The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1217: Evan Osnos | The Haves and Have-Yachts of American Oligarchy

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Money and power are merging on the high seas. The New Yorker's Evan Osnos exposes how super yachts became the new seat of American oligarchy.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1217What We Discuss with Evan Osnos:Billionaire political donations increased 200x in 20 years ($25M to $3B in 2024), marking America's shift from democracy to oligarchy — where economic and political power fuse.Super yachts are floating power centers — not just status symbols but boardrooms, tax havens, and networking hubs where billion-dollar deals happen beyond public scrutiny and regulation.Each super yacht pollutes like 1,500 cars running continuously, costs 10 percent of its purchase price annually to maintain, and creates toxic work environments for crew in legal gray zones.The ultra-wealthy face insatiable desire — where 50-meter boats become "embarrassing," half-billion-dollar yachts are "quite nice," and satisfaction remains perpetually out of reach.History shows extreme inequality resolves through crisis — war, revolution, or pandemic. But we can prevent these outcomes by making systems less advantageous to the few and more inclusive to all. Support politicians who limit campaign finance influence. Vote with your wallet. Build communities that value contribution over consumption. Small actions compound: we shape culture by what we celebrate and reject.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors:Beam: Up to 30% off: shopbeam.com/JHS, code JHSFactor: 50% off first box: factormeals.com/jordan50off, code JORDAN50OFFGelt: 10% off 1st year: joingelt.com/jhsKa'Chava: 15% off: kachava.com, code JORDANSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. As one guy said to me, he says it's the best way to absorb excess capital. It's become the new arms race. And it used to be that a 50-meter boat was a nice boat. And he says, now it's a little bit embarrassing. He said the half-billion dollar boat is, in his words, quite nice.

It's become the new arena for seeing how power is exhibited and transacted and the games that go on. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life

and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional organized crime figure, former jihadi, drug trafficker, or hostage negotiator, or music mogul.

And if you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs, and these are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. From Wall Street to Washington, the United States is starting to look less like a democracy and more like an oligarchy, where wealth buys influence, power floats on the open sea, literally, because of Wall Street to Washington, the United States, is starting to look less like a democracy and more like an oligarchy, where wealth buys influence, power floats on the open sea, literally, because of it. nothing says I've arrived quite like a super yacht. Those floating palaces selling faster than ever, with waiting lists that stretch for years and features that make luxury hotels look modest. These boats are not just toys, they're boardrooms, safe havens from paparazzi, and billion-dollar

networking hubs where one good deal can pay for the whole vessel. Presidents, billionaires, and celebrities all mingle on these decks, forging connections that can shape entire industries, while the rest of us just watch from shore. But behind the champagne and whale-for-skin upholstery, yeah, that's a real thing, lies a staggering environmental cost, a toxic crew culture, and a reminder of just how far the world of the ultra-rich drifts from our own. Today on the show, how Yachts became the ultimate status symbol of the oligarchy, why waste is chic, and what this tells us about the future of wealth and power. Now, here we go with Evan Osnos. Usually when we talk about oligarchs, we're talking about Russian billionaires who've taken over industries in the former

Soviet Union, and they end up with an army of bodyguards. and they've got a Bond villain boat with like a missile defense system on it. You've seen that one, right? There's probably more than one. But it's got like an anti-aircraft system on it. I want to explore those. That's not an off-the-shelf item. That's a bespoke piece of hardware.

I often wonder, I'm like, when you're designing your yacht, are they like, so do you want a barbecue on the outdoor deck? And you're like, actually, I was thinking more of like surface-to-air missiles just in case they come after me in international waters. And they're like, okay, we need to make a few calls. That's all. I don't think there's any reason to confine yourself to just. just surfaced-based munitions.

You could talk about drones. Once you get the helicopter involved, there's a full range of possibility. I have experience of people, once you start imagining what your yacht could be, the mine runs wild, and you can go in a whole lot of directions. My buddy built a yacht, and he's like,

I want to make sure there's a gym. And I'm like, you're thinking so small, bud, here you are lifting weights on your yacht, and you can't even torpedo someone else's yacht. You're just sitting on the deck, look at him drinking a beer, or protein shake in your kids. Also, and this is a real example, he doesn't need to go through the experience of having to work out on the yacht.

He can actually have a surgical theater put on the yacht, and they could actually make some radical upgrades to his body if he wanted to. He needs to be thinking more boldly and imaginatively about the full frontier of possibilities. You're out in international waters, so the FDA is not exactly going to be policing everything that he's doing. So I think let's see where he goes with it. It's 2025 and this is the United States. The FDA is not policing anything anyway, from what I understand. If you want to put calf implants in on the high seas, go right ahead, but you could also just have it done in someone's garage. That's it. The boat thing just keeps delivering, honestly. Well, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Out beyond the reach of ordinary jurisdictions and there's a whole

world there. That's right. One of the main ideas in your book is that the U.S. is slowly or maybe not so slowly also turning toward oligarchy. First of all, I wanted to define what oligarchy is in this idea because I think a lot of people, myself included up until a few years ago, I just figured, okay, you start a really successful business and then you buy a boat. I didn't realize, once I started learning about oligarchs, it's, oh, okay, it's very rare to start a business and end up being a deca billionaire. It's much easier if you take over a state-run industry that's already generating billions and you just siphon those off. And it's, okay, this quickly becomes shady. And people on the extreme left will say,

But billionaire shouldn't be allowed because you can't get that way without doing something shady. I don't quite go to that extreme with it. I think there's plenty of people that have started businesses that have been extremely ridiculously successful. You really have to move the goalposts of what is quote unquote illegal or inhumane to make every billionaire a criminal in some way. But when you look at the guys and gals in the former Soviet Union especially and in other states, you don't have to look very far before you find somebody getting murdered or a whole state industry being taken over in a way that. It's just obviously not okay. That's correct. I mean, I think the term oligar came to our attention in the current moment in exactly the way you described, which was after the downfall of the Soviet Union.

And it was fused in our minds to the idea of where the money came from, that it was the privatization of these state assets. But that's actually not what the word has to mean. If you go back, Aristotle, when he talked about oligarchy, and it goes all the way back, Plato and Aristotle talked about it. It was about government by men of property. That's what it meant. And so what that means in a modern sense is the fusion of economic power and political power. And that's where it gets interesting. I was talking to a professor who has studied oligarchy for years.

And he said, when I first started teaching this 20 years ago, people would say to me, my students would say, look, we don't have oligarchs. We have rich people. And Russia has oligarchs. And then he said about 10 years ago, I began to see a real change in the way my students were talking to me about it, where they would say, no, no, we have oligarchs too. And I think that's a reflection of how overt there is now a sense of political control in Washington. You'd have to have your head buried in a particularly deep hole for us not to feel that.

