The Ryen Russillo Podcast - Russillo on the Road: St. Barts Travelogue

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Russillo gives a day-by-day account of his solo trip to St. Barts. Check us out on YouTube for exclusive clips, livestreams, and more at https://www.youtube.com/@RyenRussilloPodcast. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Host: Ryen Russillo Producers: Steve Ceruti, Kyle Crichton, Mike Wargon, and Jonathan Frias Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Special bonus edition, the travel log, St. Barts, should have been St. Barts and maybe other parts, but you're going to hear it kind of diary style, running through it, a place that I've always wanted to go to, and a nice origin story about a time I thought I was going there before. It's travelogue time. Time to explore and share with you. All right. So the plan is to go to St. Barts. I am here now. We'll run through some stuff. I'll admit. Some of these trips, I am hot, coming in red hot. And this one, I don't know. I don't know why. It's obviously a place I've wanted to come to for a long time, which we will cover. It might be because I went up to Vermont. was already away from home for quite a while. I did have some second job work that had to be done. I guess I can call it a second job because I'm being paid. But it is, I will tell you this, if you want to be a writer, good luck, because you get to write all the time. So, yeah, I went up to Vermont and hung out and stow for a little bit to just be away

from everybody, which I'm pretty familiar. with to get some work done. Got everything done way ahead of time. Was able to get in some fly fishing in stow a few days, mostly three, four weight stuff, just technical, small stream. We won't get into all the details. But then leaving Vermont, we had some issues with the flights. I don't know what is going on. I was having some bad luck with the flights, but had a delay alert at like 4 a.m. when I woke up. So obviously right back to bed and then realized that the delay was information on the second flight. So that meant I left Vermont and had to go to Atlanta because Atlanta is probably the best place to get the St. Martin, which is the major airport

here in the Caribbean. And I wanted nothing to do with St. Martin and even less to do with Atlanta. So I think having to go to Atlanta and just hang out in an Atlanta airport by myself for, I don't know, 16 hours wasn't putting me in the best mindset. I did look to see. how far away Northside Tavern was. Great, great bar. And I was like 35 minutes and you have to be up at 7 a.m. Maybe if that Allman Brothers tribute band was playing, I probably would have done it, but they were not playing. So right to bed, up early, right to the airport in Atlanta, which boasts the most efficient airport in the world. Has anyone checked on that? I imagine they're leaving out the efficiency of the kudoba so um i don't know how those rankings work anyway great news though

uh starting to feel a little bit better upgraded to first class very excited about that little ominous though as i was actually walking to hand in my well not scan my boarding pass uh there was an alert on the screen right over my head telling me about a delayed flight to jackson hole just haunting So land in St. Martin. So the airport, you've probably seen the videos where there's that beach and the planes land like right over your head. That's the main town strip there on the Dutch side. The airport is on the Dutch side. I hung out in St. Martin many, many years ago, obviously the Dutch side and the French side.

Look, the town with the main area there that's not that far from the airport, it feels a bit of like the Caribbean for people that love Epcot. There's plenty of really nice places. There's some extraordinary beaches. I did a full lap around it. Like I said, many years ago, I stayed on the French side. And it was, you know, look, it was a beautiful resort. I mean, all you have to do was go outside and look at the beach and you're like, all right, you know, this is really great. But the town part of it wasn't all that thrilling. It was just a little too commercial for me. It just felt like, I don't know, like I said, I think the Epcot thing explains itself. So I was planning on going to St. Barts on that trip, but then something happened.

So I was out at the beach, I was reading, and I saw this huge catamaran anchored, not that far into the harbor, and it looked like so much fun. And I was sitting there, and I'm like, you know what, let's be a little adventurous. Again, there's a long time ago. I would never do any of this now. Music blaring from the catamaran, people dancing around. And I was like, they look friendly enough. So I ordered a bottle of champagne at the beach and then swam all the way to the catamaran and just started climbing up the ladder and handed him the bottle of champagne. And this group thought it was the coolest thing they've ever seen.

So we all just started high-fiving. I was using whatever broken French I had left over for my years of barely studying it, you know, hanging out. And earlier throughout the beach stay that day, I'd noticed this area where all these guys were diving off of this cliff. I was like, man, that looks like something kind of like a bucketless thing to do. It doesn't look that high. And here's the thing with cliffs. They never looked that high when you're not near them. So we were hanging out and I was talking to them and I was like, you know, I think I want to jump off of that.

And they were like, really? I was like, yeah, I think I do. So, you know, vibes are high. I'll try not to use the word vibes a million times. And I swam from the catamaran over to this like inlet where you could walk up the side of this cliff and then. dive off into this area. And I would say with each step, my confidence decreased. And then when I got to the top, I looked down and was like, I don't really think I want to do this now. And look, it wasn't that high. This isn't like the old 76er. Okay. So I'm not claiming to be some badass

cliff diver. But I was up there. And then I started thinking, like, you didn't even really look at like the landing area. You don't have any kind of like map for shoals or anything in your back pocket. But then when you look back at a catamaran just raging to dead mouse and people cheering you on, what are you going to do? Not jump. So at that point, I was all in, even if mentally I wasn't all in. I jumped off the cliff. It was over in a second. It wasn't that big of a deal. Land, no problem. And then the easier thing to do would be to climb back up on the rocks, walk back to kind of the inlet area and then swim back to the catamaran as opposed to swimming all the way back from where I had landed. And that's where the problem kicked

in because then, once I was climbing up the rocks, walking over the inlet, no issues at this point, swim back to the catamaran, high fives and celebrations everywhere, more champagne. I looked down, I don't know if he was the captain, I don't know what his license was, but my feet are bleeding everywhere. Now, I'm not talking like, you know, movie scene theater, you know, whatever. I don't even know what I was just trying to say there. It was just a nice little, like, flow of blood for my feet. So I'm trying to figure out, like, why are my feet? bleeding like this and i'm looking i can't really quite see anything and they're hosing it off again it wasn't teak it was you know just standard catamaran decking so i wasn't necessarily staying anything

but the blood did kill the vibe a little bit it did i'm not going to lie and then all of a sudden i'm kind of like what is good why are my feet bleeding so um you know i respect the hell out of boats as a boat owner i respected boat ownership prior to owning a boat so i felt bad that i was kind of bleeding the champagne was done and I was like okay that was your adventure for the day swim back to the beach and kind of hang out and read a little bit more and then I was like all right whatever I'm going to take a nap take a nap wake up first couple steps I'm like oh my god just this intense sharp pain all through both of my feet I'm like what the fuck is going on and then I look down and I start to see these like little black dots some in my feet some exposed in my feet and they were

sea urchin needles i guess so i call the front desk and i'm like hey what do we got here and um this guy shows up great spirits out of him he starts telling me like yeah you have all these needles in your feet so we're just going to have to soak your feet in vinegar for a bunch of days and then if you can't then you'll have to go to the hospital to get him removed uh and then i was like you know i don't know that i want to hit up a patiatrist here in St. Martin. So, you know, we tried the vinegar thing. That didn't work. I was trying to find ways to just walk around the pain on my feet. So like the sides of my feet and all these different steps. I can tell you that's terrible for your back. So I woke up the next day. It was like, fuck this. No St. Barts. I got on a flight right back to Atlanta to Hartford and then

was the doctor the next day. And he pulled all the needles out of my feet. It was fine for me. It was really that big of a deal. I don't know how good of a time he had, but he picked podiatry. So, you know, it's probably probably not the worst thing you ever had to do. Obviously, very soon after that, I went to go work out and I was doing some sort of shoulder exercise. And because my back and my entire alignment was so messed up from walking around with needles in my feet for a couple days that I don't even know how many exercises, it might have been the third set of the day. And everything just immediately seized up. And my back was more fucked up than it had been in a really long time. And I wasn't even thinking about the needles. Because once the needles were out,

my feet were fine, but now my back was super messed up. So there's a lesson for you. A lot of lessons in there. If you're going to cliff dive, understand where you're landing, understand potential dangers. You know, I think you still have to, if it's a catamaran full of French people that you swam out to cheering you on, I think you do have to jump. But, you know, the other thing I've always thought about since that time was if there's a place where you probably want to get sea urchin needles removed, it's probably in the Caribbean. You know, it wasn't like I was getting major surgery there. So maybe I could have just sucked it up, but I just couldn't walk, or at least well. So as soon as that happened, I'm like, all right, am I really going to take a ferry now to St.

Bartz with all of this stuff? Am I going to stay in extra St. Martin, go to the hospital and the St. Bart's was done. It was a big tease, a tease I've been thinking about for over a decade. St. Bartz, we're here. Let's run through some history. Population, 11,420. That was July 25. We got new numbers for you.

