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Good evening from Southeast Asia. This will be episode number 23, volume number 23 of the Southeast Asia.2
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I want so badly to say alien, because we've been making alien podcasts for years. It's like muscle memory now.3
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Aliens, aliens, aliens. Oh, there are no aliens in here. This is episode or volume 23 of the Southeast Asian Chronicle Podcast Things Designed to Help You Figure Out If You Want to Move to Southeast Asia Now or in the Future.4
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Doesn't matter. I don't care. Go move whenever you want. Doesn't matter. So if you don't have any plans to go right now, just file this away.5
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Everything that you're learning in this series6
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translates in, well, in direct or indirect ways7
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to almost any third world country on Earth,8
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including America, which is now a third world country, as far as I'm concerned.9
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Okay, so10
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all tapes are copyright 2023 by StockPhotosWorldwide.com. You'll see them hosted somewhere else. Tell us. We'll sue them. We've done it before. We'll send you a third of the net.11
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Done deal. We'll do it.12
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Really.13
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Done it before. We like it.14
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Tired of thieves.15
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Okay.16
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Last time, 22, we left you off. We were in a five-story shop house.17
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Double shop. Really, really kind of a magnificent building.18
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And we were being run out due to Thai street sellers and their noise.19
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They were...20
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I got pictures of them somewhere.21
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They'll...22
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Thai national will get themselves a pickup.23
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And they'll get the biggest loudspeakers they can possibly find and mount on the roof24
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with a player and a microphone in the cab.25
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And they'll put a person or two in the back, fill it full of oranges, and then they drive around looking for customers.26
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The deals aren't usually too good.27
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You know, the fruit isn't usually too good, but you know, it's Thailand.28
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There is no kind of welfare, so it's either work or starve.29
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Kind of a nice system, you know, really unusual in the Western world.30
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So they work. Okay. So I respect them for that. They work. They try.31
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They could do this work within the norms of polite society, but they won't because they're not polite.32
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So they turn those loudspeakers up just to the point of just blasting.33
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Just I sort of got the brick glass.34
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And they drive around and they'll loop some ridiculous recording.35
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Sometimes it's a recording of themselves laughing, you know.36
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Oh, that's nice. Yeah, we all want to hear that.37
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You can hear it for blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks. Okay.38
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In the old days, you just waited because in a little while, a few minutes, whatever, they were gone, passed on through.39
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In the last five years, waiting doesn't help because there are so many of them that if one goes away, you've got 15 more making the same racket.40
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Now, I don't know. There's only one possible way any of them make any money. That's if they steal the product.41
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Because they get very few buyers.42
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And what they do buy is, you know, a few bot worth and they'll even bicker that down, which is often turns into bickering.43
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So I don't know how they're paying for gas or the truck payments or whatever. I don't know how they're doing it.44
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I've known a number of them personally. They weren't doing it. They weren't making it.45
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They would come up with a little bit of money somewhere. Maybe they went to work in a real job somewhere and they get a little bit of money.46
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And then they go back to this street selling thing. Drive around, drive around, drive around, not sell hardly anything.47
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And then pretty soon they didn't have any more money for gas. Then they had to go back to work at a real job.48
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So I don't know what the attraction is with this. It's like gambling, you know, I guess.49
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They just they've got the idea. It's easy money. All they got to do is drive around, look at the sites, you know, say stupid things over the loudspeaker, piss people off.50
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And then make a lot of money, right? No, no, they don't. They don't. But they can't let go of it. They won't let go of it.51
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There's more and more every year. There's more and more and more and more and more.52
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OK, so we were being driven out or technically, I suppose, had been driven out by that crowd.53
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Took them to the police. Police told them to fuck off, stop.54
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Police said they didn't like it either. And they stopped for no, they didn't stop.55
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They turned it down, you know, like from a 10 to 8 for about three days. And then it went right back to a 10.56
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So it became unlivable.57
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For really for anybody in that in that wherever they do this, it's unlivable.58
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We had made the decision to go.59
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Pretty unbelievable.60
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Another problem had been rearing its ugly head. That was that we had a space between our shop houses were in a row of shop houses that went to the entire length of the site.61
