Beyond The Dial

Farewell, and thank you all for listening.  The Aesthetic Revolution Will Be Beautiful!

Allen and Rikki lament and celebrate the current world of watches in equal measure, covering the rise of fashion and red-carpet nonsense to the role of modern materials in high horlogy. 

Allen could no longer resist the forces of gravity at the center of the horological universe, and now he is broadcasting from the within the Rolex Black Hole. He has sold off swaths of his collection and aquired two five-digit Rollies. An unexpected turn in Allen's journey, and perhaps one from which he can never return. Has he sold out or bought in?

Is SWATCH's BIOCERAMIC anything more than a petroleum-based plastic? Find out in this episode as Allen shares his investigation into this divisive material, its history, its current context, its chemical makeup, and even an email about it from a SWATCH representative.

A watch movement made to exacting standards by a robot on Mars working for a third-party alien corporation might turn out beautiful, precise, complicated and fascinating. Barring production on a more distant planet, no movement could be further from "in-house." This hypothetical Martian movement would absolutely trounce, say, a cheap Seiko movement made "in-house" by actual Japanese robots. I'd take the third-party Martian movement any day, and I bet you would too.

Has Rolex evolved into a brand that's For Exhibition Only" And what if Rolex no longer made physical watches? Could this be the future of global luxury brands in the centuries to come?

Allen went to the UK for the launch of Bremont's first serially produced watches with their in-house movement, but what Allen got was a ride in an old plane that showed him the unique authenticity at the center of the brand set on reviving British industrial watchmaking.

Walt has some very classy timepieces, all of a type: smaller, understated, and often highly complicated. Allen and Walt talk through five of Walt's most favorite watches, plus a sixth that came to Walt as a very pleasant surprise.

In this essay-style episode, Allen drags the historical lens across the watch space from 1990-2020, showing how what was once a lonely nerd's hobby grew into a fashionable social activity.

In this insight essay, Allen admits to feeling a little disillusioned with the broader watch culture and tried to identify why it feels different to him since COVID pandemic lockdowns and the rapid expansion of interest in watches. Special interest is paid to the role of social media in hollowing out how we enthusiasts and collectors interact around watches.

It's gotten overwhelming, all the new releases. Allen talks about how the digital medial environment, including the socials, has put undue stress on watch brands to always be releasing something new. and he has some ideas for how to deal with it. 

David takes Allen deeper into the world of mechanical chronographs, covering all the major complications from early flybacks to the latest in mechanical chronograph technology. 

David takes Allen inside the fascinating world of mechanical chronographs, and Allen finally "gets it."  Vertical vs. horizontal clutches, column wheel vs. cam actuators, reset functions, and much more are covered here, leaving the listener with a foundational understanding of mechanical stop watches.

Allen expands on his written essay on this always confusing and sometimes contentious topic. "In-House" refers to a movement built....Where exactly? By whom? It's hard to know anymore because brands have use the term in marketing so loosely that no precise definition exists. Allen suggests new terms to help clarify the many modes of movement manufacturing.

Allen upends our current way of diving up the watch community into collectors, enthusiasts and consumers and suggests that we'd be far better off describing different levels of horological experience. Not to be missed for the die-hards, in this episode Allen's  "phenomenology of watches" finally pays some dividends.

Allen speaks with Michael Benavente of Bulova and Colin de Tonnac of Semper & Adhuc about the history of Bulova as a mechanical watchmaker. There's a lot to learn here. For example, did you know that Bulova once employed more Swiss mechanical watchmakers than any other brand, including the Swiss ones? Michael provides historical perspective and Colin provides mechanical insight. Good stuff.

David and Allen walk through the sometimes dubious topic of having your mechanical watch serviced. David explains how it all has to happen as Allen warns of scammers and how to beat them. You'll learn about timegrapher results, especially amplitude, as well as old and modern lubrications, why parts wear out, and even when service should be avoided.

David Flett schools Allen about what torque is and how it operates and is managed within a watch movement. Philosophical ponderance eventually finds its way, of course, but applied physics to horology remains the main story here.

In this second installment of the How They Work series, David Flett joins Allen and leads him through the gears that make your mechanical watches work, generally known as "the going train." By the end they've imagined complications that track time on Mercury, Jupiter and Mars.

