Ep. 56 - Josh Shanks (Watchonista)

Today I welcome Watchonista’s Josh Shanks, and we begin in a way I certainly didn’t expect: we talk about the birth of snowboards. We then go into the car culture of Indiana, and then his career which was utterly unpredictable. Josh went from working retail at Apple thanks to an early Mac-specific blog he wrote to then take his technological prowess down the path of Private Equity and Hedge funds. Josh shares a vacation that would effectively change his life forever. You see, he had no idea the rabbit hole he was about to go down when he purchased a Rolex in place of the watch he broke on that trip to the Bahamas. And I’m fairly confident he wasn’t predicting he’d marry a woman from Switzerland that worked for Richemont and encourage him to also work in watches. But life sure does take some strange, serendipitous turns sometimes, and Josh’s story offers no exceptions. In his current role as Editor in Chief of Watchonista, Josh is looking to create Watch content that isn’t what you usually see and read, with an intense focus on the collector community which is a much smaller subset than most would think. Josh also weighs in on hype culture and how it’s affected the watch collecting community, and he even gives us a glimpse behind the curtain of those awesome-looking Oris gatherings in Vail, Colorado. All that and more in what was a really fun conversation, so please enjoy it.