Talking Olympics, Seiko, Etc. with DC Vintage Watches (303)
Published on Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:13:31 -0700
Synopsis
This episode of the Watch Clicker podcast features guest Nick Farrell, a prominent vintage watch dealer known for his expertise in Seiko watches. The hosts and Nick discuss various topics related to watches, including Seiko's role in timekeeping at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. They explore how this event was pivotal for Seiko in developing new timekeeping technologies and establishing itself on the global stage. The conversation also covers Nick's experiences as a vintage watch dealer, the challenges of authenticating watches, and his thoughts on modern Seiko watches. Other topics touched on include Nick's own watch line, Sycamore, and his work sourcing watches for films and TV shows. The episode concludes with some personal recommendations and anecdotes from the hosts and guest.
Links
Transcript
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| Andrew | Hello, fellow watch lovers, nerds, enthusiasts, or however you identify. You're listening to 40 and 20, the Watch Clicker podcast with your host, Andrew, and my good friend Everett. Hi. Here we talk about watches, food, drinks, life, and other things we like. |
| Everett | Everett, how are you? You know, I'm great. I've got nothing to complain about, so I won't. |
| Andrew | You're like callback girl in the background. |
| Everett | good. I'm doing well yet. Uh, it was a nice day. I had a nice day. I got a bunch of shit done. I got my bills out. I'm going to get some money. |
| Andrew | Uh, usually when people get bills, it's like not a good thing, but no, no, I got my attorney. You're like, you're, that's a good thing. |
| Everett | I just sent out like 40,000 in bills. |
| Andrew | Just pay me, pay me what you owe me, pay me like looking like yonce. I went to the driving range at lunch. That's a long lunch. No, I'm good. When you work for yourself though, I guess no lunches. |
| Everett | When you're the boss, yeah, you're just like, I'm going to run an errand. That's what you say. I'm going to run an errand. Uh, Andrew, how are you? |
| Andrew | I'm good. Today was kind of a weird weather day. Uh, it was like muggy and warm and like cloudy and smoggy and smoky. Uh, I got a lot done. I took an intentional nap. I was like sitting on the couch. I had like just accomplished some things. I was like, I'm a little sleepy. I set a 45 minute timer on my phone and I just tipped over. And when that timer went off, I woke up and I was like, man, life is good. And yeah, it was a good day. It was a chill day. It was like a chore day, right? It's my my weekends are chore days because I'm without kids. |
| Everett | So you get some shit done. I get a lot of shit done. Well, Andrew, we're not here to talk about lunch, driving range trips or chores or smog or naps. Rather, we're here to talk about watches. And today we've got a guest. We got a guest. And you might already know who this is because you saw the title on your podcast screen. And you're probably literate. But today's guest is, I'd say, a true watches celeb. He's been featured in Hodinkee, Fratello, GQ, Worn & Wound, Motor Trend, Hypebeast. He's appeared on, been featured on Watch & Listen, Jack Carr's Danger Close, podcast, Two Broke Watch Snobs, and about a thousand other podcasts. I'm super happy to join you guys today. He's been discussed on Hodinkee Talking Watches due to his sourcing watches for celebs such as Daniel Dae Kim and Ronny Chieng. Aside from being an expert in vintage Heuer and Omega, he is perhaps the preeminent vintage Seiko dealer in the United States. Of course, our guest today is Nick Farrell. a.k.a. DC Vintage Watches. Nick, at long last, welcome to 40 in 20, The Watch Clicker Podcast. |
| Nick Farrell | How you gents doing? Thanks for having me. |
| Andrew | Well, I mean, it took a lot of work to get you here. You know, you're only like one of the biggest watch celebrities who ever landed. Thank you so much for being here. |
| Everett | We have been left on read in Nick's inbox for years at this point. |
| Andrew | Is that a real dog behind you or is that a screen playing over your right shoulder? |
| Nick Farrell | I mean, I do have a real dog here, but he's at my feet right now. Oh yeah, that is him. That is Rambo. That's the name the shelter gave him. And my kids liked it. Although, you know, they've never seen the movie because they're both elementary school age, but they love the name. So he kept it. He's a German shepherd slash Belgian Malinois. |
| Andrew | I was going to say he's got very male sleekness to him. |
| Nick Farrell | When you said German, I was like, ah, you sure? I actually you know what? I always made fun of people that got DNA tests on dogs, but I was just like, oh, it's actually like 50 bucks on Amazon. |
| Andrew | Do it. |
| Nick Farrell | He's like 58% German Shepherd and 35 Belgian and the rest are random. I think there's even some Chihuahua in there. It's like so random, like 1%. That's a street dog shit. Oh yeah, he's my third German Shepherd and slash Belgian and I've never had a Belgian Malinois before and there's definitely some behavior characteristics. |
| Andrew | Yeah, males are, they're a thing. |
| Nick Farrell | And they're kind of batshit crazy, a little bit. |
| Andrew | It can be a little bit. They're sweet, but they they will also eat your face. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. And he's he just man, he chews everything. I mean, he's still a puppy. He's not. He's like 10 months old, nine months old. So he's still in his chewing phase. And it's he chewed up a speaker the other day, which I wasn't real happy about. I was like, why do you chew up a speaker? |
| Andrew | Because it was there, man. It was at mouth height. It looked like it could taste good. You know, you have it a little lick, a little chomp and was like, Oh, this works. |
| Nick Farrell | Can you see him in the background? He's like, it's like he senses we're talking about him. He does that little head thing where he tilts to the side. Like what's going on? |
| Andrew | Oh, he knows. Yeah. No, there's a like, what is, is it good or is it bad? Yeah. Cause when we were talking earlier, that view wasn't available. So that's why I asked about the shadow. |
| Nick Farrell | Uh, |
| Andrew | silhouette of a dog in the background, because I don't know, maybe I mean, you look cool enough to have like silhouettes of dogs playing over a projector on the wall behind you. |
| Nick Farrell | So right now he's he I think he's there's bamboo in the backyard and I think he's trying to get it because he's always trying to chew on it. I'm always trying to get him to stop. |
| Andrew | Oh, that's perfect. You want him to chew the bamboo? I had there was an actual legal battle that I experienced with the removal of bamboo. It was short, but there was a legal battle nonetheless. |
| Nick Farrell | Intriguing, intriguing. |
| Everett | Well, well, Nick, I assume the majority of the people that listen to this show are going to have a pretty good idea of who you are and what you do. DC Vintage Watches is over a decade old at this point. You've been dealing vintage watches, but in the meantime, I think you've become something more than just a watch dealer, an online watch dealer, right? You've become a resource to the community. not only by way of your appearances in watch media, but just by way of the knowledge that you've gained and then imparted on the community. Do you mind giving us the 10,000-foot view of how did this thing get started? How did you get into watches? How do you one day decide, I'm going to put these 10 watches I have online and start a side hustle. How does it turn into what is now a pretty big company? |
| Nick Farrell | It's funny that you said 10 watches online because that's literally what it was at the time. I knew that. My dad got me into watches at a young age, but our tastes are definitely different. He's more of a a, you know, liking Tag Heuer in the 90s. And I, for the most part, can't stand Tag Heuer in the 90s aside from the Formula One, you know, like the OG ones, not the, the Keith. I don't care for those, but the key, not the, but that same style, but no, he, I, my taste is definitely different, but he did get me into watches then. And it literally was something I was passionate about from high school on and circa 2012, uh, my, girlfriend at the time now wife was like, he won't shut the hell up about these things. Why don't you parlay it into some sort of side hustle? And I was like, huh, that's that's actually a pretty good idea. So I started with that initial collection of 10 and did what a lot of aspiring dealers do and went on eBay. And you know, eBay is is and remains really the Wild West, I think for a lot of things. And it's never really been able to shake. It's it's somewhat sketchy, like reputation, like eBay itself. If you know eBay, you know the rules front and back. It's it's actually a pretty good place to find what you're looking for. But if you don't know your rules, their rules, it can be bad. But, you know, I so I sold on eBay for, I don't know, two or three years and I got tired of paying the seller fees because they can be they can be a fair bit. |
| Andrew | I mean, it's like, yeah, they're not. They're not a not thing. |
| Nick Farrell | I don't know what it is now. I think it was like 10 percent back then, maybe a little bit more. And I was like, I can do better than this. So I stood up the website. You know, I'm actually I'm writing an article for Watches of Eskimos right now on my time in the Situation Room in the White House. And I opened that article with because I was just proofreading it today with you know I was sitting at my computer in my apartment five blocks from the white house and I had already left the sit room and you know, there's a standby for president obama to do a speech and this was at like Midnight, and I remember thinking all right. This is weird He doesn't normally do this and like because I had been planning I was doing like my business plan for dc vintage watches at the time And then he comes up And he's like, I'm paraphrasing, he's like, we got him. We got Bin Laden. And I was like, |
