Liquidity & Liquor - Captain Lee | Running A Super Yacht

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott DeClaire. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has other great podcasts like Marketing Made Simple hosted by Dr. J.J. Peterson. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. Now, if any of these topics are interesting to you, you're going to love his show, how to write and deliver captivating speeches, how to market yourself into a new job, how design can help, and potentially hurt your revenue, and how to create a social media ad strategy that works. If these topics hit home and they're things that you want to learn about, go listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Today you're going to hear an episode of my new podcast, liquidity and liquor. I co-host liquidity and liquor with Josef Martin, a serial entrepreneur who sold his last company boxy charm for over 500 million dollars. On liquidity and liquor, we have conversations about business, money, and life with some of the most interesting people in the world. You can download and subscribe to liquidity and liquor on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the bio that I found floating around the internet on you. All eyes. So born and raised in Landlock, Michigan. True. He discovered his untapped love, untapped, no limb love for the water while managing restaurants and Turks and Kiko. That's a little dramatic and over the top. It was then that an acquaintance invited him to serve as a mate on a sailboat delivery to earn extra cash. Well, it's embellishment of sorts. I was out of money going broke. In fact, I was broke. I think we had like $55 left in the bank account. That's a little three by five business card or index card, said mate wanted for sailboat delivery down to the British Virgin Islands, no experience necessary. That's all it takes. How do you find yourself in Turks and Kiko's serving with no money? Want to get paid to do it? Well, the restaurant. I don't know, but I mean, so you made a move where you weren't born, raised in Turks and Kiko's? So you made a move? Yeah, made a move. Most people don't move the Turks and Kiko's to serve at a restaurant. How was it serving? I owned it. Oh, you owned it. Oh, I thought you were serving it. I thought it was like you were also was like the business was not going well. No. I understand. The casino that they were building right next door to my restaurant. Okay. I was in, I mean, very close proximity. Okay. Only made it up to floors when they ran out of money. Oh, shit. So you owned the casino, but before you owned it in the restaurant, but before that, you just trying to get a job, you get a job in summer, you ended in Turks and Kiko's in the open restaurant. I had a couple of restaurants prior to that. So this is incorrect. This is man. How did you come up with to say you owned a restaurant in Kiko's? Yeah. It's like I said, not everything you read is true. Really? Yeah. I've never experienced that. Not everything on the internet is true. No. It must be true, but it is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, oh, so that, so did you sell or what happened? No. I just had to give it up. Oh, shit. So you shut down those restaurants? Yeah. I can't imagine you're serving people. You don't like it. You got to work. Imagine Captain comes to people like, I don't like the food with tough luck, okay? You pussy. All right. If you'll eat what I give you. Yeah. If you'll eat what I give you. So at 35, you've changed your cap. Yeah. It's true. That's when you've changed your cap. That's when I started embarking on the journey to get it. Okay. You can't get a captain's license in a year. No, it doesn't take. Well, in order for the Coast Guard to allow you to even sit for your first basic exam to get your masters, you have to spend 720 days at sea underway. The boat's got to be off the dock and moving. And you have to verify that's 720 days. Somebody's got to sign for your time. And if they lie about your time, they're subject to, I don't know, five years in prison and quarter of a million dollar five. So you're minimum two and a bit years to do this if you went out every single day? If you started tomorrow, you'd have to stay out at sea for two years. Yeah. How long you took you from the day you started to actually obtain the license? It took me about five years. Okay. Wow. So it was very intensive. Yeah. I worked at it hard. Well, I was, I was working on boats for nothing. Hmm. You don't have to pay me. Just sign my C-servant. Councilors. The hours. Yeah. Interesting. Councilor. And I didn't, I mean, I could go on board as a cook. Hmm. The stew. That seems silly though, no? Whatever capacity, you're on board that boat and counts as time and sea. That's a lot of your way from the dock. That's different than like pilot hours though, because pilot hours, you have to be flying the plane for so many hours to get to life there's, but there's a certain regimen that you have to go through for pilot hours. Yeah. You know, you have to go to class. You know, for a second, I had some respect to it, because you're going to make sure you actually run a boat and you navigate through waves for two years, but no, you can be a cook. So to give you technical experience, specific experience, you could be a cook. And I've known some chefs that have decided that they wanted to get into the other aspect of it. And so they've taken their C time and then they've gravitated towards, you know, learning the deck and learning the mechanics and learning everything else that they need to learn because when you sit down to take the test, you could spend your two years as a cook at C, but when you sit down to take the test, it's going to show exactly what you know. You have to have experience. You have to. Yeah. And you don't get that just by being a chef at C. Interesting. Before we continue with this, obviously, completely factual bio, 100% accurate representation of your life, what is, what is being a captain actually mean? So the difference is it that you have people that are technically on staff. Is that like one direct report on staff on a boat? Does that make you a captain? Does that mean that you have to go through that whole process? Now you are in, when you're a captain, you are in command of the vessel and anybody and everybody who's on board that vessel, you are responsible for whether it's a passenger, whether it's an engineer, whether it's a stewardess. If it's a dog, you're responsible for all lives, all souls on board. You know what, do you remember that case, the Italian captain with the cruise ship that tealed over in the Mediterranean, that jumped the ship, I mean, what's your take on this one? It was such a dumb ass. I don't know the story. Okay, so in the Mediterranean, there was a ship that was a captain. We got to talk now. You got to talk to your parents about it. Okay. So your phone is on. That's the network calling right now. You need to decade? No. No. Okay. What is Andy Cohen? Andy Cohen. Andy Cohen. Listen. I didn't mean I was blowing network up intentionally, it's just for a little while. This is live podcast. I mean, raw podcast over here, guys, we're not editing anything for you guys. That's how cool we are. So anyway, what happened was a Mediterranean, there was a cruise ship, a large one in Mediterranean, and maybe like a thousand passengers. It's good to know. It's good to know. It's good to know. It's good to know. He was going really close to the shore because he was with the girl and he wanted to show her how nice the shore is. So he came too close to a point that it actually hit the ground and