Ologies with Alie Ward - Horology (WATCHES) with Cameron Weiss

Episode Date: October 18, 2017

Million-dollar watches, World War II's role in watchmaking, and how much caffeine a watchmaker drinks. Twenty-something horologist Cameron Weiss also dishes about mechanical vs. quartz, little tiny springs, patience, S-Town and the history of timekeeping. Also we address rap lyrics and some existential boolsheet.More info on Cameron's watchesMore episode sources and linksSupport the show on PatreonT-shirts, mugs, etc. at ologiesmerch.comFollow Ologies on Twitter and InstagramMusic by Nick Thorburn 

Episode five, you're here. First off, thanks for listening. I see your reviews, I read them, I thank you. If you're just hopping by on occasion, just pop it in. No commitment, you can consider subscribing. That'll get you episodes right into your pocket area. And if you wish that you had an ology's shirt or tote or iPhone case or mug or clothes for your child, even though we swear on this podcast, ologysmerch.com now has things there.

And thanks Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch as always for helping me do that. Okay, horology, what is it? I know you think it is and what you wish it were, but it's not the study of your mom's. Wow, I did not say that, Siri said that is very inappropriate. Okay, horology comes from the Greek for hora, ora meaning hour or time. Now a horologist is someone who studies the measurement or the instruments of measurement of time, but in common parlance, horology now kind of refers to mechanical timekeeping. So if you're like, is there a rift between mechanical and electronic timekeeping?

Well, let's just say that was some foreshadowing for you. Okay, so prepare to learn how many goddamn tiny pieces are used to make an old school mechanical watch and how expensive watches can get and how much coffee watchmakers drink and what would happen if you scared one and the history of timekeeping. There's so much information in this, you're never going to look at your watch again, quite the same. So I found this horologist by Googling horologist plus Los Angeles just took a stab and I came across a few articles about this one dude in GQ LA times and I was shocked to see a photo

of him and he appeared to be under 100 years old, which was odd for a horologist. He looks like a California type who has definitely surfed at least once and he may have had a short ponytail. Honestly, I don't remember because there was a dog in the office and I got so excited. I got distracted. I can't remember. Anyway, horologist, I needed to know his deal. So I drove to a business park south of the airport to sit down in the break room of the

Weiss Watch Company, an LA based, handmade, old school, but also new school mechanical watch company. And I asked this nice man a million questions, please enjoy professional horologist Cameron Weiss. Weiss? Is that Weiss? Cameron has owned the Weiss Watch Company for four years. How did you start a watch company?

I mean, because you're a young person, you're like, what, like under, you're in your 30s, right? 20s? Not yet. Here's where I awkwardly try to ascertain Cameron's age because listen, in my defense, he looks young as hell. He has that kind of Southern California guy look, but he carries himself and he speaks like a tweed clad professor.

It's very confusing. You're in your 20s. Yeah, 29. How did you start a watch company in your 20s? How did you do that? I was fortunate to find watchmaking pretty young. How did you get obsessed with horology and clocks? What was like the first thing?

Do you remember cracking open a watch when you were like five and being like, what's happening in here? I don't know about the first thing, but pretty early on I was given a cheap little plastic watch. I think it had alligators on it or something, but it was just, it was when I was a little kid and I really enjoyed wearing it. Something about it, it just felt nice to have it on my wrist. That was the beginning.

I really needed, I needed a visual of this. I searched for alligators plus kids' watches and I didn't turn up anything and then I realized what if it was a crocodile and then I realized what if it was a clock o' dial and then I got bummed and overwhelmed because clock o' dial is such a good idea. I'd have to quit my whole life. I'd have to pursue that as a children's watch company, but I was relieved, whew, there's already a kid's book of that name. Somebody's on it, good job.

I can continue with my life as planned. Anyway, from the alligator watch Cameron became interested in stopwatches. Then I found my way into a watchmaking school. Cameron went to school. He did that for two years, full time. Was able to train in Switzerland as well. Whoa. I did not ask him about the landscape or chocolate and I regret that.

Eventually I was confident enough to start my own brand. How old were you when you started going to watchmaking school? Were you the youngest person there? Because I feel like I've met a couple horologists and they're all like 70. Are you always the youngest when you go to meetups? Yeah, meetups, definitely. In school, I wasn't the youngest. But it's more so because there's very few people who are actually admitted into schools.