| Andrew | Well, that's that's like the Kennedy assassination of our generation. Everyone knows exactly what the fuck they were doing in that moment. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, I talk. I don't want to give too much the article way, but I flash back to because I had just left a few months before and I flash back to all the meetings in the sit room where they threw black cloths over the cameras in the sit room because they have cameras in the sit room conference rooms. So us, the people that are the duty officers in the situation room. the watch teams, we know who's in the meeting. So if they need to be pulled out of a meeting for something hitting the fan somewhere, we know they're in that meeting. So we can go in before we go in there and disrupt whatever thing is is being discussed. And we couldn't see that because they were discussing the raid. That's why they were doing it. And it transpired that, you know, as the story leaked out, the more the details, that's exactly what they were doing. |
| Andrew | So I have a question before we keep driving. You talk about eBay being the Wild West. How do you feel about eBay's authenticity guarantee? Like, is that a like, I mean, I hear it, right? And that's kind of my initial reaction to it. But eBay's authenticity guarantee, is that a like something you can take to the bank or is like, I don't know, without you speaking on behalf of eBay, but just you speaking on behalf of a dealer and as of a watch person. |
| Nick Farrell | I have to think how I can phrase this without being in trouble for defamation or libel. Which one is it that we're doing here? Take your pick. Yeah. So the way that that works is they, and I'm only going to give the facts, but they have a third party that authenticates the items. Okay. don't know what that third party you don't know their level of sophistication. Do they usually only look at Rolexes? And then you have this, this Seiko 6139 Colonel Pogue from the 70s. And you expect them to know every watch because in Eric Wind actually talks about this. It's impossible for every dealer to know every watch, right? He says that run like hell because they're full of it. Because it's just not possible. I would never say that personally, for my business. But The other aspect is if you get a watch that has the authenticity guarantee, it has a little play card in there. And I did a post on this, actually. And it literally says in the fine print, we're not responsible for aftermarket parts in this watch. |
| Andrew | OK, so you get a Franken watch and it's like it could be from the 70s. What does that mean then? |
| Nick Farrell | You know what I mean? |
| Everett | So it's like perhaps the case is guaranteed. |
| Nick Farrell | I can't speak on every watch they guarantee. I can speak on the Seiko. And I've heard enough horror stories from clients that it gives me pause. And that's the furthest I'm going to go. |
| Andrew | So I'll opine. The authenticity guarantee from eBay has some fine print. |
| Nick Farrell | Literally, it's like, look, if you're going to buy something from me or from Eric or from any of these dealers out there or eBay or wherever, The old adage always is here by the seller. But I would add to that, I would say, do your research first and look at your sellers and then by the seller. Yeah. The key thing here is do your research no matter what. Before you look at anyone, any dealer, any seller, anyone on eBay, do the research and know what you're facing out there. And you know, not everyone has the time to do that or wants to do that. And then they come to an established dealer with a good reputation. And that's where we step in. |
| Andrew | And that's where a person maybe ought to land is I don't know exactly what I'm looking at, but I know I want this thing. |
| Nick Farrell | I mean, it can be intimidating. I mean, there's still some there's some Seiko dials out there from the 70s that are so convincing. And in this I'm thinking particularly the 6138 Panda, 6138 8020 Panda. Some of those aftermarket dials are so damn good. If someone takes pictures creatively, you can't tell some of the fake tells and you've got to get it in the steel in front of you. |
| Everett | You know, we've we've talked about this before on the show, like at what point at what point does. For each person and for each watch, at what point are you like, you know what? I'm OK with it. Like it's an original mid case. I'm OK with this, because I think that that's a moving target, right? I think that if your goal is to have a fully original watch. |
| Andrew | Yeah. |
| Everett | Then then that's not going to ever work. But if if your goal is to have the watch that works and that is running you know at some point you have to make these decisions well yeah it's a franken dial but it's a pretty fucking good franken dial and as long as i know it and i'm able to be transparent as much as i want to be about that fact is is it going to diminish my experience at all uh yeah it's an it's an interesting thought uh maybe you don't find it interesting it comes down to transparency really i mean like if you had a watch that had a |
| Nick Farrell | and a |
| Everett | So you know, and you as a seller has you have you as a seller, a dealer has a different level of expectations than me as a consumer and enjoy your watches. |
| Andrew | Because you have a reputation to uphold and I just have money to spend. |
| Nick Farrell | I got bills to pay. So obviously, I don't want to damage my reputation when if I have a if I can't tell on something which If it's in the steel, usually you can always tell. I mean, Seiko's good at the fact that like on the back of their dials, they'll have a two number stamp or a number and a letter. And that should be within, I don't know, three or four months of the serial on the case back. I'm not gonna, I can get way in the weeds on this stuff. But like, There's a lot of fail safes if you're willing to take a watch apart to find out if it's real or not. And I like what you said about not always being fully original, because if you're getting a watch serviced, sometimes parts in the movement may need replaced. And then what's the definition? Does that mean it's not fully original? I would say if you're replacing it with an original Seiko part, then it would be. But some may disagree with that. |
| Everett | Yeah. Yeah. And what if it's a part that you had to make? that someone had to make for a watch. You know, what's the, you know, these watchmakers or these clockmakers oftentimes will just fabricate gears, right? It's like, well, uh, I'm not going to be able to find this part. I'm going to fabricate a gear and I'm going to sign it and fix it. |
| Nick Farrell | Some are that level of skill with watchmakers. Cameron Weiss, I mean, he's making his literally making his own watches, but like for me, You're not going to see a watch that that doesn't have a fake dial on the website like there's that's the number one thing for us at least because the vast percentage of that value of that watch, at least if you're going to resell is going to be the dial. Yeah. You can get a new old stock case, whatever, but that dial has to be original for me. And so that's 70, 80% of the value of the watch, in my opinion, is that dial. So that has to be legit, at least to make it on the website. |
| Everett | Let's talk a little bit about... You've got a bit of a style, right? Just talking to you, your beard, kind of your aesthetic, I understand you are a, uh, you're the driver of a 1998 Isuzu trooper. |
| Nick Farrell | Oh my god. Radically different trucks. What color? First versus second gen trooper. It's black. |
| Everett | I'm a guy who drove a 1996 Lexus for years in part because of an article I read on about Matt Farah's million mile Lexus. We had the same exact car. I remember that. Same exact car. Um, I'm, you know, I'm, uh, I'm wearing a, a JDM 1996 titanium G shock that I took the ugliest watch. I guess what I want to say about this is there, I think that there's a part of the community that really, uh, and not just this community, right. That goes, it goes into cars. I mean, there's certain markets like, like baseball equipment, you know, there's all sorts of stuff That period of time in that place, there was an aesthetic that I think for a lot of us, you know, us Gen X sort of, I'm maybe a cusper millennial Gen X, but there's this appeal to that style and that aesthetic. What is it about that period of time for you that has, that appealed to you in a way that's probably completely changed your life, if I had to guess? |
| Nick Farrell | No, I would say, I mean, you look at trends as far as watch design as a whole, and it's not just Seiko, but the 70s. And you get these awesome pops of color on the hands or the dial or something like that, that for whatever reason, has always appealed to me. I don't I don't know why. But that's always been my favorite decade is the 70s. And as I've been everyone talks about this, if you collect watches long enough, or really anything, you mature into a different sort of collector, like your taste refined, or not like either they become looser and you look at other things differently than you would have before. So you know, I started with that gateway drug that is Seiko vintage Seiko in particular, in high school in college, and I never, I have evolved in some ways past that. But I still go back to it, you're always going to see at least once a week, you're going to see the Seiko 6139 on my wrist. And that's something that I started my collection with back in high school. Um, but you'll see me like, like right now, like I'm wearing something that a few years ago, I don't know that I ever would have worn. And it's a king quartz. So quartz, I know quartz, it's not mechanical. |
| Andrew | I'm with you. |
| Nick Farrell | And it's, it's, I don't know if you gents can see it, but it's something that I've recently become very passionate about. And it's like thinking this was, this would have been, so this is a 76. So in the seventies, they, they, the, the, the, the level, the bracelet integration, it's hard to really see this on your camera. the the design aesthetic is is pure grammar of design. Yeah. At a much lower price point, the Grand Seiko, like you would see in a mechanic mechanical watch. |
| Everett | Does it have the double crystal SQ logo? I love that logo. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. And the dial has or the the bracelet has this KQ on it. And like, oh, yeah, the KQ logos. It's kind of like, have you seen what would good sake was removed? Grand Seiko now with their dials, with the texture and the shimmers of color. Just that's what King Quartz has in the 70s, but for like five or six hundred, seven hundred, maybe eight hundred at most books versus Graham. Grand Seiko now is five starts, five K. I was in there. |
