The Shintaro Higashi Show - I'm On A Boat w/Kevin Koenig, aka theyachtfella | The Shintaro Higashi Show

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

In this episode, Shintaro Higashi and David Kim ( @midjitsu ) sit down with Kevin Koenig — aka @theyachtfella (Instagram)— a jiu-jitsu brown belt and luxury yacht journalist who’s written for the New York Times, GQ, Yachting Magazine, and more. They dive deep into the ultra-wealthy world of mega-yachts, watches, private submarines, and celebrity DMs — all while exploring how jiu-jitsu keeps Kevin grounded in one of the most exclusive industries on the planet.00:00 – Introduction to Kevin Koenig and his background04:00 – Rise in the yachting world and Instagram fame07:00 – Celebrity DMs and high-profile followers09:30 – Billionaires who train jiu-jitsu and grappling on yachts12:00 – Yacht tiers, pricing, and operating costs explained16:00 – Inside the most extravagant superyachts19:00 – The psychology of wealth and billionaire behavior22:00 – Kevin’s wildest journalism stories26:00 – Reflections on money, luxury, and happiness31:00 – The real yacht buyers: mining, farming, and dealership empires34:00 – Gilded Age 2.0 and the scale of extreme wealth36:30 – American sportfishing yachts and cultural contrasts38:00 – Jiu-jitsu in the yacht industry and dealing with egos39:00 – The demanding reality of working on yachts41:00 – Yacht crew shortages and industry shifts42:00 – How Starlink is changing yacht ownership44:00 – Final reflections on wealth, yachts, and the future🚨 LIMITED-TIME OFFER: 40% OFF 🚨The All-in-One Instructional Bundle just got even better.Every major instructional. One complete system. Now at our biggest discount yet.Grab yours now at 40% off : https://higashibrand.com/products/all-instructionalsThis won’t last. Build your game today.🔥 Get 20% OFF FUJI Gear! 🔥Looking to level up your judo training with the best gear? FUJI Sports has you covered. Use my exclusive link to grab 20% OFF high-quality gis, belts, bags, and more.👉 https://www.fujisports.com/JUDOSHINTARO 👈No code needed – just click and save!Links:🇯🇵 Kokushi Budo Institute (The Dojo) Class Schedule in New York, NY 🗽: https://www.kokushibudo.com/schedule🇯🇵 Higashi Brand Merch & Instructionals: https://www.higashibrand.com📚 Shintari Higashi x BJJ Fanatics Judo Courses & Instructionals Collection: https://bjjfanatics.com/collections/shintaro-higashi/

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Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Shantara Higashi with David Kim. We have a very, very special guest. We have Kevin here. Kevin's a jiu-jitsu brown belt. Right. I almost said purple. Kevin's a brown belt now and I see him at Essential. We train together alongside David and he has a very, very interesting gig. So yeah, welcome and welcome. And thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Kevin has a super interesting background. And as we mentioned in some earlier episodes, it's always interesting as much as we like for everyone to be the same on the mat when they put on the ghee or the spandex depending on what you like. It's always interesting to talk. to people about their off-the-mat life. And I think Kevin splits his time between like billionaires and choking people on the mat. And, you know, he's had a long career writing

about the yachting world. He's written for Yotting Magazine, The New York Times, GQ. He's written in submarines and the largest shots, I guess, on the planet, really. And so it's sort of this weird soup that he's concocted for his life. And so I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation. It's a flip. Yeah. So you're the yacht guy. Yeah. How did you get into that in the first place? The yacht fella. The yacht guy

is another guy. The yacht fella. Sorry, I'm sorry. How do I get into it? So, yeah, tell us what you do. Yeah, so I've been in the industry for 16 years covering boats and yachts. I started off with smaller boats as an associate editor at a boating magazine

that you probably never heard of called Power and Motor Yacht and I did that for six years and I got poached by their competitor and I moved over there and was the executive editor at Yotting Magazine for a while and then I left there

a ball of fury during the pandemic and called everybody to get lost and not such nice words and struck out on five years ago started doing freelance and very quickly got picked up by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal I was writing for Esquire and GQ

but GQ was actually about combat sports Esquire I was writing about being a dad philosophy. I wrote a stosis and all this kind of stuff for them but most dots and then where it got really interesting was just a little over two years ago I had my Instagram was blew up out of nowhere, I went from basically zero followers to thousands and thousands of followers within a few days.