How rigorous is it? Do you have to have great eyesight and not shaky hands? Yeah, that along with a couple of certain learning styles, being able to focus for long periods of time, maybe sit there for eight hours working on bending one little piece of metal into a certain shape or filing something perfectly flat, being able to focus and keep your patience is very important. So things like that, the teachers kind of weed out people who wouldn't be able to handle that.

So they're like no spazs, no dicks. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially. Exactly. That's a major time investment to teach someone watchmaking. So they don't want to teach it to someone who might not actually succeed in the program. Right.

They're like go do something else. Yeah. They're like fixed pinball machines, could be a bartender. I imagine it's a very quiet classroom also. Yeah, it can be. Yeah. Because if you go up behind a horologist and you startle them while they're working on these movements, like you will get stabbed, I feel like.

Yeah, it's not a good idea. And tweezers and screwdrivers are very sharp. Okay, so watch movements are tiny, right? But are you also interested in clocks? Are you more interested in wristwatches and pocket watches and smaller items? Personally, I'm interested in anything mechanical that keeps time really. For the business, we only make wristwatches. And I don't do any kind of clockmaking.

It's a completely different craft. Really? Yeah. Okay. So, basically, they're all mechanical and not quartz, right? That's correct. Yeah. Okay.

So, can you explain the difference between a mechanical watch and a quartz watch? Yeah. Mechanical watches are powered by springs and they can either be wound by hand by turning the crown or they could be wound by a weight in the back of the watch that actually moves with your arm movements. A quartz watch is battery powered. So, you actually have a battery that is then putting energy through a quartz crystal. Okay.

And the crystal oscillates back and forth. And that's why it's a quartz watch. Yeah. How do you feel about lyrics that reference watches? I didn't know that with a mechanical watch, wearing it winds it until I heard a Jay-Z lyric about it. Yeah. I need to give a special thank you to the website Wrap Genius, which is now just called

Genius. I liked it better when it was Wrap Genius, but this site will explain all of your, I don't know what this lyric is or what it means, problems. So, if you remember, I'll set the scene, 2011, a Jay-Z Kanye West song comes out. There's a line Jay-Z says, ball so hard, got a broke clock, rollies that don't tick-tock, ball so hard, you don't even have time to wear your watches because automatic watches of the mechanical variety wind themselves just by wearing them. So, he has so many nice watches that they don't even work because he doesn't even wear

them enough. And when you have a rollie that doesn't tick-tock, that's good. That means the hand sweeps and it's authentic, unlike a tick-tock, tick-tock quartz imitation Rolex. So, how does Cameron feel about rap lyrics? Does he love them as much as I do? I mean, it's something that doesn't really appeal to me. Okay.

Moving on. How do you feel about watches being kind of, not status symbols, but like jewelry as well as something functional? Like which part of it appeals to you, the functionality or the style of it? I mean, that brings me back to why I chose watches in the first place to be my interest kind of was you have this artwork and it's the mechanical movement, which has this whole watchmaking background behind it, all the history that goes into it, all the mechanics. It's like a work of art.

Then you put it inside of the watch case and you can actually carry that piece of art on your wrist and it functions too. So it's like a little motor that is encased on your wrist. You can bring it anywhere, not like at your Mercedes or your car, which you park outside and you can't bring it inside. So the wristwatch to me appeals for both those reasons, the mechanics and the art. And just for the record, I don't have a Mercedes, but if I did, I also would not bring it in the building.

Exactly. My like 2007 Prius is not something I can bring in. So it's the art and the functionality of it. How many parts are there in a wristwatch? Like roughly like, can you describe how it works? Super, super basic for. Yeah, you have, so you have two springs. You have a mainspring, which is in the barrel, which is where we store the power.

OK. So instead of having a battery, you have the mainspring. And that, once it's been wound either by your hand, the movement of your hand or by physically turning the crown, it stores the energy and then it goes through a gear train. At the end of the gear train, there's an escapement. What's an escapement? The escapement, the easiest way to explain it is if you think about a pendulum on a clock, it swings back and forth.