| Andrew | Yeah. And you're getting into courts there like spring drive movement. You're getting north of that. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, I agree. Um, but no, before I, I remember you did ask a question about how we started. So I'll go back. That's sorry to go off on a tangent, but, um, no, I mean, so after, after that, like, so we were in DC and we still get, I get several emails a week where people saying, Hey, I'm in the DMV, the district of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia area. Do you have a shop I can stop by? And I'm like, yeah, we left DC in 2018. So it's my wife is a TV producer. And she was producing news in DC. And it really was a matter of she had lived in LA for almost a decade before before we started dating. And she wasn't, you know, really earning up to what she could be if we were back in LA. And I was with the government at that point. And I took I took a position out here. It was like a two year tour thing. It was something that was it. It was like D.O.D. back in my old stomping ground. But it was like logistics. It was super boring, but it got us here. The government paid for us to move out here, did the job, finished what I was supposed to. Meanwhile, she's making great money. And I was just like, maybe we should just stay here. So we stayed here. And then, you know, I met a customer introduced me to Matt Farah. And I got that that was I think that was actually my first podcast appearance on anything. And that was 2018. When he was doing the podcast, as you talked about before with Cameron Weiss, and it was on Vintage Seiko. And we talked about that. And I knew when when that episode aired, because I came out here with like, I think less than 1000 Instagram followers. And overnight, I think I had like 3000 new followers. It's just over just from just from Matt and like to this day, like, you know, Matt, that dude, like he never will back away from saying what he feels about something. I love him for it, but he always looks out for us. Like it's it's funny because the other day I was I was talking to him and he was like, he was all apologetic. He was like, hey, I got this Colonel Pogue from another dealer. I feel really bad because I can go to you. And I was like, dude, it's totally fine. Like, I'm not I'm not worried about it. He still posted it on his feed and he was like, but if you need one, go to Nick at DC vintage watches. And we sold like, I swear to God, half a dozen pogues off of that post alone. So it's like, it's fine, man. Like, don't worry about it. But then, and then podcast followed and the Bruce Lee thing, the research we did on that. And it was just, it's kind of like a snowball effect. And it's just like, you know, podcast parents and article followed each other. And then it went from there and I actually one of the big things was I was because we're a small company. So I'm doing a lot of marketing myself. And I started looking at okay, in your train like this in the government, when you go to a new post overseas, you start looking for who holds the who has the power and influence in whatever country you're in. And you go to LA, and it's it's Hollywood, DC politics, New York, probably finance. And it was Hollywood. So I started looking around, I was like, who out there? I'm not going to deal with A-listers because they all sign, you know, NDA, non-compete, whatever, with like the big boys of watches. They don't want to talk to me. You know, so I started looking at your non-Brad Pitts or whatever, but still good enough, like great actors that have face recognition, name recognition, that I can still, you know, hopefully work with and get a, you know, an audience with. And I came across Daniel Day-Kim on Talking Watches on Houdini. And he told that story about the first time he had a watch. He remembers a watch as his dad strapping on his Seiko, his automatic, his Seiko with automatic movement every morning. And he shook the watch before he put it on. And I was like, that's what I'm pitching to when I, when I reached out to his manager. And I also knew he loved Bruce Lee. So, you know, I did that research on Bruce Lee, trying to figure out what watch he wore, which I, which I think we did a good job of finding. And that that was my pitch. And 30 minutes later, after I talked to his manager, he wrote back and was like, Daniel's Daniel will do it because I had pitched him. I've been like, Look, I have this Bruce Lee watch. I'll give it to you for free. If you do a post on Instagram. That's it. You know, you got it for me. That's all that's all I'm asking for. And he was like, deal. I was like, Okay, you know, and it just kind of snowballed after that. And Daniel is a good customer of ours. I've sourced a bunch of watches, for instance, that Change your life. I think so. Yeah. Daniel's been great and I've heard nothing but love from him and other actors that I've worked with in Hollywood, other prop masters, et cetera, sourcing watches for shows and stuff like that. Like everyone loves them. |
| Andrew | What's the, what's the calculus there? And I'm going to give you a watch that I've worked really tediously to source just for the publicity. |
| Nick Farrell | But you start off with, it's tax deductible. There's that. There's that, yeah. But no, I mean, but it was like, and I've always done, and I haven't done a lot of this recently because we really haven't needed to. But anytime I would reach out to someone with a similar proposition, I want to know they're genuinely into watches. I'm not just going to willy nilly shoot off something, do this, whatever. Like, I want to know that it's legit because people can see through that. I think, yeah, you get a lot of like eight listers, they wear this whatever watch on the red carpet, and then you never see him, it's never on the wrist again. And you know, when you're when you're, you know, your watch dorks, like everyone in this audience here, in this podcast, like, you know, you see this, you see through that, and I didn't want that. So it really you got to remember, also, back then, the Bruce Lee was a lot less expensive. There's that. So you know, I think maybe to a the fifth I was like, because he spends a lot of time in Hawaii, because he fell in love with Hawaii after after what he's very well known for, which, of course, was lost, which was the TV show Lost. And he lives a lot of it. He spends a lot of his time with his family in Hawaii. And I was like, I came over his watch. I'm sending it to you. It's yours just as a token of my thanks for what you've done. And I don't have to ask him to do anything. He just recommends me to people. And it's amazing. You know, so |
| Everett | Let's talk a little bit about the Sycamore line. Obviously, DC Vintage Watches is a whole thing. You're known as a Tag Heuer, Omega, and Seiko expert, but perhaps some people don't know you've got your own line of watches. Talk to us about what the Sycamore line is. What were you trying to do there and what have you done? |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, so a lot of that was You know, I found myself lusting after the Ben Ross type one and type twos, the automatic, very simple, sterile dials. |
| Everett | One has cases. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, one of them has 24 hour dial one doesn't. The asymmetric case was the first thing that actually drew me that watch because it's just so unusual. It's kind of like, if you look at the the Seiko 6105, aka Captain Willard, and it's again, really weird asymmetric case that just appeals. To me anyway. And so I started looking at those, but the price points are, I mean, they're like five or six K, I think, for sometimes just a beat to hell one. Yeah. For the Ben Ross. If you're lucky, if you can even find one. Yeah, if you're lucky. Yeah, that's right. And I just started looking at that design aesthetic and thinking, you know, I've built up enough context now I can source these parts. I kind of want to do a limited run. of these. And but I wanted to incorporate some of my own life story from my previous careers with the U.S. government, my time in the Middle East, my time learning Arabic. You know, there's some some German shepherd love in there. You know, the wolf, for instance, was my second German shepherd. And I tell the story on the Web site. Actually, Wolf was I've had two German shepherds named Wolf. The first one's name was Zayed, which means in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, wolf. So that's the main namesake. But while I was designing the sycamore line, my second German shepherd, whose name was Wolf, but again, we didn't name him for the second German shepherd, the shelter named him, but he unfortunately passed away this past December. And it was very sudden. He, I don't even think he was four years old. Like it was, we still don't know what happened, but it was like, we didn't think to do an autopsy because it's like, it's not gonna change anything. So, but it made the watch mean that much more to me. I'm black the black matte black Hoyer PVD regatta watch such a great jet black except for those five little circles and the top half of the dial which changed colors from like this really vibrant red to blue like green. And like, so you know, I've always been a sucker for the black watches like that. So I put all that together it took I think it took six months from conception or from, you know, design phase to conception, rolling it out January 1st on New Year's of this year. And like, it really was, you know, it sounds cliche to say, you know, labor of love, but it really was because there were some, there were some missteps. Like I know that like, there were some dial fitment issues and like, yeah, there was, there was a couple of times I had to redo things, but it was worth it in the end, I think. And honestly, I didn't really care whether they sold well or not, you know, you hope that they sell. But they sold better than I thought they would. And actually, if the hunter, I think there was an initial run of 100 each. The hunter has one left. And I haven't ordered it. I haven't or the hunters actually sold a little bit. I haven't sold. There was two left and I haven't sold one for maybe a month of those. And I'm like, do I want to make more? Do I not? So I don't the the wolf one, the one that looks like the Ben Ross has actually been more popular. And we've still got we've got a couple of dozen of those left. Yeah. |
| Everett | Is that something that you're going to continue to do? Is this something you're going to continue to explore, making watches? I think of someone like Dan Henry, right? Dan Henry's like, I'm going to take a watch that I love, that I can't find, and I'm just going to make it. And I'm going to make my own version of it, but I'm going to make this watch. Is that something you see yourself doing? |