the whole boat tealed over. And then eventually he escaped the boat before everybody else, because he jumped. If you looked at it, if you looked at the topography, because they've shown it 100 times, the island slowed down very steeply, and you could get close to the island. Not that close. But there's a prescribed course that all cruise ships have for they've got a route, that they have to follow. And he just decided, well, he wouldn't do that because he was trying to impress his check. And he ended up killing a bunch of people, 35 people, and he killed the guy. Well, I mean, he's telling intentionally, but I know this story. So the thing was, he was supposed to turn the boat and try to say, but he ended up jumping the boat and serving himself first. And that was... This lame ass excuse that he used was, I felt I could better coordinate the rescue efforts from shore. Well, it must be true, just like the internet. How many people were on this boat? A couple of hundreds. It's a big cruise ship. Oh, maybe I have heard about this, but I'm just not, I'm not clocking it. So it's not a small, it's not a small, no, no, no, no, no, it's not now. It's a big deal. It was a major... It was a major catastrophe. And it took a couple of years for them to get that upright and move it. Because they were afraid it was just going to slide down the slope of the island and fall into 5, 6,000 feet of water and be irretrievable. She is. So it was quite an engineering feat together. So what does it take to move from a boat? You're doing about 200 feet or so on boats, right? To say like a carnival cruise line, size, ship, what's a different, like it's just a more experience based on the size or a number of people, what's the... More experience. And when you get into the like cruise ship type thing, you're dealing with department heads. You're dealing with a full complement of bridge officers. So rarely are you driving the boat. Interesting. It's the third officer, second officer, they're at the helm and you're telling them what route is to follow. What is harder in your opinion, a cruise ship, one of the largest cruise ships in the world to captain that, or a boat where you're actually at the helm? Well the difference is you're responsible for more lives when you're on a cruise ship. To me, it doesn't really make any difference. One life, a hundred, a thousand, you're still, do you want to be responsible for one person dying? That's the only person you've got on board. You know, I had a lady working for me and she was a seam of a major cruise liner. I don't want to say it, which one. And she told me you have no idea how many people fall off the cruise boat. Not really. Mostly when they're drunk. They don't report this, do we call the crossguards, the boat never stops. They call the crossguards to pick them up, but they fall. And many times they don't find them and you don't even hear about it. Is that, is that normal? She, I told her how, for the quill, I mean, she was working for me for about two years and I was trying to get it out of her and she just gave me a number, like, I can't tell you, I'm never going to tell you that. It's crazy. It's a big, big cruise line. Yeah. How many fall from your boat end up in zero? Well, I've only had one fall, yeah, but you retrieve them, right? Yeah. You stop. Yeah, and they don't stop. They don't want some stuff. They just keep on going. That's insane, right? Yeah. I mean, that took a dark turn. Okay. Yeah. Let's keep going down this jovial bio because it's less than, we're going from people falling off the cruise ships to joviality. Okay. So you obtained your captain license after you said five years, left the restaurant business behind to pursue his newfound passion. And then since then, the quote, running against the tide author, that's your book, has commanded more than eight dozen super yachts. This is the next line's going to kill me and you lovingly known as stud of the sea. Is that how you're, is that how they know? You love lovingly is quite accurate, but it's something that's not going anywhere obviously. He values a special bonds, he forms on deck and always puts safety of everyone on board above all else. I think that's fair. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Okay. So you're excited to, oh, this is probably some sort of trailer or prelude for a show. It says you're excited to return to the Caribbean this season with familiar faces, Jeffrey Shahar Grove, Shuh, Chief Sue Fraser, Olander, and then it goes into more about the show. So interesting career path because you, you were a captain and now all of a sudden you're finding yourself in the spotlight, which is an interesting pivot because now you're just taking your work and you're broadcasting it out to the world. So maybe just walk through your career or some of the things that have, I think that it's really cool to see your background, like some of the, maybe some of the stories that you've dealt with over the years. I don't know if they're good stories, bad stories, crazy stories, but then also the pivot from, you know, you have a very personal, probably not public life to taking the thing that you're good at and broadcasting it out to the world. How did that sort of manifest? How is that going? Obviously, you've been doing it for a while now. So you're kind of, you know, you're comfortable with it, but was that difficult? Was it hard? Was it easy? No, I actually didn't give it much thought. I just wanted people to stay out of my way, let me do my job. You can, you can film all you want, just stay out of my way, you know? Do you like more the actual reality show or being a captain? To me, there's not much difference because I don't run my boat any differently. Well, I guess the way we want to look at this question is, the reality show kind of like put your personal life now outside of the boat, too. If it was shooting outside of the boat, but now you cannot sell, what would you say, okay, you have to get rid of one, either reality show or selling, what would you choose? The reality show. You would get rid of the reality show, all right? Yeah. Well, I mean, how do you stop being a captain? So your identity is captanly in the reality show or the actual captain? No, I've been a captain for 30, almost 40 years. I've been doing it on TV for 10. But when you do it on TV, is it not like, so you're saying, you're saying, you know, kill me. Fine. But get out of my way. Let me do my job. Exactly. But I'm sure there's a lot of bullshit that comes with being on TV because you see it with even like, like real housewives and whatnot. Like, there's like, there's like, architected drama. Yeah, we don't script anything. Everything we see is real. The camera start rolling at 6.30 in the morning. Yeah. And for the next six weeks, they don't shut down except to change out the media cards. That's it. That's it. And is it like pressure performing, doing the job while cameras are around? Or is that actually the chaos that I don't pay any attention? Well, I know, you know, I noticed and I'm going to do what I'm going to do. Yeah. You know, you can film it and you are film it. But captain, what would we see when I see it? Because I've been watching the show, I'm like, Scott, that didn't do his homework and I do do my homework. What did I do wrong with that? So, so on the show, I've been watching it for years. I noticed that now it's 80% of the time it's going to be about the crew. You, the rest of the day, and then 20% is about the people. So which makes sense because if you want to go and put a story, just you want to be people, kind of like to relate to the character. So you don't want to