In-Depth With Jack Forster (HODINKEE Editor-In-Chief)¶
Published on Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:00:04 +0000
Our editor-in-chief talks about the winding road to becoming a watch journalist, his early days in New York City, and the pocket watch that changed his life.
Synopsis¶
This episode of Hodinkee Radio features an in-depth conversation with Jack Forster, the editor-in-chief of Hodinkee. The discussion covers Jack's fascinating pre-watch career, which included studying traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts for over a decade, working various jobs in 1980s New York City (from real estate to moving pianos), and eventually becoming a practitioner and teacher of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. His journey into watches began serendipitously at a flea market in the mid-1990s when he bought a $10 pocket watch and taught himself watchmaking by disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling it with help from early internet forums like alt.horology Usenet groups.
Jack discusses his evolution from forum contributor to his role as editor-in-chief of Revolution magazine's North American edition, and eventually to Hodinkee, where he has become a respected authority in the watch world. He reflects on the spiritual dimensions of watchmaking in both Swiss and Japanese cultures, the importance of telling stories about the people behind watches rather than just the objects themselves, and his wide-ranging interests from particle physics to ancient Greek. The conversation reveals Jack's philosophy that writing about watches well requires curiosity about many subjects, and his approach that every object deserves thoughtful consideration because people invested their reputations and livelihoods in creating it. The episode provides listeners with both personal anecdotes and insights into Jack's influential role in shaping modern watch journalism.
Links¶
Transcript¶
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| Unknown | Outside of watches, what are some things you're deeply interested in? Oh gosh, I think I think to write about one thing well, you have to be interested in lots of other things. You know, the history of fine and decorative arts. I'm interested in uh human anthropology as a science, I'm interested in math, science, and engineering. I'm interested in astronomy. I'm interested in modern physics, modern subatomic particle physics, quantum physics. I feel like one of your b |
| Unknown | iggest challenges as a writer has to just be the fact that you can you have all of this at your command. Yeah, dude. It's all available right there. I'm trying to decide what like house-wives reference to drop into my story. Like like do I make a Luann joke or do I make a Lisa Rina joke? Like I have no idea. And Jack's like, is this more particle physics or quantum mechanics? Hey everybody, this is your host Stephen Polveran and this is Hodinky Radio. This week I've got our producer Greg Corhonan here on uh the mic with me. Hello folks. And we were sitting down and thinking about what we wanted to bring you this week, and we realized it had been a little while since we did an editor interview. So we thought we would bring you the most requested editor interview of them all. The illustrious editor-in-chief. Mr. Jack Forrester. Does he have a middle name? Yeah, I think it's a J maybe. Okay, we'll we'll have to bring it back to the first one. Yeah, that'll be episode two. We'll just talk for an hour about Jack's middle name. You know, for for both of us, if I can speak for both of us, Gray, uh I think this was a pretty special one. Jack's had a big influence on both of us and both of our watch related careers. For sure. He's somebody I knew before he was a part of Hodinky when we kind of would go on press trips together and see each other at events, and now getting to work side by side with him every day. Uh don't tell him I hope he doesn't listen to this. But uh it's been a pretty amazing, amazing experience and a pretty uh formative experience for me. Jack is someone who has lived many lives before his current post at Hodinky and has a lot of great stories to tell. Uh yeah, he does. Uh we've decided to dedicate the entire episode this week to our conversation with Jack. And without further ado, here's Jack. Mr. Jack Forster. How you doing? I'm really excited for this one. Yeah, we got gray here too. Rare gray spotting on the mic. I had to be here for this one. That's for sure. No question. Mm-hmm. You've been looking forward to this, Jack? Um I have |
| Unknown | been looking forward to it and kind of uh dreading it. Um I got nervous when you started with an um there. Well, you know, we all think that our own lives are deeply fascinating, but there's not necessarily any guarantee that other people are gonna feel the same way. Uh but I I think I got a f |
| Unknown | ew s you know halfway decent stories. You know, I uh y as we started to think about how to put this together, you know, kind of pre-producing this, there's always the question of where do we start? And uh I thought a nice place to start would be the first times that Gray and I met Jack. Gray, maybe yours was more recent than mine. So you wanna you wanna go first? Yeah, sure. My first impressions and interactions with Jack, uh, that would be when I visited the Hodinky office as a prospective employee. And uh this you had just I think debuted the new office space that that had the the L feature where the edit space was towards the back. It was sort of the office uh version one point one one point one, which allowed you know the the edit minds to kind of uh conclave themselves and and do what they do. And when given the tour, I turned the corner and there's Jack Forster typing away very serenely. And my first impressions were just like this is this is Zen Master Jack Forster. It's not wrong. And it's it's been kind of crystallized, as I've told Stephen before, by the first page of the first notebook I used when working at Hodinky, where I used a mnemonic device to kind of remember everyone's name, uh, their name, dash, and then a description. Jack Forrester's reads, Jack, dash, boss I'm not even asking what uh what mine says. Your editor interview, you'll you'll find out it's just as good. That'll be the big reveal. Uh I don't remember the exact first time I met Jack, but I know it was at some sort of industry event in New York. It would have been like mid-2012, right after I started at Hodinky. It was really early on. Um funnily enough, a whole bunch of the folks who now work with us, you know, John, um, Joe, and you, Jack, are people I met within my first like two to three weeks. You know, the industry is not that big a place. Uh and when you dive in headfirst, you you meet certain folks. And I had just come from the academic world. I was thinking about getting a PhD. I ended up deciding not to do that. And that journalism was kind of my thing. And I remember meeting Jack and thinking, holy shit, like there were other people who come with that sort of background. Like Jack is like the watch professor. Like this is like my kind of people. Like this is somebody I know how to relate to and and who I think I'm I'm gonna get along pretty well with and here we are, however, many years later. Aaron Powell |
| Unknown | It's funny, when I uh started at uh Hodinki, uh my wife and I were talking the night before and she said to me, you know, there's uh there's just one thing that I'm uh a little concerned about, and I said, what's that? And she said, uh, you're going into a situation with an awful lot of people who are just as absolutely confident that they know how things should be done as you. And there's an old saying, uh Chinese saying. Um I think she forgot that I was the one who told her that old Chinese saying in the first place. Um but it's great when it's uh two tigers cannot share the same mountain. And uh Hodinki's been really interesting because we've got about eight tigers trying to share the uh editorial mountain. Uh yeah we do. But it's been uh I think it's been good for everybody. Yeah. We've all had to sharpen our game |
| Unknown | . Yeah, for sure. So not to get too bogged down by that specific, you know, detail, but but how has that worked out? You and the the rest of the tigers running around |
| Unknown | I mean we've all had to find ways to work together. The truth is when I was uh you know prior to Hodinki I was editor-in-chief for Revolution in North America, which was uh wonderful in a lot of respects, but it was very solitary. It was me working to an office in Singapore with a twelve hour time difference. Phone conversations didn't happen. Everything was done by email. Um I had a salesperson slash publisher in North America and basically we only saw each other at trade shows. So, you know, I was essentially running the North American uh issue of the magazine off a tiny little desk five feet from the dirty laundry bag in my bedroom in our apartment in New York. And when I started at Hodinki, there were five uh employees total, and we're working on 40 to 45 by the end of the year. And I think for everyone involved, not just me, it's been a huge, huge adjustment because it's I mean it's definitely the biggest company by far I've ever worked |
| Unknown | with. Yeah, I mean, I started at Hodinki when it was two of us. We've all had to kind of like figure it out and and find our way. And I think one of the things that that we've done on the editorial team and that you've, you know, been a big, a big leader in in a lot of ways is everybody not just identifying what they're good at, but identifying what other people are good at and identifying like, you know, I know when a story is not right for me, when I'm not the person who should be doing this, or when I'm not the person who should be editing a story or making a judgment call about something, like I know when you're the right guy, and I know when John's the right guy, and I know when Cara's the right person to throw to. Like figuring that out is a difficult thing and it's very humbling thing, but I think especially when you have folks like yourself on the team who who have a tremendous amount of knowledge and and some good self-awareness, uh that can kind of develop organically and it ends up making, I think, for a much more enjoyable, collaborative sort of sort of environment. Aaron Powell Yeah |