And two years later, I'm at 200 and, I think we're 269,000 as of today. The highest engagement in my sector. And I've kind of become like a little miniature celebrity wherever yachts are of interest, which is nice because there's about like 10 cities in the world where I can walk down the street and be recognized by people and they're all really nice places. yeah i bet yeah i bet so a lot of these like famous guys rich guys with yachts they know you obviously they're like oh what's up yeah a lot of them do um you know because they're so interested in it it's so niche and i've just kind of established myself as as the guy um so yeah they're always in

my dms i got dms from you know famous people a listers billionaires sent to millionaires whatever all the time um it's pretty crazy just just to wake up some mornings and check my DMs and be like, oh, shit, like so-and-so. Oh, man, yeah. Are you allowed to say who or who hits you up and are you allowed to say that stuff? Or that's got to be confidential. Yeah, most of it's confidential. You know, who DMs me?

They're not really my clients. Yeah, I can't, I don't know. I'll say, like, T.J. Watt text me a fair bit. He's a really cool guy, especially for, yeah, he's the highest paid defender in the NFL. And, yeah, he, we talk and then Jorge Posada. you know, former. Nice. Rick Ross follows me.

Connor McGregor follows me. Tom Brady interacts. But I haven't got him to follow me yet. I think I mentioned his ex-wife's jiu-jitsu instructor in some of my post. So maybe that's why I don't get the problem. Yeah, he's down on the jihitsu. Yeah, it's definitely for sure. That's Sebastian, Manuscalco, Burke Kreischer.

It's Hunter Biden. Oh, yeah, big list. Oh yeah Awesome So any of these guys That should meet in your world Of like super yachts and billionaires Any of them grapplers

Like you ever been like Oh my God I grappled too And then it's a whole thing It's rare You know It's a niche within a niche Occasionally you do though You know

Because there's a lot of Russians And they all love that In the Middle East You know like Who's the sheke that found the ADCC Like they're around And they get it And they think they were

And then there's guys that work on the boats. Those guys aren't like, you know, billionaires. They're just regular dudes who are active. And a lot of them are into it, especially as jiu-jitsu has gotten so popular. But I do have one, one buddy who owns a 154 footer. And he's down in Miami and Montana, I want to say. And he's interesting. He's like a white belt.

He's like semi-interested in grappling. And we're trying to put together a, a grappling match it's not really going to be much of a match but between me and Anthony Hernandez who's the UFC middleweight takedowns leader all time so we're gonna

grapple on the boat next whoa that's cool yeah it's gonna be cool we're trying to make a viral moment like Al Zuckerberg grapples so he's got a couple big boats so there's that

we're trying to get yeah he's got to have bats on one of them right I mean if he loves martial arts he's got to have bats on he must and I like write about it all time and I tag him. I'm always trying to get like, you know, over there, train. I do know of a big. Well, now

I do know. Yeah, now you have jiu-jitsu in common and you have yachts in common. Right? And he's like basically my boss because I'm all on Instagram. So like, I got to keep them happy. I do know of a 280 foot boat that's owned by Ukrainian guy that has a

full dojo on it as well. Like I said, that part of the world, they love martial arts. So that's important. Oh, they do, man. Russian those guys The Uzbek's Tajik's Ukraine all those guys love it So for sure man

So when you say like 150 footer or 200 footer Like there's tears to this stuff right It's like it's like rafling Levels and levels and levels And like you always think are the top level Yeah So let's run that down And then like what that equates to

In terms of like maintenance And the proximate income of each level You know you could say like a blue belt All right he's been training for a couple of years you could do these things. They're sort of like these milestones, right? Yeah, sure. So the thing about boats is they are really expensive

and they're like the last thing you buy. I bet. The last thing you buy because there's no real point to them. They're just kind of like after jets. Excess money. And that applies to even before or after jets? After jets. Because jets are a necessity.

You can use jets for business and like you have to get places. and like a lot of guys have jets that don't have yachts yachts are after jets and they're way more expensive um but you know with these things like I kind of get I tell people all the time like I get caught up because I write about the really big boats you know 300 400 500 footers that are owned by oligarchs and sheikhs and you know the Zuckerbergs of the world but I have these followers that like you know even if you own like a 40 foot center console which is not a huge boat but it's like it's a nice boat like you're fucking rich you got that's like a you know one and a half two million dollar boat or whatever and you're spending it's about 10% of that on operating costs annually so you know say

well it's 10% operating rule of thumb it depends how much you use the boat and there's a bunch of other things some like old salty guys we get mad at you when you say the 10% rule but yeah 10% is about give or take right so if you got two like what percentage of that is staff and what percentage of that that is fuel docking maintenance staff there's insurance there's all sorts of things that come into

it like the i wrote an article for the new york times and if you're interested you can go look it up it's it's called how much is that oligarch's yacht cost some of these folks they're big enough a paint job which they need every three or four years a paint shop can cost 20 million dollars it's just insane yeah what oh yeah geez that's the thing the sea destroy man the sea destroys everything is constantly trying to take everything back and just make everything rot and that makes boats super expensive to me no so yeah but even if you have a two million dollar boat which you know is not a huge boat that means you have give or take two hundred thousand dollars annually after taxes just to own the boat wow so if you were to pick any boat

for yourself right any yacht like do you have like all right this is it um card is Just pick the biggest, most expensive. There's a boat called Liva O, which is a 388 foot Abaking and Rasmussen built in Germany, which I think is the most beautiful, large yacht out there. It's really cool. It's almost like it has like a brutalist design. It doesn't look like anything else on the water. I think it's awesome.