And the numbers bear it out. Just to give you one example, in 2004, 20 plus years ago, the billionaires in the United States contributed. What we thought at the time was like a lot of money, which was in the millions with an M. It was like, let's say, $25 million or something like that. You fast forward to today, and they've given at least 200 times as much in the 2024 election. So $3 billion. So this curve's just gone vertical. And so as a result, the idea of oligarchy, which used to be abstract, is now really concrete, I think, to us. Yeah, I don't get too political on the shows, but we can just talk about actual realities. It's not really political to say that the amount of money in politics has gone through the roof, especially from people who have billions of dollars. I don't know if that's even a controversial. take. It shouldn't be. But no, it's on both sides. Democrats actually had more money given to their candidate in the 2024 race than Republicans did. This is of interest, I think, to both sides. Yeah, it is. That's a good point. I think people are going, hey, man, we've always had lobbyists. I remember studying Citizens United in law school 25 years ago or however long ago it was 20 years

ago. Come on, this is nothing new. Is it different that we have lobbyists from interest groups versus lobbyists who work for a specific person versus Elon Musk actually in the White House slash a government agency ripping cords out of the wall, right? This is not the same thing, in my opinion. You're absolutely right. That is a wholesale change. There was a period, and this was very much the Washington way for a really long time. If you were a pork producer, you would pay your money to the Pork Producers Association, and they would hire lobby. and the lobbyists would go and tell members of Congress that nothing is more important than allowing pigs to be grown and consumed. That was how the system worked. And then you had just a profound

change. It wasn't just Citizens United. There was actually a couple of cases right around the same time, all 2010, 2011. And as a result of that, it meant that individuals could now give limitless amounts. And the most vivid exhibition of this is Elon Musk. We've simply never had in our history a case where the world's richest man was able to give by law as he did hundreds of millions of dollars in order to advance a specific candidate. And this is not me making some abstract description. He's said it on his own social media site. And that's the other piece of this that's new. Back in the day, you used to have these newspaper barons like William Randolph Hearst and others would be dueling it out on their.

editorial pages. One guy liked the Democrats, one guy liked the wigs or whatever it was. And then the difference was that now it's been supercharged by the power of algorithmic effects, because it's not just that you're putting it on your editorial page. You're also making sure that it's reaching out and getting to individuals and all the ways that we know. And so just the effect is that much more. The way I think of it, Jordan, is that it's like we took what is an ancient process of democratic, small D democratic warfare, people competing with different ideas. trying to attract people to their side, and we've supercharged it with the power of money and algorithmic effects. And so it's just everything is in that way running a little faster than

our psychology and our culture and our institutions can keep up. I think a lot of people are following here, but I'm going to ask the dumb question anyway. Why should we care about this? Who cares, right? If there's just a bunch of people with money there in charge, isn't that the way it's kind of always been? What's the big deal? I think that there is a point at which that's the way democracy is supposed to function, is that if you care enough about an issue, you're supposed to get together with the people who also care about that issue and try to influence politics. We know that, right? What begins to wreak havoc on us and why it matters, for instance, to me, let's say, as a dad or as just a citizen, is that it can begin to monkey around with our

decision making. I'll give you an example. The biggest donor, for instance, to the inauguration fund in this year in 2025 was, in fact, a poultry producer. And what does that poultry producer want? They want, let's say, looser inspections. They want an easier time being able to get their products into the marketplace. They don't want inspections being quite so rigid. I can't see any problem why we would need clean chicken in our diet. Look, it seemed to be fine in the 19th century. People live well into their 40s. Right. What's the big deal? A few people die from food poisoning. As long as it's it's not me. You really want, I mean, are your 50s and your 60s going to be so plightly? pleasant anyway. So there's that. That's where I get, from my perspective, that's where the rubber

meets the road. Did I want my government functioning well enough without people coming in and sort of monkeying around in the engine room? You're just trying to make sure I can't put a surgery theater on my yacht, Evan? Actually, as you know, I'm pro yacht surgical theater. We'll get there, but I am emphatically lobbying on behalf of those. May come back to the oligarch thing in the minute, but I got to be honest, the boat stuff. That's where it's at, man. That's the the stuff I want to put into the listeners' minds right now. Super yachts. First of all, what are these? I mean, yachts, those are for losers. Tell me about super yachts. So super yachts are anything above 98 feet. So look, if you've got a crew on your boat, it's a yacht. Now, if it's small,

then it's not a super yacht. If it's above about 230 feet, it's a mega yacht. And if it is above about 295 feet, it's known as a giga yacht. I feel like you made that up. Is that possible? Oh, I wish I had. And by the way, the best thing is that recently the proliferation of the real big hardware, as it's known in the business, has meant that the smaller yachts, smaller super yachts are now known as pocket yachts. Ooh, that stings. So anybody with a super yacht is now desperately trying to buy a bigger boat.

Exactly. And that, my friend, that's the essence of the business. I went to the day that a super yacht was getting launched. It was a megayot, actually, at a shipyard in Italy. Literally as these folks are picking up their megayot, it's going into the water. They've spent tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on us. And the guy who built it for them in his speech was already getting them to buy something bigger. His speech was, congratulations on taking the first step up the big ladder.

It's like ABC, always be closing. Exactly. If we don't have to dismantle a bridge to get this thing out of Italian waters, what are you even doing here? How do you show your face? I mean, with your pocket yacht. All right. So these are more popular than ever, right? I mean, I remember my friend got a boat and it was 65 feet and he invited me to go sleep on it and hang out on it.

And I was like, this is amazing. This is the biggest boat with a single owner that I've ever been on. And you own this. And it's incredible. And I don't know, this is probably like 10 years ago. And now it's, oh, he admits that's just nothing. That was probably like a $3 million boat. You got to add a zero or even two.

And yet these things are selling like, okay, so I've got a buddy who built a boat. I mentioned at the top of the show. It's just over 150 feet long. So that's a super yacht. But not a mega yacht, unfortunately, for him. He's got time. Yeah, he's got time. There's a phrase with boaters, right?

You've heard this before. The best day in a boaters life is when they get the boat. And the second best day is when they get rid of the boat. this man wouldn't shut the hell up about getting his yacht for a year. And I get it. He's getting 150 foot super yacht. Pretty awesome, right, for a guy who's like 40. So we were stoked.

He was stoked. I talked to him after less than one year, I think, of having this. And he was like, I am selling this goddamn boat as soon as I can. And I was like, why? I thought you said you rented it out for the whole year. It was ROI positive. He's like, there's no such thing as that on a boat. And I cannot wait to never look at this thing again.

Let's just state at the outset. It is not intended or expected or ever possible to be a good ROI. And that's part of the flex, actually, because what you're trying to suggest to anybody who comes on board is, I have enough money that I don't need this to make economic sense. And I remember once there was a headline in the Financial Times that said, it was pretty blunt. It said a super yacht is a very bad investment. And then the guy described it, I thought pretty well. he said, buying a megayot or a super yacht is a bit like buying 10 vangos and then holding them above your head while you tread water. I mean, it costs you 10% of the sale price every year just to keep it afloat.

The boat is in mortal combat with the water, which is trying to sink it to the bottom of the ocean. None of this is an argument against them. All I'm saying is go in with eyes open. I mean, the brokers do not want people buying boats who can't afford them. They're pretty blunt about it. Because it messes with the market when people have to sell them? Yeah. I mean, basically there's enough people out there.

who can afford them. So like, you're just going to be a headache if you're going to be. Oh, I see. You're just fluffing the wait list up for somebody who wants their boat and can afford it. Is that the problem? Basically, yeah. The waitlists right now are long. During COVID, they got two or three years long. I remember talking to an owner who was waiting to buy a bigger boat. And he said, look, I don't want to wait. I'm in my 70s. And he said, I basically just decided what's one year of my life worth? And he said, is it worth $5 million? Yeah, I think one year of my life is worth $5 million. So he paid $15 million to skip the three-year waiting list.

