This episode of The Materialist is a little different.
Usually, we talk with designers, tastemakers, collectors, and creators about the objects they love: the jewelry they wear, the pieces they make, the things they choose to bring into their lives. This conversation is about jewelry, but it is not really about looking at jewelry. In fact, Rob Bates says at one point, “I don’t really like looking at jewelry. It has no interest to me. And I’ve written about jewelry for 35 years.”
That may be the perfect way into Rob’s particular genius.
For decades, Rob has been one of the defining journalistic voices of the jewelry industry. As longtime news editor of JCK, and before that at National Jeweler, he has covered diamonds, retailers, trade shows, controversies, crises, consolidations, family businesses, lab-grown diamonds, conflict diamonds, tariffs, marketing campaigns, and all the strange, intimate, global machinery that sits behind a ring in a case.
What has kept him interested is not jewelry as decoration, but jewelry as a window into how the world works. From Rob’s perspective, the industry is a small town and a global system at once: family businesses and multinational companies, romance and commerce, ethics and marketing, gemstones and geopolitics. It touches “so many people, so many countries, so many lives,” as he puts it. Jewelry, in Rob’s telling, is not merely an accessory category. It is an industry where questions of value, truth, labor, status, love, responsibility, and storytelling all collide.
That journalistic distance makes this a different kind of Materialist episode. Rob is not especially interested in whether a piece is pretty. He is interested in what it reveals. A diamond is never just a diamond. It is a product, a symbol, a commodity, a brand, a promise, a controversy, a livelihood, and sometimes a problem. The same object can represent romance in one context, extraction in another, national development in another, and market disruption in yet another.
Much of the conversation circles around lab-grown diamonds, which Rob identifies as the biggest issue facing the industry today. His analysis is characteristically unsentimental: lab-grown diamonds succeeded not because they invented a radically new use case, but because they inserted themselves into an existing emotional and commercial structure. The mined diamond industry had spent decades building demand. Lab-grown companies arrived and said, in effect: this is the same thing, only cheaper. And, as Rob says, “nothing beats cheaper.”
But Rob is also clear that the conflict between natural and lab-grown diamonds has become less productive than it should be. The two sides “take shots at each other constantly,” even though “both things can coexist.” His deeper critique is that the diamond industry trained consumers to compare numbers and letters rather than meaning, beauty, design, or brand. Once diamonds became a grid of specifications, it became easier for consumers to comparison shop — and easier for lab-grown diamonds to compete on price.
That idea opens into one of the richer themes of the episode: what makes something “real”? Rob’s novels have returned to that question, and the jewelry industry seems almost designed to keep asking it. Is a lab-grown diamond real? Is a mined diamond more meaningful because it came from the earth? Is value created by scarcity, cost, emotion, advertising, history, or use? Rob does not pretend to resolve all of this neatly. “Everything is real,” he says. What matters, in the end, may be the human impact: what kind of person you are, what effect you have on your family, and what effect you have on other people.
The conversation also turns to the moral complexity of diamonds. Rob notes that diamonds have been associated with terrible things, but also that, at their best, they have provided jobs and helped build prosperity in places like Botswana and Namibia. We talk about visiting the Jwaneng mine in Botswana — a vast open pit that is impossible to romanticize as a physical scar on the earth, but also impossible to dismiss when you consider the education, healthcare, infrastructure, and democratic stability supported by what came out of that ground. The bumper-sticker version of the story does not work. The real story is harder, more compromised, and more interesting.
The second half of the episode shifts from jewelry to journalism — and to Rob’s own entrepreneurial leap.
After 28 years at JCK and more than five years at National Jeweler, Rob recently launched The Jewelry Wire, an independent Substack. It is a striking career move: a veteran journalist leaving the security and infrastructure of established trade media to build something in his own voice. He describes the decision with a mix of humor, anxiety, freedom, and disbelief. At nearly 60, he felt that if he was going to try something of his own, this was the moment. “At 59 and a half, I can do it,” he says.
What follows is a wonderfully honest account of becoming an entrepreneur after a lifetime inside institutions. Rob talks about leaving a secure job, worrying that people would think he had been fired, losing sleep, working harder, and discovering that writing is only part of the business. Suddenly, he has to think about marketing, branding, slogans, subscribers, advertisers, positioning, and the question every founder eventually faces: why should anybody care?
There is something especially compelling about hearing this from a journalist. Writers often imagine their work as pure craft: observe, think, write. But independent media forces the writer to become a businessperson too. Rob describes the humbling realization that The Jewelry Wire is not just “me writing on a Substack and people paying me for it.” It is a business, and he has to think like one.
That leads to a larger discussion about the changing nature of media. Trade publications once provided the infrastructure: audience, editing, distribution, sales, advertising, institutional authority. The journalist supplied expertise and reporting. In the new world, especially on platforms like Substack, the journalist becomes the publication. That brings freedom — a more personal voice, more irreverence, more direct connection to readers — but also new pressures. Rob talks about “personal brand,” audience capture, advertisers, canceled subscriptions, and the need to challenge readers rather than simply tell them what they already want to hear.
His definition of trade journalism is one of the best moments in the episode. Trade press, he says, should be like community press — part of the community, but not merely a cheerleading squad. It should help people do business better, but it should also stand apart, tell the truth, and occasionally make people unhappy. That is the tension Rob has lived with for decades: to know a world intimately, to belong to it in some ways, and still maintain enough distance to see it clearly.
That is also why this episode belongs on The Materialist. It is about the people and systems behind the object. It is about the stories that create value, and the journalism that interrogates those stories. It is about an industry that sells beauty and meaning, but is sustained by supply chains, family businesses, advertising, ethics, aspiration, and trust.
And, finally, it is about reinvention. Rob spent 35 years covering entrepreneurs. Now he has become one himself. That shift gives him a new sympathy for the people he writes about — the small business owners, designers, retailers, and founders trying to make something work without any guarantee that it will. He has gone from observing risk to taking it.
As Rob says of the jewelry industry, “You check in, you don’t check out.” The same may now be true of independent media.
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