Authentic Gay Man Podcast Interview: Larry Jacobson sails around the world in 6 years to find himself

Coach Maddox  0:03  
Hello, Larry Jacobson, and welcome to The Authentic Gay Man Podcast. It’s nice to see you, sir.

Larry Jacobson  0:09  
Thank you. Nice to see you too Maddox.

Coach Maddox  0:12  
Well, I’m trying to think I always tell the guests how my guests and I know each other. I mean, the audience have I know my guest. And I’m trying to think now how we actually met.

Larry Jacobson  0:27  
I think we met foot through the gay coaches. Or, oh, somebody? My marketing guy. Yes. Introduce us, right.

Coach Maddox  0:41  
Yes.

Larry Jacobson  0:42  
Tell me about your gay coach’s group and about you. Right.

Coach Maddox  0:44  
They reached out to me. That’s right. That’s right. And then we did we were we’ve been in a couple of gay coaches calls together to get a little more acquainted. So this may be our I don’t know, maybe our third time to zoom together.

Larry Jacobson  0:58  
Yeah. And I look forward to meeting in person one day. Oh, yeah.

Coach Maddox  1:01  
Absolutely are mad perhaps it’ll be at the conference. Are you thinking about going to the conference this year?

Larry Jacobson  1:07  
I will. I don’t know what to talk about that later. Since I don’t know anything about it.

Coach Maddox  1:11  
Hi, yeah, it may be sold out already. But yes, let’s let’s touch base on that. Okay, so I guess one thing I’d like to know is, what does it mean to you to be an authentic gay man?

Larry Jacobson  1:26  
What does it mean to me to be an authentic gay man? Well, just off the top of my head, I would say it means being myself. And, and not faking any of my life. And let, I mean, I don’t It’s not like something I advertised that I’m that I’m gay, but I certainly don’t hide it from anybody. And living true to myself walking my talk. And yeah, I think that’s the basics.

Coach Maddox  2:03  
You know, one of the things that sticks out that you said, and I like the way you worded it is not faking any of my life. Yeah. Because we’ve all been around people that were faking, maybe their whole life possibly is

Larry Jacobson  2:16  
it I find it so sad and depressing.

Coach Maddox  2:20  
And it’s hard to be in their presence. Yeah, it is.

Larry Jacobson  2:23  
It’s, I mean, I know somebody who is, I don’t know, I think he’s 45 or 50. And he still doesn’t come out to his friends or family. And, and he lives in California. And I’m like, What’s what’s what’s up with that? What were you hiding from? This is? I mean, maybe I could understand it. If you were, you know, maybe someone was in a place that was less liberal or less progressive. But, wow. In today’s day and age, I don’t I’m not faking anything. I am who I know, if someone doesn’t like it. It’s not my problem.

Coach Maddox  3:04  
I am with you. I, you know, I just thought I always say that, you know, I’m gonna just be me. And if somebody has a problem with that, that’s their problem. Not my problem, right? Yeah. So yeah, love your answer. Okay, well, let’s get down to what we’re really here to talk about that. And that is what what has been the biggest challenge in your life that you’ve either gone through or are continuing to go through

Larry Jacobson  3:28  
this one I thought about a little bit. The biggest challenge that in my life, I would say was, well, I’m, I’m the first openly gay person to sail around the world. And that there’s a lot in there, which is, well, gee, how did you end up sailing around the world? And, and why and, and then how did you do it as being a gay, openly gay man, and all of that was challenging. So let me start with the the idea of going in the first place, which was, which was born when I was 13 years old, as raised down in Southern California, Long Beach, and I had my first little sailboat, on which I taught myself to sail in a little eight foot Styrofoam, hold boat, and I taught myself to sail at age 13. And then the day after that, I came home and announced to my parents, I was going to sail around the world. And I suppose that a lot of kids do that, you know, or announce something big like that. And, you know, they went Oh, that’s nice, dear. And it’s fine. Yeah. And then I got really just sailing and started in racing. And then I was then I raced for the University of California at Irvine and, and I was just really into sailing, but then life happens, you know, so I wanted to In business and after, you know, after college. And it turns out that 33 years later, after 13, I had the opportunity to sell my company for just enough money to think that I could afford to do this. Turns out that wasn’t true. But at least it gave me the notion that I might be able to try it. And I always wanted to make this dream come true. And so I, after selling the company, bought a boat, and, and left, and I and and I left everything behind, I left my career, and I left my income, and my security and my home and my partner of 20 years. And my identity of who I was as a CEO of a company. And I left and I sailed south to Mexico and then across the Pacific and certainly out if you keep going, you do end up right back where you started.