Well, the escapement in a watch is the same thing, except it's just been designed to fit in a watch. Oh, so it's a coiled spring. OK, all right. So you have these two opposing springs. One stores the energy, one releases the energy in a in a certain fashion where we know exactly how slowly it releases the energy and we harness that to actually translate it to the hands. I'm going to explain this again really quick in non-horology terms.

Number one, you wind that little knob. That knob coils up a mainspring that gets all tense and it wants so badly to go boy, this is the mainspring in a mechanical watch. But it's in this little barrel kind of dish. It keeps it from doing that. The barrel transfers all that wound up energy to a gear train, which is just a series of wheels with little notches or cogs. It's all very steampunk.

And what stops those wheels from just spinning out all that potential energy at once is a thing called an escapement. And the escapement regulates how fast the watch goes. The escape wheel has these crazy notches that look like insane sawblades and they lock and only let it turn a little bit at a time. Now, the escape wheel turning a little bit at a time makes a weighted balance wheel swing back and forth like a pendulum. That's regulated by another spring called a hairspring.

And that makes the hands on the watch face tick off the moment until your death or the next time you eat a hot dog or whatever the future holds for you. Oh, also, together, the balance wheel and the hairspring are called an harmonic oscillator. I think that's cute. Did you know that to oscillate is to swing back and forth, but to oscillate is to sloppy kiss? Isn't that gross?

How do you know if it's right? Like, do you have nightmares about springs not being the right tension? No, no, I mean, everything is it's traditional watchmaking. So it's been tested over time. What we make today is the same thing that was made 100 years ago. OK. OK. Brief, brief history of timekeeping devices. 1500 BC, sundials, 1300 BC, water clocks.

So water would drip and that would fill something that would show you how much time is passed, 800 candle clocks. You'd burn a candle depending on how tall the candle was. You knew what time it was. There were also incense clocks, burnt some incense. When a different smell would hit you, you'd be like, oh, it's time for me to go to work. In 1500, spring driven clocks became a thing. And then in 1656, thanks to Galileo, pendulum clocks were invented.

And then from there, the latest technology was quartz clocks and atomic clocks. And atomic clocks rely on measuring the vibrations of certain atoms as their electrons vault around. And atomic clocks are by far the most accurate. They're so accurate they won't lose a single second over the next. You ready for this? 15 billion years. You and I will not be around.

When do we start caring about time for reels for reels? Well, mid 1800s, so many places just had local times. There's like, let's say it's two o'clock around here. It didn't really matter what was happening a few hours away until we started hopping on trains. And then we needed to know what times this train going to be here. So in 1884, there was a prime meridian conference in Washington, D.C. We're like, we're doing this.

We're having time zones, get your shit together, people. And so the world was divided into 24 different time zones. Everyone had a certain time. Everyone's like, get a watch. Come on, people, be on time. So clocks have been around for a while is what I'm trying to say. So we don't really have nightmares because it's nothing new. It's like.

It's like if you're a painter, you know, everyone's been using paints for a long time. We're not trying some new fancy paint that might disappear in a day or two. It might fade or something like that. It's all traditional watchmaking. So there's great watchmakers that I. Borrow all of that engineering and physics and everything that they did. I borrow that and put it into our watches. Were you good at physics and chemistry and sciences as a child?

Or were you better at just like, I'm going to take the TV apart and put it back together before my parents come home. Yeah, I have more of a mechanical mind. Hands on. If I can physically have something in front of me, take it apart. How are you with like IKEA bookshelves? I have no problem with IKEA stuff. OK, all the stuff that goes into IKEA, the screws, the pegs,

everything, they're way larger than watch parts. Right. OK, which brings me to watch parts. Roughly how many parts are in you're wearing one of your watches, which is gorgeous, by the way. How many parts are in that mechanically? In our watch, it's about 150 pieces. OK, 150 pieces and they're all the size of what? Not a sesame seed, like a I don't even like a piece of confetti.

Like how big are these parts? A lot of them are about the size of a grain of rice. Some of them are smaller, some are bigger. It depends on which component. And do you drink coffee? Yes, you do. Yeah. How do you not have shaky, like Captain Shaky hands? Well, I find that there's a certain amount of coffee, right?

