Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing what I can only describe as so-called Farang intuition. For those who are unaware, Farang is a word we use for foreigner here in Thailand or I should say the Thais use for foreigners here in Thailand, specifically Western foreigners in Thailand. I guess you could say Caucasian, but Western, from the Western countries so United States, the Anglosphere, or the Commonwealth and then you have got Europe; generally speaking that's a bag of countries that the people that come from there are Farang. 

So the reason for the video, I have talked to multiple people in the past couple of weeks and a phenomenon that I hadn't seen really during COVID and then it has cropped back up but it was something that was really prevalent prior to COVID, the only description I have for it is this notion of Farang intuition, foreigners intuiting things in Thailand. This intuition if you will is just not based on reality in many cases or the state of Thai Law. For example, this is just one example and it's anecdotal but going back, I don't know a few months ago, something, someone said to me, I was sitting around with some mutual friends and somebody who I didn't know very well but I sort of knew as a friend of a friend said: "Oh, all gambling is illegal but the Army just gets paid off to allow horse racing." And I said "What? No that's not true at all. There has been legislation in place and there have been protocols in place regarding horse racing going back to the turn of between the 19th and the 20th century. I mean that has existed, there has being jurisprudence there and it was just another one of these examples of somebody just sort of saying something and believing something apropos of nothing. I don't know where this comes from but it's a real phenomenon, it's really strange. I've talked to other expats, I have talked to other folks in other jurisdictions, people I know that live in Korea for example, people I know that live in Japan, this seems to be a really Thailand sort of centric phenomenon that foreigners show up here and make a lot of presumptions about the way things work. I am talking beyond the issue, and this is its own issue of sort of Western entitlement issues out here in Asia. That is its own sort of kettle of fish if you will, but this phenomenon of just well "I've got that figured out!" Let me be clear, when I was first here I was very guilty of it but there are two manifestations of this that I have found. One is when you are, especially when you are relatively new, you just kind of presume things. Like it took me a long time even in a professional context, to extract Common Law notions of equity because they just don't exist in a Thai context. That whole body of jurisprudence, that whole body of Law and thinking conceptually, thematic conceptual thinking that has existed essentially since Henry the 8th left the Catholic church and the sort of manifestation ramifications of that going into British Common Law which then came down to American Common Law and then evolved on its own in American Common Law, none of that exists in the Thai context. To me you come by that kind of assumption honestly, for lack of a better term. But there is this, it is a very again a very weird phenomenon among foreigners I have found out here, "well I just know what's going on", "this is how it works in Thailand!" or they have seen something and they think they understand how something works and then they sort of try to apply the same logic down the road and it oftentimes meets with less than optimal results, I will leave it with that. 

But yeah it is something that if you are going to come to Thailand to live, you really need to guard against this because even when you are doing it inadvertently, like I said when you sort of come by it honestly, you are just sort of making presumptions based on the way your system, your experience has worked in the past and it doesn't work that way in Thailand, okay fair enough. But folks that have been here a while and are just kind of wandering around intuiting the way they think things work here, it is really not a good way to interact with the world here in Thailand, because oftentimes they are just dead wrong.