Eight square miles. GDP, 367 million euros. and it is now part of the French OCT. So a thousand years ago, you know, I guess you could go back further if you're a geologist. The airwarks kind of run into place, some confusion amongst scholars and the difference between the airwarks of South America

and the Taino, which I think the Taino deserve their recognition as they were, you know, you can't just say, hey, everything south of here is all the same tribe. That seems to be a bit of a general So anyway, you've got indigenous people here on record because this island, again, we'll get to kind of like the lack of value this island has. It wasn't even close to being something like, hey, let's definitely go to that place as opposed to all these other islands.

1493, Chris Columbus, you probably heard of him. He shows up, names it after his brother, Bartholomew, so at St. Barts. And again, the island historically, because it's kind of volcanic, is not really anything worth like back then right they didn't have beach clubs back then maybe they did but there's the soil is terrible you drive around and i've been here like monitoring the soil going yeah this is tough soil uh there's no fresh water source so it's this beautiful area but at least back in olden times you're like what are we doing with this place so 1648 it's settled by the french and then it's attacked by the carib indians the beer is pronounced

pronounce Karib, at least, I believe. But I don't think that's the correct pronunciation. Again, sometimes you're going to make mistakes on that. So that's tacked. People are kind of like, what are we even doing with that place? Anyway, what was the point? So then it was sort of abandoned. There's a stretch of the West India company being involved. But when the natives are warning everybody from even attempting to show up, they line the harbor with the heads of anyone that tries to visit. Then French colonization happens in 1763. The place still basically sucks. It became kind of a pirate haven. Ment bars the exterminator. If you want to look him up, great names back then. Just the pirate names, they did not fuck around branding.

So the harbor, which I've been to in Gustavia, which is the main town, and it's kind of close to where the airport is. Again, I landed yesterday, and if you want to look at that approach, I think you have to have a special rating as a pilot to even be allowed to fly in here. It is gnarly, man. I mean, that New Zealand thing that I did in the sound was pretty crazy because you had to go 7,000 feet up to clear the mountains. And then you had to come back down inside of this massive water source. But there were mountains on both sides. So we came down from 7,000 feet, but we couldn't make the landing.

No one can. and you have to go in this valley, do a U-turn, come back, get lower, do another U-turn, and then land with like insane crosswinds. When we landed in New Zealand after that trip, like other pilots were watching the guy, like cheering him on, that kind of thing. So this isn't maybe as extreme because it's so quick, but it looks like you're about to crash right into the top of this little peak with all of this traffic near this rotary and you just slide in behind it and then the landing is actually pretty quick even for

the strip, and it's only a 15-minute flight from St. Martin. So, yeah, Gustavia is the main harbor, and it's a great harbor. Well, positioned, deep, spent a lot of time looking at it yesterday, didn't run any depth tests, but I trust history on this one. But a big pirate hangout because the French ships would attack the Spanish ships, and then they would trade their plunder for supplies. So it was kind of a good little hangout there. So French colonization from 1763 on although the British try to take it over prior to that the British attack a few different times here back to the French in 1784 then the French it's back to the French in 1758 excuse me then in 1784 the French sell it to the Swedes for trading rights

plus I believe cash considerations for trading rights in Gothenburg so it was this place that I I mean, the irony of St. Bart's now becoming one of the top luxury destinations in the world because, I don't know, the Rockefellers got involved. Rothschilds have some history here and then, you know, that Jimmy Buffett, S&L, on and on and on. There was some note that I saw somewhere where they didn't have electricity for a long time, but I just have a hard time believing like the Rockefellers would set up here and be like, oh, time to go to bed. It's 7 o'clock. But it was a place every, you know, it's not every hundred years, but for a thousand years. years, there was this quest to own it, and yet no one could really do anything with it. So the Swedes take it on. They do a great job of the harbor. It's named Gustavia because of

King Gustav III. And for a while, it was like this free port. There weren't, I know tariffs are pretty hot right now. Apparently, it led to a lot of really good trade because there was a lack of restrictions on the whole thing. British attack again, 1801, Swedes surrender. And then it's kind of like, I don't even really know who owns it at that point, but technically the Swedes sold it back to the French in 1877, with a note that it was much national shame that they could not sustain this poor and then obviously had a surrender, even though it had some nice little, it sounds like a nice little shipping community, nice little stop. But there's just so many other places that are more fertile, that made more sense, way more natural resources. I drove around

some of the industrial stuff a little bit today and, you know, there's salt farming. I think there's some zinc things going on here. Again, I don't know if they're hiring or anything like that. But yeah, again, the irony is that of all of these islands with so many resources, this one had almost none, yet people, man's thirst to conquer. They were like, hey, maybe we'll just attack that. And then they haven't. It's like, what's the point? So anyway, things settled down. We stopped invading each other as much as we did back then. French control. And then, then everyone here, French citizens, 1946. Full report tomorrow. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like?

With Ancestry's global historical records, you can discover incredible stories about how your ancestors lived and worked. And for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records for free. Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCMP records or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland nursing residency. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. St. Bart's part two. Wanted to give a shout out to my guy Gregory running the airport shuttle to the hotel. Again, the shuttle is from the hotel. I didn't even realize, I guess because it's so upscale, they wanted all the information on my plane and they sent the shuttle over. I'm probably going to get charged for that, though. But my guy was awesome.

Just incredible juices displayed out in a case, nuts, necters, whatever you need, damp towels, 20 minutes from the airport to the resort. I'm staying on the eastern side of the island inside of this harbor. The hotel is located on this thin strip of land where there's a body of water in between where it's not a peninsula. It's connected, but there's water on both sides. And I look out into this majestic harbor with these little islands uninhabit. of very small islands, some rough seas, I would say to the right, a bunch of smaller boats

all anchored right in front of the hotel. So really cool. Some kite surfing over there. I have always wanted to try a shout out to the Douglas brothers, but it just feels like it'd be more equipment that I'd be buying and getting excited about and then buying the first equipment and be like, actually I need these buckles instead. These are titanium. And then I'd be like, you're not very good at this. So what else? What else? So yeah, I'm in this harbor. It's great. I upgraded to the jacuzzi room with an outdoor patio that walks out into the pool. It's not the high. You can actually get like some beach villas that are right on the beach. Those are a little, little bit more than I wanted to spend. The extra jacuzzi deal, whole thing with this outdoor access. I think it's like 500 euros more a night. Is it worth it? Probably not. Reading list. What am I reading? I'm reading lonesome dove. Shout out to the fiction readers out there. Larry McMurtry.

Never read it. Will Kane bought a gun and like moved. He was so inspired by this book. A lot of people inspired by it. A lot of fiction. That Lorena, man, she must have been something else. Dudes are freaking out about her. 250 pages in.

So I don't want to just do all gym and salad updates for you because I know that a lot of you are like, hey, cool. You went to where Pretoria? I think you talked about the gym and the salads. Real quick, the gym feels like it's going to be a high rep type of gym. Planet Fitness would be jealous that the dumbbells only go to 22 kilograms. I did. I'm sorry when I got to the hotel right to the beach cabana, reading the book, did order a salad.

I wanted something healthy. I had been traveling, you know, was in Atlanta for 16 hours, which was still in my dome a little bit. And I ordered the fresh, healthy garden salad with chicken on the top. Pullet. You know how when you go to Chipotle? And there's like that one bite of chicken where you're like, ah, man, that got hacked up into this. I don't know what was going on in a salad. It was like a collection.

Now, I also used to have a rule about Sunday salads. I don't know if the produce supply is to blame for this. I think it's just a chicken selection decision. So it wasn't very good at all, borderline gross. And it seems like people love their pickled onions on top of everything down here. So look, salad gym, get it out of the way quick. So, again, the cab driver was like, you've got to go to Nikki Beach for the beach party. That's the huge thing on Sunday.

It goes all night. Don't go to Gustavia tonight because I was like, I think I'm actually, I think I owe it to the audience to at least go out one night. So we'll see, because I don't even know if the first night counts. But I did. I went out for a little bit, taxi from my hotel at St. Jean, which is the other smaller town. Gustavia is the harbor. More going on there.