| Nick Farrell | You know, how do you say Presidious? Yeah, Presidious. Yeah, I think so. So they've kind of done the same thing as Dan Henry, actually. And they, they, I look, I don't know the quality of the build, because I don't have one. But, um, I mean, I've heard good things. But I love the fact that they copied the Mackney, the Seiko Mackney SOG. And it's a frat ton less expensive than than the OG one. Uh, we regularly sell those for about 2k and it's hard to find those. Yeah, it's very hard to find those and presidious is what a few hundred dollars So it's kind of like they kind of looked at the dan henry model, I think now for me I have a lot of respect for those guys doing that for me. I want to come out with something unique, but you know to each their own I mean, that's certainly fine. So I had looked at doing a regatta watch and it's still I've got suppliers lined up but like The biggest problem I found on that is that I wanted to keep with Seiko because the Sycamore Wolf and the Sycamore Hunter both use NH35 and NH36 because the Wolf is a GMT with an independent hand. And they both use Seiko automatic movements. Because, I mean, again, cliche to say bulletproof workhorse movements, said every, you know, watch article ever. But it's... There's some truth to that, right? I have not been able to find a mechanical Seiko chronograph movement, because they don't make them. Yeah. And I've looked at Citizen, I've looked at Miyota, I've looked at things like that. And they're all like these mecha courts. And I, I'm still not a purist, even though king courts aside and grand courts, etc. I want to know, I want a mechanical movement in there. I don't want to do courts. And that's kind of stymied me a little bit. And I looked at Valjoux, like a 7750. But that does increase the price quite a bit. Yeah. And I don't know if I'm willing to do that now. So it's kind of like I'm kind of in a hiatus until I find a movement that I really feel that's worthy. |
| Everett | You're stuck with Siegel, 77.50 or a Mack of Quartz, unless you want to get crazy expensive. And even a 77.50 I mean, what's the wholesale on $77.50 these days? |
| Nick Farrell | They're not as bad as most people think, actually. I mean, it's been a couple months since I looked at them seriously, but it's doable. |
| Everett | It's like $800 apart? |
| Nick Farrell | They're a little bit less than that, but that's not far off. But with the SQL thing, and I've talked about this before, the diplomat in me won't do it because it's Chinese. it's like and again that's that's no slight really on their craftsmanship it's that if something happens i have to think logistics i need to think am i going to be able to still get these if something happens and in you know we can talk about this later but the the u.s military you know the dod policy joint chiefs of staff etc has always been can we fight two wars at once i i i don't it's it's weird we're looking at nuclear posture i'm not gonna get in too much but like If you know you've got stuff going on in the Near East right now and what if China decides, hey, now might be a good time. Either distracted to go to Taiwan and again, not getting off on a tangent, but I can't help but think about these things when it comes to logistics. |
| Andrew | Yes, it's like and we've we talked to a couple of brand owners really early on in covid who were who saw it right. They saw what was about to happen. and tried to harden themselves against those supply chain issues. And I think that's a, that the, the position that you're taking is super reasonable. Yeah. Um, as made evident by COVID. Yeah. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. And it is throughout the cold war. And again, as we talked about before the episode, like I dork out a military history and just, you know, international relations in general and geo strategic stuff. But, Throughout the Cold War, the way that the Soviets did it is they did, you know, the U.S. military versus the Soviets, whereas we had a timed pushing of parts. Like, we're like, okay, here's when a part wears out every two months, so we're going to send a part every two months. So that was just automatic. And the Soviets, if I remember correctly, they would order and they would come late. So that's, when you look at these logistics issues, when it comes to something like COVID, There's where you run into problems, because it works very well if there's no Black Swan events, like COVID. And that same friend I talked about before the show, about how I met Eric Wind, and I've told the story before, Eric Wind was the RA of my friend at Georgetown in the dorms. That same friend, I remember that. I remember looking at, you know, Twitter before it kind of, you know, went downhill, but And it was breaking news on Kobe. And I was like, if this is happening in China and the Chinese can't censor this. This is a problem because, you know, they're renowned for their the great wall, the great Internet wall where they can censor stuff. And it's still getting out that all this is popping off. I remember her saying, oh, whatever, you're exaggerating. I'm like, OK. |
| Andrew | You know, it's coming out of China, it's real. Yeah. |
| Everett | Well, well, here we are. We're 38 minutes in. It's a perfect time to talk about our main topic. uh, he says with a tongue planted in cheek. Uh, we, we talked about Nick, you and I talked about, well, let's, let's talk about something interesting. And, and in, in honor, I think when we, when we first spoke, the Olympics were just starting and we said, well, why don't we talk about Seiko's role, uh, in the Olympics and, And as, and I said, well, that sounds like a great idea, Nick. Uh, uh, I'm into it. And, and as we, as Andrew and I kind of were developing this episode and sort of reading about it, it's like Seiko's role in the Olympics is actually in a lot of ways, the story of modern timekeeping. Uh, like my mind was kind of blown. about all the things that happened in Japan between the years of 1960 and 1964 in anticipation of the Tokyo Olympic Games. And who better to talk about this than Nick from DC Vintage Watches, who probably, I mean, I know there are some other folks out there that are writing about this. You've written about this. There's a ton of really good literature, but from the man himself, I'd say, at least in this part of the world. Well, I'll let you take it. |
| Nick Farrell | The reason I brought that, you know, we were discussing this is there's, um, and I definitely recommend the book. It's called selling the crown by Brandon or Brandon Cunningham. And he's K a time pieces on Instagram, but he wrote an article about, um, Rolex being gifted at Olympic events. So, and he mentioned Seiko in there quite a bit. And, and I remember reading, cause I, I get his like sub stack or his, uh, his email distro blast. And I remember reading that and I remember thinking, you know, Someone's got to write this about Seiko. And I had already done that previously on the website, but no, I mean, so long story short, what Seiko did was in 1964, you know, before any of these Olympic events, you know, there's always, and it's been commercialized a bit since then, but there's still a lot of science here. So they take the timing of these events very seriously. And now obviously some of it has changed of late when you have things like, you know, these advances and people videotaping the events and split second finishes. And what was it? The one race that was run where dude was like one by centimetres. Yeah. The no miles. Yeah. Yeah. Which is amazing to watch. And you didn't have that back in the day. So what happened was there was a there was a problem where they were attributing it to like human error or they were attributing it to the device itself when they were using stopwatches for the Olympics. And Seiko was thinking about this in there. They wanted to to go to the Olympic Committee to wrap the Olympics timing wise when they were held in 1964 in Japan, in Tokyo. And, you know, this is a massive honor for Japan because this is the first time an Asian nation had hosted the Olympics. And not only that, it was really it was the first time the Olympics, if memory serves, were ever televised. |
| Everett | Yeah, this is the... No, no, you're right. It's the first time they were globally televised. And it was the first time on any real scale that satellite telecast had been used. |
| Andrew | And so a lot of... It's less than 20 years after the dropping of two atomic weapons on this nation. |
| Nick Farrell | I mean, literally almost to the month, actually. And so it so was this huge so japan is going on the japanese government's going all out There you know like any big city. I mean hell I mean I was seeing it firsthand here because where is the olympics in 2028? Yep Los angeles, you know, they're right here some of them like In long beach, we have that channel that they dug for the 32 olympics that they're going to use again, right? but anyway, so Seiko being the timepiece manufacturer that it was, was like, hey, we're going to set up our game and we're going to represent here. So they did this ingenious device where they did. It's like this. I've seen pictures of it. It's mechanical tester that eliminates human error from it. So it was trying to prove that it's not the devices, it's the human error that are the reason you're having these differing times. |
| Everett | It's vice versa. The Swiss, Longine and Omega, who had been doing who had been doing timekeeping for the Olympics for decades at this point, were saying, this is human error. The problem with the timekeeping is human error. We can't get people to click. And Seiko was able to isolate the machines and say, no, no, this is a positional error. |
| Nick Farrell | That's right. And they did that pitch to the Olympic committee, the body that was choosing these timepieces. And literally, I mean, I have a There's a quote somewhere. And I hear it is right here. It's like the Olympic technical committee had noted when they picked Seiko, we are not assigning official timekeeping to a Japanese manufacturer because the Olympics will be held in Tokyo, but because these are actual functional timepieces backed up by solid scientific theory. So in other words, Seiko understood the assignment. and 5718 and 5719. So those are three different chronographs and they're 60 second mono pusher chronographs. So you push the button at the two o'clock once and every time it goes around, there's no sub-dial, it does 60 seconds. So it's these really fast events like that and you hit it again, it resets to zero. They made those specifically for the Olympics. There's an Olympic flame motif engraved on the case back. And they did a couple of GMTs, the Seiko 6217, as well. Same thing. It has all the cities that are representing on the, on this, this wheel on the inside and the chapter ring that rotates same Olympic motif in the back. And so they came out with all these things and they, of course, Seiko being second, they're really good at this in Asian markets. They have their name everywhere. So you have these games being broadcast for the first time and everyone's like, what is this company? Seiko? Their name is everywhere. And it was really how they started their campaign. to take on the Swiss. Seiko had lurked in the background for a while doing things on the down low, while the company rebuilt itself again, not even really two decades after the bombing of the two cities in Japan, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I don't know if it was on purpose or whether it wasn't, but I don't really think they were on Swiss radar. And it really comes comes out five years later when Seiko invented the first automatic chronograph. While the Swiss were busy squabbling amongst themselves in the run up to say they were the winners, Seiko beat them all. |