Coach Maddox  6:01  
Wow. And so if I’m doing the math, right, you would have been roughly 46 when you made that trip.

Larry Jacobson  6:07  
I was 46 When I left and came back six years later,

Coach Maddox  6:10  
took six years to go all the way around the world.

Larry Jacobson  6:13  
Yeah. 40,455 nautical miles. Wow. And Latrice.

Coach Maddox  6:20  
Larry, did your parents live to see you do that?

Larry Jacobson  6:24  
My mother did. My father died when he was young. He died at age 59. And, but my mother was around. And I named my boat after her Julia. And she lived to see the whole circumnavigation and the production of my publishing of my book about about the chair journey, which got a little plug here, which won six literary awards and, and became an Amazon number one. And she was very proud, very happy. She didn’t want me to go. I mean, she was you know what Jewish mother wants to see their son sail away. And there, you know, she, but she was very proud of me when I completed it.

Coach Maddox  7:11  
Well, that’s a pretty, pretty risky thing. How big was the boat that you sailed in?

Larry Jacobson  7:16  
Was 50 foot 25 tons. For those sailors, it was a cutter rigged sloop. And it was it was a big boat to handle. Especially in the marinas and you know in tight quarters, but when you’re at sea 50 feet is not very big.

Coach Maddox  7:38  
No, no, it’s not. I’ve been on some cruise ships when the weather’s the weather got a little rough and 50 foot boat would be very small in that kind of area small

Larry Jacobson  7:47  
about the size of two cabins

Coach Maddox  7:50  
weather. Wow. Yeah. Well, I would love to know. I’m trying to think how to ask this question as you contemplated making this trip before you ever got in the boat. Got in your sailboat? What was the hardest part about making that decision to do that? I mean, you gave up a lot. You clearly gave up a lot was the partner partner waiting for you when you returned?

Larry Jacobson  8:20  
We he was there? Absolutely. We we actually owned our business together. We own the business together, we own our home together. And the Berkeley Hills beautiful home. And when I got back, I mean, and then when I left what he didn’t want to go sailing. I mean, I asked him, he didn’t want to go sailing. And you get seasick and he wanted to become an artist. And so we both decided, alright, this is our time, I’ll go sailing, you become an artist, we’ll see what happens. And when I came home, we were great friends. And but but I didn’t move back into the into the home. And in fact, and now we are absolute best friends. And we’re I would say closer now than we ever have been in our lives. And so that’s that’s actually turned out really, really well. That sounds amazing. But what was the hardest thing to leave I mean, I let leave it at all was it was difficult, leaving everything but I would say leaving the hardest thing is to leave our identity behind. You know who you are as I mean who I built myself over 20 year career to be you know, businessman and CEO, CEO of this company and and you know, I was driving of fast cars and flying business class and all that stuff and and then just everything cut off. And now I’m a sailing bum, drinking margaritas and singing Jimmy Buffett songs. So to go from one identity to the other is a real Challenge. No, I can’t even imagine. Yeah, that’s a lot what I what I coach on as well, you know, for people who are retiring, as a lot of my coaching is leaving that identity. For a new one.

Coach Maddox  10:14  
I had a very wise person say to me one time that when you build your identity on things that can be taken away from you, you will always be on shaky ground. It’s like building your, your house on a sound foundation of sand. But when you can build your identity around who you are on the inside, the things that can’t be taken away from you, then you have a foundation that’s on bedrock. And I took that to heart and I thought about that most of my life.