go and focus on people that come and go and you're never going to see them again. You want to focus on the crew and it makes sense. And in between, you have, so when you, when you're going to see the crew every time going in and out and everything else, like, the crew is not like the, the guest, right? You say, well, the guest, as soon as you put the camera, the person is a different person. Is it the same with the crew that, it's the same, they change when they see the camera? I think when the network hires crew, they look for us, you know, a specific type of personality, you know, whether it's an A or a B type personality, but they look for somebody that's probably going to play well on camera, going to play well on TV. And they see certain qualities in that person that are going to be entertaining. And the last thing that you want to see happen is as soon as the camera starts rolling, all of a sudden this person that you hired and their personality disappear. And then they morph into something that I've never seen before. And you go, uh, Jesus Christ. Do you have any say on all this when we're talking about, when we're talking about that, like when you look at, when you guys choose the cast members, do you have any say and say, and I don't like this person or there are past cast members that I wouldn't work with again. Okay. But as far as present, you know, when we're getting ready to start a new season, uh, here's your cast, but I do reserve the right to fire whoever I choose. Yeah, you still have a captain. So that's one of the things that was tough for production to get used to is that once you untie those lines from the dock, there's only one authority out there. That's the captain period. So that no, no matter what any person on that boat, the captain has the authority to confine them to quarters, put them ashore, whatever he needs to do to maintain the safety and the integrity of the vessel. Mm hmm. Come closer to Mike on board. Yeah. So I think actually that's my point. It's, it's interesting because when you, when you operated like pre TV, you didn't have to put up with any bullshit, you didn't have to put up with any bad hires or if you did, you can get rid of them easily. So now it's like, I still apply, still apply and do they, even the cast they picked, like you said, you don't have a hand in actually picking them, but what if you have a whole bunch of monkeys on board right now and you have to deal with what you have, you, like, I mean, they're characters, they're personalities. I'm just equating it to, if I was forced into, in a business, a team of people that were just all characters, didn't have proficiency or they had, are you both proficiency, but they weren't great. They were more hired for, you know, how crazy they could look on camera. That would be an absolute nightmare, you know? It would be if that's what they actually did, but they don't because they do have to have a certain degree of proficiency because they have to get their SDCW, they do have to have their credentials. Okay. So they never bought you an unprofessional crew or something. Maybe there was one or two bad apples, but the rest of the people that are green just starting out not as proficient as you'd like them to be, but teachable. Mm-hmm. I can deal with that. Yeah. Give me, give me, so how many people have you fired that were part of the cast throughout the years? Well, since the show started, I've been trying to get through one season where I didn't fire at least one person. Wow. And I haven't made it yet. Wow. So every year. Don't you think they wanted to happen though now? And they're like, you know, we need, we need them to be that bad at Captain. They're planting people. I think my record. This guy's an idiot, bring him over. Yeah. He's going to get fired. We need one. One season is four. Wow. Look at it. That's half the crew. Almost half the crew. Wow. Which ones do we do the longest? How many, how many of the, did anyone stay with you throughout the entire 19 years that you've been doing this? No, nobody's, nobody's made it the full 10 years. Kate stayed with me the longest, it's six years. Okay. And people leave because of other reasons, right? I mean, they become famous. They have other options. They get tired of it. They want to do something else. You get married. Yeah. A lot of it. They get pregnant. Yeah. All right. It's interesting. So when you, when you get on board, like, did you have any people that came on board that you guys had to break up fights and drunk and stuff like that? Does it ever happen? Physical? No. No. Physical is just something that we don't tolerate at all. You know, I do have the authority to put somebody in cups and put them in a room and lock them in there. If I have to, never in all my years of yacht and have I ever had to resort to that. No. You just, you're fired. You're a dick. Get out of here. But you deal with, like, if you're playing, take it to back wherever we hired you from. Yeah. Go away. How about about the guests, not not their crew member? No. We've never had any guests, even attempt to get physical. Yeah. What's, um, we had some really dumb asses on board. What did you tell that, what's the, give us a story, something, a couple of things that happened. Oh, the horse was one of the best ones. She got all, all licked up and she had this nice evening gown on it and dinner, right? After dinner, she goes, gosh, I need to be so great. She goes for a midnight swim and said, well, it probably would be, but no, that's not going to happen. Yeah. So she strolls down to the swim platform. I said, do not go in the water. As somebody goes overboard and brought daylight with current wind, waves, it's virtually impossible to spot them again once you take your eyes off of them. Wow. If you can imagine, you're just trying to spot A-head, you can't see anything below the waterline, A-head, this big. Now, I could throw a bright fluorescent green or orange basketball or a beach ball out there, you know, the size of the moon and you'd be hard pressed to find it. And she wants to dive in the water in a black dress in the middle of the night and I tell her she can't do it. And she looks at me and just gives me the biggest fuck you look in the world and dove in. Well, I was pissed and I'm the kind of guy where my emotions on my sleeve. I was pissed. I got her back there and I said, you're fucking chartered just ended. And I said, any of the people that are here with you, if they don't like it, their charter can end too. That's where I left it. And so I got up the next morning and I called the primary. What is that? The primary is the, he's the guy that the individual that is paying for the charter. You know, he gets first dibs on everything, the best room, the master, all of that sort of thing. Because he's picking up the tab. We get to be primary, you see, you know, when we're doing stuff, I want to be a primary. It's good to be primary. It is. I'm a primary. So I bring the primary into the wheelhouse and I said, listen, I said, she went over to the line and I said, here's the deal, I said, you guys are more than welcome to stay on board. We'll continue with the charter, but she's leaving. And if you have an issue with that, you're more than welcome to join her. But her charter is over, she's gone. Then I had one of the stewardesses go down, pack her bags and escort her off the boat, order an attendor. And she got about less than 50 yards away from the boat in the tender and I'll be god damned if she didn't do it again. She jumped in? I was standing on the half deck and I was looking and she bailed out of the tender. As the tender's moving. What