This is something that happened to my buddy. So this is during COVID, like you said, he had a hull that was, I'm going to spitball because I don't remember. But it was, let's say it was a 200-foot hole. Like I said, his boat is now 154 feet. How did that happen? What happened was somebody from, I believe it was a Gulf State, Saudi or Qatar, said, I want that boat, but I want it now, because I want it now and I don't want to wait and I got unlimited money. And they were like, hey, would you consider selling your boat? We have another haul that's for sale. You basically

just trade down to 150. Here's the cost difference. We can fit most of your plans in that. You just have to get rid of, I don't know, your jiu-jitsu room or something. And we can fit it in here. And we would be willing to do that if you work with us. And he was like, sure, because I think, you know, it trimmed $18 million off the price tag or some crazy amount of money where he was like, I could use that for something else. So he downsized to 150 feet and this other guy skipped ahead a bunch of time and it basically was a win-win for everybody. Oh, it's gotten to the point now where the numbers you're talking about the size, the amount of money that's being transacted has really gone into a stratosphere that it just wasn't where it was a few years ago. I mean, I had a CEO in Silicon

Valley who owns a yacht say to me, he said, yeah, it used to be that a 50 meter boat was a nice boat. And he says, now it's a little bit embarrassing. There's just tons of places online that cover, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg's boat, where he got something, how big it was, and so on. It's become the new arms race. And I think part of that, as one guy said to me, he says it's the best way to absorb excess capital. Is that a fancy way for saying waste money? Because that's what it sounds like. Absorb excess capital. It's called investing. Oh, wait, no, it isn't. You're buying a boat. It's the opposite. He said, look, I'm not going to put that into my house on land because it looks terrible and it would attract the pitchforks. Oh, that kind of looks terrible. Yeah, okay.

Oh, yeah, no. He meant optics that way. He said the half billion dollar boat is, in his words, quite nice. Quite nice. It's a little like how your grandmother describes your new sweater. And that's why, honestly, that's why I wrote a book about it. Because it's become the new arena for seeing how power is exhibited and transacted and the games that go on. The thing that I found interesting about this is it was like, why are there so many Russian oligarchs that have yachts? One, there's a lot of Russian oligarchs. Two, they are in the news a lot because the war in Ukraine.

And look, I'm not a tinfoil hat guy, but there's something about being able to move hundreds of millions of dollars in property around the world freely, air quotes freely, because they're under sanction. when you are in an authoritarian regime. Because if you build a giant, amazing palatial estate outside of Vladivostok or Moscow, when Putin bites the bullet, he's your best friend, that might not be your house anymore in five or ten years. But this boat, you can park it in Monaco.

It's a terrible investment. It's like Bitcoin real estate, right? You're moving around. You can obfuscate who owns it. You can hide it. You can lend it to other people for money. You can just do a lot of things with it. you could keep stuff on it that you don't want anyone else to ever find.

You're absolutely right. That's a good analogy that it's like a physical manifestation of a movable feast. And by the way, your point about being able to put things on it is correct. I was in New Zealand doing some reporting for this book. And I was meeting with a private wealth manager. And this was long before I actually got interested in yachts. I was at that point writing about doomsday bunkers. And he said, you know, what you really should be writing about is there are boats that I'm involved with that are traveling around the South Pacific right now that are loaded with art, loaded with commodities, loaded with gems, loaded with gold, because they operate exactly as you described a moment ago, Jordan, essentially in a no man's land, beyond the reach of any authoritarian friend who might become an unfriend abruptly, they're the escape hatch.

and a lot of them have now become self-sustaining. So you get them on there where they're purifying their own water. They don't advertise publicly, but it's all being done where they say this thing can stay at sea for three months without going to land if needed. If you're living your life in a kind of world in which people seem to throw themselves out of windows or off of roofs with alarming frequency, I think the idea of a place where you can go and flip off the transponder and be

basically dark on the high seas is very attractive. There was, speaking of crypto, there was a coin. I think it was called one coin. It turned out to be a big Ponzi scheme, surprise, surprise. But it was run by a Bulgarian woman, I want to say. And she became a massive Interpol, most wanted FBI, most wanted fugitive because it was wildly successful. And she made at least a billion dollars off of this Ponzi scheme because it was just so widely advertised. It wasn't even geared towards crypto bros.

It was geared towards, hey. you're in a second world developing whatever country, you're never going to get ahead, invest in this because it's the future, and they can't find her. And this is a credible rumor that she's living on a yacht somewhere off the Balkans or somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea or possibly just moving around. And I thought, how expensive is that? And the answer is it doesn't really matter because even if you're spending $50,000 per month living on that yacht, it's better than going to prison for the rest of your life.

and you stole all the money anyway, so who the hell cares, right, at that point? Yeah, it's the physical dark web now that you put it that way. I mean, it affords you the mobility to operate with essentially self-contained security and nobody can come after you. And let's be honest, there are some cases where people are doing this that I don't even know why they're bothering. I mean, the best example came out in some court documents that there was a boat being purchased by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. And one of the things that his tax advisors reportedly encouraged him to do was to take possession of it out in international waters so that it would be some tax benefits. But I read that and I just thought to myself, but who's he saving taxes from?

He's the Crown Prince. So at a certain point, it becomes reflexive. I think now that we've discovered these pathways and these possibilities, it just feels almost to some like malpractice not to take advantage of them. Exactly. You're basically saving money from yourself, but Also, even if you did pay $10 million in taxes, why do you care? You have a trillion dollars. Yeah, it's immaterial. Pay those taxes and just enjoy rubbing it in other people's face that you paid the taxes, but that's not how that culture works. The culture is the opposite. I'll tell you, I live in Silicon Valley. I'm around a lot of pretty wealthy people. I've got friends who do work for billionaires and stuff like that on the low, like security work for billionaires. The flex is never, I've done so much. I've done so much. I've paid so many taxes. That's what they'll say in public when people say it's just extractive in many ways. And it really is reflexively like how much can I save. And it doesn't have to be logical, actually. You're absolutely right. This is where I keep returning to this idea that it is almost like

the most elemental human, almost from the time that we're kids competing to see who can beat the other one at this thing. If the thing is reducing your tax. income to the lowest possible number, that's what you'll do. The best example, perhaps, one of them is that Jeff Bezos, when he was already worth many billions, according to ProPublic, his income was so low that he actually qualified for a child tax credit. And that's not unique to him. He's playing the game as the game is arranged. There were 18 billionaires during the pandemic who qualified for COVID stimulus funds, according to ProPublica, because they had the legal advice to engineer their tax returns down to the lowest possible level.

It's a kind of sport among guys who can do that. It's just to say, look, I'm just not going to pay another penny because I don't think that the government's going to use it as wisely as I will. Now, this sticks in the craw of people who pay a huge amount in taxes every year. What I'm writing off my check, thinking to myself, gosh, it should be nice to figure out some of these ways that other folks are doing it. There is a certain point at which their optimization. and what is essentially skyboxification of taxes means that the rest of us end up actually bearing a little more of the load.