| Unknown | . I mean one of the great things about it is um I have learned a tremendous, tremendous amount from the people that I work with, everything from the same you know, sort of the technical side, how a website actually operates. You know, I've I watched us uh build out uh an integrated e-commerce solution on the on the web, which I had nothing to do with in terms of implementation, but it was fascinating to watch. Um integrating with uh with the video team that Grayson is a part of uh has been absolutely fascinating. I've uh you just fr my own photography, uh you know, uh my own watch photography improved enormously after my first year at Hodinki, basically, because I watched Will take pictures of watches and I stole every trick that I possibly could. Trevor Burrus That's we all do man. Yeah that's that's a common sentiment. Trevor Burrus And um you know seeing how the video team operates uh when they're doing a location shoot has been enormously enormously educational. So it's been a really rich experience and a very enriching experience. And you know, one of the problems with working solo is that you're never really challenged to expand your knowledge set or your skill set. You know, it's very easy to reach a point where you're doing what's just kind of good enough, you know. Um and you can go on for years like that, and I did. But um, you know, with Hodinki, it's been a new set of challenges almost on a daily basis, um, you know, uh a bunch of new learning experiences almost on a daily basis. Uh and I can, you know, I'm middle-aged now. I mean I'm not a young man anymore, and I can highly, highly recommend uh to people in the media industry who are um, you know, roughly of my generation, you going out and finding smart, highly motivated young people to work with, boy, because it uh it takes the years off |
| Unknown | i i wanna you know we're gonna talk a lot about your your career and watches but that's not your first career and as you talk about new challenges, I think it's worth going back to the beginning and talking about like where does Jack Forrester come from? Can you give us the the brief bio and then kind of uh uh the careers you had before getting into watches? Because people might not realize this since you are now like one of the global authorities on wristwatches. Uh, but people might not realize that this this is not your first rodeo. Like this is not what you set out to do from the time you were 10 years old. |
| Unknown | You know, I I was one of those people who had uh to itok me a long, long time to kind of settle on a professional identity. Um, I'm one of those people who's good at being good at things fairly quickly, but uh up to a certain point, you know. But getting really, really good at something uh was not something that I ever had to force myself to do uh really until I started studying traditional Chinese martial arts back in the late 1980s. You know, um and I had moved to New York after graduating from Bennington College. I went from uh a very unsupervised, very bucolic, almost you know, really I mean in the early 1980s, extremely hedonistic setting. And moved to New York, which was uh not bucolic, but also an extremely hedonistic setting. Yeah. Um and you know, you know, uh I spent my first couple of years in New York uh living in a fairly out-of-control fashion. And it didn't sew at the time because everybody else was more or less doing the same thing. You know, you have to remember this was, you know, studio fifty-four days and uh you know the era that Jay McInerney wrote about um in Bright Light's Big City, and it was just uh it it was a lot of fun, but it wasn't really sustainable. Yeah. How old were you when you moved to New York? Uh I was uh twenty-one. And and what prompted the move? I didn't really know where else to go. You know, um I had gone to Bennington, I was a fine arts and philosophy major, which I mean, you know, is is as |
| Unknown | good for one's earning potential as you might think. Aaron Powell Dude, my degree just literally says the humanities on it. So you're in very good company. Yeah. Oh, so brother. Yeah |
| Unknown | . Um and uh you know New York was really it was just where you went. You know, the the my assumption was, you know, I want to be a creative of some sort and I am new New York is the closest place where I really feel like I can figure that out. Uh so I came here in pretty much the same way that a uh you know somebody who'd just gotten out of drama school would, you know, go to Los Angeles and sleep in their car for a few years and yet just try to figure out a way to break into the industry. And it was a it was a pretty nutty time. And I tried a bunch of different things that I was mostly terrible at. A friend of mine from college had parents who owned a three-office real estate agency in Brooklyn, for example. And you know, this was during a time when it it anybody with an ounce of skill at salesmanship should have been able to make money hand over fist selling real estate in, you know, in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope was just beginning to come up. And I was just awful at it. You know, I would show people properties and they would say, Well that seems kind of expensive and my reaction was like, well y yeah. It it is. You know, which is not which is not what they call uh you know strong marquee. Huh. That surprises me honestly. Because you're you're a storyteller. I feel like you'd be able to to make a pitch for for any apartment. Yeah. Yeah. I mean maybe now things would be different. But uh boy I was just so bad at it back then. Interesting. I was making art. And I was doing a sort of a combination of visual arts and performance art, and the nature of which is probably best left to the imagination. Fortunately, there's not a lot of online documentation for the Yeah, check check the show notes. Yeah, we're gonna have to do some digging here. Did a lot of weird things. I worked for uh a year and a half moving pianos, um, which is an interesting thing to do. It certainly, you know, it gets you out into the fresh air and you meet all kinds of people. And uh uh and I drove a uh three-axle piano delivery truck without a driver's license. Um you know, so living on the wrong side of the law That's definitely not the most illegal thing about that business though, right? Trevor Burrus You know the thing about New York in those days is that everybody had a side hustle. Uh everybody had uh several side hustles generally. And you know, none of this was weird. I mean, you know, if you found out that somebody was you know if, you worked at a restaurant, there was always somebody who was, you know, like selling a little weed out the back and to the guys in the kitchen. Um, you know, it was just it was kind of just the way things the way things were done and it w it's become a more street laced city, probably for the better in most respects. But uh it was uh a very adventurous time to be in New York. Uh we were going through a huge, huge uh spike in crime. The subways were unbelievably unsafe. Um the homicide rate in New York City was higher during the period, I think 1975, 1985, than at any other time in New York history. And when I first moved here from college, I moved to Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, and that has become a very gentrified, very hip neighborhood now. But you know, back then it was it was just unbelievably dangerous |
| Unknown | . But are there any stories from that period of your life that will not get you indicted for any crimes that you can tell us on air? Or or get any hits called out on you. Yeah. That that kind of cry |
| Unknown | stallize that that period of your life. Well I I think that one of the things that was kind of ubiquitous in those days in that particular neighborhood was there were uh there was a lot of drug dealing going on and, it was hard drugs, was heroin. Uh heroin when I first moved in there, and then crack cocaine, you know, a few years later, although that was always a little bit more of an outer borough thing. Um, but you know, there was one gang of heroin dealers on my block, and there was a rival gang of heroin dealers on the next block, and you know, there would be pitched gun battles between them every once in a while. I came home from a night out one night to my apartment, which was a a storefront on Ludlow Street, and uh, you know, there was a a guy who'd been shot and killed, uh lying I had to step over him to get inside my apartment. Yikes. Um you know. Which was a little bit too much excitement even for me. Uh so I I moved into a uh shared loft on Broadway and Bleaker Street a couple of weeks after that, because I thought to myself, you, you know you're you're a nice kid, but you've been in the country for for you know the last four years, and uh the this this down and dirty, gritty city experience is maybe not for you. Aaron Ross Powell Congratulations, Jack. I'm pretty sure that's the first reference |
| Unknown | to a heroin war that has appeared on the podcast. Yeah. How did we make it a whole year without that? It's your favorite topic. I know. I talk about it all the time. Yeah, in retrospect, it seems like it should have come up before. Yeah. So after all of this, you end up studying traditional Chinese medicine. Aaron P |
