not have happened. So like we, you know, you like marine chronometers, for example, why did so many people work so hard to create marine chronometers? It's because if you don't have a marine chronometer, you don't have a blue water navy. You can't navigate across the open ocean with any reliability, and you also don't have a blue water merchant marine. If you wanted to be a world power for a couple of hundred years, you had to be able to produce marine chronometers and you had to be able to produce them in quantity. And then there's like there's the design aspect of watches. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of different decorative arts that go into them. I mean there's just there's just so much to learn. There's so much to unpack and you really can you know, you can never really get to the end of all of the things that you can learn about watches and they touch so many other worlds, you know, I mean everything from the sort of philosophical perspectives on time and the human relationship to time, to arts and crafts and design, to uh you know, the history of exploration. I mean, they're just Glaxon watches are deeply, deeply interesting things to write about, and it's true that it's I think it's true that it's a narrow subject in some respects, but it's a very, very deep one. And um I mean one of the what I say at the end of the story is the amount of interest that you can find in watches is really only limited by the limits of your curiosity, and I absolutely think that's true. I mean, I've been writing about watches probably for twenty years, and um you know I learn s I learned something new every day and um you know I just don't think that there's any there's any limit to the amount of interest that you can find in them. You know, and I mean I I I I think we're living in an interesting time as watch writers because it's starting to become considerably less weird to be a watchwriter in the same way that it became not only um normal but actually a celebrated thing to be a food writer. And uh you know, I I kind of
James Stacy I kind of like the fact that that's where we're going. Yeah, I I don't disagree at all. And I think that's a a lovely kind of encapsulation of the story. But uh anyone listening who didn't, jump back and read it. It's it's great. I I kind of broke it down into your appreciation for the raw technical merits of what what watchmaking tries to do, the historical element, which I think speaks to a lot of people. And in such a broad sense, like you can find an area of history that you love that h that was probably m drastically changed by the advent of accurate clocks and then accurate wristware. And then you talk about the people, which you've mentioned here. The part that I really enjoyed because it really made me feel like why why do I do this? Is the the final part where you start to speak about some of the barrier to entry, the things you have to understand to truly understand watches. And I read that paragraph and I went like, well, I it's a good thing Jack's on my side, because I don't really get ninety-nine percent of what you listed in there. I you know, I d I think my fascination for watches stems from a long-standing love of where technology meets art, where uh the goal of a of a let's say a car, my other big love, is obviously to take you from one place to another, preferably safely and and at a speed that you prefer. But to do that in a watch, of course, is just just meant to tell you the time in as accurate a manner as possible. Everything else is like layers and layers and layers and layers of endless context. And I think that's where m my general fascination comes from it. But I've always appreciated the ability to read something in a press release or uh read something in one of your stories, Jack, especially the stuff that digs into astronomy, which isn't not something that I studied beyond the high school level, beyond reading, I guess, your your stuff. But I always have always appreciated as long as we've been working together. And and to be honest, before that, we traded some some informational sort of conversations back in the day. My ability to just be able to ask, like, what is it that you're saying here is If you took 200 words to say it instead of seven or eight? Because sometimes I need the to the two hundred word explanation of uh you know why an escape with this escapement technology might be better than that, but also why the better one never made it to a wristwatch or something like that. Aaron Powell I mean, I think that one of the
Jack most interesting challenges in technical watch writing is to write about a complex subject simply and clearly, and it's really, really, really hard to do. Absolutely. I mean, I taught science classes uh at an undergraduate level for I think probably four or five years at one point. And um, you know, I always felt uh like going back and apologizing to the students that I had, you know, my first year because I really hadn't figured out how to explain a lot of this stuff. Teaching is an art. Trevor Burrus A long, long time ago I read the book that Albert Einstein wrote on special relativity. And you know, I mean special relativity, that's a complicated subject. I mean uh you know, he managed to explain it you know very very simply by starting out with a really simple question which is what does it feel like to ride a beam of light? And you know once you st you know once you start there, you can sort of unpack the whole thing in a way that's like relatively easy to understand and that kind of like makes sense. You know, I mean like where did this bizarre picture of the world come from? You know, I mean it came from asking, you know, this like really, really straightforward question. And, you know, with technical watch rating, I think that like trying to explain something completely and clearly, but with you know as few words as possible is just like it's first first of all it's a service to the reader, and secondly it's just like a an inherently interesting thing to try and do