And when you kind of get over that threshold, that's when you start to get shaky. Just the right amount of coffee is good. OK, I have no problem with it. Keeps me awake, even if I'm sitting there at the bench quietly. But too much coffee and there's no more watchmaking. I move over and start doing emails and business stuff. Yeah. How many coffees is it? You know, it's like two espressos or like one.

Oh, it's more than that. Maybe four espressos. Are you serious? Yeah. God, if I had four espressos, I'd just be like sweating and shaking. So the fact that you can even do that, that's amazing. So you had to learn that probably by trial and error. Exactly. Where you're like Cameron, get away from the bench. This is too much. I can't can't watch make. That brings me to a question.

Is it harder to make a lady's watch because they're tinier parts? Yes. Really? Yeah. OK. So do they cost more because they're tinier parts? Tell me about this. Tell me everything. That's the thing. They don't normally cost more. OK. And there's actually a lot of vintage women's watches that were mechanical that watchmakers will not even repair today because they're so small. Wow. Yeah.

They're very hard to find people to work on those watches. Are a lot of watchmakers, guys, fixers, parologists? In Switzerland, it's not so much male dominated. What is it about Switzerland? Why are they cornering the market on watches? Why are they so good at it? They've been doing it a long time. I never knew this, but during World War Two,

because Switzerland was neutral, that let their watch industry continue making consumer timekeeping things. Other nations of the world were like, if we're going to make an apparatus, it better bomb someone. The Swiss were like, I'm just going to keep making watches. So as a result, the Swiss watch industry had a pretty good monopoly. They're like, I'm just over here making watches, eating chocolate. I can't function without a wristwatch.

But what how do you feel about the relationship a person has to time when they're wearing a clock face as opposed to, say, like a digital clock in their pocket? It's almost like a crutch, I think, when people pull out their phones and they're like, you know, just sucked into their phone, check in Facebook, check in email, whereas the watch is more of like bringing you back into the real world. What they're you have a mechanical item that's on your wrist, that it's real pieces, they move, there's a spring in there.

You have to wind it every day or you have to move to keep it going. Right. So it's just for me, it's a little more grounded in the real world than pulling out a phone and looking at that. You know, it has nothing to do with watches, but it does have something to do with watches is punctuality. I live in Los Angeles, so everyone shows up like four hours late to things if they show up at all. Some people are punctual, some people aren't. I always run a few minutes behind, to be honest.

I wanted to find out why this was, why essentially I'm a garbage person. So I Googled it in 2001, Jeff Conte, a psych professor, ran a study. He separated participants into type A people who are ambitious and competitive and type B, who are usually creative, they're explorative. Now, these are also known as tight asses and societal fuck ups. Just kidding. And he asked these people to judge without clocks, how long it took for one minute to go by.

And type A people felt like a minute passed in about 58 seconds. So they were close. Type B participants thought a minute had passed after about 77 seconds. So clearly type B people are just on their own time. So give them that. But you know what? Either way, everyone was wrong. Everyone overestimated it. So and also what is time anyway?

Time is a construct. Oh, man. This is the time in the episode where I ask about existential bullshit. Do you have any like existential crises like working on watches about like time and like impermanence and mortality? And like, does watchmaking ever factor into that psychologically for you? The only time I ever think about anything like that is. When I service watches, like watches that come back in,

they have moving parts, so they only cleaning and oiling just like a car engine. But realizing that at some point, somebody is going to have this watch and I'll be long gone, but it'll need somebody to work on it, service it or somebody will pull it out of a lock box in 100 years and be like, wow, what's the story with this watch? But that's the only time I really think about not being around. And, you know, these things lasting for so long. When True Detective came out, did you get a lot of times

of flat circle questions from your friends where you like, OK, guys? I did not. OK. Do you ever think a lot about the time, space continuum and like whether or not time is a fourth dimension? No, not really. I feel like no. Yeah. Just I had to check. I think all all I've done is just revealed that I have an anxiety disorder

about mortality. Yeah. Yeah. OK, here's the part where Cameron almost makes me start crying. The previous generations actually were able to maintain mechanical watchmaking and kind of promote the art form behind it rather than just focusing on, well, it keeps time. Right. Because if you just focus on the time aspect, a quartz watch is far superior. It keeps better time and it costs a lot less money.