St. John is this rotary with a bunch of restaurants, a few different bars, a little bit of shopping, Nikki Beach is right over there, a couple other different beach clubs, a few hotels, but it is really small. Like if you blink through the rotary, you are through the town. And so I wasn't going to go to the Nikki Beach party, even though by the time I was going to get settled and then get back to town and then just solo, sober, winding down epic beach party with DJs inside of this like restaurant bar thing, just wasn't going to be a good fit for me right now. So did hit up a restaurant. Again, the taxi there was 57 euros, like an 11 minute drive. I didn't

have a timer. Maybe it's 12. Sat down to the bar at this pasta place. Don't worry. I'll do seafood for you guys. Hammer dude next to me telling me I have to get the truffle cream deal. I was just like, yeah, okay, whatever, whatever clawed. And then I noticed a woman by her So she was having a big fancy drink. It looked like it may have taken 20 minutes of repair. And she was reading a book. She was just sitting there reading a book. I don't know what her deadlift numbers were.

But she seemed to just, you know, she had a cigarette, a book. A look was exchanged. Yeah, now I was kind of looking at it. It's funny because I'm by myself all the time. I'm like, ah, poor thing. And then I was like, yeah, whatever. She probably thinks you suck. So headed over to La Piment.

I think I have that wrong. We'll correct it later in the week. And it is just this kind of bar deal. They do serve food. I sat in this area where the stools where the scooters are two, three feet behind you. If somebody had a horrible mirror on like a dully, it may even hit you in the back. There was a couple other bars. I walked up.

I saw one place. There was a bunch of English guys, two in particular, super red-faced. I don't know if it was from the booze or the sun, but usually traveling international, I try to avoid the rowdy English and UFC fights were being re-aired, I think. Well, it was UFC, so it wasn't live. So I was like, I'm not going to go into there. So I sat and talked to some old waitress who came over and was like, you know, what do you want? I was like, just give me whatever your lightest beer is.

We had some Karebes. Had like four of those, had a glass of Sov at dinner. I think it was Sau. I don't know. I'm not sure. I think he just kind of looked at me like, all right, whatever, dude. But then when you tip, everybody loves you. They're like, oh, that's right. These American guys tip. Now, the bar was younger. But again, it wasn't like a full-blown. It was still kind of a restaurant, but then there was like a little bar area off to the side. So it wasn't like I went to shellbacks in St. Barts and just sat there, although that's possible too. and then I saw this guy just like unbelievable shirt completely undone cabana type shirt

Gilligan hat on well groomed mustache cigarettes going beers going just running the place then there was like a birthday celebration somebody came out with some sparklers or something like that and I was like is that guy like the guy you know imagine being able to say like yeah I've got a place we should just go down to same parts for the week is that guy 2000 Rosillo I don't know. The scooter thing is fucking insane because the mile per hour, I should say, kilometer per hour speed limit posted everywhere,

constant reminding you 30 kilometers an hour. That is incredibly slow. No one goes 30, although there's so many times where you're watching stuff happen. You're like, I can't believe how fast that guy is going while it's on the rotary. And I think the cool thing to do is if you're younger, is just have one of those scooters and live dangerously.

So, yeah. these are somewhat um these travel pods always feel a little self-absorbed because i guess it's just me and as i said at the top like i don't know i don't know how much more i had in me in doing these because i don't know if i'm enjoying them the same way uh i don't know if backstory helps sometimes i think backstory helps with tv and film characters but i've been talking for a long time so i don't know that you need a ton of backstory on me but yeah like i thought i was actually planning this trip um to not be solo didn't happen it's okay things happen professionally i have like a bunch of great things but there's also a lot of

professional uncertainty which i actually kind of look forward to i enjoy the twist and turns of not knowing but this is a different place uh for me to be in than probably some of the other times that i've done this where i know exactly kind of like where i'm at it could be that i'm even sharing that because i love paul thro so much my favorite travel writer and the best travel book i've ever read Happy Isles of the Oceania, where he basically starts that book with, like, I think my wife wants a divorce and I may be sick, even though his doctor tells him he's not sick, because you're like, why is this guy kayaking from Australia, New Zealand, and then into these islands? Like, where is this guy's head at? I mean, he is, he is kayaking to places that, I don't

know if you can send mail to. And he's just like, yep, posting up here, we'll see what happens. and then locals would come over and be like, what the fuck is up with this guy? It's like, well, if you read the beginning of the book, you would know where his head was at. So let's rent a car because the taxi back. So I spent 107 euro end tips, 127 euro on a round trip taxi trip. Again, if I was going to go out, it wasn't going to drive anyway. But I'm like, all right, we need to rent a car. Hotel does it for you.

They were like, what do you want? And I said, you know what? I actually want something small. I don't need a land rover. I don't even know where you park at. Every turn, every corner, all these blind corners, trying to back out of stuff. No way. The streets are so small.

And stuff is constantly happening. And if you go the wrong way and you have to get back the other way, you just feel like, how am I going to back out of this without having a scooter fly by me? And next thing you know, you know, making headlines. So I got a mini-cooper convertible. dominating. Love it. It's got a little pickup up these hills, and you need it because some of these cars feel like they're going to stall out all the time.

So next day, drove around on the Mini Cooper, just loving it. Little Almond Brothers, although I'll admit, I've heard some of this Caribbean music down here, and you're like, I wonder what that song is, and then you just can't. You can't, Siri's just not quick enough sometimes. There's construction everywhere on the streets. So sometimes one side will be closed. It's not that traffic is necessarily bad.

You're never really waiting that long. And then when you think about the houses and the end of the pod when we do the categories, could I live here? If you don't have like something that's away from the road and so many of these houses, it's just you're on this road, you're flying down and then you just pull off immediately and you're in this driveway and then there's your house just right. there. I haven't seen any yards anywhere. So do love driving around, especially with the top down. It's my first convertible, I think. I probably did some stupid Mustang thing in my 20s,

thinking it was awesome. But I shot over to Nicky Beach the next day to eat, to see what it was like. And it was great. The food was great. We had some Wahoo tacos for the fish people out there and then some Ponzoo thing. I thought it was a little salty myself. But St. John, is really cool. It's very just, it's just really little, but there's these beach clubs that immediately you take a right down some path from the sidewalk, and then it's just paradise, and it's like two minutes away. So it's, it's perfect. Shot over to Gostavia, major harbor, more going on in that town, except the entire town shuts down from like one to four, one to five. That's 1,300 hours for some of the others were the town other than a couple

cheeseburger stands that I stopped at one. It was awful. It's there's nothing. So they have Louis Viton, Hermes, uh, Brunello. They've got Rolex tech. They've got everything. Nothing's open. Although, you know, the high end watch places is not like rich people come here and be like, hey, all these watches that no one can ever get. You have them all available. Just going in there, it's like, hey, is there a 30 millimeter you have for sale? Um, so not really, it didn't even matter and any of the stuff was closed. I wasn't buying anything anyway and going in some of the high-end watch shops

the last year is pretty pointless. I would say that Carl Lagerfeld collection was the best I've ever seen. Gustavia is also just really cool, but much bigger than St. John. So it's the major town, the major harbor. I did as I was having my cheeseburger fire off at WNBA salary tweet, if you were worried.

Look, I've been very consistent about this throughout the years when the NBA would argue that half the teams were losing money. That was a big David Stern thing. I don't know, silver thing. It was like, okay, but if I'm going to buy something for $300 million, this worth $6 billion, 20 years later, I don't care about your operating cost year to year.

It doesn't guarantee you a profit when you know you're going to make. So look, when the WNBA team's part of the TV package was packaged in through ESPN having to do it, some of the ads are done because it's a partnership with the NBA. I didn't have a ton of sympathy for some of the arguments about the player pay. But look, it's likely because of one person in Caitlin Clark that this thing is blown up. The TV deal's gone from $60 million to, I think, over $200 million a year. The players make 9% of the basketball-related revenue.

And they got away with that because over the years, I'd heard enough to know how not profitable it was. But if the Las Vegas Aces sell for what, $2 million in 21 and it's valued at $290 to $310 million now by multiple places that do this kind of stuff, of the expansion fees that Golden State paid $50 million for the Valkyries two years ago, and the next three expansion teams of WNBA are $250 million. Like, I'm a little less sympathetic about operating costs when it's looking like this is a growing business. And so, yes, I think the women should be able to make more than 9% of the basketball-related revenue.

Caitlin Clark makes $78,000 this year. Like in what world does anything, anyone that's that important to what they're doing, what world does it make any sense that you make $78,000 a year? All right. So ESPNW, I got you. After all the little hopping around in the rain and just trying to, you know, get my bearings. I like to kind of do as much as I can when I first get to a place, see as much as because then I just like being in my routine and being kind of settled. I headed over to Governor Beach and it was incredible.