That guy is second generation sells K rations or sells food. I guess I don't do K rations anymore. I got yelled at in the company that said that basically he sells MREs or whatever to the U.S. military and that's it's not that

It's always people making money all sorts of different ways believe like another one of my favorite boats is called Pink Shadow and that's owned by a German guy who's a fourth generation prosthetics company his grandfather founded a prosthetics company

in 1919 in Germany so you can imagine he had clients built right in And they, they, they, okay. Yeah. You know, this story. I mean, it's, it's really random shit. Like, you think in your head, like, oh, the rich guys to, to like a normal person.

And to me, before I got really deeply in this world, to me, like a rich guy was like an investment banker or a CEO. And those guys are very, they have a lot of money, right? That guy's worth like, let's 20, maybe 50 million max. But that's not the real wealth. The real wealth are like that. own shit, you know, like they own the land and the oil on it, or they own 45, um, uh, car dealerships or, you know,

or they own a nickel. They own like a nickel mine. Mining is huge. Um, carving parts are huge when you get up into these big boats, which people wouldn't think. Um, there's some tech guys. There's the finance guys like, honestly, like even the biggest guys outside of Ken Griffin who runs Citadel and he's worth like 60.

Those guys really can't compete with, like, you know, the tech barons and the oligarchs and the sheiks where it's just endless, endless meat. Yeah. Fertilike. Wow. I said, own shit. Some of these guys literally own shit. There are fertilized barons, especially in Russia. They own like, and it's usually the poultry guys because, like, they own all these chickens anyway.

And then they just convert the chicken shit in the fertilizer. And they have fucking enormous boats. It's really interesting. Yeah. I wonder if they have any humorous names, given the industry they're in. It's got to be. Yeah, yeah. Like if you're literally a chicken shit, you know, oligarch.

I haven't heard any chicken shit names. I don't know of a boat. I guess I can say this. Yeah, I do know of a boat named Rocket. And so it's R-O-C-K-I-T. and when they flick the lights off when they're partying, they can change the name of the boat

to fuck it. I'm not going to... That's true. I'm not saying, but if I said who he was, everybody listening to this would know who it was. You're right. So it's under my impression, right? That, like, at the lower tier, you know,

beyond, like, some of them maybe they're stretching so they can't truly afford it, so they rent it out or they charter it. But the higher you go on now, list they don't need to so it just kind of stays is that an accurate assumption yeah you know kind of I wouldn't say anybody who owns a 200 foot boat and is chartering it out is stretching but they are trying to offset their car there is a famous quote yeah from tilman fortita you know he's the cousin of the fraterta brothers found the UFC and he has a gosh what is that a 252 footer fed ship built

in holland which is best you can get and he has said that if you have to charter your boat you can't afford it and that makes a lot of people roll their eye. But there's level. He's worth I think 6 billion, 252 foot Northern European boat. That's a big deal having a northern European

built as opposed to Southern European. He's rich but he's compared to some of these guys he's not rich. It's pretty crazy. That's crazy. Yeah. And you see all these guys. You get on the boat. Your Instagram is really interesting because you get on these

crazy yachts and you get to take videos and interact with all those guys like what's that that's got to be nuts oh yeah those boats are crazy so the largest boat i've ever been on was a 400 footer um that was actually last year owned by shahid khan who owns a jacksonville jaguars and sells here's a weird one he sells every truck bumper in the u.s so if you own a truck he sold the bumpers or Chevy or Ford. Wow. That boat was insane. It had a full spa on it.

Like it had a plunge pool, a hot sauna, dry sauna, a fire pit, a cryogenic freezer, the whole deal. And the back of it, it had a,

this is kind of weird. It had a golden bust of a woman's face that was designed by eye to look like his mother, wife, and daughter all the same time. So you can make of that.

Yeah, that's kind of interesting. So I'm like, I'm like used to it now. But the very first boat I got on in my career, uh, big boat was 16 years ago. I was like late 20s and I went up to Bridgeport, Bridgeport Connecticut from New York City to get on the biggest boat that they still have ever built in America.

