Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 41evaluation 12uncertainty 8commitment 5observation 3recommendation 1prediction 1preference 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
72 published records
“If you want to know, every time an episode drops, check out our email list. It is the only place where we will share a hint of what our next episode will be, and we’ll share corrections, updates, and little tidbits that we learned from previous episodes.”
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“Yeah, you can go spend a lot of money and buy a 911, but you have the functioning alibi of, well, I needed a car and I wanted a car. I like driving.”
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“I think at the end of the day, though, I maintained that we can debate the semantics of luxury products, price points, et cetera.”
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“We’ve thrown a lot of missives here and there, but we should just say like this is an unbelievable fantastic company that makes a remarkable product, and the strategy and execution by which they’ve executed that is best in the world ever.”
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“Big thank you to James Dowling, co-author of The Best of Time, which is I think probably we went through all the big coffee table books on Rolex and probably the best one out there.”
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“I think maybe the more interesting question is, rewind back to the lifestyle era, post–World War II when they’re launching all the professional watches, the sport watches.”
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“When you’re thinking about what enables Apple’s profits versus Rolex’s profits, if I go buy a Rolex, I will pay about 10 times more than I paid for my Apple Watch.”
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“I think the interesting thing is to stack them against who is their closest competitor.”
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“You go to New York City and hope to get to Canal Street to try to buy some fake Rolexes on your trip to New York. I think that’s totally right.”
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“I think the industry went that way, and they happened to be the most prestigious high-volume player in it.”
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“I think he’s probably known and respected in the industry, but wasn’t a large player.”
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“I think the issue, if I were to buy any shares of Rolex, would be that I could never do anything with them because I could never sell the shares.”
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“Even in handbags where Louis Vuitton is so… They print money, somewhere around 20%. I think Rolex defines the category of watches.”
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“A lot of words in there that we will get to, but at the moment where we are is chronometer, officially certified.”
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“I suspect that this is part of the reason not to have gone directly into retail.”
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“I think that’s right, and it intentionally meant nothing. It was easy to pronounce, it was easy to say.”
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“I don’t know if it’s worth $200 billion, but it’s worth $100-plus billion, zero doubt in my mind.”
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“Patek also, at least now, I don’t know if it was the case back then, they’re in a very different part of the market than Rolex.”
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“Anyway the point is, from 1962 until 1995, if you like James Bond and you wanted to have a little bit of James Bond in your life too, then you wanted to wear a Submariner on your wrist.”
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“I think the important thing is they maintained the option to go play the other strategy that Omega was playing if they really needed to, but they just hoped it wouldn’t come to that.”
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“There was a half step along the way to a technology that turned out to be a detour that actually wasn’t the future.”
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““To my longtime friend, René Jeanneret,” who I believe was Rolex head of communications at the time, “who enabled me to always be on time.”
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“Then in the 1980s when the Italian thing happens, the Paul Newman thing happens, and the collector’s market gets built, I think the first real big move that Rolex makes into the luxury world.”
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“If you like this episode, go check out LVMH, Hermès, or Porsche by searching in any podcast player. Listen to ACQ2 because we won’t have another episode for another month.”
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“All over magazines across America. Maybe the world, too, I don’t know. It’s incredible.”
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“Now, I don’t know exactly what the Swiss Franc to US Dollar exchange rate was at 1900, but today the Swiss Franc is stronger than the dollar.”
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“Here it is. He’s wearing (I think) a Rolex GMT and a Submariner on the same wrist.”
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“I believe at some point, Rolex starts actually testing their watches to significantly greater depth than what is advertised for this reason.”
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“I don’t think it’s worth much detail, but I think actually for a long time the fake market was great for Rolex.”
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“His second wife, Betty, loved the Datejust, and still to this day, the Lady Datejust (I believe) is the single best-selling model in the Rolex catalog.”
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“In 1953, he’s filming the documentary, The Silent World, in the Mediterranean Sea that is going to go on to win the Oscar, the Academy Award for best documentary (I think) in 1956.”
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“You could throw it to the bottom of the ocean and it’ll keep time forever, et cetera. Like, oh, this is why this is important.”
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“I think a lot of the time they just had resources and structure that let them find these opportunities to do a rational, logical, low risk thing, and continue to pull away from competitors.”
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“Just that Rolex certainly was, and I’m sure probably still is the most faked, certainly watch brand if not any brand in the world. I think that was good for them, not so much recently.”
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“Now is a good time (I think) to bring up, there’s one more piece of Rolex the corporation and the story, which for the longest time (I think) both of us were totally puzzled by.”
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“Most of them I think are at 10% extra margin of safety, but I think the dive watches are an extra 25%.”
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“I’m sure there are some people, but I think for a lot of people who love Rolex, they’re also going to own a Panerai or they’re going to own a whatever, and that doesn’t hurt their relationship with Rolex.”