| Unknown | owell Yeah. So what happened was uh one of the choreographers that I was working with at the time uh had her husband was an Aikido black belt, and she said, you you need you need something that's gonna help you uh get your head together a little bit. Why don't you go study aikido? So I did that for a few years and that was an amazing, amazing experience. And uh while I was doing Aikido, I met a guy who uh we practiced one day and he star he was doing stuff that I absolutely did not understand. You know, generally when you're practicing uh Aikido, there's a certain amount of cooperation that takes place so that you both can learn, and my cooperation was definitely not required for what this guy was doing. Uh I mean, I remember getting about five minutes into uh a partner exercise with him and uh you know, he was this like schlubby little guy. He didn't look like anything. And uh he said to me, you know, you're doing that wrong. And I'd been studying for a couple of years at that point, and like most young people who are relatively fresh to martial arts and are fairly good at acquiring physical skills, I had a very high opinion of my own uh talents. So I said to him in kind of a disgruntled way, oh really? So what's what's it supposed to feel like? And he says, Well, it's supposed to feel something like this. And he did something quickly, and I found myself basically horizontal in midair about five feet off the ground, and I hit the mat like a sack of flower. Uh and he says, uh yeah, that's how it's supposed to feel. So I got up and walks away. No, I mean he I was stuck with him for the entire class. So I got up and I practiced with him and uh I was absolutely uh humbled and humiliated by the end, you know, because I had no I had no idea what it was doing. I had no idea why it worked. And I got off the mat and the uh sensei who'd been teaching the class said to me, Are you okay? And I said, Yeah, I'm fine, but like, but what the fuck was that? And he goes, Oh, don't worry about it. That's Eric. He he does Tai Chi. So I went to this guy and I said to him, Can I study Tai Chi with you? And he said, No. And then the next week I said, Can I study Tai Chi with you? That was amazing. And he goes, no, no, I I don't want any more students. So I asked him, this was this this is sort of you know the tradition tr certainly the traditional Chinese approach. Uh you have to ask like three times, four times. And he finally said, all right, you can come up to my house in Brooklyn and you can start practicing. So I did Tai Chi with him for about 10 years, and I was doing Aikido at the same time. And at some point, I got interested in the medicine side of it, which uh for most traditional Chinese a lot of traditional Chinese martial arts and Japanese martial arts, there's usually a at least a first aid component, and sometimes the meta the traditional medical side of it is extremely sophisticated. And I really decided that this I thought to myself, really, for the first time in my life, well, this this beats waiting tables and moving pianos. Maybe this is something I could actually do. I uh became a student at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, which is a degree-granting institution which still exists in several campuses in the U.S., and I study traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and traditional Chinese herbal medicine, uh what's called um uh you know, Twinna, uh traditional Chinese medical massage. The guy who taught us that uh was an American who'd studied for uh many, many years in China. And going you know, going back to school, you know, going back to what was essentially graduate school and you know learning a little bit of Chinese, medical Chinese, uh, and sort of figuring out how to integrate that into my own, you know, practice. I mean, I struggle with it to this day because I think of myself as a deeply rational person. And like many people who think of themselves as a deeply rational person, I'm also deeply superstitious on some level. And figuring out how the sort of rational side of the practice relates to the experiential and not necessarily rational side of the practice. I think that's kind of an ongoing process for me even today. But it was it was just fascinating. And it was the first time that I remember meeting people who were obviously dramatically so much smarter than me that uh you know I just had to um you know kind of follow in their wake and consider myself lucky to be around them. Aaron Powell I love that. I love that that's a part of your life and it's still a part of your life. Aaron Ross Powell yeah actually um one of my uh one of my teachers uh one of my two most important teachers who stopped teaching about uh it must be ten or fifteen years now. He had just last week, as a matter of fact, opened his hands again, as they say. Uh and uh going back and starting to study with him again is is uh it's been a fascinating experience. That's awesome. And while all of this was going on |
| Unknown | , the uh watch internet was starting to take off. Right. And I'm gonna cheat here a little bit because I know this story. But this kind of all this whole wild road that led you here started at a flea market, right? Aaron Powell It did. It started at the |
| Unknown | 23rd Street Flea Market back when there was a 23rd Street flea market. And this is in I would say 1995, 1996. Okay. So I was wandering around and you know, I'd always been kind of interested in watches uh and there were a few particular watches like the Speedmaster, for example, which I'd been aware of since the late nineteen sixties, but I'd never been like a watch guy, so to speak. So once on the Which by the way is insane to me. To imagine Jack Forrester not a watch guy? Aaron Powell I should say the f you know one of the funny things about my practice of traditional Chinese medicine was uh I actually um have a huge fascination with uh with science. And one of my biggest professional activities, oddly enough, turned out to be teaching uh neurology, anatomy, and pathology and programs for complimentary medicine practitioners. Jack that brain. And I think that it uh that that was fantastic, fantastic training for uh career writing about watches because the truth is you can't teach a neurology course to people who are non-scientists and who for whom science has been a terrifying thing to encounter academically, without making it interesting and entertaining and without being able to give very, very clear explanations that are also technically correct. And you can give explanations that are technically correct and completely incomprehensible, or you can dump things down and be entertaining, but the smarter people in the class, or or basically everybody in the class, is going to sense they're being cheated and shortchanged a little bit. Yeah. So uh figuring out how to do that took about five years too. You know, I always wanted to go back and apologize to the students I'd had um my first year. Now's now's your chance. Sorry guys, if any of you are listening. Uh but figuring out how to do that and being forced to figure out how to do that was really fantastic training for writing about watches. Because it's the same problem, right? Right. It's possible to be insufferably pedantic. But you know, w I'm not sure. Oh, it's possible. Um but you know, I mean one of the great things about Hodinki uh ever since you guys started it, uh, you know, really was that it was very it felt very inclusive. And I want to keep that. Yeah. So you're at this flea market. You're on 23rd Street. Yes. What happens? Meth Flea Market. Uh on 23rd Street. And I'm looking at a uh desk. Okay. I always had this fantasy of having a beautiful desk. Uh I've never had an office big enough for one, but you know. Um and uh I opened up the desk drawer and there was an old pocket watch in the desk, and I asked the guy who was trying to sell the desk how much for this pocket watch and he was trying to sell the desk not the pocket watch so he said uh ten bucks. I think he just wanted me to sort of go away. Uh so I paid ten bucks, brought it home and I didn't think about it very much at first, but after a month or two I started thinking, you know, I wonder how this thing works. So I figured out how to open up the back without uh you know damaging anything. And I started looking at the mechanism, and you know, there was the I saw the balance wheel, this little thing swinging back and forth, and uh, you know, the pivots were okay, which for a what turned out to be a125-year-old watch was uh kind of an amazing thing. The movement was basically in good shape. Main spring was pretty tapped out, but it it took about six months, but I finally put together enough tools and found enough information, uh, got cleaning supplies and oils and um you know oiling tools and all that jazz and I figured out it took a while to it uh but I finally figured out how to take the watch out uh take the movement out of the watch and uh clean it, disassemblele it it, can, put it back together again, lubricate it, and set it running. I uh found um a supply house out in California that actually had replacement main springs for that particular movement in stock, so I swapped out the main spring. And you did this in white year? This is in 1990s. That's what I'm saying, exactly. Well no, no, this is in the nineties. This is like nin |
| Unknown | ety uh ninety-five, ninety six, I think. Yeah, yeah. So it's mid-90s. Yeah, what do you how are you doing this? Like today you Google it and there's four thousand results. Like what do you doing |
| Unknown | in ninety-six? So there were. There were Usenet News Groups. Oh boy. And there was the alt.Horology Usenet News Group, which was a digital electronic bulletin board service, basically. So I went there and I started I I basically said, uh I'm trying to fix an old pocket watch and I don't know a whole lot about this. Uh any of you folks are watchmakers, please uh, you know, uh ping me and uh you know give give me some help if you can and if you're inclined to do so. And these were and folks were helpful. Uh there were several watchmakers there who suggested books. They told me where to find tools, um, you know, they gave me phone numbers, people to call, and uh, you know, what uh what supplies to Told me what were probably the best oils to use for different points in the watch. And you know, the whole thing took absolutely forever in retrospect, but you know, that was part of the fun of it. I'd I'd never, you know, done something like this before. And you know, Stephen, you and I were talking about this in the office a couple of days ago. The interesting thing about watches is that they are not a time-only pocket watch, it is not a terribly complicated machine. It is, however, an extremely precise, very sensitive one, and the way in which it works is not like the way in which most machines we deal with on a daily basis work, especially the escapement, which has the dual job of transmitting energy to the balance wheel and also basically counting the number of times per second the balance wheel swings and controlling the rate at which the rest of the gear train on lines. And you know, you stick uh some hands on a couple of those gears and you've you've basically got to watch. So it's not a complicated mechanism, but it doesn't work the way you you have to figure out |
| Unknown | how it works. I think I probably was working at Hoodinky for a full year, a year and a half, probably before like I I thought I knew how it worked, and I like could kind of explain it a little bit, but like in hindsight, I don't think I actually knew what the hell was happening. Like I don't think if you had like given me all the parts and been like put this together or gave me all the parts and we're like, what does this one do? How does this relate to that? Like I don't know if I could have told you until a ye and that was doing this all day, every day for well |