Maybe it was the rain that scared some people away, but everything broke. And the sun does set a little bit earlier here. But from about 5 to 6.30, I had this intense. entire lagoon, just entirely to myself. So I'll be hitting that one up again. Same Bart's part three. Okay, we've made some moves and things have happened, so we'll cover all of it. I'm staying at La Bartholome, which I would recommend, if you're ever interested in

coming down here, the staff was incredible. a lot of Parisians that don't want to ever go back to Paris like I said, almost too helpful for somebody like me who's just not organized enough. Like I still don't know where the next leg of this trip is going. I keep looking at flights. What gets me to St. Martin and out of St. Martin in the quickest amount of time,

it would make way more sense to just suck it up and go to St. Martin for the last night of this trip so that I'd be ready to get the flight and be able to take my time. But I'm trying to thread the needle here so that I can get to St. Martin, get to the airport, and then leave. on the back end. So St. Kitts, Nevis, obviously Alexander Hamilton, a huge part of that reason why I want to do it. Just feel like I owe the guy, you know. If we do go there, we'll talk about his upbringing. You think your dad didn't listen to you? You think because you were the

oldest, he was too hard on you. You were the youngest. You weren't given enough direction. How about shit in yourself in a bed next to your mom while she dies? All right. That's what Hamilton was dealing with. So I do want to go there, but I'm a little worried that it may be a little inconvenient. And everyone here, I was like, okay, give me the other islands. Like if we're just here and we're going to start island hopping, what are the other options? And Inguilla keeps coming up over and over and over again. But then again, you're staying at this resort. And then the front desk is like, yeah, just take a helicopter over. You know, like, really? Just take a helicopter over? We looked at that. Like, look, you're guys doing all right, but I'm not

You know, it was funny, too, because when I started asking about other hotels and other resorts, Charlotte, who was just a gem, I don't know if she knows that her name, even though she's French, and that's how it's pronounced, is the name of a mispronounced Shubtown in Vermont. But she was like, oh, no, just stay at this place. And it was like, 5,500 euros for two nights. I was like, yeah, Charlotte, like, that's a lot. That's a lot. It was like, what?

the fuck somebody in st barts is actually worried so no it's not necessarily a budget but i mean come on we kidding and on top of everything else uh the helicopter i think was five grand is private that's cool um but i just don't think i'm going to do that so look that's all just kind of lingering in the background of all of this stuff so we talked about governor beach uh the next day at the resort this is something i don't know the last time i've ever done this if i've ever done it. But when I was at Bartholome, I had a couple hours of phone stuff. I had about two hours of work I had to do. And obviously, it's not ideal. It's not what I would normally want to plan out for something like this, but it just had to happen. And then I was kind of thinking

about the moves I was going to make and driving around. I thought, you know what? This place is so sick that you're staying at. If you knew that this place existed, you would, if you were staying somewhere else in a different part of the island, you would drive here and spend the day here. That's how sickness is. And guess what? You're already here. So I did a full day and part of it was influenced by the fact that I had to get some work done and it just ended up being a lot of work calls that I just was like, look, I'm posted up here the entire day. And that's what we did. So that meant the next day. I couldn't wait to get out. And we tried to do four beaches in one day for you. And that's technically what we did. So

there was a western part of the island where it's Columbier Beach and I was given a heads up that the seaweed season is upon us here and based on current wind direction and just where the tides are at. It's a tough time. It's been a bad seaweed season.

So this beach you drive all the way through this other part of the island. There is kind of this thing that I guess would pass for a town I did see a basketball court. I did bring my Devin Booker's shout out to the extension. I have not bought a basketball, which is usually something I do on this kind of trip

just to get some shots up and say, hey, when you went to St. Parts, did you get shots up? Fuck yeah, I did. Did you try to dunk? Maybe. Did it work? No. But I looked at the court.

It's a turf basketball court, which means they're playing soccer, but there are two rims. So I can only imagine. I'm like, I bet you would fuck yourself up so bad playing on that. I haven't ruled it out, but I didn't do anything that day. So I make it over to Columbier and like I said, you park about 15 minutes. Well, I would say you park and then it's about a 15, 20 minute hike.

As I went to the parking area, it smelled like the worst waste plant, just rancid, awful. And it's just this seaweed that is stuck in the, these lagoons and you can see it. It's like red. You could even see it on the flight. When I came into St. Martin, you could see these lines. You know, I mean, obviously, captain's always looking for things, always trying to just scan the horizon. But you would see these lines. I'm like, man, looks like heavy seaweed season. That's what I was thinking. And then, of course, it backed up by the local. So it felt good about that visual. But as I parked and then loaded up the old pack to take some pictures

water bottle book I'm like it smells like shit so are you going to do you know a hike post up this is going to be an hour out of the day we're trying to get four beaches in one day

so that's the one that technically I don't feel like I got although I do think I maybe saw a part of town that was worth checking out so then I went back to Gustavia to check out Shell Beach now Shell Beach is exactly that it's not sand it's just crushed shells. It is right, like a right and a left in another block from the town. So it's

super convenient to the town. You can walk up. There was a lot of families there. A little bit of some topless action, which, you know, to me, it's just sort of head down. But that's an American thing. Like if I were Italian, I would just be like thumbs up, you know. So that's probably really the approach. But, you know, head down by yourself, Lonesome Dove and hung out of Shell Beach for a little bit. nothing really happened there it was just after governor beach i'm like okay well in the back of my head i'm like i just want to get back to governor beach if i'm really going to do this and post up i don't know that this is going to be the place shell beach hanging out they did have kind of like a a jv version of nicky beach with the dj and the food going i actually went to go up to like get

some food and they i could just tell they were kind of like dude where's your party you know we're doing bottle service here in the middle of the day even though there was families at the actual beach area because you could just walk down to the beach area and have nothing to do with the kind of, it wasn't, again, it wasn't any kind of like beach club, but I think they were trying to pull that off because the DJ looked a little bit like Devendorf. So I could see what they were going for. And no one came to the hostess station for 10 minutes. And finally I was like, well, fuck this. I'll just go eat somewhere else. As I was leaving, this was actually interesting. I was leaving. And there was a valet there where you could valet to go and eat there and then go to

the beach if you didn't want to find a parking spot. You can usually find a parking spot at least the middle of the day because again, Gustavio in the middle of the day is like completely shut down. And this dude, white kid, 20s, he was vallying cars. And I was walking back to my sick mini cooper convertible. And he was parking another mini cooper convertible. And he rammed it right into a wooden fence like loud. But the people that had given him the car, they didn't see. Who knows how mad they would have been. They likely were renting it. He wasn't upset with himself and it was so loud but nobody else was really around except for just me and he got out of the car stared straight in my eyes and just gave me that Raymond Felton look like fuck you want

and I look back at him like I have so much respect for how much you're trying to pretend you didn't just crash that car into a fence you fucking moron although again you know whatever different cars it's a lot like boats I think I have a respect for people have to park cars now because if I had to dock your boat and I don't know the controls I don't know the touch you know, even with a license up to 51 feet, I'm not sure that I'd feel great about it the first time. So, yeah, he and I just locked eyes. And again, you'd have to just understand Raymond Felton's face, which I once described as the I banged your mom face that he played with throughout his entire career. It's not even a criticism. It's just supreme confidence

after a turnover. So left Gustavia and shot over Governor Beach, and it was everything I wanted to be. It is so far my favorite beach here. Little sandy, little sandstorm. I don't know if it was like a Texas flat just north of the Rio Grande, but it was nasty enough that it was kind of scaring some people off. But look, I can handle an intermittent sandstorm. If you're talking sandstorm is going to dust up once every 30 minutes, I can handle that. So I handled that, jumped in and out of the water a couple different times and headed back because I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm a different part of Saint-Jean on the way back. And then I'm going to go back to my resort and just hit sundown. So that's what we did. I drove back there after a quick bite and made

it back for sunset. It's not the greatest sunset spot, but in a way, because the sun is blocked out over this kind of, you know, again, it is a bit mountainous here. They're not like high peaks, but it's just such undulating topography. It's just all over the place. Like these roads, it feel like you're going down a roller coaster and then wondering if your car is going to make it up the other side. And I have got my bearings here a little bit because I did get lost a few times.

I think I went down the one way street the wrong way. And then again, when you have to back out of the whole thing, like all you're doing is just being like, please, if you're a scooter, don't be going twice a speed limit. Because the scooters do not give a fuck.

They actually run. I don't know if it's official like, elected office, but they run the show here, the people on scooters. So back to the resort for that. And I did something I don't think I've also, I don't know, I've ever done this before, but because my room and the Wi-Fi was so strong throughout the resort, I grabbed a pool chair right on the edge of the infinity pool, which was then right to the sand, you know, very close to the beach, watching the sun go down. And I threw on skyfall on my laptop because I was like, yeah, maybe I'll just kind of chill out and watch a movie for an hour.