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There was a space between our shop house, shop and the street.62
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Now, three feet of that was public. That was sidewalk. The rest of it was ours.63
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When I leased the place, I grilled the Chinese landlady very, very specifically brought in a translator the whole bit.64
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We had at least Chinese and English.65
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And I grilled him. You know, is that our space? Yes, no question. That's our space.66
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Well, why isn't it in the lease? Well, oh, I must have forgot it. OK, here, I'll put it in.67
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So she and her family put in a clause in lease that that whole area there was ours. OK, done deal. We're happy.68
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OK, rented the place, paid a huge amount of money for it to get into it. At least the rent was cheap.69
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But to get into it, deposits and things like that was huge, huge amount of money.70
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And then we had to refurbish the entire thing. We put probably.71
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God, I don't even know. Probably two or three hundred thousand baht into just making it livable, painting, you know, cleaning, fixing broken toilets, which was most of them and fixing air conditioners, which was most of them.72
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We found that some of the air conditioners, they didn't work because the compressors were gone.73
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All the copper tubing was gone. All the wiring was gone. All the way through the wall, the wiring was gone, had been sold for the copper.74
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And it was really, really fun, you know. Anyway, we fixed it all, fixed it all, brought it completely up to specs.75
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And. We had the two shops that we rented out in front. We rented space for these two big shops. It was two restaurants actually.76
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And then girlfriend had her two shops in front, so there's four shops in front.77
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And all the way down the soya in front of all the shop houses, they had the same arrangement.78
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The one of the shops in front of our place had been there, I think, nine years.79
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Or more, maybe more, I'm not sure, at least nine years.80
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Long established, you know, this is how they do things in Thailand. This is what they do. This is how things work.81
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And. We went along that way for.82
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Year and a half. Didn't have any trouble. Everything was fine. But little by little by little.83
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We started getting illegal parkers who would come in. Now these restaurants out in front, they were they would be torn down to bare nothing.84
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They were loaded onto carts and the carts were taken to the back of the building and locked up every day, every night when they were done.85
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And then they come out, you know, whatever time, let's see, three, four.86
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Probably four or so in the afternoon. And they would unpack all the carts.87
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And, you know, we kept saying, why don't you, you know, build a little shed out there? Oh, no, this is how we do it in Thailand.88
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OK. Okie dokie. You just carry on.89
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And. Increasingly, what happened was they would come to set up their shops.90
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All the way up and down the whole soy and they would find some car parked in there in the spot where they're where their restaurant was right in the middle of their restaurant, outdoor restaurant.91
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And they go looking for the people, go door to door, knock and knock and knock. And is that your car? Is that your SUV?92
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In probably 80 percent of the cases, they found the people. They were almost always high.93
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High. So H.I. dash S.O. You know, arrogant, rich pieces of shit from Bangkok.94
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And they were down shopping and they thought, oh, that's just a parking lot.95
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You know, it's right in front of your home. You can't park your own cars there, but we can because we're special because we're from Bangkok.96
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OK, that's how that went in 20 percent of the cases. They never did find the owners of the offending vehicles and they couldn't open the restaurant.97
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They lost a whole day of revenue because they couldn't open the restaurant.98
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So we tried putting signs, notes on the cars and stuff like that.99
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You know, next time we told you stuff like that, we had some really, really outrageous fights with them out in front there because they just thought that was their God given right to park100
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in front of everybody else's home because the shop house is a home.101
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Living quarters are upstairs, shops are downstairs. That's how they work.102
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But they're so special. They're so special. Kind of reminds you of San Francisco, you know, or something like that.103
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And so it got to the point where we said, OK, that's enough. Everybody's losing too much revenue.104
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The shops can't open reliably. And we started trying to get them towed.105
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We put up the signs and started making the calls. Come on. OK, we got two. We got two tonight. Come and get them towed.106
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And they would, the towers, the wreckers would him haw around. Well, I didn't know. We're very busy.107
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I don't know if we can make it. And we fought that for weeks.108
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And finally drilled down to the point where they said, no, we can't tow there.109
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I said, why? What's the problem? Because you are not property owner. You are only the lessor.110
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Wait, lessy, lessy.111
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So you can't sign for a tow ticket. Only the owner can. OK, watch this.112
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Fools, watch this. And I went to the Chinese lady, the owner,113
