I seldom have been around people with lots of money. Athletes, I suppose, but I’ve always assumed they will blow it all, and before they were 40; most of their predecessors have. So athletes’ money has never impressed me.

I’m talking about an older person with money. Perhaps enough money that they feel no need to flaunt it.

I met a person over the weekend who seems to fit that category: What appeared to be a regular guy … who just happens to be rich.

The word some were using at the wedding in Hydra was “billionaire” … with a B. Something to do with high finance. “Hedge fund” was an expression that came up.

To those of us who live on salaries, much of this is hazy. We know it involves money, but we have no experience of it.

A couple of paragraphs from a published interview with this understated, perfectly charming, probably brilliant gentleman:

“I have come to accept that ambiguity surrounds a great deal of decision-making by consumers, new businesses and established businesses. They cannot be meaningfully characterized as maximization problems subject to fully specified probability distributions. …

“This fits with the role I see for hedge funds: hedge funds exist to cope with risks that are, in Richard Zeckhauser’s terminology, ‘unknown and unknowable’. Our prospects for excess returns arise precisely because we are encountering novel conditions and allow a small number of senior traders to apply heavy amounts of judgment.”

If you can follow that perhaps you, too, could run a hedge fund. But probably not.

Anyway, this individual is good at hedge-funding (is that a word?), and in his case it involves quite a bit of travel and even more awareness of the financial world as it morphs. That’s the thing about people who create their own wealth: They nearly always are keen consumers of global news. Knowledge is power, etc. They read the Wall Street Journal, for starters.

Also, in many cases, especially among those on the high side of 40, their wealth is not instantly obvious. No bling overkill. No clothes that scream “expensive”. Nothing gauche (like a “fur-lined sink”, as Steve Martin once put it) or nouveau-riche about him. Nor with his partner.

They seem so normal that you think, “Why couldn’t all of us be really rich?” And then came back my usual response: “It’s too much work.” Well, that, and most of us don’t derive deep pleasure from moving money around.

Day of wedding, we were sitting at adjoining tables, and we got to talking about the Gulf, which I know a little about at this point, as does he.

A day later, we were invited, with a half-dozen others, to have a drink on his yacht. Well, the yacht he rented. He and his partner quite sensibly had decided that renting a yacht at Athens, which is easily done, was a quicker way to Hydra and also offered a place to sleep over the weekend, eliminating the hotel slog. Quite sensible.

I have been banging on (as the Brits would say) about yachts. This one was comparatively modest, maybe 50 feet and sleek, with a couple of decks. It looked like something not just everyone would own or even rent, but it was no leviathan. And it came with a couple of French-speaking Greek people to sail the boat and keep things tidy.

So, eight of us sat up by the wheel and had some very nice wine and pistachios and talked about adult things, mostly. (Adulthood tends to come late, for sports journalists.)

Eventually, we did the nosy thing and googled our b/m illionaire and saw that he and his partner had recently purchased a home in an upscale neighborhood of New York for more than $10 million. (It had been mentioned, at the wedding.) It looked nice. Yes, I’d visit.

So, later that night those of us who had the drink on the yacht joined the bride and groom and about 20 other guests at another cliff-side restaurant, and we talked about topics ranging from pet dogs to global topics.

I broached my theory (and, remember, I have zero economic training or education) that “commodities are destiny” — what your country sits on, in terms of mineral wealth, is what matters. (Compare Yemen, with no money or oil, with the UAE, which has both.)

He fairly vigorously disagreed, citing Japan and Korea, among others.

He talked about how this or that country is in more trouble than most outsiders realize …and what he said made sense.

And it was just interesting, grown-up conversation with someone who just happens to be a millionaire. Or a billionaire. The sort of person I pretty much have never had a chat with, that is.