Yeah, of course. It's also ironic. Like the government's not going to use this as wisely as I will. Yeah, I do want a stereo system in the bottom part of this yacht that I will never go in that I'll never use. I want a stereo system in my calves that are being implanted. Yeah. Sonos just coming out of my calves. I do not want the government to waste all this money. Fill that entire fridge with Domperinianian in case I want to swig after a workout. I'll just throw the rest of. of the bottle in the trash. Exactly. It's that sort of prudent fiscal management that we can expect. Super yachts are basically floating middle fingers to the rest of us. I can't give you a yacht, but I can give you some great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every week, it is because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your

network for free over at six minute networking.com. Yeah, you're probably not booking for a podcast, but that doesn't matter. The course is about improving your relationship building skills inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. It doesn't matter if you're retired, new to the job market in the middle of your career. It all applies to you. And the course does all of this, teaches all of this, and a super easy, non-cringy, down-to-earthew, just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, and a better peer. And a six minutes a day is all it takes.

And by the way, many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to that course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course, again, all free at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Evan Osnos. By the way, the Domperian thing, I know somebody who does security for an oligarch family, and he rides on their boat a lot of the time. He works with their daughter, who's a mess, by the way.

Surprise, surprise. I'm shocked. And I asked him, these people waste money. He's like, no, no, no. That's not even the right word for it. And I was like, yeah, these boats and these vacations, no, let me stop you right there. They will wander around the boat, just bored, and then she'll go, I'm thirsty. and she'll open a bottle of Domperin Yon and just drink a swig from the bottle and she'll just throw the rest in the trash.

She's not even actually thirsty, because if you were, you wouldn't probably drink champagne. I don't know how much Domperin Yon costs because I'm not the market for that, let's say, but I'm assuming it's a couple hundred bucks. She takes a swig of that and throws it in the bin, and the guy's like, what am I even seeing right now? That's what I'm going to make this week or today in wages, and you're just like throwing it around. And she collects, I can't even remember what it was. He told me not to share it anyway, but she collects these things. like handbags, for example, but it's even dumber stuff than that. I think they're figurines of some kind. And she'll pay like $25,000 for a blue one, even though she has a pink one. And then they just

sit in the box, and the box sits in the corner. And she's just like, yeah, I have all of them. It's not even gross. It's just senseless. This is baked in. This is like at the core of the insight that Thorsten Bebelin, who was really the father of conspicuous consumption as a concept. It came out in the Gilded Age. He was the one who coined the term. His insight was that in order for it to be valuable in this scale of conspicuous consumption, it has to be needless. That's the key insight that, in fact, the throwing away of the Don Perignon after one sip is not a bug from her perspective. It's a feature. Part of the gratification of it. And I remember reading about the richest guy in the world in the 1950s was a guy named John Paul Getty. He was an oil magnet and he'd grown up basically with this big chip on his shoulder because his father didn't think that he should inherit the company. Every one of these stories when you dig in, you find some moment when Daddy did something and it like powers the whole thing. I was going to say, Daddy issues all the way down. Exactly. That's right. And in his case,

for decades beyond that, he was just earning and spending in ways that he couldn't even explain to himself. And at one point, he wrote in his own diary. I mean, he was the world's richest man. If anybody knows the name John Paul Getty, it's probably because of the crazy story involving his grandson who was kidnapped in Italy and the kidnappers cut his ear off and sent it back through the mail. And Getty would not pay the ransom because he was so cheap. But wasn't that also because he was like, look, it's just going to encourage all my family members to get kidnapped? You're right. There's some logic to that. But also, imagine being in that situation and you're like, it's for the good of the rest of the family that I'm not paying. It's like,

is that really the reason or are you just a cheap son of a bitch who doesn't love his grandkids? I'm going to go with the latter. He ended up paying as much as he could tax free, and then the rest of it was structured as a loan to his son. I'll leave it to people to decide what were his motives there. But he wrote in his own diary once. I don't even know why I'm continuing to build this much capital. And he just concluded to himself, he's like, habit. And I think there's like something there that this level of insatiability, which has become almost a kind of cultural norm.

Like we swim in it and we're not even aware of it anymore. I mean, I'm very conscious of it. They call it the hedonic treadmill. Yes, I talk about it all the time on the show. My wife's like, why don't you retire? Part of it is because I love doing this and I would be purposeless and rudderless. I'd be very bored. I'd start something else that was equally hard and time consuming but made no money

so that that doesn't have a whole lot of sense behind it or that I enjoyed less. But that goes all the way down. My parents also worked for a long time and my dad's like, why the hell am I still working? And he was an auto worker. It was just like, and don't you want to go up to the cottage and cut the lawn and then drive home like you do every weekend? We all do that. It's just that when it's a billionaire who wants another hundred billion, it just seems much more disgusting somehow. Also, if it's your dad continuing to work because he gives him a sense of purpose, he likes feeling ship shape when he gets out in the morning and I'm doing my thing.

This is what I'm here to do. And the lawn is not going to cut itself. And like, I get all of that. That's like part of, we're all sort of wired that way just as creatures, just as a species. The place where it goes haywire is where exactly. where you started the conversation today, which was, what does it mean when we have a few people in the society who are capable of actually transforming the politics in a way that then impacts all the rest of us? That's where it becomes, if people want to get the surgical theater and fill it with Don Perignon and get the cavend implants, God bless him. I just think that's fantastic, whatever they want to do.

But when it starts to impinge on my thing, and I don't want all that extra salmonella on the grill just because somebody else wanted to do his thing. Exactly. Okay, so these boats are selling more than ever. There's record sales as a crazy backlog. You mentioned COVID sped up boat buying, probably because you can social distance when you're a thousand miles away from everybody else. Yeah, it's a perfect COVID isolation chamber. And then it also had a little bit of a clarifying effect for some people who realize, you know, maybe I am mortal. I've got all this money. I feel like I'm going to be able to extend my life all these extra years, but it turns out that a virus could come along and just end it all. So there was a little bit of a you only live once moment. And people who'd been, as the brokers like to say, who'd been on the fence trying to decide whether they were going to step up to the plate to mix metaphors, they basically all of a sudden everybody went in. And so you had this huge surge in buying. There were only about 10 of these gigiots a generation ago. And now we're getting close to 200. And then there are 5,000 superiots and megaiots. Wow. Can you give us an example of how crazy some of these things are? We did mention a missile defense system. That I assume was on a Russian oligarchs boat and maybe he had a reason to put that on there. I don't know. There's also a version of that. It's not actually munitions, but there are a number of boats that have a paparazzi repellent system. It can pick up on people that are approaching the boat and basically deters them with very unpleasant lights. So it prevents them from being able to take a picture. Some of the real frontier of spending is just entertainment.

Like you can get your IMAX theater now put into your boat, which is a nice way to watch a movie. one of the things is to get a helicopter pad that is equipped for a big enough aircraft that you can then fly into a country that can allow you to take your helicopter up into certain regions. One of the things that's been happening is that people say, I want to go skiing. And so then they put on their ski gear, they have a ski room on the boat, you get all kidded out, you get into helicopter, and then you fly to the top of the Alps or wherever and ski down and then go back to your boat. And so that's one of the ways that people are doing it. The other kind of choice accessory, Jordan, is a boat for your boat. Yeah, you got to have a boat for your boat. I mean, it's not going to just go out there on its own, like, lonely.