| Unknown | over a year. So I would say it took a good six to eight months for me to take this thing apart, um, clean it, put it back together again, oil it, and adjust it. But I will never forget um the night that I uh actually uh dropped the balance wheel in and uh you know, put some energy into the main spring and then you know, you see the balance start swinging in a machine that's three, four times older than you are. You know, the this watch is a hundred and twenty five years old and I f I had brought it back to life in a sense. And boy, my hair stood on end. And uh you know, part of the problem with that is it's given me a real prejudice against people who are not interested in the technical side of watchmaking. Um and people like watches for different reasons. I mean, you know, you can not really understand or care how a liver escapement works and still be a very active, interested, engaged, knowledgeable collector. Um, you know, people are just interested by different things. Um and I've had to learn, I've had to become comfortable speaking that language as well because that's how a lot of people come out watches. You know, the technical side is not uh, you know, it's not something they're interested in. But seeing that little heart start to beat again was uh it it was amazing. It made me feel as if I were in touch with, you know, somebody made that watch 125 years ago. I'll never know their name, um, I'll never know anything about their life. Uh, but they existed and they made this thing. And at some point, 125 years ago, whoever made that watch had exactly the same experience I did. They saw the balance start to beat for the first time. And I thought to myself, you know, whoever you are, long dead guy who made this watch, I salute you. Love that. Yeah. Long de |
| Unknown | ad guy. That's our patron saint. The patron saint of Hodinky. Long Dead Guy. Long Dead Guy. We love you. We love you, Long Dead Guy. For sure. Did the Speedmaster come soon after that, or was that a little while still? The Speedmaster came afterwards. |
| Unknown | I bought a $10 watch because the only thing I could afford at the time was a $10 watch. But you know, the speech. Yeah. Yeah. But you bought said watch as a result of your experience with the pocket watch? I got interested in watches again as a result of my experience with the pocket watch. And then I started to remember what an impression the Speedmaster had made on me when I first found out about it in it was probably 1968. If you were interested in if you were interested in everybody was interested in space travel. Um and uh growing up, you know, I was six years old in nineteen sixty eight when Apollo eight orbited the moon for the first time a any spacecraft had orbited uh a heavenly body other than the earth. And you know, we really felt like we were going places. Collectively as a species, we really felt like we were going places. So the Speedmaster was, you know, kind of part of that in anything that the astronauts were using that you could actually touch and hold and use yourself also here on Earth was uh uh it was a desirable thing. I mean, you know, we all we all knew that most of us were never going to ride a 36-story-tall Saturn V rocket to the moon, but you know, you could like drink the same freeze-dried drink that the astronauts drank, you know, which was uh gave you a sense of connection to what was going on. This week's episode brought to you by Tang. Coincidentally, yeah. Uh and you know and the Speedmaster was a part of that. So of course I wanted one desperately, you know, with with all the purity of heart that a six-year-old brings to wanting a physical object. Which is a lot of purity. Honestly, that is a lot of purity. So that so I put the pocket watch back together and I started talking to people on uh you know the alt dot urology news group about watches and uh it sort of reignited my uh passion for the speedmaster. And then around 1999-2000, I really started to participate heavily in the first watch discussion forums, which were TimeZone.com and shortly thereafter the Purists.com. And I ended up doing a lot of research and corresponding with people about the history of the Speedmaster, trying to figure out how it came to be part of the Mann Space program. And I, you know, the six-year-old in me kind of woke up and I fell in love with the watch all over again. And um, when I finally started to do a little better economically uh after graduate school. It was the first good Swiss watch that I'd uh that I bought. Now before that, uh I had owned two Seiko's, a Seiko 5 and an SKX 0007 dive watch. And those are fantastic, fantastic watches. But the sp but you know, the Speedmaster has a connection to my own personal history and to the history of manned space flight that really is unique and I think that's the it it it aggravates a lot of people to hear the you know, the whole sort of um this watch went to the moon drum being beaten over and over again. I mean it gets a little monotonous, I'm sure. But it also happens to be true. So yeah, it was the first good Swiss watch that I bought. And I've owned and sold several other watches. Unfortunately I got interested in watches about the same time as I started a family, so I never had a ton of disposable income to spend on collecting, and I've never been a collector per se. But the Speedmaster has stuck around for the last probably 20, 25 years. Uh the first good watch I ever got. I'm wearing it right now. Um on a Spidel Twisto Flex bracelet, another relic of the 1960s. Uh and uh while I've owned and sold several other watches and still own uh some nice pieces now. Um Grant Seiko, for instance, which I have a huge affection for. To me, the Speedmasters it's special. I |
| Unknown | love seeing Jack in the Speedmaster in the Hodicki office. Same hair. I agree. All feels right. Jack rolls in with a with a hat on and his speed master on his wrist and like all feels right with the world. Completes the look for sure. Um what are some of the ones you mentioned? Some watches that have have come and gone. What are some of the pieces before we get into your career and watches. Sure. What are some of the watches over the years that have have come and gone that you maybe wish didn't go? A |
| Unknown | aron Powell The single watch uh the okay the two watches that I regret the most the acquisitioning as they say. O isne an omega-30 T2RG uh chronometer. I didn't know you owned one of those. I did. Oh. That makes sense. And uh, you know, I paid eight uh all of 800 bucks for it again at the 23rd Street Flea Market. And you know, when I I took the back off and looked at the movement, the movement was meant. Uh it was an earlier version of the caliber with uh split uh by metallic they were still using split by metallic balances. That's so blue-steel balance spring. Uh might have been a Guillaume Balance. I don't actually remember at this point, but it's certainly possible. Uh and it was just a beautiful, beautiful machine, you know. And I I loved that watch because the movement was such a wonderful piece of work. As such a Jack Forster watch. And I worked on it. Uh and Roger Smith and I talked about this when he was in the office for his talking watches. I don't know if it necessarily came up during the actual episode, but we talked about what it's like to work on the omega-30 millimeter movements, and they just seemed to put themselves together. They're so beautifully made. You know, it's no, it's zero effort to disassemble and assemble them. It's like they want to be worked on. So there was that. And then there was a Hamilton 950E pocket watch, which normally those are that's a railroad grade pocket watch. Normally those are cased in gold-filled um ten-year case, what are called 10-year cases because the the uh gold plating is guaranteed to last at least ten years before wearing out. So for railroad use for use on the railroads, conductors uh would you know typically have those cased in ten year cases. This one had a gold case on it, which was a retirement case. So whoever had owned the watch had decided to, you know, uh hold on to it after he retired from the railroads and he'd had it cased in gold or it had been cased in gold for him. And, you know, again it was just an unbelievably beautiful mechanism. I think one of the most beautiful uh railroad grade movements that Hamilton ever m Ye |
| Unknown | ah. That'll be tough. Um All right. So let's let's go into jack watch professional. All right. So you're on the forums, you're on purist, you're on time zone. At what point does this start to become something that can maybe be not just a job, but but something that you can make like a really big serious part of your life |
| Unknown | . So the very first watch event that I attended was uh in 2000 when Rolf Schneider, the late Rolf Schneider, uh who uh resurrected Ulyss Nardin in the 1980s almost single-handedly. He came through New York with the very first iteration of the freak, and we had never seen anything like it. It's hard now, after uh, you know, 20 years basically of um super watch watchmaking. Uh it's hard to gauge it's hard to gauge and hard to understand what the impact of that watch was, but it was completely crazy, completely over the top. No one had ever seen anything like it before. First use of silicon components in any wristwatch ever. And, you know, Rolf was an extremely charismatic individual. And I went home from that dinner which I had been invited to by Dr. Thomas Mao, who was the founder of The Purists.com. I went home and I thought to myself, boy, that would be fun to write about. So I started doing some more long form writing for some of the forums. And you know, this was all something that I was just doing as a hobby, basically. Um I wrote uh a two-part extremely long, uh and in retrospect, probably too long for its own good history of the Omega Speedmaster for the Purists. |
| Unknown | com. Aaron Powell I think people people who weren't around the watch internet in those days might not realize that like pre-watch blogs and and real sort of like contemporary watch internet, the forums were not just home to discussions, they were home to lots of writing. Like people were publishing for sure in-depth articles, in-depth reviews, like real studies, because you you might not have your own blog or your own website, but like you could go on to purists and or time zone and publish a, you know six thousand word story about something and like people would read it and engage with it and be excited about it. Trevor Burrus And you know for the first time |