| Everett | Yeah, you know, there was an interesting idea I read about this thing. So in 1960, when Tokyo's awarded the Olympic Games for 1964, Seiko catches wind of this, obviously, and and really stands up an entire engineering team to do this thing. And Seiko, famously an isolated place, an isolated culture, didn't have any experience in sports timekeeping, zero experience. In 1960, they'd never done any sports timekeeping, at least not at any sort of scale, certainly not at the scale of the Olympics. And so when they come in, in 1960, they don't have any of these preconceived notions, right? They're like, the Swiss are saying this is human error, but is that true? Like their fresh eyes were important in the way they approached this. They didn't approach this with a framework or a skeleton. Rather, they're like, well, how do we start doing this? And that is such an important part of the story. They approach everything from fresh. They're like, well, how do we figure out what the accuracy is? Also important in this story is that this time period is when Seiko really finalizes a lot of their quartz designs. These crystal timekeepers come out of this early 1960s period. |
| Nick Farrell | that that like, they were everywhere. And like, really, even within Seiko's house, as it were, they're like, a lot of this is owed to really, I think, Seiko President at the time, Tsuji Hattori. And he's like, we're gonna do this. And even the head of that development team was skeptical. He's like, you know, we don't have any, any backbench of knowledge on this. It's very like, I don't know if we can do this. And Tori was like, guess what, we're gonna do it. And, you know, we know how that turned out. So he had that foresight. And this is like, he, I don't know that there's ever been a greater Seiko president than Hattori. I mean, his name's on every, I mean, his family's been doing it for a minute too, obviously. |
| Everett | You know, Nick, I sent you an email earlier. I sent you a text message earlier. It's the, this actually is the second model of this, but, but it's a Seiko quartz crystal chronometer, right? So, so in the, in 1960, they had these, basically like boxes. Like if you can imagine, they're like locker size timing chronometers that they used at sporting events. And Seiko was like, well, this isn't practical for our games because, you know, we'll have, we'll make some clocks that are going to be put in like the basketball stadium, for instance, or at the track. And those will be permanent fixtures. And we'll just, we're going to leave them there after the games. And those will be their timers for forever more. But we need we need something that we can move. We need something that we can move around from place to place. And they designed this quartz crystal chronometer that is, you know, this is like probably a I don't know, but six by ten little box with a handle on it, you know, like a briefcase. And inside is this is this quartz chronometer timekeeper, right? I mean, this is not the first quartz watch, but, but really like in a lot of ways, this is the sign of where timekeeping is going to go right now. So we're in 1964, the Astron's going to come out in 1969. We're just five years out. This starts the death of watches, right? Like Seiko did it. for the Olympics in 1964. And I don't mean the death of watches in a practical sense, but you know what I mean, right? Like this, it was close. |
| Nick Farrell | It was, it was a close run thing. Uh, you know, obviously that I could literally talk hours and hours on that alone, but no, I mean, it really did. I mean, it decimated the Swiss industry because they didn't take the threat seriously. And there's, unfortunately within the Swiss industry, watch industry, there is a history of this where the, the, the upstarts, the newcomers, they don't take seriously. And then, you know, the only thing that really saved the Swiss, I think was, you know, you had some part of Hoyer amongst them, but some, some parts of the Swiss industry finally didn't take it seriously. And you have, again, you have like the, the eighties, um, for your divers, like the rep nine, eight, oh, uh, double Oh six. And that whole, that whole range of watches. And then you really saw the Swiss reinvent themselves. And they, they made the watch become something you hand down to your subsequent generations. And they did really, really good selling that. I mean, as Cunningham covers in his book, Selling the Crown, you had what Rolex did after World War II. And they do this later, but what Rolex did after World War II is they took MI6 officers from World War II that had specialized in covert influencing messaging against the Axis powers, and they apportioned them to do marketing. So but you saw the Swiss have always they've been really good at that, I think. So that's that's how close it came, because had they not reinvented themselves to make it like a watch being handed down the subsequent generations? I don't know. I don't know how it would have turned out. |
| Everett | How big of a how big of a. Well, do you find it interesting that Seiko comes out with the automatic chronograph more or less at the same exact time that they come out with the quartz movement? |
| Nick Farrell | I mean, it's it's I don't even think they're a year apart. Yeah, because I mean, I've seen I've seen I actually and I have this on the website we have when we talk about the dial codes in the back of the dials. And I have a dial from November 1968. And I think the Swiss came out their big debut was May or June of 69. So there's, yeah, there's very little time between that and December 69. I think that what you had was Seiko being traditional large conglomerate, Japanese large conglomerate, there were different parts of the organization doing different things. And I don't know that it was, this is some research I need to do. I don't know if this was something they intentionally did. Someone high up probably knew that both efforts were underway. But I don't know in this instance, if like the people working on the Astron knew what the people devising the 6139 were doing and vice versa. |
| Andrew | It seems like hedging bets to me. Really? It's like, Hey, we have this new thing. And it's cool and it's new. And we have this thing that we know everyone wants and is going to like, we think people are going to like this new hot shit that we're about to drop, but it very much seems like a, um, hedging bets decision at the, at the super high level executive level. Right. you know, at the, at the work group level, at the project management level, it's like, I don't know, we're just doing our job. But at the high level, it seems to me like a hedging bets. We're going to do the best that we can in this, in this new kind of untested environment and in this world that we know everyone wants. |
| Nick Farrell | And the 100% and the other thing was, they came on the market at very different price points. Yes, it goes three nine was more of an every man's watch. Still expensive for the time. Don't get me wrong. But when that astron came out, it the the the funny thing that you always see all the history books repeating is that it was the same price as a Toyota Corolla at the time. And you know, we laugh at a Corolla now because it's very much every man's, you know, car. It's like a Civic. But back then Toyota Corolla was was not that old. I mean, it was it was pretty new on the scene. So it was like this new car. So, you know, we're talking a watch that probably was. I don't know. I remember doing the math somewhere, you know, ten thousand dollars in today's money. |
| Andrew | It's a huge Japanese industry flex. Right. Right. We have this this car that's going to last forever. And we have this new technology that is better than anything you can buy from the Swiss. |
| Nick Farrell | No, the irony is if you find a Seiko Astron these days and they do come up on occasion, they sell about the same price point and about 10K, sometimes higher for like just very because usually the first generation of any technology has room for improvement. And the Astron did, for sure. But it's because it's so epoch making, you know, it paradigm shift everything you want to say. |
| Andrew | It changed the world in the way of timekeeping, at least. And it's, it's, I don't know, I see it as a huge flex for Japanese industry of like, we ain't gone. |
| Nick Farrell | And then you look at what, uh, I don't know if you guys, I imagine you do, but like most of your listeners, if you, you know, read Watches of Espionage and, you know, they talk about the Casio F91, which was so widely used by insurgents in various war zones during the global war on terror. You see where that, you know, you've got the high end, the Astron and then F91 is what? 30, 40, not even. No, like 18 bucks. |
| Andrew | Yeah. They're 20 bucks these days. |
| Nick Farrell | It's crazy. I mean, but that was, that was something that ironically Seiko suffered from as well, because you look at, you know, a lot of people when they ask what I do, that's always a weird conversation. They're like, wait, what did you do? And I tell them sometimes I do, if I don't want to go on a long conversation, I just say I'm an antiquities dealer. But if there's someone that seems interested, I say I sell vintage watches and they always ask what kind and they think you're gonna say Rolex. And then sometimes you say Seiko and people give you this weird look like it's a Seiko. But the problem is, is that you have Seiko, you have the high end, you have Grand Seiko, you have Creedor, and then you have Quartz Seiko, which again, I mean, it's more expensive than Casio, but you get the idea. So for the longest time, and I think that's why Seiko broke off Grand Seiko to be their own line, because it used to be Seiko and then on the dial would say Grand Seiko. And now it just says Grand Seiko, because they want to differentiate themselves price point wise. |