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and said, OK, we're going to have to start calling you to give tow authorizations for these cars because we can't open our shops in front.114
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Nobody can.115
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And she looked at the ground, you know. Oh,116
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well,117
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you know,118
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that's not really your area.119
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What? What? What? What do you mean it's not my area?120
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I'm paying for it every month.121
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It's in the lease. What do you mean it's not my area?122
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Well, no, I just said that because I want you to move in.123
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And finally, it turned out we dragged more and more and more out of her.124
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It turned out that she had moved out of the shophouse partly because of that reason,125
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like 10 years before.126
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And she could never find a way to control it.127
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So she had just scammed us, just lied, fucked us. Just fucked us.128
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So night after night after night, my girlfriend sat there and watched the SUVs come and go.129
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And parked in front of the shop. Nobody could open the restaurants.130
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We got to the point of we took a bunch of flower planters and we made a perimeter of them around this whole area.131
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It's fairly large.132
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So that you could walk through, you could ride a bike through, but you couldn't get a car through.133
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And we'd fill them full of dirt, you know, they're quite heavy, couldn't be moved.134
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And one day an old man came and never seen him before.135
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Never heard of an old time man. Really cranky piece of shit.136
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And he started turning over. He just he never said anything to anybody.137
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He just walked up and started turning over these flower planters, turning them over and trying to roll them out of the way so that cars could drive through there.138
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And I didn't happen to be there at that moment. Girlfriend was and she went off on him. She wanted to fight him.139
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She should have. Could have easily taken him.140
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And he's ranting and screaming that it's illegal to block this area off, even though, you know, everybody in Thailand does it.141
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He just took issue with this and we couldn't get him to say who he was or why he thought he had the authority to do this.142
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We called the owner and she said, Oh, that guy.143
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That's another reason I left that shophouse.144
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Turned out this guy had owned this entire stretch of shophouses back like 30 years ago and he had sold them like 25 years ago.145
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He had no claim to him whatsoever, but he lived in the area and he still thought he was the boss of all these shophouses.146
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And so he just went through periodically and raised hell, told people to do this, do that, fix this.147
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Now you got to paint this. And people told him to fuck off.148
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And we did also, but it got really, really, really, really heated.149
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You know, to the point of staying up all night down there by the front waiting for him to come and throw boulders through the window and shit like that.150
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Now that's ties.151
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That's a lot of ties are like that.152
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And a lot of Southeast Asians didn't matter the country.153
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They're irrational, illogical.154
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Dare I say it? Stupid.155
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This guy wasn't a drunk, but he acted like he was a lifelong drunk.156
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If you know a lifelong drunk and how they act, especially when they've had a few, this is what this guy acted like.157
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This is what a lot of older ties act like.158
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So that was, you know, we were probably 100% moving anyway, but that kept it. We're done.159
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So we went and got a hotel.160
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And we, as much as I hate him, we needed the place pretty quickly.161
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I didn't want to stay in a hotel. I had a lot of work to do, a lot of computer work to do.162
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I was doing photography pretty heavily.163
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I had stuff to do.164
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And girlfriend wanted to get her shops going again, stuff like that.165
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We had to make the other two restaurants out there vacate.166
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They didn't like that, especially the one that had been there nine years.167
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So we're in a hotel thinking what in the hell?168
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And at this time, I'm starting to think, well, you know, maybe I just had enough of Thailand.169
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Maybe that's just enough.170
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You know, really, this is just getting ridiculous.171
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But I saw an ad for a realtor, real estate agent in this town.172
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He had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of places for rent, commercial and homes and condos and you name it.173
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I thought, oh God, oh God, I don't want to deal with another agent. God Almighty, no.174
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I had not had good luck with him in the US either.175
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We had one in the US where we rented a place, paid the agent, and then like four months later,176
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the owner came in and said, look, you know, I've been really patient with you, but you know, you really got to pay the rent.177