the fuck is she doing? Proving a point, giving me the last finger, I guess. That's a little strange. I said, if you can pick her up, pick her up if you can't, what the hell? Wow. Well, I was like, I don't know, well, you don't watch it much. No. I get to talk to you as parents and I was doing some work. We had a girl named Rocky that she was stewardess and she got her knickers in a wand because I got rid of her chef named Leon, who just wasn't a very good chef, caused a fire in the galley because he didn't clean the oven back in time. But that's a big fucking deal, though, that's not, I mean a fire on the boat. We put the fire out, put the boat sank. You can only pour so much water on a fire before the boat's going to sink. So he ended up getting terminated and she was just so upset about it that she decided, I'm out of here, too. So she takes off her clothes, takes off her microphone and she dives overboard. And he goes, he says, Rocky just went over the side, that's good. I just don't understand why that's the go-to move. She's went to another boat, I said they can have her, and welcome to her. Have you ever had a guest, or somebody that's obviously paid for the charter that you've had to shut the charter down that's been so pissed they've gone after you, tried to sue, get money back? I've never had anybody go after us legally, no, or any other way, no. Season one, I did have a group of guys that, you know, if they had to kept it to themselves, what they do behind closed doors is none of my business. But they were just openly doing cocaine, and I can't have that, you know, I put everybody's career at stake, I put the vessel at stake, that's at risk, because you can't cop with drugs on board, they take the boat, I go to jail, that's your responsibility. I'm going to be there a long time, and guess what, Caribbean jails are no joke, you know, it's not like here where they treat you with kid gloves, you think jail here is bad, try Caribbean jail, no thank you. And so I took the charter back to the dock and said, you're all out of here. And then I made, I sent a crew member with each one of them as they packed their bags to make sure they didn't leave a little present behind. And then get to the airport and call them, and go like, yeah, you know that boat down on the D-Dock at Portable Science, they got drugs on board, you might want to check them out. Next thing I know, I got customs and immigration down there with the dogs, and I'm still in it. So after they left, well I made sure that somebody went with them to pack so that, you know, I had a crew member with every one of them. And then after they disembarked, I had customs come on and bring the dogs and sweep the whole boat. Yeah, you wouldn't be the one making a phone call. You don't want them to make the phone call. Yeah, it's stressful, you know. It is stressful. People on board, they're gone now. I made sure I waited until after they're plain and left to make sure they were out of the country. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, called up Customs and said, did you ever have, uh, bring the dogs? Did you ever have a cruise where you said, just, it's just not the day like we should, I wish I didn't have to do this one. Made it through where there are people, something, just everything goes wrong. Well, every, every captain has been out at sea and due to circumstances beyond his control finds himself in a situation where he goes, oh, I'm not getting paid anywhere near enough to go through this ship. And you bitch about it, you moan about it until you get to shore. As soon as you get to the dock, get tied up, you go have a couple of pops. But don't you have like raiders? Then you go like, that wasn't so bad. But don't you have it raiders to go and tell you, get your seal ready on the screen. And like, nah, I shouldn't go and this is just the weather system coming over here. We should just not know if you're, if you're ever in any doubt, you don't. Yeah. It's just that simple. I'm just thinking of people, people will raise hell about it. Why can't we leave the dock? Why can't we do this? And it's not a democracy. You don't get a vote. It's like Jordan Belfer and when he think his yacht, no, it's more, it's more like the helicopter ride with Kobe or Ryan. The same, same situation where he was kind of like telling his guy, let's go, let's go and he told him it's the direction. I like Jordan. You're on the line. Yes. I know. That's your responsibility to do that. Yeah. Yeah. So if you... The consequences are very steep. Expensive or death. Yeah. Only two options. Yeah. What are you bartering with? Someone's life for a potential good time. I don't barter. You shouldn't. I don't. Never have. You can get all kinds of pissed off. You can jump up and down. You can tell me I'm never going to work in this business again. I don't care. Well, I was looking for a job when I got this one. Because you're dealing with... I assume you're dealing with egos. How much? That's huge. Huge egos. Usually people that come to those chargers, they don't well up. They don't know who I am. I know exactly who you are. I don't give a shit. No. Do you imagine the types of people that rent charter yachts, that if they're not getting their way? Yeah. I mean, you... Millionaires are never, ever used to somebody saying, no. It's just not never vocabulary. That's not how their life works. That's for other people, but not for them, you know. Because they go, I don't care what a cost make it happen. And they can do that for a bunch of people. Can most people around them are going to be yes people? And that's for... Like 99% of them are... Yeah. And they're not used to having one telling them no, confiding them. Yeah. And they run into me. And... What... Let's just say it's not always pretty. And the average person that books the charter, are they... You know, Deca, Millionaires, over 100, are they billionaires? What's the average type of persona you deal with? Well, the ones that you find that'll book a 200 or 250 or 300 foot yacht are generally in a billionaire category. And they might do that three, four times a year. Now, Billionaire, I mean, it's 150 grand, right? For a weekend or for a week or something? I don't know. Like the last boat we were on is like... You're probably all in with everything. Tip, alcohol, fuel, all the rest of that stuff. Probably half a million a week. A week, a week, a week. And how many guests? 12. 12 guests. Maximum. Yeah. That's all you can have legally. So if you technically own a boat, like my neighbors on the other side, they own a boat. It's like a hundred and twenty four to seven, it's at two hundred, but it's a hundred. And they're on the boat about 120 days out of the year. That's a lot. Yeah. And they told me they have a crew, they have seven men, crew, and it cost them about 1.1 million a year. That's the math. So it was seven crew, that means it's probably maybe a hundred and 120 foot boat? Yeah, a hundred point. That's what it is, yeah. It's probably a little light at seven, probably needs eight to do it properly, but yeah, that's about right. Maybe it's not including the captain, I don't remember exactly, it might be seven or eight, something like that. And then what it also counts is the fixing, because there's always every year they have to go and put it in some repairs or some sort or something like that. It's about your life, you have to put money in it. Yeah, always. What are the, what are the, it's a depreciating asset. It's just never, it's a year worth what you need. It's sold to all the time, so be by it. So what do you put towards it? See, but I don't even, I don't know about