| Everett | You know, something we've talked about a number of times on this show is this period of time. So when we started, we started this show in 2018, right around the time you moved to LA and you had been around for a while at that point. But there was a phenomenon at that time and just before that time where Seiko 5 watches were like really plentiful, really available. There was a website called I think the Seiko 5 Finder, which I'm sure you're familiar with. But there was this period of time where there was this glut of really efficiently produced at very large scale Seiko 5 watches. Those have, of course, dried up, right? The Seiko 5 Finder is no longer a meaningful or relevant website because those watches don't exist in any number. I think that the time of the $60 SNK is pretty much gone. I think you can still find them for not a lot of money, but you know, there was this question at the time, like 2016, you know, you're like, what automatic watch should I get? And some people, oh, the SNK, but you could also try this or this, you know, there was like 30 Seiko fives. All of them were the like classic, late 90s, early 2005. |
| Nick Farrell | That really the SKX, of course, which is always my my go to for anyone who asks, how do I start? |
| Everett | Sure, sure. |
| Andrew | It used to be and it can't be your answer now. Yeah. |
| Nick Farrell | And I think what Seiko did was they kind of try to recapture that market by when they came out with the SK, the successor, the SKX, which the fifth But maybe that was, I think they were trying to recapture some of that lost market share when they reinvented it for a younger generation. |
| Everett | I think that there was something that happened there though, right? I think that a lot of people say, well, Seiko's more expensive now, which I don't think is true. Seiko's changed the way, you know, but actually I think there was something else that happened. And we've talked about this a little bit, but I think that there was, watches were changing really in a meaningful way. There was some sort of supply and demand problem that Seiko had probably created for itself. But there does seem to be a shift that happens right around that time, 2018, 2019, where Seiko's like, all right, let's regroup. Let's figure out what we're doing. Let's get organized. I mean, this show isn't about modern Seiko by any means. But with that said, there does seem to be a shift. And I think the shift has taken us back maybe 45 or 50 years in terms of what Seiko is doing. When you look at, so going back to the 1964 Olympics, Seiko had three factories at the time. And they have these three factories which are really operating as independent companies in a lot of ways. And they have them all working on different things. I think two of the companies were working on like swimming and track timers. like collaboratively, but, but they all had like, okay, you're going to do, uh, you know, you're going to do our, our stadium timers and you're going to do our handhelds and you're going to do this. Uh, it seems to me like Seiko is sort of re-imagining itself as this multi-tier compartmentalized company. that's able to navigate the watch world in these discrete ways, as Andrew said earlier, perhaps hedging. That feels fair to me. Do you feel like modern Seiko, like today's Seiko, is really calling back to that period of time, that 60s and 70s Seiko, in some meaningful ways? |
| Nick Farrell | That perhaps they weren't in the... I think in a multitude of ways. The long-standing joke about chapter ring alignment issues aside. Which is fair, which is fair. We'll all say that's fair. I should always point out to your audience that vintage does not suffer from that. Vintage has no alignment issues, but that's neither here nor there. I think some of what, I think some of what they're trying to do is, and you do see, and it's ironic that You were talking about the expensive part of Seiko. The only reissue they've come out with that isn't more expensive than the OG one is when they came out with that 6117-8000 Navigator Timer GMT reissue, which is astonishingly faithful to the original, more so than any reissue they've come out with. That is the only one that is less expensive than the OG one. |
| Everett | But you're talking about adjusted for inflation. |
| Nick Farrell | Well, I'm talking about what we charge or what the market will bear for the OG one versus buying the reissue. Got a really nice one if you can find it. It's going to start at 15 1600 bucks. And I think the reissue was like 1000 bucks. |
| Everett | Yeah, I think it was less than that. I think it was like 700. |
| Nick Farrell | Really? It's like so if they want to do what they can do it now. Obviously, there's vagaries here when you're talking about the level of the movement they choose. My watchmakers hate the 4R36 automatic movement, which nothing I sell has that in it, but they don't like it. They talk shit about it all the time. |
| Everett | Because it's huge, right? You can get a Miota 9000 for not very much more money, $20 more, $30 more, and it's like a millimeter and a half to almost two millimeters thinner. |
| Nick Farrell | Remember, I was looking at all this stuff when I was when I was looking at what I'm going to put in the sycamore line, looking at all the various movements and things like that. But it's, it's hard to really to get a grip on what Seiko is playing, because it's just so astonishingly large of a company. I mean, you've got like, literally, like I have a scanner here made by Epson. Do you know Epson is part of the Seiko conglomerate? |
| Everett | We sure do. |
| Nick Farrell | We've talked about this a lot. |
| Everett | Let's go back to 1964. Let's go back to 1964 because Seiko invents the printer in the 60s for the 1964 Olympics. It was the Seiko Epson at the time, Seiko Epson, which was a division of Seiko, which worked with one of the Seikosha factories to to literally invent the printer |
| Nick Farrell | The thing that I love about the vintage Seiko, you find these watches and it's engraved in kanji Japanese in the back, 25 years of service for the XYZ company. And I'll do my you know, I'll translate it with Google Translate. I'll do the research on it before I put it up on the website. And I'll give a history of the company. It's every single one of them. I kid you not some conglomerate and they do everything from building sustainable, like agriculture and same company to making aluminum cans. And you're just like, what? How does this work? Like, it's all over the place. Just a little bit of everything. Fine in the way. But in American, I mean, GE used to be like that. |
| Everett | Or Bridgestone. Bridgestone is a company that we talk about a lot. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. But but, you know, back to the thing, like so Seiko, there was the the president now did a press conference. I think it was two years ago. And he was astonishingly candid. and what he said the history of Seiko or what the future of Seiko held. And it was, I think he used the term getting back to grassroots and the Seiko history and things of that nature. Now, this isn't time exactly to the 2018 period you speak of, because this was after that, but it's only a few years after that. So maybe this is something that they were already doing and they just decided, hey, we're going to announce it, which would actually kind of be on brand for Seiko. |
| Everett | Yeah, and I'm talking about these time periods vaguely, right? The 2018 is the year, I think, well, at least for me, and maybe Andrew feels the same way, that's the year I kind of isolate because that's the year we really, you know, started getting into it. Our first 20 episodes of this show is, looking back, and I do look back occasionally, it's just us learning about watches, right? In real time, oftentimes with the red button on, the red light on, you know, like learning about watches. And of course, you know, like with anything, the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don't know. |
| Andrew | Yeah, the more you learn, the less you know. |
| Nick Farrell | I was literally just about this for me, like I'm dorking out on I was talking to Cam Wolfe, who's like the lead, the lead for watches for GQ. Yeah, I know. I know, actually. Yeah. Yeah. |
| Everett | Cam, when I launched my watch, Cam interviewed me and my business partner. |
| Nick Farrell | Oh, that's awesome. He did those posts just this last week on summer watches. And I reached out to him and he's like, what do you got for me? And I literally one of them was a Stellaris. And a lot of this goes back to, you know, talk about learning and like I'm always learning. I can this this was so innately like just learning about foreign cultures, culture or foreign countries, culture rather. there's there's never the learning never ends. So with the Stellaris thing, like my kick this summer has been learning about even more about Stellaris, which was the Sears and Roebuck in-house brand. So the movements were made by Seiko if they were automatic. Sometimes they were made by Swiss if they were manual winding. And he was like, what are the two watches you worn the most? And it was it was that that 61178000 GMT we talked about just a second ago. It was the Stellaris Skin Diver. Um, and that has been my thing has been learning about stylus and a lot of their stuff like you go on ebay And there's not many on there and they tend to be broken like, um electric watches, which was that weird transitional tech between mechanical and quartz watches And they're they're just a bear to service and it's just not a good idea to get one if it's broken But it has been learning about this watch and it's always going to be like that for all of us We're all going to find something that catches our eye We're going to look at the other stuff that company may make. And chances are it was a company that was destroyed during the courts crisis, which again brought on by Seiko. And they don't exist at all anymore. So they're literally lost to the back pages of eBay. And that's the only place you're going to really find these these watches if you're lucky. |
| Andrew | So yeah, because they closed up shop and that was just it. Right. They didn't. There was no archival process. It was just it's done. It's gone. |
| Nick Farrell | There was no Internet. I mean, there's no there was these people like us that literally are documenting this stuff for the record. And look, my website, if I something happens to me tomorrow or I retire or whatever, the website goes down, no longer selling. You can at least go back to the Wayback Machine if you're familiar with that online and find because the Wayback Machine archives previous iterations of the Internet. and saves it. So you can go back and look that up. It doesn't get everything, but it gets major things. And you can find this stuff still, even if it's off the internet. So they didn't have that then. |
