Gilbert: Our goal is to communicate about the substance of the episode as little as possible to maintain that organic spark when we do get together. You need to share the scaffolding, the structure.
And are each of you focusing on different areas?
Rosenthal: It’s like a cruise ship.
Gilbert: David is our tour guide through the universe but then I’ve got acts along the way where we’re going to pause the boat and everyone’s going to get off and you’re going to go and learn about this thing.
As you’re learning this stuff, did you find that watches and watchmaking was the most difficult barrier of entry to an episode that you’ve done? Just having to learn all the mechanics and jargon?
Gilbert: Weirdly, no. Everything about how watches work made intrinsic sense to me.
Rosenthal: Compared to semiconductors—
Gilbert: Or Novo Nordisk [a Danish pharmaceutical company]. Like trying to learn the science well enough that we could then explain it and simplify it on air of how a GLP-1 receptor works, that’s way harder.
What was the process like of leaning the mechanical side?
Gilbert: First, I talked to Marc Bridge a lot. Then, I listened to Ben Clymer on “Talking Watches” and a podcast interview on Business Breakdowns. So I picked up the lingo from just hearing enough people say things like “escapement” and “movement.” And then I started watching Teddy Baldassarre, and he was great. I found this channel called Animagraffs, which does full 3D renders of how complex engineering systems work, and they have this one of how a mechanical watch works. I’d say that video was my a-ha moment.
So maybe the watchmaking piece itself wasn’t challenging, but Rolex is infamously so secretive. Was this the most opaque business you’ve covered?
Gilbert: The most secretive.
Rosenthal: Mars is pretty close.
Mars, really? You would not think it’d be chocolate.
Rosenthal: The family is maniacal about staying out of the press. Rolex is more secretive. Luckily, for us, our main process doesn’t really need to involve the company, which is an artifact of when we started and nobody knew or cared who we were and so no companies would ever talk to us. We just got good at telling their stories without them.
Gilbert: In fact, Jensen [Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia] listened to our first Nvidia episode and then had his head of comms reach out and say, “Jensen wants to know who your sources were at the company.” We didn’t talk to anyone.
Rosenthal: The fact that it was secretive was great—we knew it was going to be catnip for our listeners. It didn’t really intimidate us.
You guys have done LVMH, Hermès and been swimming in this really high-end luxury pool. How does the watch industry differ from leather goods, fashion, and jewelry?
Rosenthal: Most obvious just industry-wise is that Rolex dominates it. That’s not true in the rest of the luxury industry. I may think that Hermès is the best brand out there, but they don’t dominate the whole industry like Rolex does. We can have religious arguments about [which brands are] better or worse than Rolex—Patek, Audemars, whatever, but when it comes to an industry or business standpoint, they’re tiny.