economics. It's a very rich conversation, I hope to have some day, but when you buy it, for say you buy a boat for anything from $25 to $50 million, what's the maintenance costs on something like that? You're going to spend, you have to have at least $5 million every year, if you buy a $50 million boat. That's a lot of $5, it is $77.5 million every year that you don't care about, that you could just take, put in a pile out in the street, put a match to it, and walk away and go like, anybody bring that up? Yeah, but the, the, the, the, the way you think about this is if you have a business that makes you about $50 million a year, you're not going to take it all to heaven. You have already enough in the size. $7 million is a lot of money. Well, I mean, you, you, you can depreciate some of it on taxes. Yeah. If you're going to bring in some people, you write it off as expenses, and then the rest of it comes down to, okay, look, that boat is on, by me, I'm going to go and spend third of my money on leisure, third of my money goes to boats, jets, all that stuff, and that's, that's the numbers, that's, that's what it is. I mean, in, in their case, it's one and a one point. And look, when you have seven men crew, they make you all the food you want. They have enough food to last them for their, like, they have enough fuel to go from the Mediterranean to Florida and come back. And you get that boat and it's always there that crew always serves you and it's, it's one point one million a year. And you leave like a king. What's the crew doing when they're not traveling? Working. Working what? There's always something to do on a boat. So it's a full time, 40 hours plus, I mean, yes, okay, for, usually, like, with my crew, it's a nine to five job when we don't have guests on board, okay. So start a day to clock in the morning, we're done by four or five in the end. But what kind of work do you do when there is no one there, really fixing the boat, cleaning again from yesterday? There's always, there's always something on a boat that's broke. Always. Yeah. I don't care. The boat that just came out and it's brand new and nobody's ever set foot on it. Yet. It's got something that's broke. That's real. That's fucking real. That's crazy. Yeah. There's never, nothing is ever perfect. Yeah, I don't know anyone that, anyone of my friends that own boats, no matter how new they are or whatever it is, there's sort of the time it's somewhere in the garage. And they're complaining. But stop taking it. Get in there. I mean, no. Just be clean and be clean from top to bottom. At least once a week, maybe twice a week, depending on where you're, where you're docked at. Mm-hmm. Now, if you're docked anywhere where there's like a highway or something, you know, just the road dust means you're watching that boat three times a week. Now, if you've got a 200 foot boat, it takes some time to do it. You've got four deck hands that are out there, busting their ass. Yeah. Eight hours a day. And as soon as, you know, for two days, and then one day they don't have to wash it and then the next day they do, and you start all over again. And if it's washed, and it's got to be dried, and the decks have to be scrubbed. And then for those, and the tenders have to be scrubbed. And then you've got all the toys on board that have to be exercised and used. Otherwise, the next time you go out with the owner, and he says, I want you to put all the sea bubs in the water and you have them run them. Battery's dead. Mm-hmm. Or why is the battery dead? Well, we didn't, we didn't use it. We just left it. Yeah. No. That doesn't, it doesn't work. It's four times a day. There's a, there's a, literally checklist I guess that you have to have for, that's prepared for every boat, right, that you're selling said to commonalities, but the end. The boat has to always be ready to go when the owner calls up and says, I want to go out. So it can't be, well, we're in the middle of washing the boat. And if he says, I want to go out tomorrow, then you have to be ready to go. Crew has to be ready to go. Everybody's got to be on their game. So that means all of the laundry has to be done. All of the beds have to be made. Every refrigerator has to be stocked. The jacuzzi's got to be ready to be functional. It can't be any leaks. The gym's got to be set up, got to have all the towels in. You got to make sure that the sauna's working properly, gets up to the proper temperature. You can't have any dust or any fingerprints on any mirrors, anywhere on the boat and all of the guest rooms, all six of them, if there happens to be six on board. And, you know, just, you just have to think what it takes to maintain a house, but quite droopled that for a boat. That's what I'm understanding. So it's, when you buy a boat, you buy a full-time staff. Yes. Because after a certain size, your insurance company requires that you have, have with the commanding requirements, and your insurance company says, you will have a captain on board all the time, you will have a first officer on board, you will have two engineers, you will have somebody for the interior, you will have certain amount of deck hands, and this is the bare minimum that you have to hire. Now, usually, the bare minimum that they say you have to have is nowhere near what you have to have when you've got guests on board. You can easily double it. I didn't realize that. You know, both is expensive business, yeah, it's a very expensive. It happens. Entry level for a captain is $1,000 per foot per year. That's how that's a good benchmark for a figure in a salary, okay? That's for entry level. Now, you want to hire, like, if somebody came up to me and said, well, I'm going to pay you, you know, I've got a 230-foot boat, and I'll pay you $1,000 per year. You better go find somebody else, because no, I'm not doing it. That's your rookie. And if you think hiring experience is expensive, what do you pay for inexperience? Yeah. And then you go, yeah, okay, I get it now. I mean, it's like when you're flying, do you want to see a 22-year-old kid come strolling out of the cockpit of a 747? No. You're not? No. I imagine that. Right. What about the rest of the salaries? You have your captain. That's a good benchmark. But then you see if your chef is going to cost you on a boat, say, a 50 meter, 165 feet is going to cost you $8,000, $9,000 a month, and they're only going to work 11 months out of the year, but you're going to pay him for 12. And if you're working for 12 months out of the year, you're going to pay him for 13. You're going to have a couple of engineers. Your chief engineer at this work, the dam, is probably going to make in the neighborhood of just a little bit less than what you're paying your captain. Oh, wow. So if you're dead, it's a lot of money. My mom told me go be an engineer at the center. Not six hours. Engineers are, if you're paying your captain 15,000 a month, odds are you're paying your engineer 12 to 13 a month. And then he's gotten assisted because you have to have two engineers on about that size. It's profitable. Your chief's too is going to be making on about that size $8,000 a month. Plus you're going to have to pay for everything that they do. You're going to pay for their shoes. You're going to pay for their uniforms. You're going to pay for their belts. You're going to pay for their shirts, socks. The only thing you're not going to pay for is their underwear. You're going to buy all their toothpaste. You're going to buy all their beauty products. Buy all their toothbrushes, their deodorant, shampoo, conditioner. They're going to have one clots of down in the crude mess that is designated