What's on Your Riste? A Watch Podcast

S02E06: The Locker Room is Not Watch School: The Bedazzled Submariner Problem Description Professional athletes are some of the most visible watch collectors in the world; but fame, money, and taste do not automatically arrive together. In this standalone episode of What’s on Your Riste?, Watchovski explores the strange overlap between professional sports, sudden wealth, predatory luxury culture, and the watch industry’s obsession with flash. Beginning with a personal story from an NFL locker room, the episode looks at how young athletes can become targets the moment the windfall arrives — not only for bad investments, but also for watches that look expensive while quietly destroying real value. From iced-out Rolexes and the “bedazzled Submariner problem” to Jacob & Co., Marcus Stroman, and the quieter virtues of real collecting, this episode argues that the loudest watch in the room is not always the most valuable one. The real lesson is not that athletes have bad taste. It is that taste has to be earned, education matters, and the most meaningful value is often the part no one can see from across the room. Do not chase the sparkle. Chase the work. Keywords: watches, luxury watches, watch collecting, horology, independent watchmaking, Rolex, Rolex Submariner, iced out Rolex, aftermarket diamonds, athlete watches, professional athletes, sports and watches, NFL, football, soccer, Borussia Dortmund, Sporting Lisbon, Marcus Stroman, Jacob & Co, Jacob and Company, Astronomia, luxury culture, sudden wealth, watch education, watch taste, bad watch advice, watch investing, watch value, originality, collector education, fine watchmaking, hand finishing, anglage, black polish, Watchovski, What’s on Your Riste, watch podcast, watch collector, luxury watch podcast

Title: The Hum and the Light: They Invented the Electronic Future and Did Not Get to Keep It Description: There is a man in Kyoto named Gunpei Yokoi who won by refusing the newest technology. He called it lateral thinking with withered technology: take the cheap old chip everyone else has thrown away and understand it so completely you can do something nobody expects. In 1989 he put that idea in a gray plastic box called the Game Boy, and the color screens that were supposed to bury it were the ones that got buried. This episode is about two American companies who believed the exact opposite. In 1960, Bulova threw out the balance wheel and put a tuning fork in its place, humming three hundred and sixty times a second in a pure F-sharp. The Accutron was guaranteed to two seconds a day when a fine mechanical watch lost thirty. Its most famous version was an accident: Bulova sent dial-less display props to jewelers so people could see the machine work, and customers walked in and demanded to buy the prop. That is the Spaceview. In 1972, Hamilton went further and built a watch with no moving parts at all. John Bergey got the idea from a movie prop his company had made for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and named the result after the spinning dead stars astronomers had just found. The Pulsar cost $2,100 in solid gold, more than a Rolex, more than the average family car. Johnny Carson joked it would tell you the exact moment you went bankrupt. The first run of four hundred sold out in days. James Bond wore one in Live and Let Die and pressed the button twice, slowly, so the whole theater could watch the future light up. Then the future arrived, and it was quartz, and it was Japanese, and it was cheap enough to make being advanced worthless. Bulova belongs to Citizen now. Hamilton is a Swiss brand owned by the Swatch Group. And the name Pulsar, the proudest name in American electronic watchmaking, is owned by Seiko. Two truths that will not cancel each other out: they did not survive the future, and they caused it. Look at any screen you own. We close on the one machine that outlasted all of them, and on why the programmers in this audience, the people who ship the new thing and delete last spring's thing for a living, come home and wind a mechanical watch. Small but mighty. Keep winding. Keywords: Bulova Accutron, Spaceview, tuning fork watch, Max Hetzel, Omar Bradley, Hamilton Pulsar, John Bergey, LED watch, first digital watch, P1 gold Pulsar, Live and Let Die, James Bond watch, Johnny Carson, 2001 A Space Odyssey clock, Seiko Astron, quartz crisis, quartz revolution, American watchmaking, Lancaster Pennsylvania, Biel Switzerland, Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo Game Boy, withered technology, lateral thinking, Tetris, Citizen, Swatch Group, SSIH, mechanical watch, watch history, watch podcast