Larry Jacobson  10:46  
I love that. Yeah. And I would say that, I mean, I had a good foundation, but the trip itself is what really, I think made me It certainly made me into who I am now. It changed so much of me changed my views of the world in so many ways. And you know about what’s important in life. And those physical things just aren’t they just not valued is diminished. And I found that people in the around the world who, who have the least were the happiest.

Coach Maddox  11:23  
I think you’re exactly right. In my I’m not, not terribly traveled. But in the travels that I have done, I’ve seen exactly that the people that had the least were the happiest.

Larry Jacobson  11:34  
Yep, that’s right. And so it was it was a challenge to leave. Um, but, you know, there’s, I would say the most difficult, scariest, challenging, exciting day of my life was the day that I sailed out the Golden Gate. And I mean, that was scarier than anything else that we encountered along the way. And there were some really scary things that happened to us along the way. And what,

Coach Maddox  12:08  
what do you think, aided you in having the courage to bite off something so big? It’s so profound?

Larry Jacobson  12:20  
What gave me the courage,

Coach Maddox  12:22  
because I can’t even fathom what you’re talking about passion.

Larry Jacobson  12:28  
And in fact, the when I got back, I ended up giving two TED Talks. And the first one was called Passion, Trump’s fear. And the theme of that is that if you’re passionate about that enough about something, it will drive you through any fears that you have. And that’s what drove me is that passionate, I, I really wanted to sail around the world. And there were so many times that it was so challenging that I really wanted to throw in the towel. But my passion kept me going. And I would say that, that. That’s what gave me the courage.

Coach Maddox  13:11  
Larry, with your permission, I would very much like to add a link to that TED Talk in in the show notes for this episode, if that would be okay with you. Can we do? Absolutely,

Larry Jacobson  13:20  
absolutely. In fact, to make it easy. If it’s on my website, people can watch it on my website. So yeah, you want me to give that to you now or later? No, we’ll

Coach Maddox  13:32  
get that later. Yeah, good. So it’s all good. I just think that’s, I would like to see that. And I’m sure that some of the other listeners would like to see that now that you’ve mentioned. So we’ll make sure it’s in there.

Larry Jacobson  13:44  
And then the second TED talk I gave was about achieving big things, making big accomplishments and how to do that. And that was called Passion, priorities and perseverance. And I wouldn’t say that I had all three of those things in order in order to go well, you

Coach Maddox  14:04  
know, I think the thing about it is, when we overcome fear, it translates out to into other air every area of our life.

Larry Jacobson  14:14  
Well, one of the things that, you know, I talk a lot about fear, and it’s kind of become my speciality and speaking, I don’t sure how that happened, but maybe because I faced so many fears. And I teach that you don’t overcome fears. It’s when you’re standing in a boat, a small boat behind the wheel and you’re pounding into 30 foot seas, which are the size of three storey houses. There is no overcoming the fear, you are still afraid. It’s about how to manage that fear. And then I teach that there. It’s really just a two step process. The first step is right Recognizing that you’re afraid. And the second step is embracing it. And then knowing that fear, I say that fear is nature’s way of making us focus on the task at hand. Right? It’s either fight, flight, or freeze. But you can’t freeze. If you’re at the helm of your boat, and you can’t fly. You can’t get get away. So there’s no, there is no choice but to fight. But the fear doesn’t go away. You know,

Coach Maddox  15:31  
I think you’re right. If they are and you do it anyway. You have

Larry Jacobson  15:34  
to embrace it and just say, Okay, I’m afraid. I know, it’s making me strong. It’s making me focused right now. And you use that fear to your advantage. And it took being scared so many times to learn that. And we finally I finally learned that in the Red Sea, this huge storm that we were caught in, like I said, with 30 foot seas and 60, knot winds. It was just, it was was it? It wasn’t scary. It was terrifying.

Coach Maddox  16:07  
Oh, I can’t even imagine.

Larry Jacobson  16:09  
Yeah, but you don’t have any choice. What do you do you deal with it? You face it? Absolutely. Yeah.

Coach Maddox  16:18  
So is it typical for about that size to take six years to go around the world? Or were you just really enjoying the trip along the way?