just for crude toiletries. So this is, this is where you listen and you set yourself up. If that is not a motivation to make it in life, then what is instead of thinking about that? You're right. You know what? It scares everyone or almost everyone. But if your mind is... That's true. No, I need to go and understand that. I need to have an abandoned amount of cash that's going to be such an insignificant amount because the last thing you want to do is nickel and dime those stuff. You said that is such an insignificant amount that I need to go and produce with a lifestyle business or investments that get me fascinating. I don't think anybody thinks about when, even when they're coming up, even when they've sold a company for 100 million dollars, nobody's thinking about the residual cost of owning a buck, absolutely they do. When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... When you sell a business... If you have a live... No, but the idea is this, okay. When you cash out, the first thing you start thinking about is how can I produce income going forward? If you sell the cash code that you have, you get a lot of principle out of it, why you don't want to touch a principle in our mind is going like, all right, how can I produce money out of it? So say you put the money in the stock market, into the bull market and every month you get yourself an extra $2 million, $1 million a month just from profit. You still understand that it's just a matter of time and you said, you know, it's again a last forever, but I made $12 million, but if it's an actual business that gets you an additional after taxes $12 million, you said, well, I have already a hundred in a bank. I have a boat that I purchased, whatever. And it cost me, say, half a million a month to maintain it, but I fucking love boats. And I love it that much that I said, that would be where I put my money. But half a million seems like a small bill when you have it. You know, half a million a month, that's six million a year, half a million a month. Okay. So you say it's a big boat, but you really like it, but you need to say, all right, do I want to give half of the money that I just made on my, no, I want to make more. So all you need to think is not how much I'm paying should they save? How can I make more, how can I invest smarter, how can I can I go? That's just the way I'm, when I listen, that's the way I consider. That's the way I'm picturing everything in my mind. I don't care for boats. I get to seek very quickly, so I try to stay away from boats. But for someone that loves boats and I have friends that are seriously passionate about boats, they'll buy 60 footers or so on, and because that's what they can afford, some of them have bigger ones, obviously. But the mind is, no, I need to go and produce so much that that would make it 10% of my, yeah, no, no, no think of saving money on not doing it. It's like, okay, I'll get to it once it's, it's, it's responsibly good investment. It's okay, not investment for my, my leisure time. But I need to go and produce more. That's a way, a healthy mind should think. Would you ever buy a boat? All things being relative. I'm probably never going to make the amount of money to own the kind of boat that I would want. That's fair. What kind of boat do you want to say? Oh, I would want something, you know, nothing less than 50 meters. No. Why? Why not say 90 foot or 100 foot boat? It's just not quite big enough for what I would like to do in places I'd like to go. I wouldn't feel comfortable taking a 90 foot boat from here to Tahiti. Oh, you're going to cross there. Okay, I got you. That's a major. You're going to, well, you are a captain. You're not going to go and say, well, I'm going to put it on a bigger boat, on a sheep, sheep it. Okay. So you're saying with a 50 meter, you can comfortably sell across the ocean. Yeah. Really? You can. Interesting. A lot of them do. And then there's a lot of them that don't want to put the hours on the engines or for whatever reason. They'll put it on a large cargo ship and ship it over there. In fact, they have ships that are just designed for doing nothing more than yacht transport. And they'll put seven or eight mega yachts on one boat like Doc Express. It's called. And they just don't want to put basically the mileage on them. Yeah. What they'll do is with Doc Express, this is probably 800 foot boat, 900 foot and they'll actually sink it to a certain level. And the back door will drop down and then they'll start moving these mega yachts on board and they have underwater divers with welders. That as soon as the boat gets in position and gets tied off, the divers will sit there and they'll weld a cradle in place to hold it while it's still sitting in the water. These guys are under the water and do them his work. And they'll be down there until they get all the boats on board that they can physically capable of handling. And the divers are down there. Sometimes it takes three or four days, maybe a week to load up one of these Doc Express boats. The divers are down there, welded their asses off. Is it due to the crew status of the boat? In place, they put the back door up and they pump all the water out and if thing pops up out of the water, all the water drains off and then they go about hooking up all the air conditioning lines so that they can still function. You know, they have power to it and some of the crew stay and I think you're allowed to crew on each boat and they stay on just to monitor all the systems on board. But they have crew quarters where the actual crew on the boat they're carrying across the ocean can stay somewhere else if they like on board. Are you going to say? No, that was my point. Is it true that some of the crew members have to stay on board when that happens? Yeah. Especially if they got the AC running or something, you don't want to sit there and bust a water line. Yeah. I'll sudden you're pumping 300 gallons a minute. Yeah. And what would be the smallest ship that you'd ever say should try and do a transatlantic or some sort of journey of that? Certainly. I wouldn't do anything smaller than 50 meters. People do it though? People do it. Yeah. I've seen them go 100 foot boats, 120 foot boats. But the North Atlantic, depending on when you go and when you come back, you know, you've got to pick your weather windows. You've got to know exactly what you're doing and it's boring as hell. You may do an Atlantic crossing and never see another ship. Never see a dolphin, never see a whale, never see anything. The crew is going bad shit crazy because they're going nuts. They've already watched every movie that's in your library. In your library. They've read every book on board, you know, and they're staring out at open water for weeks. How long is the journey? I've seen nothing. Yeah. How long is the journey from same with the Mediterranean to Florida? About three weeks, depending on the speed of the vessel. Or if you're running the weather, it can be a lot longer than that. Yes. Do you escape it if you see a weather system? Do you go north, South, like, and like, oh, we don't really like that? You have satellite communications and you have weather companies that you can call up that track these systems. They'll look on, they have, you have what they call, it's ARPA. And it'll show up where your boat is at any given point in time and they can track it. They'll say, okay, you've got a system heading here. Here's the rug you should take to avoid this weather system. That can add four or five days to your trip. Which is more of a time you're already taking the shortest route to get there. But you may have to extend it. And that's when you have to make sure that when you set out on the trip, one you have enough crew. You're always going to put on extra crew because you're going to have to have extra people because you always want two people in a wheelhouse. 