Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "jobs for the boys"; it could be jobs for the boys and girls but "jobs for the boys" is actually an old term I heard actually when working in the casino business years ago. There was this old guy from Chicago who had literally been, I'm not kidding you and bear in mind I'm working in a Midwestern Indian gaming casino, and this guy was from out of Chicago and had been a real honest to God Ward Heeler in Chicago in like the '70s or whatever it was. He was an older guy and I'm talking to him in, oh this would have been 2003, 4, 5 - somewhere in there - and he told me all of these different stories, but one of them he told me was "jobs for the boys". That was important in Chicago politics, because he was a Ward Heeler, he came from the Chicago Machine. And he was talking about - I can't remember what it was, Bingo Halls or something came up - and then he just kind of launched into this whole thing about look anything in Chicago politics at that time was always about "jobs for the boys". 

Look, I'm not saying Chicago politics is good or that it's objectively the way you want to run a railroad as it were. That said the notion of jobs for the boys should never ever, ever, be underestimated okay. It's really important and there is a ton of this that I don't think anybody here in Thailand is looking at when talking about the issue of legalization of gambling and casinos here. I discussed why I think at least for now we do not need to go rushing headlong into Casino Gambling here in Thailand. I've talked about it in one video. I'm making another one contemporaneously with this one where I get into that in a little more straight, like acutely touch on that topic. More to the point in this video is if we do it, ultimately don't rush headlong into it because we need to think this over because there are benefits, a lot of them. For example, tons of stuff, what really worries me about fast-tracking some kind of legislation that we don't get a look at is Thailand leaves so much on the table that Thailand doesn't even know it's leaving on the table okay. And one of the perfect examples, it's like jobs for the boys here. I talked about hey maybe there should be a body that licenses the dealers and trains the dealers - or maybe you could outsource the actual training but put them through a licensing body that all the trainees have to go through - and then you use them and you source labour through them. 

Another side of this is Cruise Ship Casinos. I've talked about this; these jobs are not bad. Again, I'm not saying gambling is in and of itself good and knowing sort of Buddhist ideology, Buddhist theology if you will - although philosophy might be the better word, gambling is definitely not aligned with that and I see why obviously. So I can see the argument for just yeah we're not going to have it here. Okay that's one argument but if we are going to have it, we need to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative as much as we can. Jobs for the boys is something to be critically concerned about. Again, cruise ships. If we have trained dealers that can deal anything on a casino floor that come through a certification body here in Thailand and then they have had two, three years’ experience on a casino floor dealing with foreigners, dealing with it in real time, those guys can go get jobs immediately on cruise ships. 

You want a little detail about my life. I initially thought - before I ever thought I would move to Asia - I was going to go to work as a casino dealer on a cruise ship. It ultimately fell through, and my backup was just, not just, I'm not meaning to belittle it, but my backup was moving to Korea and working as a teacher for like a year. I did that for six months, ended up down here in Thailand and that's the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say. But the point I'm trying to make with this video is these Cruise Ship job are a great deal. Like the ship I was going to work on, it was like "oh you work in Europe in the summer or the winter, whatever it was, Europe in the European summer, and then you would be in like the islands in the European winter". And the other thing, once when you are a casino dealer, you don't have to work when the ship is in Port so you can actually go out and see some of this stuff; you're not stuck on a ship necessarily. I'm not saying it's all wine and roses doing this job. I'm just trying to make the point again. We need to sit down and think this through Thailand because I think if we move too fast, we leave so much on the table that we can all benefit from and we can again mitigate down the negativity of the gambling activity, while sort of turning up the volume if you will on the benefits that can be accrued to Thais and to Thailand in a general sense.