And I go, wait a minute, why don't you do it outside in St. Barts? And I'm telling you right now, I'm going to start doing stuff like that more often. It was, I was just having a blast. I was just sitting here. I was like, this is just so relaxing. Great. So I was going to eat at the resort that night. Let's talk about the food a little bit.

And if you'll allow me a moment, a minute or two on sinks. Between Vermont and now the resort I'm at, people are getting really creative. of about sinks. And as a guy that grew up installing a few of these things, I don't know what happened. You know, whenever we got to the kind of accepted, hey, let's have a sink that's a basin, this kind of pitch on both sides, it all funnels to the middle, then everything kind of drains. And that seems to be good. Like, what's the fucking point of anything else? And then design people got involved. And the last three places that I've stayed, two places of Vermont, this resort I'm at now, they're so aggressive with the sinks that are trying to develop and install that what you notice is these don't really work like yeah they look modern and it's kind of cool but they don't work like there's always shit in them if you spit out your toothpaste and you don't go like right to the funnel then you know the sinks before this was never an issue i don't remember this i don't remember toothpaste residue all over everybody's house and you just go visit and now it's like

some, I don't know what, like a Red Bull car jump idea within this metal tray that goes over the other part that then means stuff is stuck on there all the time because it's not getting constant water flow. I don't know, man. And the reason why I think of sinks and wanted to share that with you, one, because it's just important. I mean, we can end the pot now and I think the message would be clear and it would be a valuable podcast. But there's a thing that's also happened with food for a really long time, especially at the higher end places where they take simple things that have worked forever and then just decide to make them way

more complicated and it's not as great of a dining experience. It's fucking stupid. I ordered the fish tacos and guess what? It was an open face tortilla that I had to cut up with a knife and fork because it was just taco stuff with some sort of guacamole deal

and then of course onions and yet it was like this open face thing and it was just fucking stupid. And the tortilla actually tasted really good and you're thinking all you had to do was just make the taco in this tortilla. But no, no, no. This is a five-star resort. We have to take food that has generally been accepted as simple, just like sinks. And we have to make it more complicated. And then dinner, I got the, I think, Mahi sampler or whatever. And they cut it into a thousand

diced pieces like I was three years old and then put toothpicks in all of them when you were like, you know what? Just a piece of fish probably would have really good. And I do think when I ordered the fillette, they gave me the kid's size to the point where I even asked. I was like, is this a kid's size fillet? And they were like, of course not, sir. And I think it was like 79 euros. And it was like two thimbles across. So you run into that at some of the higher end places. There was a lounge singer. I went to the bar and talked to my guy, Lucas. I had a sov and then he asked me if I had tried this Belgian beer ever and I was like I'm game so he cracked one of those open for me I left a tip so that meant beer was free because he was so excited

that somebody tipped him and then it was just me and the lounge singer just the two of us and then I was like well she looking at me because I'm the only one in here or is this a bit like what happens when you go to those places to stay open a little bit later and they pretend they like you Should I not look at my phone? Should I stop outlining this podcast? Is you going to ask if you're a writer? What do you say? Because you actually are writing down on the legal pad

in a fucking resort and St. Bart's by yourself like a fucking weirdo. How do you handle this? This could be like a scene out of Casablanca. Lucas and I are talking. He also never wants to go back to Paris. Unless he's going to visit family. So I don't know. I don't want to break news here in case there's someone in an extended family

that's listening to this podcast. So you know what? Nothing happened. Nothing happened. But I wanted to share those thoughts with you as I ran through all of them. So to bed, up early, checking out, they're like, what are you doing with your rental car? I was like, I'm just keeping it. They're like, do you want to shuttle back to the other place? I was like, I could just drive my rental car to the other place. What's going on here? What's going on there? Tons of questions. They didn't know what to do with me. Like I said, they just kept sending text after text, Mr. Rissillo, Mr. Rissila. They weren't upset about anything.

They just couldn't understand why I didn't care more about any of these things. And I just like, look, here's a $20 bill, bring my car, and I'm just going to drive to the hotel and check in when I need to check in. And they were like, all right, you've never experienced anything like this guy. So I did see a gym that feels a bit like it wants to be like the jungle gym there in Tulum, which I have hit up. That was strange during that weird kind of COVID trip that I went on. And I was like, I'm going to hit up a real gym here for a little bit. Roll in 45 euros for just a day pass. And they had the wooden stuff. But honestly, that wooden stuff for it to be heavy is just a massive pain in the ass. All it is really is like, hey, I have these mammoth pieces of wood

dumbbells in my hands. And it looks like it's 300 pounds, but it's maybe 65. And it's just a pain in the ass. And they actually had normal stuff in there, which was great. Because the saloon thing is strictly a photo shoot. You get your workout in. But it's kind of a gimmick more than a now. Not that I'm even knocking it, But let's just say you wouldn't want to be, if you lived in Tulum, you'd probably want a different gym and wouldn't want to do that every single day. This one was nice because it had traditional equipment and then it had all the photo op stuff if you'd want to do that. And they even had some heavy bags, throwing some 12 ounces. Those gloves stunk, wicked bad. Took them off pretty quick because it was like how much of a hard-o do you want to be at this place?

Throw on tons of kilograms of weight. I'm not even sure if I've done the conversion, which sometimes can be good because you don't even know what you're putting on. You're like, hey, can I do this right now? That was pretty good. And then the cool part was they had, and I don't mean that to be funny, they had a cold tub. They had some plunge tubs in there. So we hit up the six degree Celsius one for a three plus minute stretch, which was terrific. Then checked into a new hotel, the tropical, which I was kind of on the fence about, but the girls Bartholomew were like, no, you have to go to that one if you're going to go stay in St. John. And that's where I'm staying now. And how to work, Zoom, have a nice room.

This place is fantastic. It's a little closer to the action because I'm going to go get a big dinner. And then we'll see what happens and report back. And hopefully by tomorrow we'll have made a decision on the next stop. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant. You're building something big. And Square's there for all of it. giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in-person with Square Ciosk or online. Instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights so you know what's working, what's not, and what's next. Because when you're doing big things, your tools should to.

Visit square.ca to get started. Part four, St. Bart's. So we have made the hotel switch. as I mentioned, went to walk down to Nikki Beach for a little late night, sunset, lonesome dove. Again, incredibly friendly, helpful staff. They do a great job. These kids, I don't know what they're teaching them in the trades and some of the Parisian schools that specialize in hospitality, but they are doing it right. So shout out to the administrators, which, you know, at times I think have driven up tuition prices.

to ridiculous ratios based on spending and cost over the last few decades, but let's not get bogged down and all that kind of stuff. So as soon as I went to walk down with my beach share and book bag, it started pouring rain. And, you know, a lot of pay it forward. Kevin Space is not a huge inspiration, but I saw a construction van parked outside of the resort, windows down. And it was just about to downpour. You can tell, too, it's kind of cool. I don't know if it's the sailor atmosphere, but you just kind of look up to the sky, a lot like Dietz and Lonesome Dove. Sorry, I keep referencing this book nonstop. And you just kind of look up and you're like, oh, storms are brewing, probably going to be a southwest, perhaps, you know, maybe 30 minutes. So just as it was about

to start a little light sprinkling because it warns you in St. Bart's, I mean, how accommodating is that? Hey, the weather's about to turn, but here's just a few droplets so you can get all your affairs in order. And I saw the van with the windows down. I go, you know what? It'd be an awesome thing to do is roll the windows up for these guys. So they're not coming back to wet seats in their van. And considering the lack of crime on the island, you know, there's some places maybe you're like if it makes it look like you're breaking into somebody's car and going through the van, you might not want to do that. But in St. Barts, I felt safe doing it, rolled up the windows, felt really good about myself, walked back through this little garden sort of overhang thing, entrance

into the resort and cracked my head on the top of it so bad that I started bleeding. So if you can figure that one out, I mean, it was within 60 seconds of rolling up the windows. And then immediately I cut up in my head. It's not like I'm that tall. But I'm just thinking like, why? Who designed this? You know, and then it was bad. I mean, it actually hurt. And enough where there was a couple people that saw it that worked there that were like, ah. Speaking of my head, I wanted to get a hair cut. I didn't pack the clippers. I don't know what it is about 50 pounds. I see a lot of people complain.