Yeah. I have a friend. He was the activity manager, I think, for a couple of yachts. Usually Russians, but one of them was from one of the stands. Big yachters. They love the yachts, yeah. Yeah, it was one of those nominally Islamic kind of guys, but was like, I'm only Islamic when my wife and family are paying attention.

So he had two yachts that were supposed to be more or less identical. And one had his wife and his daughter and his son and whatever on it. And they were dressed as they would be dressed when they were at home. And they had their carefully curated food and movies and everything was halal or whatever it is. And then he had another yacht that was out of sight at all times, that he would travel back and forth to him. And I would say I'd let you guess, but it's more fun to tell you what was on that other yacht, which was a bunch of hookers. Yeah, I had a sneaking hunch, that's what it might be.

Just a ton of hookers. Yeah. And drugs and alcohol and food and buddies that he had picked up from wherever that were like probably keeping the party going or whatever for him, you know, and a DJ and stuff like that. And he would just go there for business meetings and his family supposedly none the wiser, but I can't imagine they didn't know, or at least some people didn't know. And he would just fly back and go like, oh, I've got to overnight on my other boat because I'm entertaining guests and I want them to see my wife and daughters.

And he would just hang out. It's like, oh, back to the family dinner on the weekend. It was absolutely crazy because these were not small boats. Again, my friend was the activities manager. If you have a crew that includes an activities manager full time, that's a big enough boat, right? It's a big staff. Yeah. That's not one of the skeleton crew of five guys.

He's not steering anything. He's not fixing anything. No, they're known as toys. That is what you call the machines and the jet skis and tenders and everything. That's what he did. He like managed the jet skis. He would book things for them in other countries because he spoke another language. He would make sure that the inflatable things were all inflated and out when they wanted to go swimming. It was that kind of stuff. I mean, so what you're describing, which is very much a phenomenon I've encountered where essentially there's the main boat and then there's the dirtbag boat. And I think there's something about being out at sea. And this is such like an ancient phenomenon. that there's something about being away from land in which people feel suddenly unfastened from the constraints that usually govern their lives. If it's in his case, you know, that he's a devout Muslim when he's brokering oil deals at home. But when he gets out into the middle of the

Mediterranean, he might as well be the most luscious cousin of the most degenerate guy you went to high school with. And one of the things I've encountered by talking to a lot of people who've skippered yachts and worked on them is there is quite literally nothing. that is impossible when you get out there because it builds on itself. Once one thing is available to you and you find, oh, actually people will give me this, you begin to ask for more and you begin to get more. And you get bored instantly. One of the guys who I've talked to is his job is servicing what he calls board billionaires. And he does that in a variety of ways. He'll say, let's build you a restaurant from a 3D printer that will drive.

it onto a sand shelf in the Maldives, and it'll only exist for seven hours before it is swamped and destroyed so that nobody else can be in that restaurant ever again. And they'll say, what about that? And I imagine the Bond villain in that situation being like, yes, build me the restaurant. They're getting to the point where like there's not much else we can think of to keep people entertained. No, you're right. A buddy of mine of this cybersecurity stuff, in part for some oligarchs, was saying things like, by day, it's secure my computer. because the KGB and the CIA and the Mossad are all trying to get into these machines, right, because he's got his secrets on there. And then by night, it's like, what do you want to do? Because he's on the boat and he's not part of the crew, but he's also not part of the family.

But they're like, hey, you know, you're doing the thing. I want to talk. So he described doing a lot of fun stuff, like shooting things off the back of the boat because they just happen to have an armory on this boat for reasons. And it's just, it's wild. You can order pretty much anything. They somehow have any, any food you could possibly want on there somehow and they'll go get it for you. He would say things like, I don't even know where they're getting some of this stuff because we're in the middle of nowhere. People have said, for instance, like they'll be sitting on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean, and suddenly they have a craving for bagels from Zabars in New York City. And like, the bagels from Zabars will arrive. And the answer is that they chartered a plane to go get them and bring them. And so the per bagel cost is substantial, but nobody's particularly concerned about that. a $12,000 bagel, but who cares? You just made a billion dollars commandeering an aluminum factory

outside of Novosibirsk. I mean, there's also, there's some particularly rare melon from Hokkaido that a guy had a real hankering for, and they managed to get those all the way to them, and it has to be picked at the right moment and brought from the right place. But I kind of feel like, as a person who's trying to figure out, okay, what will make me happy, always running beneath what I'm writing about. I'm always trying to figure out what is it that would make me having. And what I discovered was I remember checking into the yacht club in Monaco, which is a very nice place. Yeah, I can imagine it's not a dump. Not a dump. I stepped into the room and I did have this immediate sensation where I was like, I will never be fully satisfied anywhere else. That's

happened now. That's a one-way door. And, you know, and then the next morning, I was sitting out there on my terrace and they brought an omelette and I was having this glass of like incredibly good orange juice, like the freshest goddamn orange juice that a human has ever had. And I look out from my terrace and I see this guy down below on this kind of mid-tier yacht. And he's looking up at me. And I'm on my perfect terrace and he's this kind of sad middle-aged guy, juiceless, there on his banquette. And I had this sudden sensation. Honestly, it started in my chest, just kind of warmed over me. And it was this feeling of superiority.

Yeah, I was going to say, the feeling of what is that feeling? Ah, superiority. I mean, it's sort of like what Monty Burns feels all the time, but it's also what he's seeking. I really kind of clarified things. I was like, oh, that's the ultimate luxury good. Yeah, no, you're right. I also would imagine that powerful and famous people, it's one of the only places they can relax, right? because if you're Taylor Swift, you've got an army of security and staff around you at all times.

But if you're on a yacht outside of Monaco, you have security staff. You don't have to see them for the first time in forever. They don't have to inspect the premises. Again, it's done. It's handled. No one knew was coming on. No one's going off. There's nothing dangerous.

They haven't found. You're just there. Nobody can take pictures of you so you can get out in your bathing suit or whatever and lay on the deck. and you're finally safe and private for the first time in maybe a year or two? That's correct. So the fact that their security is not on their hip. For people who don't live with that, it's almost hard to imagine how much of a change that is where you can actually relax. And then here's the key factor too, Jordan, is that it's the other people you're with are in the same situation.

So all of a sudden you take maybe five of the most powerful people in the world who suddenly find themselves around the lunch table. and all of a sudden their guard is down in a way that it almost never is. And so they begin to talk more honestly and more candidly to one another. And that then has this bonding effect, which then creates this like, and we all know that feeling. You go on a trip with somebody and even five years later, like when you see that person, you just get that sense like, oh yeah, that guy, we had a thing. We had a special time on that trip. And it's true if you're Bruce Springsteen or your Barack Obama, it's just a fact.

And so I've talked to people who've been literally in those kinds of environments, and they'll say, for years to come, the fact that I've seen this Master of the Universe floundering around trying to get up on a paddleboard means that he will just treat me in a different way than he treats other people. Yeah, exactly. It's one of the reasons I know this guy who has the yacht. I ran into him, this is years ago. I was a different person. I was single back. I ran into him the bathroom line at a strip club in Vegas at 4 o'clock in the morning. Okay.

You were just doing research. I was doing a story or something. Anyway, and I was late for church and or early for church, one of the two. Early, early. It was 4 a.m. You were way early. So whenever I talked to him, he's, hey, man, you ever go back to, and I'm like, no, but I know you have. He's like, oh, man, all the time. Every time I go to the bathroom, I think about that time I ran into you in the line.

