Transcript of the above video: 

I have got to tell you, I am so ecstatically, exhilaratingly happy to be using this meme. I love this meme.  Wu & Swearengen - Hang Dai. Anybody that has ever seen Deadwood knows this meme. It's great. So background, especially for anybody here in Thailand that doesn't know the show. HBO's Deadwood, it is a great show. It's about real place that was actually on the American Western frontier that was not part of American jurisdiction. Under a Treaty it had been ceded to an Indian tribe, but then settlers had come out there anyway and just didn't care - which would happen quite frequently on frontiers - and Deadwood, this town popped up that was effectively lawless or a law into itself maybe is the right term. And this, I think it was a three-season series, and then they made a couple of later movies to kind of wrap it up, it was really sad the way they ended the series, it should have gone at least one more season, but it's a great show. 

The reason I bring it up is the broader context of the US-Thai Treaty of Amity. I’ve done videos in the past where I've compared America and Thailand and I think it's apt to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, and I love that line in Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid, the guy that just played Ronald Reagan. By the way, thanks for robbing the Ronald Reagan movie, Academy Awards. I mean really, you can't just objectively say a guy did a good job acting as a former President; it's all got to be political? I mean I'm just saying. In any event, so Dennis Quaid was playing Doc Holliday in that Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner and he says essentially, "I know sometimes it's not easy being my friend, but I'll be there when you need me", and I love that line. I always think of the US-Thai relationship when I think of that because at different points in the relationship, Thailand may be acting like Wyatt Earp and the USA is a little more Doc Holliday and at different times, Thailand will be a little more Doc Holliday and the USA will be a little more Wyatt Earp, okay. And then you get to Swearengen, you have got Swearengen who is kind of the guy that runs the local tavern, and he runs the gym, and he's kind of running Deadwood and then you have got Wu. And first of all, for those that are like, "oh they made Wu out to, it was derogatory toward Wu because he speaks sort of a kind of a pidgin English as they called it the back then, and it's China", well that was how it was. I mean these guys really interacted like this I imagine, and I think they did a pretty good job. And it's interesting when you watch the behind the scenes of Deadwood, the actor that plays him is like an American guy of Asian extraction. He's just an American guy, he sounds like me, you know what I mean, but he intentionally wanted it to sound the way that people would have talked to each other in that kind of frontier context, and it makes for a great scene. I'll put a link in the description below to a scene in there. I warn, it's not safe for work; it's got some language; it's Deadwood, but I like the notions it kind of portrays of how the frontier works. And in many ways, for us Americans out here in the Andaman Sea, in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea and East Asia, this is a frontier. In fact, it's not even a frontier, it's abroad for us, so there are going to be different interactions than you would think about in maybe a different geopolitical context. 

The only point I'm trying to make is much like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Wu and Swearengen, Thailand and America are Hang and Die out here. I mean that's just what we are doing. We've always hung together; we're always going to do business; we've always been friends. People have asked me recently, they have sort of said, "are you worried about anything with respect to the..?" No, not at all. It is actually one of those things I view as sort of a given, frankly. But I don't think people really fully understand how many undertones of sort of frontierism, that kind of pioneering sort of mentality and also just kind of a general rugged individualism that is inherent in both the American psyche but the Thai psyche as well, and how they interact and sort of come together and the interplay between those two things is just fascinating to me, and oftentimes I'm reminded of these, oftentimes kind of peculiar relationships that manage to manifest on the American frontier.