| Unknown | in in uh the history of being you know sort of a watch enthusiast, it was possible to go online and say and say, you know, publicly, hey, I don't really understand how a router pond chronograph works. And you could get an answer the next day from a German master watchmaker who spoke serviceable English and wrote serviceable English, who would actually tell you you in a way could understand how a Ratrapan chronograph works. I mean that was revolutionary. You know, you could talk to people who had been lifelong Paddock Philippe, lifelong Automar Piquet collectors, and had a really, really deep knowledge of the brands, knew all of the references inside out, had all of the reference numbers committed to memory. Um role the sort of Rolex enthusiast uh world was really starting to take off then. That was really an internet driven thing. And so it was a wonderful time because you could you could really you could find people who not only shared your interest in watches in general, you could find people who shared your interest in particular aspects of watches and watchmaking for the first time. And I'm sure that this must be true of other sort of narrowly focused enthusiast domains as well. I mean people who were into uh cars started talking to each other online for the first time. I have no idea what that world looks like, but it must have I'm sure that it makes uh the Watch Internet look like um you know an episode of You ended up, you already alluded to it, but you ended up the editor-in-chief of Revolution US. Yeah, that was a very interesting thing too. The magazine when it launched in the USA um Which was when? Okay. So they they had a collector's dinner and they invited some folks from the purists. And I ended up sitting next to Way Co, who's uh still the global um editor-in-chief and mastermind uh behind Revolution. Shout out to Wakeout. Shout out to have you on here sometime soon. Yeah, you know, and we still see each other on a regular basis. Uh so I was sitting next to him and we were talking, and I thought to myself, okay, I'm gonna see if this guy is is actually serious about watches. I'm going to pitch him a story that is absolutely totally non-commercial, has no possible upside with any of the brands. And I said to him, How would you like a story on the history of Mickey Mouse watches? And I was sort of interested in the history of character watches, but you know, then as now, they're not terribly expensive to collect. Yeah. You know, for most of the history of character watches. They were fun novelty items, you know. |
| Unknown | Um but you're also partially just doing a jack, which is you're you're uh you're being not controversial, but you're sort of like being the devil's ad. Yeah. You're testing the waters. You're trying to see how far you can kind of push |
| Unknown | . His v first very f his first reaction, uh completely spontaneous, was great, fantastic. Uh can you give me um three and a half thousand words on the history of the Mickey Mouse watch? And I thought I said, all right. So I wrote the story and I sent it to him and they published it. And he said, That was great. Do you want to do some more writing for us? And I thought, okay, sure. And at the time I was teaching and my practice, a lot a significant chunk of my practice was actually doing end-of-life care for cancer patients. But you know, by the time somebody gets to somebody who practices back in those days anyway, by the time somebody got to somebody who did traditional Chinese medicine, they had kind of exhausted good options in terms of conventional medical care. So a lot of what I did was palliative care. And it was extremely rewarding, but it was also pretty emotionally exhausting. And now some people can do this work, that sort of work their entire lives, and they find it deeply, deeply, deeply rewarding. Um, I have a sister-in-law who's been in oncology her entire professional life, I think going on 35 years now, and she absolutely loves it and would never do anything else. But I I think I was sort of saying to myself, uh I I don't know if I can keep this up. And you know, I would do it again. It was uh an unbelievable experience and very, very educational in many, many respects. But uh I writing about watches was just fun. An escape for from the little bit of it. A little bit. Yeah, yeah. Um and uh so I started doing more and more writing for Revolution and after a while, Waze said to me, you know, we're we're going broke paying you as a freelancer. Uh how would you like to come on board as technical editor group technical editor for uh revolution magazine worldwide group technical editor okay and so that was my first title with revolution uh and then as you know a couple more years went by and he said to me, how would you like to be editor-in-chief? And I said, Well, I don't know anything about the magazine business. And he said, That's fine. He was completely unconcerned. had no idea how a magazine was constructed. I had no idea that went what went into producing one. You know, we published a pretty big book. They still publish a pretty big book uh four times a year. And the idea was basically hire people who are capable of producing large quantities of well-researched um writing that does not have to be extensively fiddled with to make it suitable for publication. And I've always been lucky in this business in that I write fairly fast and fairly clean. I can attest to that. I'll co-sign I'll co-sign that. Thank you. Well it's true of you as well. And yeah that was so that was uh that was my time with Revolution. And that was how I really got out on the road and started seeing the watch world for the first time firsthand. So my very first, my very first trip to Switzerland was two I was also around 2006, I think I went out to visit uh Manufacturer Roger Dubuis and it was a whirlwind one-night trip in Switzerland. Was this pre-Richemont? Uh just post. Okay. So I uh uh flew out to see the factory, uh landed in Geneva, met my contact, spent the day at the factory, had dinner, and uh fell asleep, got up the next morning, went at the Geneva Airport, flew back, and you know, that was the first time I traveled internationally since my wife and I had taken a vacation in Scotland about 15 years before. You know, and I I mean it just felt unbelievably glamorous to me. You know, I was flying business class and uh, you know, it was uh life, you know, life was wonderful. It was, it was an amazing, amazing adventure. And that was the beginning of really, you know, not only traveling to Switzerland, but traveling around the world and and seeing how beautiful things are made where they're actually being made. So, you know, I've had a chance to see how over the years I've had a chance to see how, you know, watches are are actually made in Switzerland and how other amazing products, everything from you know art glass to cashmere, you know, how these things are actually made by the people who make them the old fashioned way, the way that uh luxury products and what luxury actually is and what it actually means. And uh it's it's been uh it's been pretty fantasti |
| Unknown | c. I can say this and I think Ray probably feels the same way. It's funny to hear about your first trip to Switzerland because going to Switzerland with Jack Forster is an entirely different experience than going to Switzerland with anyone else. In Geneva, which is in many ways a uh, you know, kind of one industry town, you know, it's it's really like you'd be shocked if you haven't been how much watchmaking is like a part of day-to-day life in Geneva. Yeah. And Jack is a bona fide celebrity. Like you walk around Geneva and like people know Jack and people in the watch industry, whether it's people who work at boutiques, whether it's brand folks out, you know, walking around getting lunch, like people know who Jack is and approach Jack and he carries some serious sway in that country. Trevor Burrus I mean go anywhere that is a hotbed that could be considered a hotbed of watches and and you'll have that reaction. Yeah, for sure. Which to me |
| Unknown | is um I mean it's nice obviously. I have an ego just like anybody else. Do you? Yeah. Do I? The eye roll I just got was amazing. However, it also kind of amazes me because, you know, and this is something we've also talked about on a number of occasions, you know, when I first got interested in watches, there was no watch internet. There were three magazines. They were on the newsstands I've s I think I've said this on the podcast before too, more or less for Batum. But you know, they were on the newsstands next to the model railroading doll collecting and numismatics magazines. They we we didn't even get to go up on the shelf where the wine magazines were. You know, and to actually be around for the time when watches went out more or less into the mainstream and really became something that somebody who was serious about style, who's serious about history, who's serious about culture, serious about the history of mechanics and the history of science. You know, all of these people from all of these domains are now, you know, seriously interested in watches, not just wristwatches, but the history of watches and clocks in general. I mean, it's just, it's been fascinating and very gratifying. Uh, and and surprising, honestly. I mean, I never thought that when I first got interested in watches as an adult back in the mid mid to late 1990s, it just seemed like we were going to be stuck in the library uh with our, you know brandy and cigars pretty much you know indefinitely. And it was never gonna be cool. I mean, what kind of a person is cool people aren't interested in watches? Cool people aren't interested in in in wristwatches and pocket watches and clocks and the history of time and timekeeping. That's that's uh the most insular, nerdy, profoundly uncool thing you know that you can possibly think of. I mean, you know, accuracy and timekeeping, that's that's for the man. That's not for the cool that's not for cool people |