But a mechanical watch would be like the actual painting. Whereas the quartz watch would be the poster print. Got it. So the poster print is going to be very accurate. Colors won't fade. It'll be really nice and perfect, just like the last one. But the actual painting on canvas, that one is going to be unique. It's a real work of art.

The artist may have had a slightly different brush stroke or so that one has more of an artistic appeal, almost like each one is unique. Right. This is making me want to cry. That's like such a wonderful way of putting it. Like that, that makes every mechanical watch seem so much more emotional. Do you know what I mean? When you consider that there's like a person behind it working on this, who's gone through all this schooling, squinting, like looking at these tiny cogs.

Yeah, that's pretty nuts. How do you even deal with those tiny tools? It's a lot of repetition and training. Um, learning to look at things in a certain way. Being able to see perfection is really important. And when you go to school, you actually spend about the first six months just learning how to see if your work is perfect or not. And by perfect, I mean like down to 20 times magnification.

So learning to see any imperfection. And then actually act on correcting it is a big part of learning how to work with everything, even just making sure your tools are perfect. That's the base for good watchmaking. Is that part of your personality? Are you a perfectionist? Is your house like immaculate or your tax returns sparkling? Um, it does kind of be becoming grained in everything you do.

However, I do also enjoy working on cars and the reason I like that is because if something doesn't fit, you can bang it with a hammer. If something's not exactly perfect, it doesn't matter so much. So it's there's other parts of my life where I kind of, uh, relax a little bit and don't focus so much on the tiny little, uh, details that I focus on with watches. Yeah. I'm sure cars just seem like these big crazy, like working on a dinosaur, like a, like doing surgery on a huge animal.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like that's got to be so different. Yeah. And all the parts are greasy and dirty and watchmaking is much cleaner. When you decided to form your own company, um, Weiss, like what, what did you want to do differently? Well, I truly believe that, uh, Mechanical watches are very important

because we don't need clocks or watches. We have that everywhere. The time telling part is not my main interest. The art behind it is so beautiful and the amount of work that goes into it is recognized. Um, so for me, I wanted to take that and, um, I wanted to take that. Expose more people to it. I think there's a lot of people who they don't even really know about mechanical

watches. They may have heard it, but they don't understand it. Um, I'll show my watch to people and I'll tell them it's mechanical and then they'll see the movement and they'll still ask me, where's the battery? Right. I think a lot of people like, of course a watch is mechanical and you're like, no, there's actually like taxonomic things. Like if it's a quartz watch, there's a battery and, uh, if it's a mechanical

watch, it's all based on spring's intention and there's far more parts and more complexity to it. Yeah. Right. It's, I feel like you're kind of like the jack white of horology. There's something about mechanical watches. It's very like a kind of like, I'm, I appreciate hearing music on wax cylinders and vinyl and you know what I mean?

Very much so. Um, just like winding your watch every morning, it becomes this ritual. And because my watches have a display back, I always wind mine looking at the movement. A display back is where if you flip over a mechanical watch, you can see the guts tick talking and working and clickety clocketing and doing all of their horological magic. Now I thought these were just glass backs, but I looked and know oftentimes in really good watches, including Cameron's, they're not glass.

They're made of polished sapphire crystal, which is hard as hell. And I watch all the wheels turn and it's, it's like maybe 30 seconds, but I do it every morning. And then when I look at my watch, I know that I've wound it and set it. And it's almost like this connection you have, um, like if you had an animal and you feed it in the morning, you know, you're feeding your watch every morning. Oh, that's an interesting way of looking at it. It's like kind of a 30 second mechanical meditation.

Yeah. And I love that your watches have that display back. It's kind of like a sleeping beauty glass coffin where you can see inside. Yeah. Right. And was that like one of the first things that when you're like, well, I have a watch company, it's going to be display backs all the way. Definitely.

Yeah. Because like I said, I want to, I want to show mechanical watchmaking to a lot more people, especially here in the U S where we used to make a lot of watches. It used to be a major industry here. There used to be a lot of watchmakers, um, around the early 1900s. It was a massive industry. Right. And you would actually meet watchmakers.

But now I'm the only watchmaker that people meet usually. They're like, Oh, I've never met a watchmaker. This is amazing. What do you, what does that mean? What do you do? How did you become a watchmaker? It's always, um, interesting to talk to people. So did you listen to like every drop of S town?

