Beyond The Dial

If you're flipping watches constantly and wondering how to slow that down, Allen's got a method for picking out keepers and avoiding flippers. The method grew out of a talk Allen gave at a Gear Patrol event about creating the perfect three-watch collection. He wanders into Spiritual Materialism, a developing theory he's been tinkering with for about a year.

Rather than go to Vail, CO with Oris and his awesome colleagues, Allen came down with the worst stomach flu of his life, during which he entered a fever-induced delirium and started shopping for a new watch for 3-days straight.

Have you tried to settle in on just one or a few watches and find yourself bored? Are you more interested in the hunt for the new timepiece than in a long-term relationship? Allen confesses to growing bored with his carefully curated 3-watch collection and to how he began to quell that boredom by fooling around on the side. This infidelity includes springing for his first Nomos!

Why are we so excited about a recreation of a vintage movement like the Omega 321? Has digital social media and the ensuing crisis of truth prompted some of us to seek analog expressions of our authentic selves? Can a mechanical watch help us maintain authenticity?

Allen goes through his top 10 favorites of the year. Not a "best of" list, but a "my favorites" list, including some very expensive and some very affordable watches.

How do booze and pot affect your perception of time? Your sense perceptions? Your impulsivity? Find out as your host, Allen, brings his personal experiences up alongside phenomenology and medical research to form a theory of how watches connect us to eternity.

Allen's birthday watch is a Grand Seiko Limited Edition SGBH269, a watch that explores the turning of the seasons from Spring to Fall, just as Allen is turning to the autumn of his life. This episode is a meditation on mortality, nature, dying, living, and being true to your self, all in relation to this fascinating Grand Seiko.

Allen sits down with best selling novelist Gary Shteyngart to talk about how watches have figured into Gary's writing. From his New Yorker article called "Confessions of a Watch Geek" to his novel Lake Success Gary has used watches as literary devices that become windows into the internal lives of characters both real and fictional. Gary's command of watches as a topic is impeccable, and he is as fluent as anyone in going into "why they're so fascinating."

Grand Central Watch's 3rd generation leader, Steve Kivel, has turned his family's business into a high-tech service center with seven full-time watchmakers working full-time in a brand new state of the art facility. Allen and Steve sit down to discuss the ins and outs of proper watch servicing, how to vet your watchmaker, and why spending the extra money on proper servicing should be the norm but, alas, is not.

Allen's colleague Cait Bazemore comes on for a lively discussion of the emerging trend of women wearing more complex mechanical tool watches, and how the watch industry is shedding it's old-school attitudes toward so-called lady's watches. From Serena Williams to Cate Blacnhett and Lindsey Vonn, badass women are wearing some seriously badass watches these days.