| Unknown | . I have to say one of the you know, thinking about being in Geneva with you makes me think last year, a little less than a year ago, uh, you were there for the Grand Prix and I was there as well, uh, for the FHH Cultural Council meeting, uh, which we are both of which we are both members. Um and yeah, yeah, Gray's Gray's given us a round of applause there. I'll give it a few more years before I'm there with you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll come you want to come this year i'm all right um yeah okay um cut that out and being i i'd never been to the keeper yeah i'd i'd never been to the grand prix before. You know, I'd covered it for years but, i'd never been. And seeing last year, seeing Jack at the Grand Prix, I can safely say one of the biggest uh administrative headaches we have had in all of my time at Hodinky was figuring out which table Jack was going to sit at at the Grand Prix last year. There's a dinner afterwards where all of the brands who who have submitted watches each, you know, sponsor a table and they get to select who their guests are and whatever and dealing with the influx of invites of everyone who wanted Jack at their table. And then at the actual dinner, seeing all of the people who were like, Oh, Jack, it would have been uh, you know, so nice to have you at our table. But I see you're sitting with our friends over over across the hall was incredible. Just the the sort of like weird industry politicking and the way that, you know, over the years you've really become kind of a a star around what around which other things orbit. In the in this industry is is very f very interesting. That phenomenon is w is an interesting one |
| Unknown | anthropologically. Um I think that the two uh parts of the world where passive aggressive is done with the highest degree of skill are certain parts of the American South. Uh and Switzerland. Then they're really true, yeah. And uh the the the Swiss, you know, their game is right up there. There's there's no there's no passive-aggressive expression of disappointment, quite like a Swiss passive aggressive expression of disappointment. But you know, traveling to Geneva has been a fascinating experience because you know, like you pretty much whenever I go there, it's it's for work. So you you get off an airplane and you go to meetings and then you go back to you go to a hotel and then you go back to the airport. You maybe eat a club sandwich somewhere in the middle. Right. If you're lucky. Club sandwiches we have known. So many. Yeah. Uh and then you know, and then you fly back to New York and you haven't really seen the city. No. And it took me more years than I want to admit to actually just spend some time in Geneva, start walking around and get to know the city as a city. And it happened relatively recently. I've had a chance over the last few years to spend, you know, on several occasions a week in Geneva where I didn't really have anything major to do except wait for the next meeting, which was a week off. And you know, it's a weird town. It's uh it's a city, it's very cosmopolitan. It's also the, you know, it's the Calvinist, it's the Protestant Rome, it's John Calvin City. It's a very contradictory place. It has a it has a history of obviously tremendous, tremendous wealth, everything from the banking industry to the fact that the you know Willsdorf Foundation, which owns Rolex, is headquartered in uh in Geneva. Uh so it's a tremendously affluent city. Does not wear its affluence on its sleeve. Uh that's a very un-Swiss thing to do. And m there are beautiful sights to see, there's beautiful architecture to see, but it's a very, very difficult city to get to know, and the Swiss are very difficult or relatively difficult to get to know because in Geneva, you have these very, very close-knit so you know you're born if you're born in Geneva, uh, you have a very close-knit social group that you start to sort of have when you from a very young age and you stay with those people. That's your circle as you grow up and as you grow into adulthood. You you know, stay in touch as you get married, and it's it's a it's a wonderful thing, but uh it's also not something that people who are outside those circles of relationships are typically invited into. And I traveled to Geneva for 10 years before I was invited to the home of a friend in Geneva for coffee. But actually getting inside that world a little bit and starting to understand Switzerland, starting to understand the history of Geneva, starting to understand, you know, why watchmaking of all things, why did this become a particularly Swiss industry? There are a lot of fascinating historical forces having to do with everything from the look the geographic location of Switzerland to the history of religion in Switzerland, the history of religion in France. You know, all of these things led to a certain revolution in France. Yes, yes, yes. you know, for instance there was a suppression uh after Kelvin of the goldsmithing industry in Geneva because there were, you know, sumptuary laws, basically laws against creating just obvious luxury objects. So, you know, what do you do? You're you're a goldsmith, you need to apply your trade. Well, you can start making watchcases. That's okay. You can start making watches. If you have a you know a child who wants to uh you know learn a good trade, they can go into the watchmaking industry and they can learn how watches are made. So for all of these historical reasons, what you start to understand when you begin to spend time there and get to really know the Genevans uh a little bit better as people, you start to understand why watchmaking happened there in a way that it didn't happen any place else. Ye |
| Unknown | ah. So I wanna know the the trips to Geneva, at least in my experience, tend to be relatively low-key. Like you said, it's a relatively low-key city in a lot of ways. You've traveled a lot of other places. You've seen some uh to be frank about it, you've seen you've seen some shit. You've seen some crazy shit doing this, doing this job. Probably done some crazy shit too. For sure. I want to hear those stories. What are some of the crazier experiences? They don't necessarily have to be body, but like what are what are some of |
| Unknown | the watch writer. There's you know there's a certain level of uh excitement that you get to as a watch journalist as opposed to a fashion writer and it's you know, the the bar is not terribly high for well, this is out of the ordinary I don't know. I suppose one of the most amazing experiences that I had was going to Japan for the first time. Yeah. Uh w and I was lucky enough to travel there uh I think around two thousand ten or 2011, um, to visit uh Seiko and had a chance to see the three major locations where Grand Seiko watches are made. And you know, Japan is a very this is uh the the most cornball c And just how different it is is hard to understand for a Western anyway without going there. And uh I remember the first full day we had in Japan, we had sort of a morning off, and myself and John Reardon, who was writing for Hodinki at the time, uh, and is now um you know having a very, very successful career in the auction world. Uh, he and I were walking through uh Ginza and I realized I said to I said to him, John, I don't hear anybody's voices but ours. You know, and I realized we were like, you know, sort of the two loud Americans walking down the street, you could and the the the Japanese people could probably hear us for blocks. Uh there was no there were no gum spots on the sidewalk. Uh it was a very, very busy weekday morning, but you could not hear a single car horn. Nobody was beeping at each other. You know, um, and it was then that I realized, what, this is this is different. This is going to be a very different place. I mean, speaking of places where |
| Unknown | Jack holds a certain amount of sway. Oh my god, Japan. Having had the the distinct privilege of going to Japan with Mr. Jack Forrester, I've I've seen it firsthand. Yeah, I mean I, you know, it's uh It's okay. You're big in Japan. You're allowed. But you you also love the Japanese and |
| Unknown | and the Japanese track. This gets back this gets back to my whole sort of um you know connection with uh Asian culture, with East Asian culture. My uh mom was from the Philippines, her family was originally from China, so I've always kind of had one foot in that world a little bit anyway, and then between studying traditional Japanese and Chinese martial arts, uh practicing uh Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhism, you know, for me going to Japan and actually seeing uh the place that was the the wellspring of so many things that I was deeply emotionally committed, am deeply emotionally committed to and deeply interested by, that was uh boy, you know, you're if you're if you're if you feel a sense of connection to that culture and the first time you go there is just unforgettable. And I've been been lucky enough to go back uh several times and it's always really exhilarating. You know, I mean Gray, you and I have been to Japan a couple of times together and it is uh um it's it's a game changer. For sure. You |
| Unknown | know and and I love watching you interview, you know, the the watchmakers and and representatives of the brands that we've been working with over there because you always imbue your questions with certain a level of appreciation for Japanese culture and understanding of it. And it kind of opens up a whole new avenue for us to explore |
| Unknown | in these various stories that we tell while we're there. Yeah, it's funny. There's a level of one of the interesting things about both Japan, watchingmak in Japan, and watchmaking in Geneva is they are both in a very uh non-obvious way, uh, spiritual enterprises, but in different ways. So, you know, in Japan, there's this uh the the the word is a shokunin. Th'sere sh theokunin mentality where you you you you have something that you do and you just do it every day with full attention, day after day, week after week, year after year, and your skill improves but it,'s not a result of trying to be better per se. It's a matter of doing what you're doing with full attention. And you know, you see that when you visit Grand Seco and you watch the guy who's Blueing the hands for, you know, blued steel hands on Grand Seiko watches. Uh he's doing it with a level of uh it's corny as it sounds to say, a level of selfless devotion, which is really, really interesting to see. It it kind of makes you wonder about your own approach to life a little bit. Yeah. And you know, you go to Switzerland, and this is something that I really didn't understand about uh Swiss watchmaking, especially at the high end. You know, it's an industry also, obviously. I mean, industrialized Swiss watchmaking was um critical to the survival of the industry, certainly, critical to its existence as an industry. But you know, the cabinotiers of Geneva, the watchmakers of Geneva, the watchmakers up in the up in the Jura, and you know, up in the mountains, you know, this is a Protestant country and God is watching. And part of the reason why, especially at the high end, you devote yourself to making something beautiful that absolutely nobody is ever going to see but another watchmaker. Well, there are two reasons. The first is another watchmaker is going to see it, and you don't want to embarrass yourself in front of a colleague. The other reason is that God is watching, and uh he sees if you are being lazy, he sees if you are cutting corners, he sees if you are not devoting yourself wholeheartedly from a spiritual perspective to the work that you were doing. And this is one of the things that I find the most fascinating about high-end Swiss watchmaking is, and and you know, it's not talked about all that much, but there's a there's a a spirituality to it, a devotional aspect to it, you might say, which is also present in the best watchmaking in Japan. And they are sort of brothers from different planets. But the result kind of comes to the same thing. There's a there's a desire to make something beautiful for reasons that are bigger than yourself. I |