| Everett | So best collection of vintage Seiko got to be Eric Strickland, right? |
| Nick Farrell | He's out there. |
| Everett | He's got some amazing stuff. So do you source watches for Eric Strickland or is it vice versa? |
| Nick Farrell | I don't, I don't, I don't know. I mean, talk about every now and again, I think it's more of those like game recognizes game type things where like he had, if he's the level of collector now, he knows what to do, you know? And for him, I think as well, like it is for me, I just happened to make a business out of it. You enjoy the hunt. So that's a big part of it. |
| Everett | We talk about the hunt on this show a lot. Yeah. We, we talked about that a lot. So I understand Eric Strickland has... Because I enjoy the hunt. |
| Nick Farrell | I'm going to find it myself. |
| Everett | I understand that Eric Strickland has two of these, but one of the watches that came out in for the 64 Olympics was the 57. The 5718. And I read about this. I read about this in prepping for this show. So, so the 5718 is a very, very interesting watch. |
| Nick Farrell | And I understand it's the top three grill for me. |
| Everett | So, so quickly, this is a, uh, an automatic chronograph. that has a module and the module is a counter and it's operated with buttons at 10 and seven. And if you click the 10, it advances the counter one. And if you click the seven, it advances the counter 10. So, so I've got, we got to talk about a watch and this is the one. Tell me a little bit about this watch, what they were doing with it and why this does not exist outside of the hundred or so of these. that Seiko made for the 1964 Olympics. |
| Nick Farrell | I'm trying to remember if they ever made these commercially available. |
| Everett | Never, never. They've made 100 of them and they've never made any more. |
| Nick Farrell | All the others they definitely made commercially available, but not this one. I didn't think they did, but it's, and I had this on the website. If you go back and look at some of the watches that we have from the 64 Olympics, I've gone and found if that's where that that academic research is missing that it's like for like for the most people they're just be like oh yeah cool whatever but for me that's like huge that's like on my list of i have like this i have a moleskin here with like all this like to research eventually and that's on there um but back to your your question on what they were doing it if memory serves it's some sort of like lap counter yeah i think that's right yeah and i think i could be misquoting this but i I believe does Mike Stockton have one from Fratello? |
| Everett | You know, that's possible. Fratello, I did read I did read a couple of articles about this. One of them was on Hodinkee. One of them was on Fratello. But but I think the one I read, I think the one I read was on Hodinkee and they were taking pictures of both of Eric Strickland's version. He's got both versions. They made it with like a light silver dial and a dark silver dial. And Eric's got both of them, of course, because it's fucking Eric. But It was like one of those things where I was like, I don't need this watch. I don't want this watch, but I need to have this watch. I guarantee I'll never have it. But it was that I got that feeling, right? Like, oh, God, I need this. |
| Nick Farrell | Actually, I'm just so so number one Seiko writer, in my opinion, is Mike Stockton on Pertello. OK, like they go. That's him. Like he's he's like any time I do research on a reference for the website. And I was joking with him about this the other day. His name pops up and something he's written. And I always, you know, I do it in print or I do it in quotation marks. I source back the original document because I'm not going to take this stuff like I want him to get credit for it. But the second one, I just started finding his stuff is a gentleman named Thomas Ruput. I'm going to mispronounce it. Russ Putinsky. And I believe he is he's actually because I'm I just pulled up an article and he's talking about the title articles 2021. It is the Grail Seiko 57188000 stolen during transit, the dark side of watch collecting. And I can only imagine if one of us had that and it was still like I just. Oh, my God. I don't even know. It was it blew my mind. But Eric has how he found to. I have no idea. I just know that any time I don't think I've ever We've had a few people reach out to us and ask us to source one. I'm just like, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. I don't want to take your money because we charge a nominal sourcing fee. It's like 150 bucks and it goes towards the final cost of the watch. But I was like, I can't accept this in good faith from you because we're not going to find one. Even if we did, guess what? I'm taking it. |
| Everett | Yeah. |
| Nick Farrell | I want, you know, so it's like, well, yeah. |
| Everett | Someday we'll get there, right? Or not. Nick, unfortunately, because I think we could talk for hours and hours and hours. We do try to limit the show. We don't have any rules, which is nice, but we make them. We make the rules. But here we are. We're about an hour 15 in. This is the time of the show that we move to other things. And so I'm going to go right in. And Andrew, I know you've got I do have another thing. And I'm wondering if you'd be willing to talk about it. |
| Andrew | It's a bit of a repeat of another thing. So we've talked about a television show on this show called The Umbrella Academy. We sure have. And two years ago, they finished season three, and it kind of seemed to be A tolerable conclusion. |
| Everett | And they gave me one of the best concluding |
| Andrew | Seasons of television that I've ever watched. |
| Nick Farrell | Because I haven't seen season four yet, so don't know. |
| Andrew | I'm not going to ruin it. What I'm saying is that you you tolerated, you accepted the conclusion at the end of season three. Yeah. And then they gave you a season four and you were I was fully bought in and fully accepting, maybe even perhaps more accepting of conclusion than at the end of season three. It was terrific. It was fun. It's very much like Stranger Things where it's like, what could you possibly do to make me interested in a new season? And they did that. They did it well. They developed the characters in a really good way. And then they tied it off in a way that you're like, oh, I'm okay with that. Very much unlike Sons of Anarchy, where it's just like, God, we got to fucking finish this thing like Game of Thrones. We're like, God, we're out of time. No, this was well thought out. It was well developed. They told it at a good pace and they tied it off with a little knot that you're like, OK, with. |
| Everett | So so season three, we get the alternate the alternate siblings. Uh, yeah. Do we, do they, is that still the main focus of season four? No spoilers. |
| Andrew | No spoilers. They are a component. Okay. Okay. |
| Everett | I, it was, I actually did not love that about season three. I was hoping that they would cleave that at the end of that. They cleaned it all up. All right. Good, good, good, good, good, good. |
| Nick Farrell | that I Take your word on it. |
| Andrew | Or it's a like, I'm just gonna put off other responsibilities commitment. |
| Nick Farrell | Uh, which is sound. I apologize for that. You probably heard in the background. I was on the Wikipedia page for the series and I was like, was Seth Rogen involved in this show? Cause anytime you see something, make it to live action from a comic book, Seth Rogen is somewhere. Oh, and he was not involved in this. That's the, that's my control app search looking for his name. It happens. It did. Because Dark Horse comic books, because I'm a comic book nerd, not as much as I used to be. But Dark, I started with Dark Horse back in the 90s. And so, like, so much amazing stuff has been made from Dark Horse. But Seth Rogen was involved in a lot of them, but not this instance. |
| Andrew | Interesting. I would have not considered him to be involved. But. And you would have been right. It also, it kind of tracks, right? If he was. |
| Nick Farrell | Have you read Preacher or did you watch the show? |
| Andrew | I have not. |
| Nick Farrell | That's dude. It's really good. You like the dark comedy stuff and you must if you like Umbrella Academy. Preacher is highly recommended. |
| Andrew | It's on my list. |
| Nick Farrell | Then there's The Boys, obviously. |
| Andrew | The Boys is great. But the the season four of Umbrella Academy tied everything off really neatly in a really tolerable way. |
| Everett | Nick, did you? I understand you came equipped with another thing for today's show. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, no, the thing that, um, because I sent the link to you guys right before the show, but Rolling Stones just put out a really interesting article that I literally got texted to me by like a dozen friends and they ran the gamut from diplomats to, to CIA people. Most of them are formers, you know, they're, most of them have retired and gone on to do other things, but Rolling Stones did an article. And I'm starting this thing every every weekend where I post a what I've been reading the past week. It's I'm going to do it this weekend. Rolling Stone did an article and they talk about the psychological and mental toll that non-official cover CIA officers have. So non-official cover for the Rolling Stones article is you're not overseas diplomatic community or anything like that. You're posing as a business person or what have you. So the long story short is you get caught, you're kind of screwed. |
| Everett | These are the CIA's spies in the deepest of cover. The most sort of classic version of that story, right? |
| Nick Farrell | Yep. And the title of the article is, CIA sent him deep undercover to spy on Islamic radicals at cost and everything. So it basically tells us... And again, I don't know this guy. I don't know how much truth is here. Rolling Stones as a whole obviously has a bit of a political slant, but This article, I feel really closely hewed to what I knew of people like this overseas when I was a diplomat. So, you know, it talks about this gentleman, you know, he goes overseas, he learns Arabic, he infiltrates, you know, this sounds like the height of the global war on terror. He infiltrates jihadist groups overseas trying to get intel to stop the next 9-11, etc. And basically the psychological toll it took on him. and the aftereffects of that. And it was like you guys talked about. I mean, the article sucks you in. It's maybe about 10 pages. And I started it and finished it in one. I was like, I couldn't put it down. I was like, this is really good. |