Season 2: Episode 5 Contact: [email protected] Title: The Crown Jewels in the Castle — How the Great Houses Were Saved, and What They Paid For It Description: The conglomerate episode. In the early 1980s, quartz nearly killed Swisswatchmaking and the giants were the ones dying. This is how Nicolas Hayek refused the funeral and funded the rescue of the most precious mechanical watches on earth with the cheapest plastic one, and what that rescue cost. A tour of the three great houses, Swatch Group, Richemont, and LVMH, and a close look at two jewels locked inside them: Breguet, the source code of the art, and A. Lange & Söhne, bombed, expropriated, erased, and carried back from the dead. The bargain at the center of the modern watch world is simple and a little sad. A brand inside a group buys immortality and pays for it with a little of its wildness. The independents we love are refugees from that same trade. Keywords: quartz crisis, swatch group, nicolas hayek, the hayek study, asuag, ssih, omega, longines, tissot, swatch, richemont, johann rupert, cartier, vacheron constantin, jaeger-lecoultre, piaget, iwc, panerai, lvmh, bernard arnault, tag heuer, hublot, zenith, bulgari, breguet, abraham-louis breguet, tourbillon, a. lange & söhne, walter lange, ferdinand adolph lange, glashütte, günter blümlein, lange 1, blancpain, glashütte original, watch conglomerates, luxury watch industry, independent watchmaking, philippe dufour, roger smith, habring, what's on your riste, watchovski, watch podcast, watch collecting, whatsonyourriste Riste Simnjanovski

S02E22: Make it Black: How the World Got Optimized Into One Color Description: Henry Ford said you could have a Model T in any color you liked, so long as it was black. The reason you were taught, that black paint dried faster, is mostly a myth. The real reason is the one that runs this whole episode: one color means the line never has to stop. This bonus episode starts with a man in a good suit standing very still at the 1923 New York Auto Show, watching seven blue cars stop a crowd in its tracks. That man is Alfred Sloan, and his bet against Ford was that ordinary people would pay real money for something that does nothing for the engine, nothing for the price, and everything for the feeling that the thing you own is a little bit yours. He won. The lacquer that let him do it, DuPont's Duco, started life as a coating sold to pencil makers. Then it lands on your wrist. The shared workhorse movements from ETA, Sellita, Miyota and Seiko are the Japan Black of watchmaking, and they are a gift: they are the reason a real mechanical watch costs about what a nice dinner costs. But the same logic that made those movements cheap also decides which dial colors you are offered, and why grand feu enamel, guilloché and hand anglage cost what they cost. Every one of those is the line grinding to a halt so somebody can swap the paint. That is not a flaw in craft. That is the definition of it. Plus a roll call of the makers who stop the line on purpose: Kari Voutilainen and the Comblémine dial workshop, Ochs und Junior letting you pick your own colors, Garrick, Stefan Kudoke, Sarpaneva, and Roger W. Smith making ten watches a year by hand on an island. Efficiency built the modern world and we are grateful for it. But your watch is one of the very few things in a grown adult's life that gets to be the watercolor instead of the crayon. Do not let the same thing happen to your wrist. Keywords: Model T, Henry Ford, Japan Black, Alfred Sloan, General Motors, DuPont Duco, Viscolac, True Blue Oakland, assembly line, standardization, mass production, ETA movements, Sellita, Miyota, Seiko, Seiko 5, Rolex Submariner, no-date Submariner, grand feu enamel, guilloché, anglage, black polish, hand finishing, dial making, Kari Voutilainen, Comblémine, Ochs und Junior, Ludwig Oechslin, Garrick, Stefan Kudoke, Sarpaneva, Roger W. Smith, independent watchmaking, watch podcast

S02E04: The First Thing You See: A Survey of Dial Finishing, From the Workbench Up the Mountain Decription: Fifty thousand glances. That is roughly how many times you will look at your watch’s dial over the years you own it, and yet the dial is the part nobody talks about. This episode fixes that. We climb dial finishing like a mountain, one rung at a time, from humble printed dials all the way to hand-painted enamel that costs as much as a house, naming a watch you can actually go find at every step. The surprise of the climb is that some of the most beautiful, genuinely hand-finished dials in the world, like a brushed Fears or a lacquered Laco Cuxhaven, sit near the bottom, at prices a real person can reach. Craft, it turns out, is not gated by price. The only question that matters is whether you can see the hand. Keywords: dial finishing, watch dials, sunburst dial, brushed dial, lacquer dial, fumé dial, guilloché, engine turning, grand feu enamel, cloisonné enamel, miniature enamel painting, skeletonized dial, openworked dial, silvered dial, Fears Brunswick, Fears Copper Salmon, Laco Cuxhaven, Grand Seiko, H. Moser, Dornblüth, Naoya Hida, J.N. Shapiro, Czapek, Parmigiani Fleurier, Voutilainen, Anordain, Louis Erard, Donzé Cadrans, Comblémine, Patek Philippe 5531, Bovet, Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, affordable hand finished watches, attainable watches, What’s on Your Riste, Watchovski, watch podcast, independent watchmaking, watch collecting, mechanical watches