Allen explores his new directions for his own budding collection of Vacheron Constantin watches, centering on a near disaster of a purchase due to his unbridled impetuousness. Two friends saved him from repeating past mistakes.

Allen sold his 50th Birthday Grand Seiko, and now he's run out and bought a sweet 33mm platinum 1984 Vacheron Constantin Historique and a Unimatic U4, which he feels embodies Milanese Brutalism. Find out why he's in The Horological Flow State.

Allen explores his decision to sell his BIG 50th BIRTHDAY WATCH just one year later. This one is all about aligning one's true passion with one's budget, or lack thereof. And Allen explores how modern watch marketing can come between an owner and his watch.

Allen return from an epic cross-country motorcycle trip with reservations about his Grand Seiko birthday watch and a head full of American Weirdness.

Allen goes into the ideas behind the Alsta Motoscaphe 120, one of a very few purpose built motorcycling watches. Not branded to match this or that bike, nor just a clever facelift, the Motoscaphe 120 is the culmination of Allen spending the last 30 years or so riding motorcycles with mechanical watches. 

Why do the rich get away with all kinds of bizarre quirky behavior while the rest of us are made to look silly when we express our little kinks?  The answer is complicated, and when we bring watches into the picture, it only gets more complicated.  

Walt Odets is, by most accounts, the first person to blog about watches, thus creating a template for how watch journalism evolved over the past 20 years. His work, however, never resembled modern watch journalism; his was critical, mechanically minded, and decidedly unconcerned with fashion and trends. Allen and Walt discuss his journey in watches and much more.

Allen grabs the mic and speaks for an hour with zero edits on topics ranging from his dream of playing with The Grateful Dead (#letallenplay) to OEM straps to how mechanical ignorance leads to silly horological obsessions, and more...

Horology Inc. provides us with a vast array of dial colors able to splash dopamine onto our opiate receptors. We often dismiss new colors as a superficial trend lacking horological innovation, but Allen argues that - because splashy dials spontaneously inspire joy, beauty, and emotions that, science has shown, replicate our experience of Love - great dials may be closer to the center of The Aesthetic Revolution than we ever imagined. 

Allen breaks form on his approach to the hands-on review while exploring how Moser creates what is, in his opinion, one of the most beautiful watches currently being produced.

Can irony reconcile the cynical Gen X world view with a luxury hobby? Does the Swiss watch industry sell us "Vintage Nationalism" along with our watches? Did Jean-Claude Biver leverage anti-establishment tendencies with his anti-electronic rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s?  Allen takes a stab at these topics and more in this essay episode.

In this essay-style episode, Allen takes a journey through the history of glow-in-the-dark materials, drawing a personal narrative spanning five decades alongside a technological and psycho-evolutionary analysis of luminescence. 

Daniel and Lung Lung from The Waiting List podcast join Allen and James for a 2-hour conversation about how unique regional cultural experiences shape our attitudes toward watches and each other. Expect a lot of laughter and surprises as cross-cultural discoveries emerge in this lively conversation.

Flare ups in anti-Asian hatred in the USA have inspired communities to join together to raise voices and awareness around the often overlooked (and sometimes intentionally erased) abuses against Asian-Americans.

Allen and Jon both ride Ducati Panigale V2s, and therefore have much to talk about. But they don't talk all that much about motorcycles, instead focusing on Jon's family's history at Cartier and Tiffany, Italian espresso machines, and the indie watch scene.

This is an explanation of how our commitment to you, our readers and listeners, requires that we maintain traditional journalistic ethical boundaries. It summarizes many months of concerted dialogue between the four founders as we created our brand of product journalism. That brand can be summarized as a promise to always keep you, our dear readers, as our primary allegiance.

Welcome to "How They Work," a series of episodes dedicated to understanding the devices behind the dial. In this introductory episode, David Flett walks Allen through a history of mechanical timekeeping going back over 5000 years and sweeping up to modern times.

Greg knows his Star Wars, Speedmasters and NASA history inside out. Greg's rebuttal to Allen's deconstruction of "Grand American Space Narratives" via the Swiss watch industry opens up new ways of thinking about the Omega Speedmaster, humanity's role in space, and much more.