And I was just like, that's so damn fun. So that's a somewhat classier version, I suppose, of that same thing, right? I think it was David Geffen who you wrote about who had Obama and Oprah and Tom Hanks on the boat. You're going to get that call returned. Your dumb nephew who can't add and subtract is going to get an internship with Harpo productions or whatever because Oprah is basically your auntie now and it doesn't cost or anything. This gets to this point you made about what's the ROI? Because there is an ROI there in the sense that, okay, the boat itself is instantly depreciating

and is trying to sink to the bottom of the sea. However, when you have your guest on, all of a sudden, you know, you've been treating them well for a week. You've been treating their kids well for a week. Not only are they going to return that phone call and give your lousy, no good nephew, the internship, but you are in a different kind of mental category. I had this fascinating conversation with a guy who goes on a lot of big yachts and one of the owners of one of the world's most cherished yachts said it to him pretty bluntly. He said, look, these guys have both done well. He said, you and I both fly private. We both have chefs. We both have art. So the only way that I can signal to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat. I was thinking

to myself, so he's saying this to you is you're sitting in the living room. And like, he's calling it like it is. he's not hiding it. He's not mincing words. But it was a little bit of a reminder that don't forget who's the owner. Yeah. Wow. Look, you're on a boat, do a little insider trading, do an oil well deal. The thing is paid for itself potentially at that point. I don't know. There is a touch of that because part of it is that if you're invited, and this is for listeners who when they get their invitation, they think, okay, what am I supposed to do? You know, what do I wear? It's not about what you wear. It's about what you know. And if you work in Hollywood, you better come with a good story or two about some superstar. Yeah, here's a photo of

Leo DiCaprio doing a bump off of, I don't know, somebody's private parts. Yeah, and if you work on Wall Street, you better have some, shall we say, useful information. That's why you've been invited. Yeah, wow, it's transactional. Just like this podcast, this is the giga yacht of podcasting, and you're invited, Evan, but you better not come empty-handed. So, yeah, as you can tell, I drove a really high price. I'm a terrible negotiator. I think I'm on here for exactly zero dollars. That's how it works, Jordan. That's right. It's not the money I'm interested in. So the yacht thing is just endlessly fascinating because it's, like you said,

it's highly visible to the right audience, but then it's invisible to the rest, right? It's invisible to the taxman in the country that it's not floating in. It's invisible to the people with pitchforks who can't even get near the marina where you sometimes have your vessel. By the way, these things must pollute like crazy. Any data on that? Yeah, they're the equivalent of about 1,500 vehicles. One yacht is the equivalent of 50,000. 500 cars with their engines purring.

Oh, my gosh. So this is like rush hour traffic on I-75 and you're just going to lunch or whatever? Awkward for some of these guys who are also big climate philanthropists. So there's a lot of offsetting that they are doing, a lot of offsetting. Got to buy those carbon credits. That's a lot of carbon credits. Now they have solar powered yachts. I don't know if you've seen these.

Yeah. And hydrogen is the next big frontier. If they can get a hydrogen powered yacht, that's going to be helpful for the reputation of the industry, because right now these things are just like, it's like burning baby seals all day long. I heard that the placing of the yachts in the marina is a political game, right? I heard this even at the lower end. It's like, we want the big boats that are kind of near the front so everyone sees them and they're really nice, but they also play a role in shielding the other boats from prying eyes. So it's like the big boats are up front, but the nicest, maybe even biggest ones are also on the outside because it's more private. And people will pay more to get those slips.

It's like a huge status contest. In the book, I have a pretty fascinating conversation with a woman who is in charge of making those decisions in Monaco. And this is like you've got some people who are not used to being told no who come in and say, I need my yacht to be seen from the side. I don't want people just seeing it lined up like the tip of a pencil. That's embarrassing. I want people to see the whole thing. Look, we're kind of dancing around the main thing here,

which is these boats are defined ultimately by length. And if a guy is going to burn his fortune on it, he wants everybody to see this giant yacht. This is like a dick that you buy that floats. Turned into steel. Yes, that's exactly right. It's essentially as close as you can get to a metaphor made in steel and suede. And so then she's the one who has to then.

and say to him, sorry, your boat's not big enough to be seen from the side. Somebody else's boat is going to be seen. And so it's like guys, heads explode. There's a lot of fury around that. And having worked on this for a long time, writing this book and thinking about all these issues, the reason why I care about this, the reason why I think it's interesting for any of us is it actually is an insight into how we're wired as a species. This is not that different from when we were two cavemen competing over who,

had a bigger hunk of stone in our hands. And we've just now upped it and upped it to a point where we're now competing about whose surgical theater is bigger on his boat's boat. You said steel and leather, but that's not the only kind of leather that they, I mean, it's not just cow leather that they have in the boat. You mentioned eel and then what was the other one, whale foreskin? I thought that was a joke because that's real. That's a real kind of leather. Because I'm so curious what a whale foreskin feels like. It's a absolutely indelible detail. It was used to upholster the bar stools on the boat that belonged to Aristotle O'Nassus. So this is Jackie O's husband. And he was a great Greek shipping tycoon. And he had whale foreskins

as the upholstery material. I don't know what that it feels like. First of all, who's circumcising whales? Yeah. I mean, there's so many questions. I have so many questions. Just about that. Are there Jewish whales? I'm so confused now. Yeah. That's come up a couple times with me. I've been thinking about that. And by the way, in the whale community, I bet this is massively divisive. Like, they're like, this is so frustrating that this is still an upholstery. That's right. Although, I don't even know where my forskin is. I hope it's upholstering something, but I doubt it. Great. If it's being put to some productive nautical use. For all I know, they just threw it away. What a waste. I didn't have vision. You needed vision. That's right. Man, the only way I'm even

getting close to renting a yacht is if you stick around and support the amazing sponsors that support this show. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what are they're smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the sponsors they make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor or a code, always email us. Jordan atjordanharbinger.com. We are happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show.

Now, for the rest of my conversation with Evan Osnos. I've seen these yacht tracking websites. It's kind of a paparazzi-ish thing. It's kind of like those people who track private planes. This tail number was spotted here. They do this for boats. Marine traffic, it was an app I used to look at, and I'd go, I want to see what boats are out near the California coast.

And you'd see a bunch of oil and a bunch of shipping stuff, and you can filter, and you'd see some big boat. And I'm like, who owns this? And then there'll be a website that says, like, owner is this shell company? But we think it's probably this guy. but we're not totally sure. And I just thought that would be really interesting. And sometimes you look at it and then you find out like, oh, yeah, we lost track of this when it left U.S. waters.