And that was a 200 two footer named Cake Walk. And I remember, um, walking around and getting a tour. and there was a refrigerator and I like stuck my head in and I commented like oh this is as big literally it was as big as my bedroom on the upper east side uh in like a rent control apartment and I was like wow they went a lot of food here and the designer goes oh no we don't put any food in here the owner's wife likes fresh flowers at every port so this is the flower

refrigerator and I was like oh wow this is a different that's the thing completely of base yes yeah you must see yeah i think that's interesting go ahead sorry no i think you must see some crazy stuff on this both like parties and stuff or they yeah as press i get invited to parties but i feel like they're real

party parties that you know people want to get salacious out there that they want journalists there that's a usually of course yeah yeah i have a couple of boys and a lot of girls is what it is but people here here's the thing like here's the other thing that people Everybody thinks, like, oh, it's just a bunch of, like, hookers and cocaine and whatever on all these boats in the parties.

Like, there is that for sure. There's anything, anything you could imagine, like some of the ditty stuff happened on some yachts, a yacht that I've been on, actually. But also, a lot of times it's just families who are very successful hanging out and looking at their phones. They're like playing card games or whatever. It literally, literally, literally, people always ask me, like, what are really rich people like and they kind of have this certain answer that they want to hear in their head

but their reality of it that they're just like anybody else like some of them are super cool funny honest like hardworking people that you want to be around and some of them are pieces of shit but that applies to everybody across economic spectrum right

like there's poor people that are awesome to be around and some are like criminals and like you don't want to be around but same deal with $40 in the bank it really doesn't make a difference difference on your character. Although the money will reveal your character a little bit. There's that whole, don't say that power corrupts.

I don't think that's true. I think more accurately, you can say the power reveals. It's like drinking, you know, you're drinking, and then you're an asshole, you're a super asshole, right? I think a lot of people, when they think of yachts, like the guy in the street, they think of like Saturday Night Live,

you know, that digital short word like, I'm on a boat, you know, that digital short. And then, which is like in your world of a relatively small boat. And, you know, people don't, they have the stereotype of what it means to have a yacht, be on a yacht, like, you know, have that kind of lifestyle. And I feel like it's probably very mistaken, you know, I mean, to some degree, there's probably a lot of misconceptions. It depends how long you've had the money, really, you know, like if brand new guys are

stunting, they want to show the world, you know, I did this. and I have this girl and I have this boat and they might not even be on like the biggest boat in the world like the guys are really like party like that song the guy usually like day charters which is like the lowest

right but you could still get out one of those boats for reasonable costs like one of these like if you're a rapper or something and you could show it a boat for 20 grand and look like you know oh yeah for sure especially down Miami

they run day charters for these 80-foot boats and people have these wild parties on them. There's whole like Instagram feeds that, you know, we'll track those. But that's really like the lowest rung. That's like, you know, buying a blue belt at like a big dojo. You know, that's not the real deal. No, one of those guys. If you had to pick your top three or top one,

what do you think your, you know, most interesting experience have been in your career? Because I'm sure, like, at some point, I would assume you can get jaded, right? Because you're looking at these things all the time. But I'm sure there's a thing. you that stay you get you do get jaded and i have to like honestly i like try to be meditative about it and just like remind myself to be like grateful where i am which i find very helpful because you can yeah the fact of the matter is i have the best job of the world i fly all over the world see some of the coolest most expensive shit going i talk to interesting people famous or

wealthy if that's interesting you or you know adventures and all this kind of stuff um so if i ever find myself being like, oh, this sucks. I have to like sit back and be like, no, this does not suck. And like, you know, if I talk to that with some gratitude practices, I'll do that. Because like I really, it's rare though. So I really do love my job. Like I'm very thankful. And a large piece of that is that I work for myself as well. Like it's so much, you know, any, I would say to anybody if you have a certain personality and a certain work ethic that if you can work for yourself, you should and just take that risk. Because that has been one of the greatest amplifiers of my own happiness and satisfaction, both personally and professionally

in my entire life. But I got away from your question. I went on a submarine. I took a personal submarine 3,000 feet deep off Curacao a couple years ago for an article. And that was before the Titan implosion. So like I like right. I remember you got called up for that because there was a lot of questions, right? And like, who's been on a submarine? I broke that story on my Instagram, the Titan implosion, like all these like CNN and Fox and we're like, oh, the countdown, like on the air ticker, they have 18 hours left and I

just call it bullshit. I was like, that thing is gone and I spoke people who kind of knew. And I was the first person to say it out loud and like that thing went super duper viral. So yeah, being on the sub was cool. I actually slapped the rear naked joke on the on the subpilas.