| Everett | I had the same experience. I told you I was procrastinating, but show prep reading, reading my children. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Reading was part of the show prep. Fair enough. |
| Everett | Fair enough. So the fellow's name, I think Anthony Lagunas is what he's known as in the industry. That's not his actual name. His actual name is not revealed. It does seem like there are people who know what his name is. Um, but, but really the story is about, uh, the, the emotional toll that being deep undercover took on him and, and, and you brought up the political slant. This is a bit of a critical reaction to maybe Bush era |
| Andrew | Uh, foreign, foreign policy, you know, where it was and like height of the, the, the GWAT or like global war on terror. |
| Everett | Let's just go hard in the pain. Exactly. We'll figure it out after. |
| Nick Farrell | Yep. |
| Everett | Yep. So yeah. And ultimately, uh, Anthony Lagunas dies, um, in maybe kind of vague circumstances, probably drug related, perhaps suicide. We don't we don't know all the details there. And either way, it's attributed directly to the PTSD and perhaps the lack of support that he received when he comes back. And you can put all that aside. It's still a fascinating article just because it's like this is a side of of things that we know probably exists. Um, but that we maybe don't ask too many questions about. We don't have a lot of information about if we did ask the questions. Uh, it's fascinating. I thought it was terrific article and thanks for the article came out two days ago. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. And it's taken around like crazy. It's by Zach Dorfman. I'm looking at right now, but I'm trying to, I think the one other show and you know, you really, you trust these, these men and women to be the protectors of the country, but there's a, there's a cost that must be born with that. Uh, be under, and particularly if you're, if you're some sort of spy in, in some of these environments that could be utterly foreign to your value system and how you were raised and everything that you know and hold dear. And, and I think Dorfman did an amazingly good job at capturing that. It's a solid article. |
| Everett | So I got another thing, Andrew, do me. I, uh, I think like a lot of us, I'm sort of into classic style, right? So however, however you interpret that, I think probably everybody listening to this show is in some ways, uh, into classic style. Uh, you know, we're, we're all wearing these anachronistic, timekeeping devices on our wrists, like there's something there, right? I, I have been a person who's worn Ray-Ban Wayfarers for probably the last decade. In fact, maybe a little bit more than that. When I was in law school, when I met Andrew, I was wearing a pair of Wayfarers as my, as my, my clear lens, just day-to-day glasses. Those were the new Wayfarers, right? So some people may know this, other people may not, but at some point, I think in the 90s or perhaps in the 80s, Ray-Ban changed the Wayfarer, like Coke changed Coca-Cola. |
| Andrew | No more cocaine. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, which time? Do you mean when they took the Coke out of it or when they did the new Coke? |
| Everett | Pick your poison. Uh, in many, in more ways than one. Uh, so, so I've always had new wayfarers. Uh, the new wayfarers are, are, are shaped different. They're a little bit shorter. They, they're, they have less, less tilt. So, so classic wayfarers tilt from the bridge backwards into your face at your cheeks. Um, I've always worn new wayfarers, uh, because those were the ones that I just, this is like maybe a little bit more comfortable. I had to get some new sunglasses this year. Um, and I was at the store and found a pair of wayfarers that were, they look black, but they're actually like a clear. Really really dark blue. It's this really it's actually a pretty captivating color. I've got him here Andrew You can see it's kind of like this smoky. Anyway, I'm gonna talk about what I'm gonna talk about is they were original Wayfarers and I was like, you know, I don't I don't think I like the original Wayfarers and I think like I want new Wayfarers and I put them on and I was like, you know Maybe let's do it right. It's just sunglasses, right? It's not gonna break me to bite. Sorry script Oh yeah, there's prescription. So I buy a pair of original Wayfarers. I've had these now for probably about a month and these are my favorite glasses. So I put them on and I'm just like, yes, this is the style that I love and want. I've gotten a dozen compliments from just random people. Like I love those sunglasses, which is weird because they're the most not notable glasses ever, but there's something about that classic wayfarer shape and the way they sit on your face that is just like, this is one of the greatest designs of all time. So that's my other thing for the week. Andrew is the OG wayfarer OG classic wayfarer. If you haven't, I'm going to suggest perhaps you should, If you have, then you already know what I'm talking about. These are the coolest sunglasses I've ever had in my life. And I mean cool in all the ways, right? They're comfortable. They're plenty of comfortable. I don't suffer from any discomfort wearing them. They're maybe not the most like ergonomic things in the world, but I don't wear sunglasses to be ergonomic. I wear sunglasses to look rad. These are the raddest glasses I've ever had. Buy the classic Wayfarers. If you've thought about it or you consider it and you haven't, just do it. It's one of those purchases that you make and you don't think about it ever again. For me, I made this purchase and I was like, what took me so long? I'm going to wear my SKX and my classic Wayfarers. |
| Andrew | There's the one. |
| Everett | And a pair of Dickie 874s that Andrew's going to make fun of me for. Yes. Classic Wayfarers. That's my other thing. |
| Nick Farrell | I'm actually trying to remember. Do you remember what? What model this is, it's like I always called him like the the lenses are clear, the Ray-Bans. Yeah, I know. |
| Andrew | I know you're talking about the X. They're the they're the Malcolm X. I was just about to say the same thing. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah. Yeah. To the point where I actually had these for like maybe eight years where I went to the optometrist and I got the club master. Now, after the lens broke for a prescription, just regular glasses lens and wore those forever. But, but I found after, I found these fit very well ergonomically when you're wearing a motorcycle helmet. |
| Andrew | Oh, yeah. Because they got that thin, that thin earpiece. Yeah. |
| Nick Farrell | because you're limited to what you can wear inside a helmet because some things are not going to fit or you're going on long rides and they're digging into your nose. These are perfect. And like I wear these, I've had these for maybe a decade and I, I wear them. I just wore them today. Uh, when, when I was on a ride today on the motorcycle. So yeah, that's my go-to. |
| Everett | The club, the club master is what they call it. Well, Well, Nick, this has been a pleasure, man. Thank you so much for doing this with us. We're probably going to wrap it up. Is there anything you want to add or you want to shout out to the people? Obviously, if you want to go to the website, it's DCVintageWatches.com. You can also find DC Vintage Watches on Instagram. I'm sure you have other social media. Anything you want to say and anything you want to plug before we hang it up for the night? |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, no, I mean, the majority of our presence is Instagram, because that what that is what lends to what we're passionate about. And when I say we, I don't mean DCBW. I mean, literally everyone listening in, and you gents as well. And we've got I don't think everyone knows is we actually have like four or five different accounts on Instagram. So I'm not going to call them all out now because it would take forever. But They're out there. There's there's one for LA, there's one for the DC area with different angles to each one, like one's more car oriented, one's more geo strategic. That's the DC one. |
| Everett | We'll drop links to all this stuff in the show. |
| Nick Farrell | Yeah, we can do that later. I'm not going to go into that. But like, I don't know, like really news wise on our end, the thing that we're really getting into now is working with prop masters to get some of these in particular vintage Seiko in film, in TV shows. Like we got one of the Mac V Sogs in ABC's The Rookie for season seven, which is filming right now on on the wrist of Sergeant Bradford, Tim Bradford. They like the hard nose, like former special forces sergeant on that show. Um, and then, uh, we work with Jack Carr's prop master on the prequel to the terminal list. Uh, Dark Wolf it's called to get another Mac VSOG and that as well. And they're using it as kind of like, um, a plot device. And I'm not going to give anything away, but, uh, just make sure you watch it and you'll be like, I know I'm going to lose it when I see it. I'll be like, that's amazing. You know, but so it's really part of my, I mean, obviously it's good for business, but it's also one of those things where getting more people out there aware of this amazing history that this company has. So yeah, other than that, that's pretty much all I got. |
| Everett | Well, Nick, thanks for joining. It's been a pleasure. We'll have to have you on again. I'm sure we're going to be able to come up with more things to talk about. And you folks at home, thanks to you for joining us for another episode of 40 and 20, The Watch Clicker podcast. Do me a favor. Check out DCVintageWatches.com, but also go to WatchClicker.com That's our website and that's where we post every single episode of this podcast, but, uh, also articles and reviews and other fun stuff. If you want to follow us on social media, you can do that at watch clicker or at 40 and 20 underscore watch clicker on Instagram. Uh, yeah, that's where we post pictures and updates about things we're doing. If you want to support us and oh boy, we hope you do. You can do that at patreon.com slash 40 and 20. Look, that's how we keep this thing going. All of you who are already supporting us, we thank you so much. And if not, go think about dropping a buck. And I guess don't forget to tune back in next Thursday for another hour of watches, food, drinks, life, and other things we like. Bye bye. |