| Unknown | think that approach comes through in your work. I think it's like hearing that you're and we have we we haven't talked about this off-air either, but hearing that that's something that fascinates you about watchmaking is entirely unsurprising to me. You know, the the way that you approach your work is very much from that standpoint, you know, and and we've talked in the past about you know the definition of luxury before, right? And one of the things you've said is is one of the things that defines luxury is it costs what it costs and it takes how long it takes, right? Exactly. Exactly. And like there's Traditional luxury. Traditional luxury. And like there's there's an element of that approach and that devotion to what you do often in that like if a story that I don't file stuff on time. Yeah, sure. That is not where I was going, but sure. Um while while we're talking about it, Jack, uh is is that whether something needs to be a thousand words or five thousand words is is in a lot of ways irrelevant. It's it's that it it needs to be done properly. And it needs to be shown a level of respect and a level of attention and a level of sort of like reverence that matches sort of all of those elements that were put into it in the first |
| Unknown | place. Yeah, I I mean I agree with you 100 percent. And I mean t you know, two things. Um it takes as long as it takes and it costs whatever it costs. Yeah, that was the trad that's kind of luxury traditionally something very, very aristocratic created for aristocrats, but it it also is capable of being something bigger than that. It's capable of being a multi-generational representation of certain core cultural values. So in that sense, real luxury is meaningful. You know, it's part of something that we very nice thing that we like to call culture. And you can you can there are other kinds of luxury. You can have mass the advent of precision mass production means that this is the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus this year. Yeah. And the whole idea that you can have a beautifully designed object that is affordable, democratic, and available to anyone who wants it, you know, at that point you have a democ you have you still have an aristocracy of taste, but you have a democracy of acquisition, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing to have. So there's all of that. But you know, traditionally things were luxury objects because they were uh because of rarity of craft and rarity of materials, combination of the two. And with watches and with watchmaking, we you know we kind of we have we actually have both nowadays. We have something on uh uh you know we we have stuff on both both ends of the spectrum and everything in between |
| Unknown | . Yeah, I t I totally agree. Um I I even mean it in an additional layer in in that your actual writing. Like the actual work you are doing is in some ways sort of mirroring the work you are writing about. So pursu |
| Unknown | ant to that, I think that everything that um if you're creating something, whether it's a painting or a story um or you know a wristwatch, with with stories, for instance, uh every story kind of to me it almost feels like it wants to be a certain length. You know, and it wants it wants to have a certain uh depth to it. And you know, writing about watches, I think it's really important. Actually, this is probably true of writing about anything, it's important to have a sort of a sense of power-to-weight ratio, especially if you're a consumer journalist. So you don't treat things with uh disregard for depth that want to be treated with more depth, and you don't try to make thing you don't try to blow out of proportion and and inflate in importance things that are the things that don't sort of merit it. Yeah. And this is complicated by the fact that typically when you di when you're digging for content. Sometimes they are. They're very sometimes they're very well crafted. But sometimes they're not. Sometimes you you know you say to yourself, oh gosh, this you know, you you sort of shoot the messenger, you say to yourself, this press release is so shitty that I'm going to uh write a perfunctory dismissive story about the watch, which is kind of unfair. And a lot of the not all the time, but a lot of the time, there's almost always a more interesting story to tell about just about anything than you think there is at first. Yeah. I actually think that's |
| Unknown | one of the things I've learned most from you is I'm we've talked about this on the show many, many times, but uh I subscribe to our good friend James Stacy's uh strong opinions loosely held philosophy. Shout out to James. Shout out to James. And uh yeah, I am uh and I think you'll both attest to this, I'm known to uh come in hot as they as they say. And one of the things I think Jack that I've I've really learned from you and that's that's been a huge help to me professionally and personally is checking myself on that and saying like, okay, I can come in hot. I can have my initial reaction, but then kind of like as a as a sort of like personal and professional challenge, say like, okay, this thing seems like garbage, right? Like this seems like not even just garbage, but it seems like irrelevant, which to me is actually almost worse. But like why? Like why does this exist? Why does this exist? You know, and like in the case of what we're doing and what we're covering on the site, like if a watch exists, it's because a global multi-million dollar corporation thought fit to invest in and produce this product with the intent of hopefully making a profit on it. Trevor Burrus Every object that is made is made because somebody decided to make that object. Right. And in a decision made. Yeah. And in the case of of the companies we're dealing with, like there's lots of checks and balances usually and lots of design by committee and decisions by committee. So like if a watch comes out, there are probably a few dozen people who made the conscious effort to invest time and money in making this thing and to put their reputations on the line making this thing. So even if you don't like it, and even if initially it seems silly and dismissible, probably is at least worth a second thought. And you may decide on second thought that it is in fact dismissible, but you should at least give |
| Unknown | it that second bout of attention. Yeah. And you know, this gets uh th this gets us back to uh what we were talking about when we were talking about my hundred and twenty five year old friend back home at the at the beginning of our conversation. You know, there are people behind these things. And one of the most interesting things about watches to me has always been that they are objects in and of themselves, which can be seen as, you know, sort of things in isolation, and judge more or less in the abstract on their own merits and flaws, both as mechanisms and as design objects. However, they are also communication devices. You know, when you hold a beautifully made watch by Patrick of Ashraman or Langa or Or, you know, whoever, uh Grand Seiko. Um fortunately for us nowadays the list is getting longer rather than shorter. Watch, you know, which you can say this. But you know, you hold these things in your hands and you feel the sense of connection. There's somebody back there. There's somebody behind this watch, more than one person usually. Somebody designed it, somebody engineered it, somebody put more or less, sometimes a huge, huge amount of thought into how it's going to work, how it's going to be put together, how does the movement work with the case? How does the case and movement work with the hands? How do we get all of these elements to play together? How's it going to feel on the wrist? And let's not forget it has to be commercially successful. So how much should it cost? How many of these are we going to try to sell? Should we make it in gold only? Should we make it in gold and steel? Is it devaluing it as a luxury object to produce it in steel instead of just precious metals? We've thought about this a couple of times. And you you can kind of hear all those voices in your head, so to speak, when you hold a really good watch in your hands. Not even necessarily a perfect watch, because there are very few of those, but a watch that some thought has thought and effort has gone into. There are people back there who put this thing into the world and hope that it leads a successful and productive life. And as you say, Stephen, a lot of the time they've staked their reputations and, you know, the livelihood of their family on the success of these objects. And I think about that a lot. You know, when I write about watches or anything else, um there's always people back there. Yeah. In the same way that I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my head when I saw the back I think that was the moment when I really realized these are these watches are these weird necromantic little time machines on a certain level. You know, they they make you feel the presence of people who are not actually around, either because they're physically not around anymore or because they're just sort of, you know, geographically in a different location. And 99% of the time you have no idea who they are, but you you you feel that they're there. I think anyone who's familiar with your writ |