I think I technically hold the world luck as to for deepest joke. that's a marketable thing a deepest joke you know guys he was all right with it he's a Dutch guy there's a picture of it too

which is pretty funny so yeah the submarine is cool I did a profile of Bobby Knight the Indiana basketball coach some year like 10 years ago in the Bahamas we went bone fishing and a little flats boat for three days with him and his best friend

John Havlechek who's also an NBA Hall of Famer. And Bobby Knight was, he passed recently. He was the most interesting person I've ever written about. He was just a huge personality. If you guys want to look that up, just Google Kevin, Kevin Tonick Bob Knight fishing and it pulled that. The story ended up writing won tons of awards.

It's probably the best thing I've ever written. I mean, there's got to be some weird dynamic, right? Because you're a journalist, so they want to, you know, for you to like them. because they want a positive portrayal of themselves out in the world. But they're also so rich and like they have so much powers. It's like, oh, you work for me also, right? Is that kind of a weird dynamic?

Yeah, that can get really weird. Especially one thing I've learned is that people really don't like reading about themselves. Like profiles are, I like writing profiles the most because frankly, people are more about the most. But I've had the most issues with people reading profiles about themselves and getting really pissed off. well because it reveals their own yeah it reveals yeah it reveals more about them and the rabbit government itself running across the field right so they don't know they might see some things that they didn't realize about themselves that they may or may not like

even never like trying to like trash somebody um but yeah no no yeah a lady female billionaire um that i was profiling and she got hung up over this ladies worth a billion dollars she had a big boat down in south florida and uh she got we took a did a photo shoot of her in her backyard and it was like literally like a 500 photo shoot like not that much and she wanted to get photos for some reason for like she wanted the head shots and then photographer was like oh you don't have the rights and she's like oh kevin promised me the right did i did not i never never guarantee you or promise anybody anything in this business and so like the and she like properly tried to like gaslight me

like with my boss, my boss's boss on an email thread. I haven't promised this. And I have like printed proof and it does know. Show us a text messages. She's like, no, it's an email. She was like, I don't have the email. It said it. It was like over and over to the point where I was like, did I say that?

Like something I would say. And like this was like before the gaslighting was. But it was like proper like sociopathic behavior from this woman who probably, it probably works. You know, 95 times out of 100. Yeah. I'm just very scary particularly if you've got the carrot of like I'm going to give you business or I'm going to you know do whatever like it just becomes this kind of vicious cycle of manipulation you know our dynamics can never be underestimated especially when you have that much money it's it's a whole deal like when you're a journalist you're kind of in this nice area where it doesn't really matter like if I piss off a billionaire it doesn't really matter you know if you're a journalist because it's kind of what you're supposed to do like you're You're investigating.

If you're, you know, selling boats and selling charters, you're really at their, at the beck and call or anything, like people, journalism is like the one field where, like, you're not, you know, you're going to get paid either one when you say something nice or not. Most of these guys just have to kiss their houses all the time. And that this is, but this must have made you somewhat philosophical, right? Because you're seeing the full distribution of wealth here, right? Like, you obviously know plenty of normal people, right? And you're also seeing people at the tail end of the income distribution.

And so I imagine this has got to impact your philosophy on just money, life, and happiness. You know what I mean? Yeah, you know, my mother always told me growing up that all the money you need is the money you need to not have to worry about money. You know, once you get, there's really, once you hit a certain core. And I'm not breaking grout here. Once you get in a certain point of money, there's diminishing returns of what you get back being, you know, extremely wealthy. It doesn't make you any happier. Like, there's, you know, you point to any rich person who's just miserable, you know, it's more about your, you know, how you feel by yourself, like all that kind of stuff.

And money's not going to help you be happy in that sense. And I also have a theory similar to that. But with luxury, there's kind of a certain point you can hit where, like, you hit the perfect piece of it. Like, like, like, like a portion 9-11 is, you know, expensive car, but it's not like a million dollars. It's not a Bugatti, but yeah, it's 200,000 or whatever. No. It drives incredibly well. It looks great. It's just super, super classy lines. and like you can spend two, three, four, five times that and the car's not going to get any better looking.

It might get a little faster, but he's than you can't really drive it on the road. You know, like it's right. It's like if you, I used to write about liquor as well, like high end liquors. Like, so take a scotch. Like if you have a McAllen 25, which is a very expensive bottle, but a getable bottle if you're celebrating something, you know, I think it's a couple thousand dollars. that at McIntyre five tastes like heaven it's like the best it's just like perfect and that's how like you know 18 20 25 year old scotches are really good once you get to the McAllen 50 which is like literally like $1,500 a shot it just tastes like cognac because all the sugars like there's you don't get anything beyond it's being like oh I got 50 and like you know filling up some hole inside of you that that we tell people.