That podcast about horology? No, I did not. Did you listen to any of it? I have not yet. Cameron. Just going to bounce in here with a quick email update. I figured, okay, we recorded this a few months ago. He probably listened to it.

So I'll get his reaction. I emailed the company. I got this back. Cameron still hasn't listened to S town, but I would estimate he's had about 70 people ask him thus far. Oops. End quote. I'm just saying, just put it on your list.

Do you listen to anything when you're watchmaking or do you just need like the sound of silence? Usually silence, but sometimes if I have a lot to get done, I'll turn on some music and that helps me sit at the bench for a longer period of time. What kind of jams? Um, we already know he's not a huge fan of Jay-Z and Kanye. Classical or just like old Carly Simon. Sometimes when I polish, I'll listen to a classical music.

If I'm at the polishing machine, but usually just a bunch of random mixes. You're just like Pandora anything. Yeah, exactly. Play me some hot jams. Yeah. I have a bunch of questions that people want to ask you. So I'm going to fire them up. This is kind of like a speed round or I'm just going to lob a bunch of questions

that people want me to ask you. Okay. Um, Emily was like, did you listen to S town? Everyone wants to know if you listen to S town. Elspeth wants to know what is your absolute favorite timepiece you've ever worked on? The rarest or your favorite that you've ever worked on? The rarest that I've ever worked on was a grand complication from Audemars Piguet. First off, grand complication sounds like a Wes Anderson movie.

Is this an expensive watch? It's not too bad. It retails for $996,000. But the good news is that I think there's free shipping. They've utilized multiple complications in one watch. Okay. Split second chronograph, perpetual calendar, minute repeater. And a lot of people, this won't mean anything to them.

I don't know what any of those mean. Now a complication, is that like when there's a dial within the dial? Well, there will be extra sub dials because the more complex a watch is, the more it needs to tell you. Okay. The minute repeater, though, is what I like the most about it. What is that? So the minute repeater is, it's a chiming watch.

So you actually pull a slide and then it will sound off the time. Oh. So kind of like a grandfather clock. It will actually repeat the time to you on demand. How? Down to the minute. How does it do that? That seems like it's all mechanical.

So it's a musical instrument also. Exactly. How big was this thing? It certainly doesn't seem that big. It's still smaller than like a pocket watch. That's crazy. Yeah. So you got to work on that?

Yeah. Were you so nervous? Yeah. How did you prep for it? Well, there just wasn't any prepping for me. It was just a simple little fix on it. I'm physically nauseous just thinking about how much it is. So that watch has 1500 pieces.

Go God. Yeah. And they're all about the size of a grain of rice. In that, because it's so complex. Many of them are like an eighth the size of a grain of rice. I can't even tiny. I can't. I don't understand how, how you're not.

Your palms aren't just like so sweaty. You can't even handle this stuff. Just move slow. Very slow. OK. Lena wants to know if you're a horologist. I love this question a lot. Do you feel like a total sell out if you want to buy a Fitbit

or a smart watch? Um, I would feel pretty weird wearing that. Yeah, it would be hard to tell people what I do all day if I had a Fitbit on my wrist. Right. Um, not to say there's anything wrong with it, but maybe on the other wrist and then a mechanical watch on, on, on one wrist with the Fitbit on the other. Yeah, I feel like you'd have to get an ankle Fitbit or something.

You know what I mean? Hide that under your pants. Exactly. You can't, your wrist is good real estate. Yeah. It better be reserved for like a mechanical watch, maybe a medical bracelet, but I don't think you could just like slap a Livestrong band on there and like a Fitbit.

Okay. A few people asked, Britt wants to know why some clocks click as seconds tick by, but others are silent. So they all make noise. All of them. Okay. Um, the difference is how loud. Oh.

Uh, and it really just has to do with a couple of the components that actually knock into each other. Oh, knock into each other on accident or on purpose, on purpose. Okay. There's a, there's five noises that the mechanical watch will make. And that's actually how we time the mechanical watch and make sure that it is keeping time accurately because we know how many, uh, how many noises it should make in a set period of time based on the frequency of that escapement, the

balance wheel and hairspring. What we'll do is we actually lengthen and shorten the spring, that hairspring in the watch. Oh, got it. So that's how if a watch is fast or slow, it would have something to do probably with the hairspring. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. It would likely have something to do with, uh, with your hairspring or some of the oils that are on the, on the parts associated with the escapement. Okay. You have to wash your hands before you use it. Probably writer. You get your grimy, dirty hand. Yeah, definitely.

