#1640 - Josh Rogin

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Do you, really?

Josh Rogin (0:21)

Yeah, it's got like 22,000 followers.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

What's it called?

Josh Rogin (0:23)

It's called Watch the Ramen. It's where I combine my love of watches and my love of Japanese ramen into one Instagram account.

It's never been done before.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

That's an interesting combination.

Josh Rogin (0:32)

And what I do is I take pictures of my watches, and I review the watches and the ramen together.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

Oh.

Josh Rogin (0:38)

And I pair them, I mean, to some extent, it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek.

Joe Rogan (0:40)

There you are.

Look at that. Oh, that's hilarious. You get the fucking watch and the spoon.

Josh Rogin (0:45)

It's a Pogue. That's the Seiko version of your moon watch.

Joe Rogan (0:49)

That's a beautiful watch.

Josh Rogin (0:50)

So the story is, I don't know if you're, are you running, are you taping this? This is good shit. Okay, the story is that Admiral Pogue on his moon mission was supposed to take the first chronograph into space, and the Omega people had a branding agreement with NASA, so they gave him an Omega moon watch, and then he didn't like it. He trusted his old Seiko. That's what he trusted. So he took this watch in his pocket, which was his, and this is not the same exact watch, obviously. It's a version of, a recreation of it.

And he took off his Omega once he got into space, and he put on his Seiko chronograph, which was then forever called a POG. So this was actually the first chronograph worn in space, not the Omega one, despite what you may have heard. That was fake news.

And now that's considered a POG.

Joe Rogan (1:37)

So is that a quartz watch?

Josh Rogin (1:39)

No, that's an automatic watch.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

It's automatic, but I thought that was the problem with the watch in space, was that with no gravity, that the moving of the gears wouldn't be the same.

Josh Rogin (1:48)

Admiral POG would dare to disagree with you, because he just did it, and that was like 1973

Joe Rogan (1:53)

Maybe he didn't give a fuck about the time, he just loved that watch.

Josh Rogin (1:56)

No, no, he needed it to time, the whole point was that he needed it to time the bursts, so that he wouldn't incinerate himself in the atmosphere.

And he didn't trust the Omega, he knew how to use his watch. So he was like, I'll take this watch for the pictures, but then I'm going to get my old trusty Seiko out of my pocket, because I can't die on this mission right now, and I trust my Seiko. And that's obviously not as prestigious of a watch, but now it's amongst watch freaks and geeks, considered to be one of the ones you want to collect.

Joe Rogan (2:20)

That's so weird, because a watch expert was explaining to me the reason why the moon watch from Omega is a wind-up is because you can't rely on gravity, because the automatic movements, you know, these little things, and they swing back and forth, depending upon, like, your watch.

Josh Rogin (2:35)

I don't know if that guy was foolish or...

The Admiral Pogue is... The watch is called the Pogue for a reason.

Joe Rogan (2:43)

Right, right, right. Makes sense. Makes sense. So that's a weird combination, though. Ramen, and why didn't you just have two separate accounts?

Josh Rogin (2:50)

Well, because that has been done before.

No one's ever combined reviewing ramen restaurants and reviewing watches together, and then pairing them appropriately in most cases. No, the real reason is because, you know, I, as a lonely reporter for 17 years traveling back and forth to Japan and Asia, I just got super into the food scene, especially in Tokyo. I used to live in Tokyo. I worked for the Japanese newspaper there. I used to teach English there for a couple years. In Shin-Yokohama, Japan. I was 23, fresh out of college.

Living my best life in an apartment the size of this table. I had like one burner. But I loved it. As I got older, I started getting into watches. And then my Instagram was like all watches and ramen. My wife was like, nobody wants to see that.

She's like, can you just stop posting that? I'm like, oh, I'll just make its own thing. And then people started to like it. In the ramen community, people started to learn about watches. In the watch community, people started to learn about ramen. Communities were brought together.

People seemed to like it. Now we have a ton more followers.