Transcript of the above video: 

I made another video contemporaneously with this one where I was talking about the fearmongering that I have seen from what I can only really describe at this point is like the YouTube content machine. And what I mean to say is it looks to me like there are folks now out there, that are using AI to go through, and you know I focus on myself here, but I don't think it's unwarranted. 

I have been making these videos for 9 years and I have got really substantive content out there that if you were to like point AI at me or the channel, you could like churn out a bunch of effectively and we have transcribed this over the years and put it up with the resource section of legal.co.th, you could kind of compress some of the knowledge into some form where you can then put an AI voice robot or whatever out there, and basically like regurgitate it and put it back out on the ether of the internet.  Whatever, I don't really care in the sense that I guess mimicry is the serious form of flattery as they say, but also the fact of it is I am a real person who has discernment and frankly I think the audience, especially of this channel, realizes that when the S hits the fan as it were, I am going to do real analysis in real time as to what is happening. I mean COVID was a really good example of that. We have also seen the situation surrounding Cannabis as it kind of percolated up, became legal and then it sort of evolved over time. I have discussed a lot of stuff in a Visa and Immigration context. Especially I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking to me about the Destination Thailand Visa and all the problems people have had about it and I said, yeah, I talked about that. He said, "yeah you did actually, and it is time-stamped that you literally said it within the week of the thing coming out." And everybody kind of poo pooed me and hated me for that when it came out and all the problems I said that would ultimately be begotten from that scheme came to pass. And as I was saying to that person, great I got it right. I didn't make any money off of it; everybody hated me at the time and later on it didn't do anything for me, but I feel like this channel is a place where expats can go or prospective expats can go to learn really some straight information about what's going on around here. And again, these sort of AI videos that I am seeing and then you sort of see the hyper, how do we put it, the hyper-focused thumbnails and things associated with them where it is really just geared toward - Louis CK the comedian once talked about how he said somebody was telling him about making content for the internet and how you had to take into account the algorithm, and Louis CK sort of said "what is the point of that? Who am I making that for then? I am not making that for people, I am making it for the algorithm? I mean why would I do that?" And that's kind of how I view it, but I see these videos. One, I really question whether or not they have the view counts that you see them claiming that they have, especially; I'm not saying YouTube is lying or something, but I wonder how these view counts are begotten. I have been in this space for 9 years. The Thailand, expat, travel space, whatever you want to call it. I know the other folks that are in it that concentrate on being YouTubers - I don't consider myself exactly a YouTuber per se - kind of an ironic thing to say but I just I never have, it's ancillary to what we do here at the firm, and I always viewed it as such. Maybe more and more I am viewing myself a little bit more is a YouTuber or whatever you want to call it but other folks, Tim Newton for example, I have done content with him in the past; we have collaborated on some stuff - tip of the hat to him, he makes good stuff - he is more concentrated on things than me in terms of the YouTube space per se doing news etc. and I have seen his sort of subscriber count, his view counts, things of that nature. I've watched his videos. That is in line with what the audience really looks like. Some of these videos I am seeing that appear to be AI generated, I look at the view counts and I am like why are hundreds of thousands of people watching content in this sort of niche space? It really causes me to question the genuineness of the statistics that I am seeing associated with that, at least ostensibly on YouTube when I see these videos pop up. 

In any event the point of this video today is I have seen a couple of videos recently and I have described what I call the Southeast Asia Travel Cold War out here where it seems like other jurisdictions, especially outside of Thailand, are perhaps funding if you will or supporting content creators in an effort to make Thailand look bad so that people won't come to Thailand and they will go to other places. I am not going to name any countries or anything like that, I just have my thoughts, and to be clear, I don’t think Thailand is doing anything like that in reverse. Frankly I don't think they should; I don't think ultimately this is going to do anything amazing for any other countries, but it seems like that there are all these videos that are like "hey Thailand has got this problem, come here." I have noticed this from commenters too. There is a lot of push in comments where it's like "oh Thailand has got too many problems, come on over to such and such a place", and it is like well, I have done the videos before on this when you compare these two jurisdictions it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. 

That said, getting back to the main thrust of this video is this whole, "oh I got a Thai girlfriend, and she took everything." Look, I have talked about this in other videos. There are horror stories throughout the internet that you can find regarding people that have come to Thailand and had a bad experience in more ways than one. It might be affairs of the heart; it might be they came over here and invested money in something that completely went kaput. Long story short, there was a book once I read - I think it was Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye - I read this book years ago like right when I first got here, I want to say some 17, 18 years ago I think I was coming down out of Korea frankly, and I remember reading this book, I think the guy that wrote it was a Kiwi who was a PI in Bangkok for a while, and he talked about how a lot of foreign men sort of checked their brain in at the airport when they got here, and then would make decisions especially as it pertained to a Thai girlfriend or wife that they would never make in any other context. I'm not trying to make this video to blame all the "farang" guys for bad decisions and things like that. Look there are bad actors in any milieu. At the end of the day yeah there are frankly women out there, throughout Southeast Asia, that may have a guy's wallet more in the forefront of their mind than the guy’s heart. But I don't know, seeing the footage I am seeing from over in the West on TikTok and every other thing, I am starting to wonder if maybe there isn't plenty of that going on back there as well.

The point I'm trying to make with this video is folks that are looking from the outside into Thailand, one, everything associated with the Internet is skewed. It always has been. I have told that to folks who look into becoming an expat out here for years. You can't just look at the internet and say oh; like property, you are looking at buying property in Thailand. “Oh, I saw on the internet that it's this, that and the other thing”, and I'll often ask them when they contact us, I'll say, “have you been here? have you seen it?” And sometimes when they say no, I'll say “hey you need to look at this thing before you make any further decisions and especially before you start putting deposits down” etc., and oftentimes they will come back to me after they go and do that or come back way later when they have real problems and say, "you were right, I am glad I looked at it", or "man you were right, I should have and I detrimentally relied on certain statements and then lo and behold it didn't turn out to be what I thought it was going to be."

The point I am trying to make with this video is the fearmongering around the notion that like every Thai woman is out to get you out here is pretty nonsensical. Anybody that has ever been here knows the vast majority of Thai women are very conservative by nature, and they are not necessarily all out there trying to get their hooks into a guy to suck all the wealth out of him. Again there are horror stories; there are stories and situations where things don't go great. We deal with family law, we deal with divorce, we deal with issues pertaining to international transactions that maybe were not on the up and up. Again these are unfortunate situations, but I would tell you, and this is from nearly 20 years of being out here, the vast majority of relationships between Thais and foreigners and I know this from having done US Immigration, Thai Immigration - foreigners coming this way, sending Thais back over to the States - the vast majority of relationships are pretty legitimate, and they frankly turn out rather well. That said, that doesn't make for great content for getting a bunch of views on YouTube, so you are probably not going to see a lot of videos that are telling you how great such relationships are.