Allen finally takes on this horological masterpiece, which he's never really felt anything for at all - perhaps until now. From musicological analysis of Phillip Glass's minimalist music to deconstructing nationalist narratives, this episode doesn't critique Omega's branding of the Speedmaster as much as it critiques modern branding entirely.

Allen takes us on a downhill journey back to his days as a ski-punk while rocking an Explorer II Polar White in Vail, CO. It's a tale of personal rediscovery aided by a badass tool watch.

Following up on Episode 51, Allen turns a cultural-history lens onto the Quartz Crisis for a look at how quartz watches fit into the broader context of the 20th Century. Using his formal essay format, Allen contextualizes The Quartz Crisis as just one of many technological disruptions that ultimately culminated in the so-called Digital Revolution of the 21st Century.

Pedro comes on to discuss his new-found acceptance of some quartz watches, and he and Allen end up discussing the Quartz Crisis from many different angles. Notably not reaching consensus on key topics, this conversation leads to some rather interesting questions about how and why electronic watches disrupted the watch industry in the 1970s. The Quartz Crisis Part 2 will be a formal essay by Allen inspired by this discussion.

Episode 50 gets a special episode in which Allen spends one minute each on fifty different lessons he's learned over the past 30 years of being into watches.

It's not just COVID-19, it's the hundreds of watch brands bombarding us with hundreds of "media worthy events" every year that's a creating clamorous mess. New watches hit the market every day, and it's exhausting. The decorum and sanity of a reasonable annual release schedule is long gone, but perhaps it's time for brands to innovate new marketing strategies before the white noise of Horology Inc drowns itself out.

Evolutionary theory suggests that we are drawn to certain people and not others based on hardwired aesthetic judgements wrought over some five-million years. Allen suggests that similar hardwired aesthetics are at play when we judge "wrist presence," and goes on to suggest that tool watches categorically fail to achieve this elusive quality. A deep dive into Cartier and Rolex in the early 20th Century shows how very different impulses in creating the wrist watch, the former elegant, the latter not so much.

We see so many recreations of vintage watches issued to commemorate moments in history, people, wars, accomplishments, and so on. A certain line of WWII pilot's watch recreations present difficult questions about memorializing the Hitler's Nazi regime. Israeli paratrooper and military watch expert Oren Hartov joins Allen in an open dialogue which explores numerous angles on what will always be a tricky subject.

The Calibre 400 is not the first of Oris' in-house modern movements, but it is their first work-horse automatic winding movement of the modern era. Designed from the ground-up according to Oris' value-focused ethos, this movement is highly efficient, packs a 5-day power reserve, is robustly anti-magnetic, and happens to look a bit like the Oris Bear. VJ gives us an in-depth consideration of this innovation.

BTD guide James shares his concepts about collecting with Allen. They discuss James' spreadsheets, his love of Omega Soccer Timers, older railroad packet watches, and alarm watches. James gets into Buddhist philosophies about mindfulness as a guiding principle for watch collecting and life more generally. This episode wanders in a rather delightful manner.

Seiko famously had two factories working simultaneously in both collaboration and competition to produce the most accurate watches in the world in order to beat the Swiss at their own game. David and Pedro had done deep research into this topic and come up with new intel that's fascinating in its own right, and very relevant for collectors of Seikos and all watches.

With the diving behind them, the BTD Crew that dove Lake George is unpacking both their gear and their thoughts about the experience. Allen reads an essay he wrote about SCUBA diving in search of outbreaks of the invasive species Eurasian Milfoil, and he muses on everything from bringing climate change deniers together with environmentalists to how much better the Oris Divers 65 was than his dive computer.

Sponsored by Oris and in partnership with The Lake George Association, the BTD crew is headed out to document invasive species in this iconic American fresh water treasure nestled in the Adirondack Mountains. Allen and Shelley will be making 6 dives over two days to photograph Eurasian Milfoil, a plant that threatens fresh water ecosystems throughout the USA. In this episode, Greg and Allen discuss the mission, their preparation, their gear - including watches - and the concept of mission-based journalism.

Allen and David discuss their simultaneous breakthroughs in their personal collections, with David going deep on very specific vintage Seikos and Allen finally admitting that the Cartier Tank is his favorite watch of all time, and thus worthy of his full attention.  David's keen distinction between watches one wears (the rotation) and those one collects (the collection) clarifies and focuses the whole endeavor of owning watches.