24-7 day night doesn't matter. Two people in a wheelhouse always. You want that extra set of eyes because it gets that boring that you just need to keep them awake and alert and sharp, yeah, sharp. I mean, let's say, you know, one of these cargo ships drops a container, you know, they lose a container. Now a shipping container which is twice the size of this room and it's floating two feet beneath the surface because it hasn't completely sunk yet. You have no idea and you don't see it until the last second. And you hit it. You got all kinds of trouble. Do you know what it happened to? I don't personally know. But it happens. Yeah. In the middle of the ocean, you get some of the, depending on what they're shipping. You get up north in Alaska and places like that where they're shipping logs and some of these 100-foot trees, you know, all of a sudden they fall off and it does sink vertically. Problem. You can straight up and now and then, you know, they're only two feet or three feet beneath the surface. You draw 10 feet or 12 feet. What happens if you hit something like that? If it breaches the hull, you've got serious problems. You better hope that your build pumps can keep it up and you can, you know, get down there and stuff the hull. How long do you have if something's in how big the hull is? Well, don't they have, don't they have those, I guess, sections of airs, if it breaks one or two, the boat still floats, just like with the Titanic, to that view. You do have watertight compartments, like if it were to hit up by the anchor pockets or something like that, that's a, that's a watertight boat head. Okay. And so you could confine it to that. But if it's the side, that's where it's more dangerous, right, because you can damage quite a few. Well, like, container that ripped a hole in the side of the boat that was like what, 30 or 40, 50, 60 feet long, you're not going to recover from something like that. Yeah. So then you sink and you wait for help, right, you go, everybody go on boats and, and the life rafts. Yeah. And they always have, what's the long, they find you. They might not find you. Might not. Don't they have satellite, well, you have your, but the batteries are only going to last so long, as in where you're at, if you're in a shipping lane, odds are, you know, in a few days or so, you know, a ship's going to come by and they're going to pick up your, your signal. A few days. Your e-purve. Wow. And theoretically, your e-purve should send a signal to a satellite up in the sky that'll relate to the proper authorities. Yeah. And every raft is equipped with its own e-purve. That's registered with the Coast Guard. So they know who you are when they get that signal. And they know, my right, they're in trouble. This is where we need to go. Wow. A lot to think about when you're out there. There's a hell of a lot to think about. When you actually hit something and say the ship is sinking, what is the saying, the captain has to go down with the ship? Where did that come from? I don't know. I've heard it before. I never understood it and it always seemed, well, the captain should be the last one to step off. Yeah. But they don't go down, they don't go down. How would you go down with your boat? It's a saying. I don't know why it happened. I think it goes down with the ship. You know, I think I think in Japan and the war when Second World War, there were one or two stories where the Japanese captains decided to sink with their boats, which there was no reason because they could have left, but it was part of their tradition. So I assume that's where it came from. That's bad, true. There's no reason for you to die. You're going to run another boat, you did a good job. This captain ain't doing it. I'm trying to think what else. Okay. So we went into a ton of stuff about yachting and boating that I had no idea. I'm so clueless. Now I feel like I'm more of a professional. We can go and talk to other people. I know I feel like we actually have an educated discussion. We should have had a podcast TV for the podcast. Do you want to check if people ask questions on your social media and pull your phone? Because you know what? You're right. I actually haven't watched the show as much as I should have. And it's only because I'm inundated with so much reality TV that I can't take any more reality TV. My brain's burning. No, we don't blame you. We're not blamers. I watched it. I did. Okay. Sure. My ex got me to get into bravo at the time because my party because we were watching project one way, then chef, top chef, and obviously below deck came through this and that's how I know below. We haven't watched it actual TV for a while. So now let's look at some questions. Just a short one. Okay. So we did before people that are listening and watching. You're doing amazing job as an narrator. So I'm going to give you this one. There's one. Oh, I got here. Okay. So let me show you. Let me show you. Basically, so we put out a question to ask Captain Lee to his audience to our audience. So I'll ask one question that came in and Joseph is going to see if there's more because I'm sure that there's people that are following you that have questions for you too. But we somewhat touched on this, but we'll go into it again. So is crew attrition as high as it seems and how do you deal with onboarding new crew all the time? Is that stressful? It's one of the most expensive things that happens onboard a boat is training new crew high rate of turnover. And a lot of times, especially I think it's generational because some generations just don't have a good work ethic. And they think that once they get on board, they just, you know, they're going to be sitting on the beach drinking pina coladas until they find out that each exotic country that they visit will they have guests on board. Yeah, they're going to see it from a port hole. That's about it. And if we happen to be there after the guests leave, if we're there for any period of time, and you know, there's time and we get our work done, then yeah, you can go ashore. But when they see the amount of work that actually goes into running a boat, a lot of them just aren't prepared for it, they're not ready for it. And like, what do you mean I have to work past five? We have guests coming tomorrow, yeah, you work until you're done and the boat's ready. If that means midnight, and it's midnight, no, I don't care, do it, or leave, it's your call. Cool. Okay. Wait, where is all these other questions, but don't read and just go and screen through the ones that needs to be screened out. So but you can see the questions over here. Okay. Now move to the second one over here. Oh, how do you, how do you rest when the crew is up partying so late? Usually my quarters is on the very, very top deck. My quarters is right behind the wheelhouse. So they don't need nothing. The wheelhouse is, you know, there's a big sign there. It says knock before entering. And it means what it says. But it's loud, no one else is quiet. Usually that's at the very close to the bow. Okay. And most of the partying will take place, you know, on the aft deck in the party salon in the bar area, which is, you know, well back from the central line of the boat. It's not even close to being midships. You ever give them help for showing up in the morning hungover? I have on occasion. As you said, and I have no sympathy, see, it's self-induced