No touching the parts with your bare hands. Oh, you just need, like, you need tiny tweezers. Everything is only touched with tweezers, uh, and small other little prodding type devices to move things around. Uh, we never touched the components with our bare hands. Yeah. I guess there's like, you don't want pepperoni smudges on that thing. Exactly.

Funniness is very important when working with watches. No one's eating lasagna at their desk. No, definitely not. God, can you imagine what a nightmare? Yeah. Oh God. I would not want to think about, uh, think about opening that watch up in 10 years and finding little bits of red sauce or something like that.

Oh God, no. Okay. Well, tell me what your last question, um, last two questions, like, what is your least favorite thing about what you do? And then we'll end on a positive note. You can tell me your favorite thing about what you do. But what's your least, like, what's the one thing that drives you crazy or that you didn't expect to encounter when you got into this field or questions that

people ask you that are annoying? Um, everything about the making of watches, I absolutely love. However, the business side sometimes gets in the way of that. Well, often gets in the way of that. And it kind of takes me away from why I got into this in the first place, which was to work on the, the watches. So I'd say my most favorite thing is developing something new and designing and kind of prototyping, testing something, making something that I haven't made

before that is very exciting to me. So do you have a favorite moment that you've ever had doing what you do? More so something I didn't expect that would be really exciting is driving around and looking at the person next to us in the car and they're wearing a watch that I made something like that is really exciting. That just blows me away and it reminds me why I got into this, which was to expose more people to mechanical watches and try and restore an industry and just create this, uh, um, resurgence of watchmaking here in the U S.

Do you ever roll down your window and you're like, bro, that's my watch. Um, I haven't in the car, but when I see people in person, I'll usually say, I like your watch and then I'll show them mine and they'll let them know that I made theirs. Do they freak out? Yeah, usually. Yeah, I bet people want to hug you, but they're like, good job, bro. Or they give you like that back pat, that man back pat.

That means I respect you. And sometimes I won't even notice. I'll be at a restaurant or something and I'll hear someone say, Cameron, Cameron, is that you? And, you know, lo and behold, it's somebody that's got my watch and no way. Yeah. They recognize me and you're like famous horologist over here. Thanks very much.

I never would have thought. Well, where can people find you? Number one, what's website for your company? And also, do you guys maintain like a social media presence so people can gawk at your wares? Yeah, uh, our website is vice watch company.com and that's all spelled out. Um, we also have, uh, Facebook and Instagram. So we, and on Instagram and Facebook, we're oftentimes showing the workshop

and how we make certain, certain components, how we assemble something, new things we're working on. Uh, so for people who are really interested in watchmaking, they can kind of get an inside look at how watches are made. And if someone wants to be a horologist? Well, start young, maybe no. So you don't have to find it young. If you're interested, um, for me, it just so happens.

I found it young and it's a major passion of mine. So that's perfect for me. So if you happen to own a vice watch and you see Cameron around, you should definitely high five him. And if you're wondering how much his watches cost, which after writing up this episode, I was like, how much are these watches cost? They're not that bad. They're mechanical watches.

They started under $1,000. Some of them go to $7,000, but in terms of other watches, they're not like second mortgage level, expensive watches, really nice watches. I'm just going to say, if you're a Haraloo Jafile, Haralafile, Horafile, so I suppose it's time to wrap this up. Thank you guys for listening. Subscribe, rate, review, all those things. And thank you to everyone who is supporting on Patreon.

You can support for as little as a dollar a month, 25 cents an episode, and that gets you access to behind the scenes pictures. And you can also vote on questions forologists first. So if you feel like doing that, go to patreon.com slash allergies and thank you everyone for making this possible by doing that. I heart you. Don't be afraid to ask smart people so much. Stupid questions before the bell tolls for us all.

Next week, bugs and tomology. Hackadermatology, homiology, cryptozoology, letology, nanotechnology, meteorology, nephrology, nephrology, seriology.