it's like that with everything it's um like a sweet spot for me let me ask a question so when you go out to see like you know the super high-end liquors the super fashionable stuff yeah there's got to be something that makes you want some of these things too right it's kind of like you know when you're a grapple and you're watching some of the stuff like i want to get to the olympics i want and there's like this thing that kind of takes over you don't have any of that um i i've been bitten by like I like I like watches yeah but no I how deep are you into watch pretty deep love yeah I'm talking with a the watch store in in Greenwich right now to hopefully be a master ship program yeah yeah so I love watches I have a I have a Rolex they just

I'm hoping to get a Rolex Explorer too polar very soon but I also have my eye on a that's the nice one yeah are you watch you don't like thumbs You're on a yacht all day. Every yacht broker in the world who sold their first boat goes out and buys a sub. So I just can't like do it, do that. Yeah. I went with the,

the sea dweller instead of the regular. The sea dweller's dope. I mean, I had a regular sub back in the, yeah, it's really, it's a little bit bigger. It's not like the, it's not massive. It's like a 43 mill.

It's kind of perfect. I'm a heavy guy. Yeah, it's 43. It's got that big. I like the steedweller a lot. I would, I would wear a steedweller. No.

But it's kind of like, I like the polar as well. That's a big watch. but it's kind of a flexion of its own self. Like, I'm a pretty big guy. I can, like, wear a polar where I was like a lot of people can't look huge on that. No. I'll tell you what watch.

I really see. Yeah. You know Glasshuta original? Yes. They have a dive watch, a 43 millimeter called the CQ panorama date, which I tried it on the other day. And I was like, oh, my, this is beautiful. Like, it just, like, spoke to me.

Yeah. So that's, that's in competition with the polar right now. nice nice so there's a little bit of that design but you must be around crazy watches because you go on these things and you're like oh my god you win like a richard mill or whatever it is crazy a richard mill is a perfect example of what i was just talking about like richard mill is an ugly watch and it's like it's yeah to me it's just like i would never in a million years where watch but like you know once you hit a steel daytona after still daytona or like a vassadron overseed like maybe a nautilus like then it just starts to get it to be it to

diminishing returns, like I said. You don't want to, you don't want to both. Be very low on my list of things to get. Honestly, I have a lot of friends with boats. So that kind of scratch with that itch. Yeah, that's what you want. So let me ask the question. There's a thing, right?

It's like the two happiest days of owning a boat is the buy, they sell it, you know? Is that the same with these guys or not really? Because they have everything, it's fine, you know, like? I think that probably. translates across the spectrum, you know, it's a, it's a rule of thought. But a lot of these guys, yeah, they buy boats like chronically. Like there's one guy down to Florida, John Staloupie, who, another interesting guy, he, he was a Brooklyn auto mechanic, high school dropout, I believe, and used all the savings

for, like, fixing cars to buy a Honda dealership in the early 70s, like right before the OPEC crisis. So nobody knew what Honda was. Right. And so nobody can afford gas anymore. And oh, this guy owns that at this point. A couple Honda dealerships and these things are like the most fuel efficient, cheap cars that will run forever on no gas. And that guy's worth.

But he buys boats every six months. He just runs through him. Wow. It's every single. James Bond movie. Wow. That actually begs the question because I know you've written on this, changing of the guard and people sort of placing yachts in different locations that they want to be

in and generational change and he's buying habits has it become more rational less rational not rational at all because it never has been like you know what I'm saying well there's two answers to that question right so as the baby boomer generation dies off there's this enormous transfer wealth that's never happened before it's trillions of dollars being handed down to people that are you know my age maybe just a little bit older um and that's a young yacht owner So they're not going, they don't want to do, you know, Centropay and St. Bart, which is like, you know, the normal places in Yaw would be, like, I would want to go to the South Pacific or like Antarctica or somewhere cool. And that's where they're going where you can like dive with leopards or like do a charter trip based around surfing, which is what I would, I would do. That'd be my dream charter. And so they're tracking out all these new destinations that are interesting. And it's the way the boats are being, we'll probably getting a little too into. the weeds, but the boats are being designed to be more for younger people with, like, more outdoor spaces

and pools and things like that as opposed to, like, enclosed dining areas, which are like the typical stodgy yacht, the picture, like you open over. Right. Yeah. And then, what was the second piece of that answer? Oh, yeah. As far as rational purchases, like, this shit has gotten

haywire. Like, we're living in, I don't know if people realize this, but we're living in a second gilded age. Like, the amount of wealth that has accumulated, basically since COVID, the very stratospheric layers of wealth is incomprehensible to a normal person. And it makes even wealthy people. Like the millionaires are getting squeezed out right now.

It's like the billionaires. And even like these guys who are worth like one billion, like, yeah, I get one billion. You're not struggling. But like you're not competing with the guy who has 40, 50, 60, 100 billion dollars. Like it's a different person. And people are buying. Yeah. Yeah, it's not uncommon.