It's perhaps an obesity criticism where it'll be like, you know, 50 pounds for your piece of checked in luggage. But if it's 52, maybe they let you slide. It feels like north of 53 is where they start getting a little weird. If you have enough status, sometimes I'll let it fly. No pun intended there. But there's something about just north of that where it becomes an issue, especially when you're traveling and hopping all over the place,

especially when you're on some of these smaller planes, too, because if you'd start doing that and that's happened in the past where they're just really, really strict about it. So usually domestic flights, they'll let you get away with it a little bit unless you're just egregious. I do wonder if all of us would be fine at 55 pounds, but if 55 were accepted, we all push it to 60, human nature kicks in.

Because it always feels like for me, it's just always at like 50. no matter what I do, it's like always 52 pounds, especially when I'm going to be gone, you know, almost coming up on three weeks now, there's just nobody to avoid it. And I've got the podcast equipment. And I have my Devin Bookers, you know, so a lot of the essentials. So anyway, I didn't bring clippers to shave my head. And it's getting a little weird, like almost, does he think that looks good?

But you know what? I'm not here on the scene the way I would have been when I was younger. So I don't give that much of a fuck. But at the same time, I would like to shave. head and get things tightened up here a bit. So now I have scab in the top of my head after I helped out the guys with the windows. That took a little too long. So here's the plan. I promised that I would try to make a run at at least one night. I mean, it's St. Barks, right? It's a festive place. It's a lifetime destination. A lot of people are going to go there maybe one time in their

life, right? I know that some of it's been pre-retirement scouting for myself, which I've hinted at in the past. Again, that probably sounds good out loud. Maybe I'm lying to myself. But it's, it's, let's just say on my radar. Hey, could you ever do this? You know? So I asked the hotel about getting a haircut because there's a salon on site want to charge me $100 and it's going to take like two minutes. I was like, you know, that just feels like it's a little excessive. And then the guy who valets the cars was like, I know a girl, she'll come to your room. I was like, wait, slow down. He's like to cut your hair, 30 euros, no problem. I was like, all right, great. And then they wanted to do it at 8 a.m. I was like, I don't know that I want to do that at 8 a.m. Because again,

the promise to myself and the audience was that I would try to make a run at one night, no matter what the night presented, just go for it. So also to step up the food part of it for you, because look, I think I deserve all the criticism post-San Sebastian. That's on the hand up. No one else to blame, obviously. So there is a place called Le Papillon-Uv, which means the drunk butterfly. It's a Parisian-style tapis restaurant, right in Saint-Jean, one of the 38 sections of St. Barts that I learned. It's a really small place to have 38 different sections, but it does. I believe they're called Cortier's, maybe. So I make it over Le Papillon, solo. You never know. It wasn't. like super busy, but people were at the tables. People were outside. Um, and the menu was like

incredible. It was all in French. Everybody's super, super French. The owner, she was from Paris. The waitress is from Paris. Everybody that I've met is basically from Paris. And I haven't met one person that's from Paris that says anything nice about Paris. Like every one of them. Now, granted, if this is the kind of person that wants to move to St. Barts from Paris, then there was nothing in Paris. But this is a continuing theme of everyone that I've met. And they're all service industry people. It's not like I'm like meeting people socially. But hey, where are you from? Even one guy was like, are you from Paris? He's like, how could you tell? I don't know. Something about it. Maybe I'm getting used to it. And none of them have anything nice to say about

Paris. It is across the board. So Le Papillon, I went with the beef tartar. And here's the thing with beef tartar. It needs to be cold. The meat has to be cold. If it's warm, it's just fucking ground beef on a piece of toast. And this was so cold, so refreshing, a shaved Parmesan thing on the top that actually worked, a little bit of hot sauce, some lemon juice, some capers, and just a feel of actually eating real beef in tartar style. And it was great. I went with six oysters. I'm a little, I know this is shocking to you when it comes to oysters. I'm really particular about I love the Rhode Island stuff. I love the briny, kind of smaller size things. I don't like the golf ball ones that are just fucking huge because then it kind of crosses over into this actually feels a little gross. But if you have the right accoutrements with it, I'm just flying right now. And you know, you can just make an oyster a great experience. But again, speaking to temperature based on serving temperature, they need to be cold. And there's something about French food with oysters sometimes. I've seen this a couple times. They just came out in like a bed of hay. So they were a little gamier than what I'm used to, which is fine.

The duck confit, unbelievable, don't normally eat duck. But this was basically the fanciest shepherd's pie I've ever had. It was duck that actually tasted like short rib with this very light whipped mashed potato that wasn't even close to being dense enough to be considered mashed potato. So what did I drink? I told you I tried to go for it. No, sob, what do we do? We pivot to Vermintino.

One of the most underrated sources of liquid grape, I believe, in the entire industry. Do not sleep on a nice vermantino. And I went for it. I had five glasses of it. And oddly enough, because I ate so much food because I ordered a second beef tartar, because they were like, three things will be fine. And I was like, I'm going to have five. They were like, oh, okay, who brought this fucking?

guy. Must be American. Did he serve? So I ate so much food that shockingly enough, even after five glasses of Mermintino, I didn't feel a thing. I even started joking with him. I was like, I don't, I was like, are you guys fuck with me? Is this some non-alcoholic thing that I ordered by mistake that's a soft substitute? What's going on? And they were like, oh my God, when we have three, we're shit-faced. And then the owner came over and she was really funny about the whole thing. So because I'm just sitting there by myself pounding Vermintino and trying to make a night of it. They came over and they were like, you have to have dessert. You have to have dessert. I was like, not normally the biggest dessert guy. I didn't expect key lime pie here, not La Pepi. But they brought

out apple pie and it was one of the coolest apple pie experiences I've ever had in my entire life. It was almost zero pie crust. So a very, very thin thing where it was the slicing of the apples in such a thin way and then caramelized and kind of sauteed in this design. And you kind of sauteed in this design. that it almost felt like eating some sort of caramel thing. And then, of course, to top it all off, homemade, fresh cream on top. And don't want to go on glorious bastards. I don't want to be compared to a Nazi because I enjoyed the fresh cream so much. But it was worth it.

So then walked back across the street towards the hotel to La Piment, where we spent a few hours when I first got to town, I was like, let's see what's going on here, had one Kareb again, and was like, okay, there's no point. There's nothing to do. Go home. go to bed, workout. And that's what I did. Got up the next day, worked out again at Zion. Did after the second workout, was asked by the hotel, hey, where are you working out? I was like, at Zion, like, we have a deal with them. I'm like, great. I'm out of $100

bucks already, 100 euros working there back-to-back days. So if it was free, it sort of sucks, 100 bucks isn't going to ruin my year, but you get the point. And they were like, well, how much did you pay it? I was like, it's 45 euros per visit. They were like, oh, we get it for 43 euros. win. I didn't even feel bad anymore. I was like, oh, wow, that's, they really hook you guys up, two euros off if you're staying here at the resort. What else? What else? We covered the haircut part of it. I shot over to Gustavia. Actually, before I went to work out, I went early, because again, we talked about the two days that happened in Gustavia, where I was wondering, it's so dead from one to four, one to five.

Is it possible that it's just dead because it's the offseason? And it isn't. The town was lively. Everybody's out there. They're shopping. I mean, because again, some of the luxury goods are to the point where you could argue it's worth it because of no taxes, depending on what you're going for. But I hope you declare it.

And I just kind of walked around, but it was cool to see it a little bit more lively. I did go into Brunello, check it out. I got to be honest with you, some of these high-end clothing, lines, which, you know, if you're guilty of dabbling into some stuff that I'm embarrassed to say, I even own, whatever. But $500 for some of these fucking hats, you know, painter's cap, 650. You're just like, who the fuck? And you got to really ask yourself, you're like, why would I even buy this? And you know what? I didn't. Although I did notice, and this was sort of shocking for a line as elite. I mean, if we're talking tier status, God tier status for

Benllo. They had a Brett Favre oil painting, which was maybe four feet long, three feet wide. It was fucking massive. And it was just his face, early Fav, a wispy mustache, which I don't necessarily remember. And then him and his shoulder pad so you could see the Packers jersey. So it was like mid numbers up his face. And then I thought it was just kind of off to the side, like maybe a manager's son or daughter did this oil painting. And it was for sale inside. of the store, 12,000 euros, if you're interested. I took a picture of it, may post it a little bit later. So, yes, left a more active morning Gustavia. I did go there to try to get a haircut because I found a place online and guess what? That guy just decided to be closed for the

day. My French is not very good. It's getting worse because I even looked and was like, okay, that's a day. That's a day of the week. It isn't Lundi, though. So we'll have to see because I'd expect them to be closed on Demonsch. So then, yeah, headed to the gym, I got to admit, I mean, I know I feel like a bit of a, I'm too old to be taking pre-workout, but I fucking love it, sorry. And scoopings from pre-workout into a pre-workout concoction that I put together on the road in a parking lot, in Gustavia, in the harbor. As people are walking inside Louis Vuitton, I was like, you're either the fucking coolest or the least cool.