They turned off the transponder. They don't do that in U.S. waters because they don't want the Coast Guard to come on and seize the boat or whatever happens. But as soon as they leave, they're like, we don't need you guys prying around anymore. No one will we're headed back to Vladivostok or whatever. Exactly. Right after the war in Ukraine, when the U.S. started seizing yachts, all of a sudden a bunch of blips on those scrubs. on those screens just went, boop, and they disappeared because these boats didn't want to be seen. And some of them later resurfaced on the other side of the world or on some little creek in the

Emirates. It got to the point where you were starting to be picked up only by satellite. There are these sites like Supriot Fan, which will give you some ownership information. But there's always a funny moment where you're looking to see, all right, who owns this thing? If you start going back through the shell companies, suddenly you're like, wow, this is owned by a 22-year-old gym teacher who lives in Vladivostok, that's a really successful gym teacher. And then you realize, oh, it's because her uncle is the head of the KGB. And so there's an awful lot of that, just inspiring gym teacher stories. The Ukraine war must have been gas on the fire, because as soon as that happened, I would imagine oligarchs who didn't have yachts were like, I need to figure out a way to move

billions of dollars out of here and hide them. And not just put them in a U.S. bank or an Australian Bank or a UK bank because it's not safe there. So I would imagine that drove yacht prices through the roof too. There was also, but there were also a bunch of people freaking out because all of a sudden they were getting their yachts. So they'd go in to get it repaired in Germany and Germany would say, all right, this is ours now. And so the yacht market just went through the roof. And then it got crazy for a while because you had these Russian oligarchs who were trying to get rid of yachts. Some of them were trying to get yachts, all of which, of course, is making money for the people who buy and sell them. I heard that we have to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of yachts that we have seized. So if we seize a 600-foot mega yacht or whatever giga-jot from a Russian oligarch, we got to pay $50,000 a week or whatever to keep that thing floating. And what's the end game there? Because are we eventually going to sell that thing and make the money back or what?

What's the plan? Yeah, they've only recently had the first test case where they took a yacht that had been seized by the U.S. government and was eventually finally sold after the U.S. kept it afloat at the cost of millions of dollars a year. And part of the purpose in that situation was it was supposed to be what they say in China is kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, meaning you make one big example of a yacht and then hope that all these other oligarchs are going to turn on Vladimir Putin. It didn't exactly work out that way. They just dock in Dubai instead of Italy or the U.S. or Germany. The instinct to seize stuff was actually a pretty interesting approach to coercive diplomacy. It was not something that had been done on a

broad scale before. And they said, let's try it. So there was this task force called KleptoCapture. And they went out and they just started seizing all kinds of boats and apartments and things that had been clearly bought with elicit funds or that had been bought in part of Putin's orbit. But it was very much an improvisation by the U.S. government. I've talked to people involved in formulated that policy who said, this was literally just like an idea we came up with and said, let's try seizing some boats and see how it goes. And we ended up paying for it. Turns out it's super complicated because the people you're seizing them from have a bunch of lawyers who get paid the longer and more aggressively they contest those seizures. They're also growing in size, right? Like you mentioned before, you can't just have a 65-foot yacht,

You can't have a 165 foot yacht. You got to have a 365 foot yacht. Who do you call? If I want to buy a yacht, which is not something's going to happen ever, but even if I had the money, what do you do? How do you design it? I know you've got to get on a wait list. You just call some Dutch guy and you're like, hey, man, I'm on the market. Yeah.

There are a couple of very sought after super yacht designers. And they will sit down with you and you start very often. people will start with an idea of, let's say, okay, I want to spend $200 million on this boat. Nobody ever ends the process. It's a little bit like a house renovation. You end up spending double what you expect, and people get obsessed with it. I've talked to people who are working on these projects, and it takes over their lives because they're so involved in every little detail.

And there's a lot of secrecy around it. For instance, inside the firms that are building these yachts, they don't want ever it to be leaked. they're building for because their credibility hinges on it. So they're known by code names internally. And I actually just recently, even after the book came out, I heard about a wild situation. A guy I know who is building an extremely large yacht was told that if he wanted to meet somebody else who had recently gotten one from the same builder, they would not learn each other's names, it was all going to be, but they would just be hull one and hull two. And they were put in touch and he was given a GPS location where he could go out and meet this other guy.

And they could just have a kind of, I don't know what the hell they were there to meet, but just to acknowledge the fact that they were in this extremely small community of people in the world who have these things. It exists in this realm where it's supposed to be completely invisible to the outside world. I can't think of another area of our lives where you have something that is so unmistakable, so physically enormous and conspicuous, but is also designed to be secret. Yeah, it's very odd. And you have to wait because it takes a long time to build a ship. What's the wait if I order a ship?

First of all, I need a custom design. I'm not going to get something off the rack. Does that even exist? Surely up to a certain size. Yeah, they're known as series yachts. Yeah, horrible. Yeah, exactly. Good answer.

So you want something more bespoke, and it'll take five years from the time of conception. It's done it. kinds of things that can happen along the way. We all heard about the case of Jeff Bezos not being able to get his out of the Netherlands because there was a bridge that had survived the bombing of the Nazis and it was too low. What they ended up doing actually was taking down the mast of his boat in the dead of night and they quietly brought it out so that the protesters couldn't see and they didn't have to dismantle the bridge. But even afterwards, the builder involved in his boat was fined by Europe. Union officials because it had used teak that came or was suspected to have come from Myanmar. The conceivable rat holes you can go down on these things are endless. And for some people, it's a little bit of filling their days when everything else has been optimized. What's left? You know, you already paid to have your kids' ACTs taken for them.

You've already done all the hard stuff in life. What's left, the boat? How much of these things cost? What does Bezos' boat cost? Do we know? Yeah, about three quarters of a billion dollars. Okay. And that's for the boat plus the secondary boat that trails behind with the toys and the helicopter pad. So that costs 75 or so million dollars per year to run? Correct. Fuel and food and Dumper and Eon, but also the staff in the harbor fees and all and stuff. This is a very important piece of it, is the staff is huge

because the international law on boats like this say that most boats can only have 12 guests. There are exceptions, but that yachts of this size can only have 12 guests. This was a law put in place after the sinking of the Titanic. If you have more than that, you have to have all kinds of different safety provisions. But there is no limit on the number of crew. And as a result, you can end up with 12 guests being attended to by 50 or 60 crew members, which is a ratio of attention that really you don't see. on land anywhere beyond the 19th century.

That's right. I personally hate it when my butler takes forever to come down from the fifth floor just to get me something out of the refrigerator while I'm sitting at the kitchen table. That's a very relatable problem. That's why you have the downstairs butler, evidently. My boat, I would just have a downstairs butler and an upstairs butler on each floor and a refrigerator butler at that point. Left-hand butler, right-hand butler. Look, I know having more staff is great, but at some point, I don't want these strangers all over the place outnumbering my family. No, no, you hit on something that is like a little bit of the dirty secret

here too, which is that, and I heard this very often from people who would just get off of being a guest on a big boat. It sounds like it's going to be fantastic. You're like, oh, my ship's come in. I'm going to have so much fun. But you get out there. And the truth is, it's a little bit like going to a boutique hotel that is owned by your buddy. And your buddy gets to decide when you eat, what you eat, like when you're going to be charming and like when you're going to be able to relax. The owner of the boat is the one who's like, all right, we're now going hiking. And so then everybody has to go and pretend to love hiking. So there's a certain amount of captive enjoyment.

And people often come home at the end. Meanwhile, there's like crew and that everybody's been hovering around them, you know, taking each little crumb of tempura that has fallen on your lap and removing it to save you the humiliation. And finally, you kind of get off this thing and you're just like, oh my God, I'm exhausted from my vacation. Yeah, I need a vacation from this vacation. Exactly. What do these people who put up with all this crap make? What did Doc Hans earn? My friend who did the activity, Sam, me, this is a, that was a good job. It was a decent job. Yeah, you can do pretty well, particularly if you're the captain of a yacht, you make basically about $1,000 a foot per year.