In fact, it's a trend right now for people to be not just buying one 300-foot boat could be buying like three at a time so they can keep one in one destination. One has a submarine on it and like, you know, one has chefs or the hookers or whatever they have. Like, Donald those are them? I mean, these things scarce. Like there's got to be, you know, like in airplanes, like they have like the airbus in the bong and it's a duopoly. there's got to be something similar in the yachting world too, right? There can't be that many companies making it.

They can't probably produce, you know, so many of these a year, right? So there's a scarcity alongside the demand or like, what is that? No, there's actually tons of mega yacht builders. There's a lot of rich people out there. The ones that are highest in prestige are in Holland and Germany. And for big boats, there's only like four or five of those. Like they're building over, you know, let's say 250 feet or so. Once in Italy and Turkey, the boats are on average 40 or even 50% the cost of what a Dutch boat would cost, for example.

And there's so many goddamn Italian and Turkish boat builders, you'd be shocked. Wow. That's a huge surprise because no one's making airplanes for a commercial flight, you know, like or right, it's airbus and boats. Yeah, I believe that the airline industry has a lot more regulations, though. I know at least when you're flying on a private jet, like that private jet, industry. It's a lot more regulated than yachting. So I assume that has something to do with it. But yeah, I don't exactly know how it works in Europe. But I know in Florida, like, if you want to be a boat builder, you can basically just like hang up your own shingle. You don't need much beyond

just like wanting to build a boat. The best fishing boats in the world are all built in these two tiny towns in North Carolina. I'm talking like tiny tiny like 8,000 people. And it's just these like good old boys who are all competing with each other to like build like what they think. is the best boat. The craziest fishing. Like they're full custom. They're made out of wood, which is rare for boats that size. And they get, Michael Jordan just bought,

famously just bought one. Michael Jordan's got a big meggy yacht. He's got a 230 foot or whatever it is. And he's 80 foot fishing boat, which is just like the coolest thing going. It's like, it's like a pickup truck on the water, the other.

He got the boys on there. You catch a big thousand. Is this, is this what you keep saying? the European mind cannot comprehend the, is it, are those, the books you're talking about? So I have a string of posts that I do where I'd say the European mind cannot comprehend this. And it's always about a big fishing boat like that because the Europeans don't fish like that. The fisheries don't support it.

And like they just, they don't understand it. They always like think the boats are. And they just think it's stupid. They just look at it. It's very much an American phenomenon. Yeah, you'll find them in Australia as well in South America, but that's usually American known boat. It's like a very hunting fishing class. I would talk guy

for them on their boat. Yeah. The equivalent of the American tourist. You see the guys who they drive their like, you know, $200,000 pickup trucks or whatever, and they get on their $10 million fishing boat and they go out and fish, drink. Yeah. Just to bring it back a touch to the martial arts.

Have you ever had to use your jihitsu on a boat? Aside from the deepest we're naked on the submarine. No. I've never had to use by jihitsu. I guess thankfully, although we're all kind of like hoping to use it a little bit. No, I've never had to use my jiu-jitsu. I do, I think it does help though. Honestly, like the yachting industry probably surprising to a lot of people is like a very macho, masculine industry.

There's a lot of big egos and there's a lot of drinking and there's a fair bit of shady characters as well. It's a lot of con men and just like aggressive types. And I think the fact that people know that I'm pretty highly trained, and I talk about it on my channel a lot, too, because I'm passionate about it. I think that certainly helps a little bit, you know, like that in the back of their mind, like, oh, this guy might do something if I like, nobody's running up on me in the docks and getting in my face, which does happen. What's the staff like? That's got to be a whole not other thing, right? Because I see, like, sometimes, like, I'm, you know, on a yacht as a staff. And, you know, I've seen that on, like, Instagram and such.

Like, those guys must be getting put to the ring. Yeah, working on a boat is not easy. You know, you're at the Beck and Cole, very wealthy, extremely demanding people. Basically 24-7. They're working 18-hour days on the water, which is exhausting in the sun. You can imagine, I don't know how much time you spend on a boat, but just being on a boat is tiring because your core is always engaged because it's rocking. they're tired on boats plus they're in the sun plus you know it's long long days very demanding schedules you never know the client's always right you never know what the client's going to be

like and a lot of those clients you know they get some drinks the armor they get whatever else in their system and they're it's great um and then they also they deal with some captains can be abusive and like it's it's a really hard job i've never seen below decks i don't even ask me about that, but it's significantly less glitzy in a lot of ways than people would probably realize. The upside of being crew is that they have no expenses at all. Everything is paid for even when they're on land. If they start to the power of their friends when they're on land and they're working, it's covered. They'll pay for clothes or anything or housing. The housing's covered. So like, you know, in stack a lot of money pretty quickly as a young kid with, you know, without a ton of

education um trick is uh for men and women is that you got to have an exit plan because you don't want to be working on a boat uh past 30 unless you know you want it to be your career which if you want to be a captain you know career you can make a lot of money it's a hard life most captains are are good guys and extremely uh jobs professional but it's a hard life you know you're at sea you don't have yeah i bet so i if it were but you know it's like year round that you're on the water though, right? Because I mean, if you're a rich guy with a yacht, you're not on there 365.