You can decide on that one. So work out, nothing to report much there, back to the hotel, reset, and let's head back down to Nikki Beach, because Nikki Beach, that was the plan to spend a good chunk of the day there yesterday. I did go down. There's just incredible little harbor from Eden Rock over to another beach club. Nikki Beach is kind of right in the middle of it, the hotel that I'm at. I mean, if you can't afford Nikki Beach or Eden Rock, which almost like nobody can to go to

tropical and walk across the street and then not have to deal with anything. of the parking stuff. It's actually a huge St. Bart's hack if you end up doing it. So walk in there, sit down, read, not much to rapport. Although there was an Instagram model, I believe, shoot, I need to check the tagged locations where it was about a 40 foot turquoise boat, just beautiful outboard set up. I don't even know what the make was, but it was gorgeous. And there was a model who, again, I couldn't tell how old she was because, you know, I just, I didn't have, I didn't have a great sight line. And she was on the bow of the boat. And then there was a dude, a photographer in like a raft, maybe, you know, 12, 14 foot, maybe something the local beach would have for a rescue type of deal. And the photographer, the photog, was in the raft, taking pictures of her on the bow.

And then the boat had to keep like spinning around the entire time. So it was about 30 minutes. And I just kind of thought either she's like a real person and this was the job or because of the way this whole thing set up, she may have just paid for all this stuff or some guy she's dating. But at least he didn't have to sit there and take the pictures the entire time. So good for him. Little lunch at Nikki Beach. It was very, very slow. The wait just came over, talked about it. She's like Sunday.

Sunday's the day. You have to come Sunday. I was like, I don't know. I don't know. Because I would admit. And again, it's not because it's anything that's wrong with beach clubs or wrong with DJs or loud music or getting after. middle of day. I'm not sounding like that guy. But I'm telling you, if you've done it enough times, it's just kind of the same thing all the time. But if you got the right crew and you

want to go for it, go for it. Full endorsement for me on that one. Casidia for lunch and some sliders. Not bad, not spectacular. Checked out the gift shop, walked away. And got some work done back at the hotel, really loving the outdoor movie watching on the laptop of the AirPods in and still debating what to do with St. Kitts next. So for dinner, I was not going to try to go for it another night, one and done after the Burrentino night, even though nothing, like, it didn't even work. Very weird. Didn't work on me. So I went out to the hotel lobby, checked in with Jasmine, and said, hey, how's this sushi place down there? And she's like, oh, it's my favorite sushi place, St. Bar, it's best, no problem. So walk across, and then I start

realizing, like, as I'm looking at my phone, which isn't always the greatest source, because sometimes the signal works, sometimes it doesn't. And I'm looking for this sushi place. And the pictures look good. It was fine. And you walk down to Nicky Beach, and then you cut across. And I'm going across Nikki Beach, which closes really early, by the way. So it's not even open at night. And I'm looking at my location. It's like, I think I'm walking past it, but I don't see it anywhere. So then I walked over to this other beach club where I walk into the front of it from the beach, which is sort of weird because it's super dark. And by the way, there's no streetlights anywhere in St. Barth. And I walk up into the bar and I'm pretty sure I was crashing some sort

of wedding reception. Everybody was dressed up really nice. It wasn't just the St. Bart's thing. There were a few looks. I was not dressed up. And, you know, they looked at me. I looked at them and I assessed the situation. I was like, all right, I wasn't going to stay there anyway. And it wasn't the sushi place. So I finally can't, I can't find it in this little cove of there. It shouldn't be missing. A restaurant shouldn't be fucking missing. I can't find it. Everything's dark. I'm like, all right, maybe it's just, let me call the number. I call the place was closed. So I walk over to Eden, which is the other legendary spot there in St. John. Even more expensive to stay, I would say there than maybe anywhere else. Certainly there's villas that were far more expensive. But if you

look at this place like peak season, I don't think you would ever get a room there less than six or seven thousand euros a night. So I was a little curious and it actually worked out great because I'm like, well, instead of going to this random sushi place, I'm going to kind of one of the other standard stops that are like it's, it's very famous. And you walk in and it's all red and they have their little Instagram backdrop of Let's Rock, Eden Rock, St. Bartz. And it's this incredible room. Awesome. two-tier dining room, another kind of social area off to the right side, all opened up to waves just crashing down to this lit beach where, again, the water in this little lagoon in this

area is just crystal blue. It's perfect. And so you're looking at the room and the red is something about that old school red that just pops and makes you think about like, imagine when this place is rolling that week before Christmas, New Year's Eve, what this must be like to see Bazelerman And next to, I don't know, Ben Bird and April Watson just mapping out the next major motion picture. It was inspiring. Went to the bar, sat by myself. They were totally cool with it. Very helpful.

Again, all Parisian. Had the lobster, a lobster ravioli for you. It was good, not great. There was one ravioli where it was so much better than the other five raviolis that it kind of hurt the meal. Because each one was fine. I got to be honest to you, I think they may have been frozen at some point. A great lobster ravioli, you can just see the meat break off inside of the ravioli. These felt a little too packaged down.

Then this one ravioli was better than the rest of them. I appreciated that it was served in a broth. It wasn't really seafoody. It was kind of a lemon wine butter thing. It wasn't a cream sauce. I don't know how you kids do it, a big healthy bisque. And then you're supposed to go out. Who the fuck does that north of 30?

So this was nice. It was appreciated. There was a broth. a couple Bermitinos, and then over to the gift shop where you're walking around and you're like, you're going to buy something that you're going to wear none times. And I bought a red t-shirt for 100 euros. Totally. I just, I had to. I felt like I had to. At least I didn't buy the Von Dutch style Eden Rock trucker cap that I think was 250 euros because you're like, you're never wearing that. That actually looks fucking stupid. At least this is a very simple red shirt,

kind of classy, a little thick, a bit like a goose tour shirt, you know, if you guys could dial down the thickness of some of the shirts, it would be appreciated, although some of this oversized thicker cotton is kind of back in now. If you look at the trends, I don't know if you're on this stuff, you kind of have to be, if you're staying in the game. So I did buy that shirt, and then when I woke up today, I was like, you ever going to wear that? But I am glad I went to Eden Rock because I wasn't even really planning on doing it. I looked at rooms there. It was for the most part.

It was sold out the nights that I was trying to get there. So it wasn't really going to work anyway. But it was clearly one of the coolest. It makes sense why that place is so famous and so many people go there because you imagine when it is peak season. I saw zero celebrities, by the way. Maybe other people saw one. But you get the point.

Like you could just walk into this room and totally get how it must be sick for all the people that have access to people to get into there during the peak season and just all be socializing and heading back to their just expansive villas. So will I make it to sink kits? No, I will not make it to sink kits. I'm fucking over it. It's been about three weeks since I've been home. I have a quick turnaround where I have to go back to the East Coast. I have a million things going on. I'm sick of pulling over in my rental car and then parking someplace and then talking about business. And so I am going to kind of regret this a little bit, but I also looking at the St. Martin flight thing. I'm like, this sucks. And then you're going to do all of

this to get to St. Kitts for like two days. So I'm going to be really disappointed myself when I get home, but I'm going home. Categories. All right, could I live here? The retirement plan after spending a week here is taking a bit of a hit. I don't even know if it was like really possible, but I don't, again, what do we say on this show? Don't put a salary cap on your life. So, I've looked at real estate here just to see. And now that I've driven around and gotten to know the areas, and I do think you could do like four days here and you got it. You know, even if you're not a huge explorer type person, like within three or four days, it was actually kind of cool, like the second day, I had my bearings. And I was like,

okay, all right, I know where I'm going now. I mean, you can take a left turn and it's wrong, but it's just going to filter you somewhere else that fixes it for you because a place is so small. But to do it right, to have a place that you were really excited about, it's an astronomical number. All right. So there's that. And despite my ability to function in isolation, even that might be too isolated for me. And you're going to remember, the people that live there, live there basically because they're in hospitality and then whoever is working to make sure the toilet slush. But so much of it is tourism and so much of it is people buy these expensive villas than hire villa management companies. There's villa management companies all over

the place. I might have seen 20 different offices that specialize in that because I think that's such a huge part of the industry is you buy something and then you're running it out and paying property managers and the whole thing. So maybe you could argue if you had that kind of money that you could pull something like that off and make back some of it on renting it out religiously. But living there, I think it's even a little too slow. And it's not that there's nothing, right? Because there's a couple real towns. Gustavia's a harbor village, right?