So if this is a 300-foot vessel, or in some cases a 400-foot vessel, biggest yachts in the world right now are closing in on about 500 feet long, so they'll make $500,000 a year as the captain. The low deck hands, like the very kind of junior people, they make a decent salary, but more importantly, they get a lot in tips. Like somebody might throw them a $50,000 tip after a trip in the Mediterranean. Now, the problem is that you're not exactly living the high life. You tend to be living in very close quarters. It's a bit like working for a company that has no HR department and that is like operating in international waters. Weird stuff happens all the time. Such as?

Well, I mean, I've talked to a bunch of crew. I mean, there was one young crew member was working on the yacht. Everything was fine. And then they got raided by gangsters from the former Soviet Union who were hunting the owner of the boat. and she's like, this is not what I signed up for it. And it was pretty, pretty scary. So they all got tied up while they searched the boat? Is that what happened?

Yeah. Yeah, basically. So it can get a little weird. And there's been some tragic stories that have been covered in the yachting press, where there's been a greater sense of awareness that, wait a second, we have to bring this industry into, if not the 21st century, maybe the 20th century, because it's just been pretty loosey-goosey out there. I know there's harassment and bullying and lower morale.

And I also know that getting out of the industry is tough because, again, a story my friend told me a zillion years ago, but it was like, these girls, usually women would work there. And it's like, they're the maids or whatever. And they're from maybe another country. And then it's like, I hate this. I'm being abused. Or even worse, maybe they get assaulted or something by crew or guests. And then it's like, I'm going to get a real job. And it's going from being an exotic dancer where you're making a thousand bucks a night.

and then you got to go work at a restaurant. You're like, wait, this is a lot of work. I'm working for a long time, and I'm making 10% of what I made before. It's maybe scrubbing marine toilets isn't that bad because I'm trying to get a job at the steakhouse with very little experience and not a whole lot of stuff I can talk to. And I'm making a third of this, and I've got to pay taxes. It's tough.

It's a trap. It's a weird transition. You're totally right about the fact that they have a very hard time going land-based, as they say. It's not like your skill set transfer is very easy. You've been paid pretty well to basically clean a bathroom. It's the look the other way factor, I think, was what it was. You're going to watch celebrities do stuff they don't want anybody to know about, and the maid has to clean it up.

And so that might be a $25 an hour job, but now it's a $250 an hour job because they really don't want you to take a photo and sell it because it's not worth it. They need to economically incentivize you to never have seen anything. Yeah, the power dynamic gets inverted in those moments. I think one of the things that happens is you get used to this life of being out working in this environment. And then suddenly you're supposed to go off and get a job where you clock in in the morning and clock out in the evening. And it can seem pretty dull. So there's a reason why the yachties, as they're known, tend to be pretty young.

They come from English-speaking countries so that they can operate in environments where the money is. I spoke to a therapist who used to be a chief stew on one of these yachts. And then she went into the therapy business and now actually just mostly deals with people who work on yachts. But weirdly, part of her training, she said, yeah, I first was working with prison inmates. That was how I trained to be a therapist. And I've discovered that there's a lot of very similar problems because you're working in an environment where your schedule is very rigid, your location is fixed, you're confined. And then all of a sudden, you're trying to figure out how to go back, reenter society. So strange as it sounds, there's some shared DNA there, according to her.

You made an interesting note at the end of the book, which was that economic elites used to prop up the economy. During the Great Depression, we had bailouts from elites like J.P. Morgan, the man, during the Depression. And they've largely been replaced by the Federal Reserve, which I can imagine is a better system than just relying on the generosity of billionaires. But this is the first time in history that elites aren't really needed since medieval times. We don't have lords anymore. But now the rich are seen as extraneous. And yet on the other side of that very same coin, they're actually much more like lords than they probably have been in a while. Yeah, it's really true. Just as a percentage of their share of overall national wealth, we've returned to a condition that is much closer to the gilded age, much closer to the 19th century. But unlike that earlier period, when there used to be in our country in the United States, when there was a national crisis, frankly, the richest people in the United States would come in and put their money in. J.P. Morgan being a prime example, we created institutions in which that was no longer required. And that is in some ways, the engine at the heart of the whole phenomenon we're talking about, because all of a sudden,

they had all this money to begin to use, and they could invest it in some cases, which would then continue to build their net worth beyond any recognizable levels that had existed in the past, or they begin to spend it in all the ways we've been talking about. What you've described quite well, I think, is this period where, and I talk to archaeologists about this, we're really in uncharted territory. The scale of the fortunes that exist today are low. larger than anything we've ever had. Obviously, when you adjust for inflation, I'm not just talking about that. Ten years ago, there was nobody in the world who had $100 billion. Elon Musk was worth $10 billion, 10 years ago. He's now worth 400 plus. So the curve is really bending in a way that

it never has, and it's made for a hell of a story. Where does this eventually lead? I mean, bummer, I seem to have missed the excessively large boat on becoming an oligarch or anything close to it. I married a normal human being, so I'm not going to get married into an oligarch family, which I think I'm fine with after hearing all the stories of how these people are in real life. But where does this all eventually lead? The curve is going in that direction for a lot of this wealth. Is it bad for society like some people say, or are we just overreacting? And oh, well, there's some rich people and they waste a lot of money.

Who cares? History on this is pretty clear. And you don't have to just take it for me. I mean, there are a number of very prominent American billionaires. Ray Dalio about the direction this is going, because the history tells us that when you get a gap between the richest and the poorest, as large as it is today, it only resolves in one of a few ways. War or revolution, or in many cases, pandemic, because you get diseases that circulate among people who don't have the ability to protect themselves. That's not a happy story. There was a book

called the Great Leveler, written by Walter Shidel at Stanford, which is just telling you something that is already out there. So that is a reality. And I think what we know is that in order to prevent those kinds of really dramatic, harsh outcomes that none of us would want, we should be pretty smart about saying, all right, we know how to tweak the system here. Maybe it takes more than tweaking to make sure that we're not making the system so advantageous to a few. and leaving too many people out in a cold. Evan Osnos, thank you very much. Save me a seat on the yacht, or at least at the Monaco Yacht Club.

Come on. Thanks, Jordan. I'll look forward to seeing you out there. The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery, with 75% still unexplored. You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vescovo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans, built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures, revealing a world few have ever seen.

71% of the Earth is ocean, and of that 75% of the ocean. and of that 75% is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary. Deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown. We just don't go there, and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive

to explore the ocean. I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. If I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a 10, million-dollar birthday party. I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology. It was kind of like Oceans 11, where I basically got to go around

the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management? Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it. That, I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries, but I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear, and I don't leave it to other people. I want to be at the control. When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together. Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15,000 meters. That thing was a tank. And things did go wrong, eventually. You can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware and you need to

mitigate those risks. What did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach? To find out, listen to episode 1089 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks to Evan for coming on. Man, I really wish I had a yacht. What can I say? 1,500 cars, though, that's a lot of pollution. But then again, imagine a podcast studio on the high seas. Sounds a little dizzying.

I think I'm okay where I'm at. All things Evan Osnos will be on the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. All at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, Webit Wiser. Very fun for us to write. Very fun for y'all to read.

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