James Stacy . Well I mean that the brief that you're describing there is essentially a TED talk, right? Explain something to a general audience that's typically exceedingly complicated, sometimes almost ludicrously complicated. Yeah. And you have a time limit. Yeah. Yeah. You can't spend a week. You have eighteen minutes or whatever. Exactly. And I would love to see Watches a Love Letter become Jack's Ted Talk. I wouldn't mind at all. That would be great. That would be fantastic. We could probably produce that without Ted. Call it a jack talk
Danny . It's a jack talk. We'll just start a whole thing called Jack Talk. No, but like uh my my I know. My first I don't know, six or seven months at Hodinky, I was writing a story about um new Rolex releases and I was having sort of a story conference with Jack about it. And the conversation about balance springs sort of went we went way off topic, I think, for what my story was, and it ended up turning into me writing another story about like a technical piece about balance springs and something that I was not in my comfort zone, but I think I was able to learn it. And the same way that I was learning it sort of at a at an entry level manner, I think helped me to explain it once I had a grasp of I'm nowhere at the technical level that Jack is, but I think there's there is an art to technical writing. Especially when we're talking about the small components that are in watches, to a a literal spring. I mean I wrote fifteen hundred to two thousand words about a spring. Not a lot of people read it, but it's there and you can you can check it out whene
Jack ver you want to. Find it in the show notes. Exactly. Good Valentine's Day reading one of my very favorite books. This is going to sound super weird. One of my very favorite books is called Ignition Exclamation Point. And it was written by a guy who worked in the rocket industry, developing propellants for his entire professional career. He was a chemist. And um at one point he's talking about a class of rocket fuels uh that are uh uh hypergolic. That is, if you mix the propellant and the oxidizer together, they will spontaneously ignite. And um he was writing about a particularly nasty fluorine compound. Like if you want to s really scare yourself, read about fluorine chemistry because it'll burn things that you would already think are burned beyond recognition. And he said that this particular compound was not only hypergolic with all-known oxidizers, it was also hypergolic with things like concrete, rubber, reinforced uh steel, uh doer flasks, which are, you know, containers for keeping fuel at a certain temperature. And uh it also turns out that it's hypergolic with test engineers. And um I thought, you know, this is this is a pretty that's a pretty hilarious sentence. And it's about like potentially the, you know, one of the most boring things of the world that you could possibly talk about. But it it's like it's a super, super enter entertaining book and just a classic example of how to write about a technical subject for a general audience and be funny
James Stacy . Yeah, this is a this is fascinating and and it could be a podcast all its own, really, right? Like like getting into these topic and trying to explain them in ways that make sense and and I think it's something that we should consider, you know, kind of digging into, but I do really like the impetus of it coming from more of a love letter format than a textbook. This is why I like watches and why I've devoted so much time to it. And and like I said, I think it's something we should Aaron Powell
Jack I mean the great thing about uh writing about watches is that uh all that it takes to spend your entire career kind of growing as a watch writer is curiosity. Aaron Powell And a hodin
James Stacy ky at this point. It helps to have a soapbox. Well look, guys, we're uh we're well our way into this, and uh it's Valentine's Day, so if you've been listening for 40 minutes or whatever, you should get back to uh more romantic topics and uh and experiences and and you certainly have our blessing on that front. Nora, Jack, Danny, thanks so much for uh coming on the show. Thanks, James. Thanks, James. Thanks for having us. And a happy Valentine's to all three of you, of course, and to everyone listening. A happy Valentine's to you as well. Thank you so much for listening. Like I say, every week, if you if you enjoyed the show, if you're liking the show, hit the show notes, leave a comment, and tell a friend. Send them a link, uh, share it around. And uh otherwise, we'll speak to you in about a week's time. Take care.