illness, like the bottle flow. Yes. Yeah. I don't care. That's when you are fair game. Your ass does belong to me. And I will sweat every ounce of alcohol you've ever ingested out of you. Hi. So I have another one. Are you still in touch with some of the crew members who left the show? Sure. I don't even see where those questions are. I keep missing them. We get a lot of other questions, but there are just a lot of things around, yeah, we're not going to read those over here. What are? That's a man. Okay. Wow. Yeah. I have to screen stuff. So Captain, was amazing. You got to let me look at it. I mean, yeah, well, okay. I'll let you look at one. It's one. Well, last one. Here it is. Let's keep the dance and don't tell them what it is up. All right, so I was great. Do you have any any other remarks? Less remarks? No, I actually really appreciate that because I learned I was actually I was actually pleasantly surprised because we learned so much about yachting and voting that I didn't know anything about. And I'm happy actually that I actually came out of this smarter about voting. I mean, I still have to watch the show more. So that's, you know, that was one of the things that below deck has done is that it's put a spotlight on the yachting community because I mean, there's a lot of people in Iowa, Omaha, Nebraska, you know, a lot of the middle of the country, they're like, we can charter about. We can actually like I heard the book. They had no clue and there's a lot of good, hardworking kids out there that are looking for a good solid career, like, okay, the military always says, come see us for full of adventure, see the world, get paid while you do it. Well, the military doesn't pay with yachting pays. It's not nearly as much fun and besides that, you have people wanting to shoot your ass off. So we don't have any of that. We pay better. We have a better working environment. You're going to work about the same hours. You are going to get to see the world. There's a lot of benefits and that was a career that most kids in the midwest and still like, I can get paid to go live on a multi-million dollar yacht and travel the world. You're right. It paid for it. I never thought about that coming from, I mean, yeah, there's boats in Toronto, but I never thought about chartering yachts. I think for a lot of the least, the number one hub for the boat. It's like a thing. It's the adding capital of the world. It's definitely a thing and you start to realize it when you come down here and you start boating and even on the weekends, you take out boats and small, it's not like the, you know, $500,000 a week yachts. You can go from here to Jupiter. Yeah, I know. Just sit there and you go, you know, a hundred foot boat, it seems like everybody's got one. Well, it's the only other place in the world I've ever experienced for a long time. It's the place. You go from Miami to Jupiter and you could just, you just say you've got a small 30 foot cons, center console and you're just cruising up the inner coastal and you see all these canals and you see all these yachts. I know. And it's like, Jesus, there's not that much money in the world, but there is. There is that much money. And I've never experienced this except when I've been in Monaco. That's the only other spot I've just seen so many insanely large boats. You know, it's funny about Monaco in places, some places like that. In the Mediterranean, like you would take the boat, I was on St. David, 200 foot. You'd pull into Monaco and the people on the other boats who go like, who let them in here. Yeah. It's like, oh, there goes the neighborhood. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, because there are 300, 350 feet, 200 feet. Also, it's also the boats that they have, I can't, when I saw it, I noticed that the type of boats, I mean, you can make 200 and you can make 200 feet. You can see 200 foot and then you see another 200 feet and one of them is just built like a palace. It looks like something you've never seen before and then you see a traditional 200 foot boat and you said yourself, wow, just even in the size, there's a different, I remember I saw in the design, you mean, something else, yeah, I mean imagine a builder's, as well. You know, there's some names that are just, they're equated with, well, it's the same way of the cars. Yeah. Rolls Royce, Bentley. Yeah. For right, this is what you expect. This is the standard. This is where they've set the bar, boat builders are the same way. You get some people that, you know, want to get away cheap and it shows in the boat, because they're not using the best materials. They're not using the best craftsmen. Yeah, that's, you can see the classes over there, just, there's reaching that there's a whole new level of reach over there. And people that, that kind of cruise the Mediterranean, I guess they, the old cruise of Binder a few times and what you see is that they cruise, it's so small, so you go from one place to another. See, for right now, the Grand Prix is, is in Monaco and then to more, it's the Confield Festival. And that's just going to go, so they'll tell you now we're here to more over there and they can go from there to Greece to Israel. Yeah. Just a very live attraction and the boats are going to move. So it depends on the day you're there and then you're going to see it's empty after. Yeah. It's all going to move to another one. That was a lot of time. Like, if you want, if you want, you already seen in the travel magazines when you think about the Grand Prix of Monaco and you see the boats backed up to where the cars are just screaming by, well, that dockage right there comes with a premium. You better have your captain walking down the dock to see the dock master with a suitcase full of money. Cash. Do you know what it costs? And easily six figures. Just a dock there. That's for, no, the dockage is going to cost you more than that. It's just for the privilege of him charging you to stay there. And then for the Monaco Grand Prix, he's going to want to know who's on board your boat. And if you don't have the right people on board, you're not getting in. Huh. So it's not about money sometimes. No. I don't know. You can just be another billionaire that has a bunch of nobody's on board that nobody ever heard of. And you're not going to get docked side. Wow. You've got Leonardo DiCaprio and some of his buddies that want to be there. Okay. Or if you got Oprah, David Geffen, guys like that, Steven Spielberg, you know, damn it. It's a different type of currency, right? Famous. Famous above regular money. Yeah. No. So just everybody isn't going to just because you have the money doesn't get you in the door. Yeah. Just being a Russian oligarch doesn't help. It is crazy. It is crazy. It's totally insane, but that's the world that that I live and work in. I love it. All right. That was great. Where can people reach out to you? Do you want people to reach out to you? You're Irish. Yeah. Yeah. What are you? Okay. So what are you working on now? People that are fans, you've been doing the show for about 10 years now? Yeah. Okay. So you have a book. You've been doing the show for 10 years. What's next for everybody, though? I'm thinking of doing another book, Cocktail Table Book, maybe you're of my captain Liyasms. I love that. Toine with the idea of a podcast. Good. Nice. Yeah. I got some other projects that I'm working on. Good. And I'm not a liberty to discuss right now. Yeah. I'm not scared. I'm not scared. Anybody off. I don't want somebody getting there before I do. Smart. Smart. Captain, listen. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us. Pleasure is mine.