St. John's just basically a rotary with stuff in two directions. But it's not like you're walking up and down all these streets or anything. I mean, you can walk through St. John from like the end of it in less than 10 minutes, one end of the other. but it even if you had a sick house infinity pool the whole deal even with beach access and you had the boat um let's just say the retirement option has been downgraded i don't know what it is but it's been downgraded and it also well again i don't want to put a salary cap in my life so i'm not going to say it's not even uh attainable boating I'm disappointed to myself.

I scouted it a little bit and I was like, okay, so it's going to be worth $2,000 euros to take out a center console that's going to get its ass kicked in the break, trying to get out of a couple of these different areas to then poke around and look at a beach that you could have just driven to. I mean, some could argue I traveled, I took three flights to go to a beach that is not even as nice as the one in my backyard, but whatever. My backyard isn't a foreign country. I want to check it out. I've thought about this place for a long time. So to take the boat out,

to spend that much money, and when I would look at how the wind would pick up on a couple of the days, I'm like, I don't even know if you could get out in a center console. Again, rent something that's huge, just by yourself, that's just a waste of money. And then it's like, where could I actually anchor? And my York, it made all the sense in the world because even though it wasn't the biggest boat, it was like 27 foot center console, maybe it was 24. I don't remember. But it wasn't that hard to get out of this huge, huge lagoon. It was basically like a mini bay. And then I worked over, Beyonce, and found a private beach that you can't get to.

You can't drive there. You can't really walk to it. But you can anchor a boat. And then you can swim to this beach. And it's like, this is awesome. So it felt entirely worth it when I did it there. And then again, in Lucerne, Switzerland, I mean, you can't walk next to that lake and go, you know, you would never go like, well, why wouldn't you get a boat here? So with St. Bart's, it felt a little more complicated and just didn't really feel like it was worth it.

If I had a massive, massive catamaran, if I had sailing skills, maybe. All right. This is immature, but we're doing it. Toughness scale from Clint Eastwood, High Plains Drifter, Clint, although maybe we just to keep it nicer, say, pale rider Clint to DeAngelo Barksdale. So a scale of toughness there, how did I feel? I did hit the bag, did some movie tie at the gym, looked around a little bit. A couple decent-sized guys. A lot of ab guys, though, with some hair accessories that I didn't love.

I would give it a lot of skinny Parisians. Honestly, some of the biggest, the Parisian guys were awesome. Some of the biggest dorks were like the rich American guys that are even a little bit older than me that I would just over here talking. And I'm just like, Jesus, I hope this guy doesn't want to make some sort of connection with me whatsoever because, you know, I might not be the coolest guy. whatever. So yeah, I'll give myself a 7 out of 10 on that one. Also, side note, at the gym, I had an assy bowl. I was like, let's see how they do this in St. Barts. It was soup. People got

to stop. Like, if you can't make the fucking bowl have any kind of consistency to the texture, then just get out of the bowl game. Um, well, we're doing this because it's what some guys want to hear, uh, women. Scale of, con to the track side of Winooski, Vermont. It's a lot of just younger service industry men and women. And it's pretty good. This guy from Switzerland waited on me. Just, you know, like this guy must just like dear season 12 months a year for this guy.

So, yeah, good, good, but not that night that I had in the South of France. Let's see. Beach ranking. I think the top two spots are Formintera off of Ibiza and Le Club 55 in Centrape. Although Negril is its own category, but I was so much younger. When I talk about ranking in my experiences, nothing's ever going to talk about. the grill, but I'm never going to be a 23-year-old DJ again. It's not, I didn't go to any beach that was better than Formintera or the club of 55.

Governor Beach was awesome because I had it to myself. It was beautiful. The Nikki Beach thing is fine. The water is gorgeous. It's not so warm even at that longitude, latitude marker. You know, because sometimes you go down to South Beach and you walk into the water, although I haven't gone to South Beach in a long time, and you just go, oh, cool, I'm taking a fucking bath. And I feel grosser than when I was sitting on the beach. Let's see. My French is getting worse. Oh, this is something that's important. Import, export deficit. Very concerning. I was looking into the numbers here. Out of 226 ranked countries, recognized bordered nations. I don't know how you would frame that because, I mean, I feel like we've got more

than 226, but according to who's, you know, he's like, I guess, D1, 226 territories, St. Bart's, their deficit ranks at 208 in the bad way. Refined copper coming in at number one, 13.2 million in 2023. These are 2023 numbers. I don't have the 25 data yet, but again, you know, we're not through the year. My guess is that refined copper number is probably going down, too. you balance that with, all right, so you're sending out 13.2 million in refined copper. They brought in 2023, just over 17 million in watches, both precious metal watches and base metal watches.

So I'm not an econ major, but it's like, fuck, you guys, you know, get the salt farm pumping. Find more copper. But I guess the watches, I mean, they must be moving product down there to be bringing in that kind of number, but I don't like those. Let's end on something positive, though, because even if I mentioned the retirement planning, again, I don't know that I'd ever want to like retire, retire and do nothing. That would drive me crazy. And it's probably too early for me to even be thinking about this. I'm a planner from anything, right? So I love, I love thinking about scenarios, playing them out. But I want to talk about the whore from Lonesome Dove Lorraine. Again, that's the term they

use for her in the book. So I just want to be accurate historically in there, although we could call her a sporting woman, too. That would probably be nicer. So let's use that term. So Jake Spoon shows up, right? And Jake Spoon used to run with Call and Gus, who were all Texas Rangers. Is that name offensive? and they were kind of just, you know, trying to settle Texas in the border a little bit. A lot of horse thieving going on, cattle thieving, a lot of hanging. And, you know, look, just showing up, basically Texas colonization. So Jake Spoon is somebody who makes a great first impression, I think a bad second impression, a third impression is probably really like this guy kind of sucks.

But he shows up to Xavier's establishment. Xavier is the owner of the bar and Lippey's the piano player there, Lonesome Dove. And Lorraine has got a room upstairs and entertains men that need to be entertained. And so Jake rolls in and he's on the run. He had shot a dentist by mistake somehow in Arkansas. And he shows back up to Lonesome Dove, hooks back up a call. and Gus, who then are thinking about making a move up to Montana, based on Jake's recommendation of like saying, hey, Montana. Look, I would agree with Jake. Montana's great,

but a little less refined, perhaps than today. No big sky resort, no Yellowstone resort. So Jake and Lorraine hit it off immediately. You know, you don't get this a lot after the services are compensated, but they end up. cuddling. He's like moved in. He's like sleeping there. And Lorraine desperately, and she's had an awful, awful life to this point. Um, but apparently she's just stunning and, and cowboys come from all over asking about the blonde. And Jake, she picks Jake because Jake is someone that can potentially provide her with the means, not necessarily money, but like she wants to make it to San Francisco. And at this time period,

it's not super realistic that Lorena would just get on a horse and ride from loan some dove to San Francisco. I'm not going to work out. So she needs to go with somebody. And Jake Spoon's like, I'll do that. But Jake's, you know, he's a gambler. He likes to drink, tell her everything she wants to hear. And like the first few nights are magical, right? And so I thought that this was really telling and something we should all remember from page 149, hardcover, obviously. Immediately Jake Spoon began to change the way her thinking worked. Before he even brought his bottle to the table to sit with her, she began to want him. If he had taken the bottle and gone to sit by himself, she would have felt disappointed. But of course he didn't. He sat

down, asked her if she'd like some refreshments and looked her right in the face and for a while in a friendly, easygoing way. It seemed a miracle to Lori that a man had walked in who could figure that out so quick because he had said to her, we didn't see this much beauty when I lived in these parts. Now, if this was San Francisco, I wouldn't be so surprised. I reckon that's where you really belong. I laid into that a little bit more towards the end. So it seemed a miracle that someone could figure her out so quickly. In the last year, she began to doubt her own ability to get to San Francisco and even to doubt that it was as cool and nice as she had been imagining it to be.

And yet she didn't want to give up the notion. And here's the part that matters because she had no other notion to put in its place. It might be silly to even think about it, but it was the best she had. I hope you enjoyed that episode enough to listen to the whole thing. I'm sorry, it wasn't more exciting. They were going to name me Michael Jordan. My dad was like, I don't think he can live up to it, so they named me Michael Jared.

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