You know, you're kind of like, oh, I'm going to go on vacation. You're all the thing. Typically about six months, but that's a lot when you're working that hard, you know, and then you got to get something land. Yeah, six months. A lot of them will get back on a boat and working on another boat or, you know, whatever it is they're doing.

So being cruised up, but you do, you do get to see the world. You know, and if you're smart about it, a lot of the most successful brokers, I know, brokers, make investment banking money those guys if they're good at it can make a ton of money and a lot of them learned the ropes when they were crew and those guys know the boats inside and out and it'd be like going from being a mechanic to a car salesman that's going to be a good car salesman as soon he knows how to sell right they just know the product um so there's there's definitely

upsides to being crew um but it's it's a really hard job and um i think a lot of people the industry actually i've written about this where wall street general the industry is having a problem finding good crew because, as I said, with the second Gilded Age and so much more money being in circulation, the super yacht fleet worldwide has expanded faster than they can find good help to do it. So, like, it's a miniature crisis, a champagne problem for sure, but a miniature crisis within the industry. Are they turning to automation to help with that?

I mean, I'm sure technology has also grown by leaps and bounds on these things. I know you've written about just internet on yachts changing, you know, Oh, Starlink has changed yachting in incredible ways. It just wrote about this. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, Elon Musk is having an enormous impact on yachting, even though he doesn't own a yacht. And it's because, you know, up until Starlink came around,

like what, two, three years ago, whatever it was, even if you were the richest guy on Earth, you couldn't get good cell service on a boat in certain parts of the world, right? It would just, you're cut out. And the way that affects you when you're, you know, running a business, say, and you want to be on your yacht, you can't be on your yacht as much. You have to go back to the land or, you know, if you have a meeting in New York, some board meeting in New York City, you can't take it from the south of France on your boat

because you're going to cut out. So you've got to fly back to New York. Now with Starlett, just so much, such a better signal and so much cheaper, these guys are basically living on their boats and running your business is from the boats. So I have an article in the newspaper journal magazine in October called Working from Yacht. And it's like a property.

And they can spend more time in them. So the boats are getting bigger. And there it's changing destinations. You can go to. I talked to a guy who took a call from literally a conference call from the South Pole. Like took his boat down to Antarctica. And then they dog slotted them or something 700 miles of the South Pole. And he took a conference call there just as a black cess of boat.

Wow. Yeah, that's quite a flex right. That's pretty cool. And I have a buddy who didn't want to be interviewed for that article, but he owns a, gosh, at 164 or so. And he's spending the whole summer in the med. He's still there. He's coming back in a couple weeks. And he's running his very large auto business from there.

It's not been home, not been in the States once that I know. It's amazing how these have these knock-on effects, right? I did a post. I was a lot if you guys saw last year, there were all these like fires and crap. ashes and stuff like that, especially in the Mediterranean. And I did a post, it was like, Elon Musk is response. I was kind of like trolling a little bit, but I was like, Elon Musk is responsible for these.

And it was like only because, you know, granted, people have phones in their hands now so they can get a video of a yacht burning or whatever. But it's really like the amount of time you spend on a boat increases the chance of something bad going happen, bad happening, right? Because you're at sea and be a risky, you have big chains, you have crazy weather, you have these batteries, and these toys and catch out fire

and now Starlink everybody's on their boat all the time so like the amount of incidents like that has to increase even if relatively it's not a proper increase so I wrote I'm responsible for this boat burning and like you know I love trolling

I troll the Europeans a lot and I troll Elon Musk fanboys all the time and I just have a blast with it well this is this has been fascinating I feel like we just scratched the surface. Oh, yeah, we didn't talk about it. I can talk forever if you can't tell.

Once you get me to start talking about boats or jujitsu, I'll just go. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Kevin, for sharing something that is, most people have literally no idea, you know, and your comments kind of just on this new gilded age. I mean, you can talk about it in the news,

but I don't think people really understand it for good reason. Because we're talking about like more to understand unless you see it. And I'm just around it all the time. And it's like it's a real thing. It's like these people. Yeah. And who knows what it's going to look like 20 years from now. It probably going to end up with real problems worldwide.

Right. When a lot of people can't afford to move and some people are buying four 300 foot boats. But across that bridge where we get to it.