| Unknown | ing knows that about you and and your approach. I think, you know, if if Will Holloway taught us how to shoot watches to a certain extent, Jack Forrester taught me how to think about watches from a narrative perspective, how to tell stories about these objects through the people who care about them and created them and cared and cared enough about them to create them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Um yeah, one of the things, you know, we talked about this actually right before we turned the mics on. But uh one of the things I think everybody sitting around here feels, and it's something that that is in the watch industry as well. And I think we try to like synthesize our own approach and and this approach and the watchmaking approach together into one nice happy thing, which is the advice we got from our good friend Innie Archibong, a former guest, which he got from Mark Thorpe, who uh shout out to Mark Thorpe. Uh, show up and make dope shit. Like that's what we all try to do on a daily basis. Like, and I think that's what the folks who are making these watches are doing. It's what we're trying to do kind of second degree off from these watches, is like these things exist to to bring us pleasure. Like nobody needs a mechanical watch in the same way that nobody needs to read an article about a mechanical watch. But in the same way, like they can put a smile on your face. Like they can make you think about the world a little bit differently. They can communicate culture. They can uh help you meet people you wouldn't have met otherwise. They can do all sorts of things. And like I mean |
| Unknown | they can give you a sense of connection with certain fundamental, you know, physical principles, some some some certain fundamental universal physical principles. I mean, if you understand how a mechanical watch works and you understand its relationship to other you know, kinds of time keep time keeping devices with perhaps a more organic relationship to things like gravity. Like a pendulum clock, for instance, has a direct organic relationship with gravity that a wristwatch does not. But when you start to understand something as fundamental as you know, what is an oscillator, how does it work, how does it work in the context of a watch, and you start to see its connection to much, much bigger problems and much more universal problems in physics, uh and math and science. You know, boy, oh boy. Just that as that aspect alone is enough to keep you engaged with them for the rest of your life. Yeah |
| Unknown | . All right. So we're gonna have to wrap up in a little bit, but I wanna know what are some things you've worked on that you're most proud of at Hodinky? Um I |
| Unknown | 've had a chance to do so much at Hodinki just because of the infrastructure that has been provided and the fact that I am trusted to create interesting content. Um I had so much fun working on the Spring Bar story. Uh you know, the the history of who invented the Spring Bar. We talk about that story what? Twice a week, three times a week in the office? That comes up? Um I'm really, really happy with the uh there's a story that I read about uh a Seiko five that I've had for for I don't know, thirty years at least. It's uh uh the seventy-five dollar watch that looks like a million bucks. so good Which is which is being read to this day, much to my you know very, very pleasant surprise. Um another one of my favorite stories was the uh thirty-six millimeter yellow gold day date story, which that was actually a comparison between the thirty-six and the 40. Um had a great time writing it. And man, there's there's so much other stuff that I really, really enjoyed writing and I just hope that the enjoyment comes through to people. You know, they read it |
| Unknown | . I loved Quartz Week. So I was not at Hodinky. That was the the uh period of time between my two stints with Hodinky. And I remember so early on in my career Hodinky. I loved it. I pulled up the website one day and you and Kara, which were basically at that point you,, Cara, and Ben to some degree, were the editorial team. I remember pulling up the site and being like, they're doing fucking quartz week? What? Like, okay, Jack's Jack's doing this. Okay. He's he's he's making this his thing. He's pushing it. My favorite comment from that whole experience was uh Jack Forster has ruined Hodinky. How many years down are we now? Four years down the road from that? Yeah. What do you what do you think? You think they were right? We've never recovered. Yeah. So outside of watches. You're you're a man of many interests. Outside of watches, what are some things you're deeply interested in? Oh |
| Unknown | gosh, I think I think to write about one thing well you have to be interested in lots of other th I would agree. Besides that thing. So I mean pretty much anything. I'm a terrible it's not a helpful thing to say, but pretty much anything that's interesting. You know, I mean I'm interested in um you know the history of fine and decorative arts. I'm histr I'm interested in uh human anthropology as a science. I'm interested in math, science and engineering, I'm interested in astronomy, I'm interested in a str which by the way is extraordinarily relevant if you're writing about watches. Modern physics, modern subatomic particle physics, quantum physics, which um I don't have a great technical grasp of, but I understand some of the mathematics on a basic level better now than I did ten years ago, which I'm kind of proud of. I feel like one of your biggest challenges as a writer has to |
| Unknown | just be the fact that you can you have all of this at your command. Yeah dude. It's all available right there. I'm trying to decide what like housewives reference to drop into my story. Like like do I make a Luann joke or do I make a Lisa Rena joke? Like I have no idea. And Jack's like, is this more particle physics or quantum mechanics |
| Unknown | ? Uh I am proud to say I'm the world's greatest shitty guitarist. Oh, cool. Um yeah. Good. You're a photographer? Uh by necessity, but also out of pleasure. Um I still keep a sketchbook. I have, you know, I have was a fine arts slash philosophy major in college. One of the most fun things that I have had a chance to do as an adult was I was a full-time stay-at-home dad, full-time stay-at-home dad for about five years uh when our when we started our family. And I'd always wanted to learn ancient Greek. Um and the story did not go the direction I thought it was going into. And I I found a I found a wonderful, wonderful tutor um who uh was teaching ancient Greek and ancient Latin and I st I studied Greek with her for two years and got good enough at it that I could read uh the uh Iliad Odyssey and some of the simpler Platonic dialogues. I mean, with the help of uh grammar and with the help of a dictionary, of course, but uh you know for, for for a non-professional academic, I got pretty good at ancient Greek, which is a useless thing to be good at. Um, you know, you you can't have a conversation in ancient Greek, really. But uh Do you mind giving it giving it a shot? Giving us a little sample. Can you give us the first the first line of the Iliad Main Aide thea pele iadio acileos ulumine hemuri alge a thek I mean it goes on. I love that man. Wow, I really did not think we were getting |
| Unknown | Homer the poet, not the cartoon character. Correct. Yeah. One of one of my favorite Jack memories has to do with you and and photography. And one the first time I think we traveled together, because people forget a lot a lot of a lot of the folks who are on the Hodinki team now were not originally. We were all kind of like dispersed at different publications. Yeah. And so, you know, you go back to 2011, 12, 13, 14, and we're traveling together a lot because we're representing different publications on these trips. So we got to know each other traveling together. So I was in Germany with Jack and uh we got to Dresden. We were visiting Glassute Original the next day. We were so jet lagged, got to Dresden and there was a fresh driving snow and neither one of us could sleep. So Jack and I flat out blizzard it was yeah, it was intense. Uh and a blizzard in Dresden is a beautiful thing. It is a very beautiful thing. I had never been there before. Um Jack was reviewing for Forbes, I think, reviewing the Leica monochrome, which had just come out, the original monochrome. And so Jack said, Hey, you want to go shoot some pictures? And I was like, Yeah, great. So I pulled out my my DSLR at the time. And Jack and I wandered through the streets of snowy Dresden at like three o'clock in the morning, did not see a single person the entire time we were out. Shot photos for probably two hours, two and a half hours, couldn't feel our hands by the end. It was great. It was awesome. Uh and I remember I was like, who the hell is this guy? Like I'd met I again, I'd met you like probably twice, maybe three times before at all. And I just remember being like, this is this is not a bad way to make a living. Just another content creator with a personality disorder. That's I think all of us. Um I know you gotta take off, Jack, but uh thank you so much for doing this. This is good and you know, you're obviously a frequent contributor to this show, but it's good to get to talk about |
| Unknown | you instead of just to you. Yeah, and I hope there was something there for the folks listening. You know, um it's like I said at the beginning, you kind of make an assumption that your own life is incredibly fascinating, especially if you are a writer and you know, as a tribe, we tend to be uh unbelievably insecure and narcissistic at the same time. I think it was Tony Bourdain who said that uh he said writers are terrible people. If you're in a room with ten writers, you might as well put your head into a bag of snakes. Uh which is a very colorful way of putting it. But yeah, I hope I hope there was something there for folks, you know. I mean, if nothing else, just a sort of a sense of enthusiasm for something that uh you know we all share. Well, I find you endlessly fascinating, |
| Unknown | Justin. I agree, man. I I've had fun at the very least. Same here.. Yeah, me too Round two soon? Me too. Yeah. I mean anytime. This week's episode was recorded at Mirror Tone Studios in New York City and was produced and edited by Grayson Korhonen. Please remember to subscribe and rate the show. It really does make a difference for us. Thank you, and we'll see you next week. |