Larry Jacobson  16:28  
Well, I was, I wasn’t racing to get around the world. But when I left, I only thought that I’d be gone for two or three years, because it can be done in in a couple, two or three years. But ended up stopping in places. We stopped in New Zealand for 10 months. And basically what you’re doing is you’re following the weather. So you go into the South Pacific during the the good season, and then it becomes hurricane season there. So you have to sail either north or south to get out of hurricane season. So you sail south in New Zealand, then back up into the Pacific for another season of of beautiful sailing. And then you’ve got to get back out of the hurricane season. So we went back down to Australia, and stayed there about eight or eight months or so. We also stopped in Thailand for three months in Turkey for about 10 months in Israel for three months, in Barcelona in Barcelona for a month. And, you know, so yeah, we definitely enjoyed our way around the world. And I was with a friend of my dear friend of mine, Ken and I, who was kind of a sailing buddy. And then we became very close on the trip, if you will, if you can read between those lines?

Coach Maddox  17:57  
Well, yeah, six years on a boat, you know, whereas Was it just the two of you? Or did you have some crew,

Larry Jacobson  18:05  
for the most part, it was just the two of us, which was quite challenging. Because the boat, you’re sailing 24/7, the boat doesn’t you don’t stop, there’s no place to stop. So it’s three hours on three hours off on the watch. So someone’s always on watch. And it’s a big boat to handle for two people. When we crossed the three oceans, the Pacific, the Indian and the Atlantic, we took two more crew with us, people who are friends or people we met along the way who wanted to crew. And that helped with asleep factor. But the most challenging of the passages were the three days, two days, three days, four days, five day passages where we didn’t have other crew, it’s just us, that was quite a challenge. Because you’re looking you’re eating you’re you’re trying to sleep and a three hour off period, you don’t really get three hours because you’ve got to be back on watch. Exactly at the time when the other person goes off. So you’ve got to get up about a half 20 minutes earlier to get you know to get ready and and then your backup on watch. And so it’s about two hours and 15 minutes of sleep if you can fall asleep. And as captain, I found that really difficult to sleep,

Coach Maddox  19:26  
I would imagine. Yeah. So you stopped in a gazillion different ports along the way over that six years. And you talk about sailing as an as an openly gay man. So what did you discover when you got into those varying different foreign places and how showing up as that openly gay man? Was that part of the challenge?

Larry Jacobson  19:54  
Definitely. And I had decided at the beginning of The trip that that I would that I was not hiding anything wasn’t about to hide anything in the cruising community, you know, with other sailors, when we left and we sailed our first day on the coast of California, then in Mexico, we, we flew the rainbow flag all the way around the world. And except for a couple places, which I’ll mention in a minute, but for, for the most part, we had the flag up. And so when we would come into an anchorage, everybody knew that we were the gay boat. I was the gay guys over on that boat. But our boat kind of became the central of an anchorage and kind of the party boat. And families would send their kids over, because we would show movies in the afternoon, and we would make popcorn for them. And we had a water maker and some other boats didn’t, where we could, you know, we had our own desalinization plant on board, if you will. And they would send their kids over with a five gallon jug saying can we have some water, please? You know, so we became it was very friendly, and nice. There’s a, there’s a section in my book that talks about the one person who we discovered his true colors. And they weren’t that of the rainbow. And it was a rather nasty encounter. And, but that was pretty much it. Everywhere else that we went, where we flew the flag, nobody really cared. Nobody really bothered. In so many places around the world. It’s just not an issue. So we flew it in. I mean, we were there were some places where we didn’t fly it though. And we didn’t let we didn’t hide it. But we didn’t let on. You know, it’s not like we advertise it. So in Indonesia, it can be a challenge. And we didn’t have it up there. Singapore, was in Thailand, we had it up. And in the Maldives, which is very strict, strict Muslim country, we didn’t have it up. And then in the Middle East, so in Oman, Yemen, of the Red Sea, Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan, those places we did not fly the rainbow flag. And because they’re just they’re very it’s not a it’s not popular to be gay there, shall we say?

Coach Maddox  22:42  
It’s not a safe place. Yeah, you had to play. Why has that had nothing to do with hiding and everything to do with