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“There are maybe two with Porsche and Hermès, but I think you’re right that’s Hermès.”
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“Even to this day, I believe the market of buyers for Rolex watches is basically 50/50 men and women.”
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“As waitlist management becomes more important, I think that becomes more critical.”
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“Again, because of the way the market works, it doesn’t matter that that’s a very small number of people.”
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“I think he even wore two. There are like some photos of him where he is wearing two Rolexes.”
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“Kodak, I believe, was the first invented product brand name, and it was a name that meant nothing.”
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“I think your points are valid about they are increasingly wanting that customer touchpoint, especially as it comes to things like waitlists.”
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“Even in, I don’t know, 2010 or something, you could walk into a jeweler who’s an authorized Rolex dealer and you could just buy something out of the case, which you cannot do today.”
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“Hermès didn’t, and Rolex followed this exact playbook over the last 10 years of not price-gauging themselves out of the market, but intentionally limiting supply, letting the secondary market go nuts, and then but keeping an even keel for themselves. Now that there’s been a bit of a reset, they’re stronger than ever I think.”
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“I don’t know that André and they were thinking about it necessarily as luxury yet—and it’s not really luxury yet, it’s much more lifestyle at this point in time; it would later become luxury—but this is his real, real genius.”
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“Diving down to great depths, taming oilwell wildfires. I think there’s even one where they’re walking in a volcano.”
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“The movements are incredibly high quality, and I think consumers actually might be getting a pretty good deal on Tudor watches.”
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“I think if that were the only factor, Rolex probably would’ve stayed in England.”
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“The reason I think that Rolex is a luxury company extraordinaire is managing the market as opposed to participating in it.”
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“We will happily come to Geneva and talk to you about it. Okay, so Ben, as you were saying though, the Datejust.”
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“There are so many of these moments in Rolex history, really in all the stories we tell, where the company does everything in their power to align the stars perfectly and it doesn’t work.”
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“I think about it as this beautiful blend of French beauty and appreciation for aesthetic and Swiss precision.”
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“I think that probably rarely happens, but to Hans’s original vision of I want everybody to be able to own a Rolex, this is the way that they can have that happen.”
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“One of his maniacal control things was, I believe, up until he died or pretty close to it, he did all the creative for all the advertisement.”
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“Ultimately, after the war in 1919, Hans moves both himself and the official company headquarters to Geneva, where of course it still is to this day. And even to this day—this is crazy—design, sales, marketing, and (I think) final assembly all happen in Geneva while production of the movement still happens up in the mountains in Bienne.”
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“Rolex is completely in control. They could sell their products for much, much more than they do, and they do not because it is the right long-term decision to do so.”
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“I think if at least you buy the premise that if they were to operate their own retail locations, they would be pushed by customers to have more things in those stores than just the six or seven core Rolex models, which you probably can’t walk out of the store holding one of them anyway.”
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“The first quartz watch that hit the market in 1969 from Seiko was dependent on the invention and miniaturization of the transistor and integrated circuit before it could actually happen. That’s why we’re stuck waiting from the 1920s all the way to 1969 before it can be used in a watch.”
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“Then at some point in time—could be a couple of months, could be a couple of years—you’ll get the call that your model is available. The Daytona is (I think) the only model where there is no waitlist.”
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“Talk to me about terroir. I know exactly what you’re talking about, but établissage, I don’t know.”
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“In part, the lesson is it is incorrect to describe markets by the products in them.”
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“Created the modern watch collector market. And all of the crazy prices, auctions, and insanity that occurs today, (I think) you can say really is all because of the Daytona.”
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“IMG was the first modern talent celebrity endorsement agency, and really visionary of Mark McCormack to have founded in 1960.”
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“James Cameron, on a man submersible, takes the Sea-Dweller Deepsea Challenge—it actually is (I think) all of those brands; they include the sub-brand with the parent brand in this thing—down to the Marianas Trench to the deepest part of the ocean.”
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“I will say, very interestingly, in 1932, Omega released a waterproof watch, which is, I don’t know, half a decade after Rolex.”
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“Unlike everything else that is incredibly tight inside a watch, this component, the balance almost floats and it moves with really low friction. It’s weird because it’s the opposite of everything else that’s in the whole watch.”
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“This is where I think Rolex may have bought the shares back from Aegler. But again, we don’t know and we’ll never know because no one at Rolex will ever talk about that.”
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“Fascinatingly, and I’m not sure if this is counterintuitive or not, I don’t remember 2014 thinking about the watch industry because I didn’t, but it was the best thing to ever happen to Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Patek, et cetera.”
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“Rolex was better positioned than most of the other Swiss companies because they had already transitioned to lifestyle.”
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“I think the Birkin bag is a really good comp for it because pricewise, they’re actually pretty similar.”
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