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We're like, what do you mean pay the rent?178
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What are you talking about? And it just so happened, I guess there was a stack of papers right there on the counter where we were talking.179
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And among them were the rent receipts.180
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And we showed them and she's like, what? What is this?181
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She had never received rent from day one from this agent, the California agent.182
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So, you know, realtors and real estate agents were kind of stuck in my craw from day one anyway.183
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I had so much trouble in the US.184
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In the US, I would say 80% of them were shit.185
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They were professional scammer pieces of shit.186
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20% were OK.187
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In Southeast Asia, I would say 100% are shit.188
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100%.189
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Anyway, we saw this ad and I thought, OK, you know, I used to be a landlord.190
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I, you know, I can kind of sort of take care of myself even though we're in Southeast Asia, you know.191
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Let's see what they've got. Let's just see what they've got.192
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Maybe if they show us something really nice that we like, you know, we can find a way to get a hold of the owner and circumvent this agent.193
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OK, so that was the plan.194
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So they took us around for a few days or a week. Look at this, look at this, look at this, you know, and everything was just not workable at all.195
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And finally, they took us to a place way outside of town, way the hell out in the boondocks.196
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And it was a beautiful one, two, three, four bedroom. No, no, no, wait.197
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One, two, three, four bedroom, I can't remember.198
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Home. Nice home.199
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It was at the end of a private drive.200
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It had its own pool. Nice pool. Clean. Everything was in good shape, it looked like.201
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And price was way too high. It was absurdly high.202
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But I liked the place because I thought, man, this might be quiet.203
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Had a huge concrete wall all the way around it, you know, old Spanish style almost.204
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So it was its own little complex.205
00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:04,000
And at the end of the private drive, nobody around it.206
00:21:04,000 --> 00:21:09,000
And I thought, man, I need to get a lot of work done.207
00:21:09,000 --> 00:21:14,000
You know, I got like two years of computer work to do and I need peace and quiet.208
00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:19,000
And I can't take any more problems because I'm just fed up, fed up with this shit.209
00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:25,000
And so we went in and we met in an appointment. Owner showed up, went in, talked to him.210
00:21:25,000 --> 00:21:34,000
Talked to him for half an hour, I suppose, probably. What about this? What about this? What about this?211
00:21:34,000 --> 00:21:47,000
And finally, I said, well, I don't know. I think we can probably stay here. You want to rent this to us?212
00:21:47,000 --> 00:21:53,000
And the guy called me by name and he said, well, you think you'd be happy here?213
00:21:53,000 --> 00:22:03,000
And I thought, well, how do you know my name? Who are you? And I looked closely.214
00:22:03,000 --> 00:22:10,000
It was a guy with, I don't know, several months worth of scraggly beard growth.215
00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:14,000
Old looking guy.216
00:22:14,000 --> 00:22:19,000
But I recognized one of his facial mannerisms.217
00:22:19,000 --> 00:22:23,000
Barely. I said, Jay?218
00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:28,000
Yeah, how you doing? Sticks his hand out, you know, like we're old friends.219
00:22:28,000 --> 00:22:34,000
No, we're old enemies, but he's too fucking stupid to figure that out.220
00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:43,000
And I almost just walked out. I thought, oh, geez, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, not this goddamn oaf again.221
00:22:43,000 --> 00:22:48,000
Not this fucking piece of shit again.222
00:22:48,000 --> 00:22:51,000
Oh, geez.223
00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:58,000
But I got the agent aside and I said, look, how often are we going to have to deal with this guy at all?224
00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:04,000
And they said, well, never. You should never have to deal with him because your contract is going to be with us through the agent.225
00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:09,000
You're going to pay the rent to us. You got any repairs?226
00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:17,000
You come to us, we'll contact the owner. The owner takes care of it.227
00:23:17,000 --> 00:23:22,000
Oh, God. And I thought, OK, oh, God, oh, God.228
00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:26,000
Really lovely home, though.229
00:23:26,000 --> 00:23:31,000
Exactly the kind of setup that I wanted.230
00:23:31,000 --> 00:23:38,000
And I said, OK, OK, OK, I'll deal with the realtor. I'll just deal with the agent.231
00:23:38,000 --> 00:23:44,000
So we did the contract. I had to pay first, last, and two months worth of deposit.232
00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:52,000
Huge sum of money, far more than the place was worth.233
00:23:52,000 --> 00:24:04,000
And so we did it. Signed, sealed, consummated, as it were.234
00:24:04,000 --> 00:24:09,000
And the move-in date was a few days hence.235
00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:19,000
And we were supposed to meet him there, meet Jay there, on the move-in day. I don't know why the agent didn't want to show up.236
00:24:19,000 --> 00:24:23,000
But I later pretty much found out.237
00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:28,000
So we're supposed to meet Jay there on our move-in day. So we got there in the afternoon.238
00:24:28,000 --> 00:24:34,000
Door was open, walked in, car was there, walked around, couldn't find him.239
00:24:34,000 --> 00:24:40,000
What the heck? Walked into the master bedroom.240
00:24:40,000 --> 00:24:52,000
And there he was, laying on the bed, pants down, porn on the phone, beating his wacker.241
00:24:52,000 --> 00:24:57,000
Mr. Sex Pit.242
00:24:57,000 --> 00:25:04,000
And he was all flustered, of course, and he says something like, oh, you came early.243
00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:07,000
Well, we weren't early. We were like two hours late.244
00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:11,000
But I almost said, yeah, looks like you did too, asshole. You know, almost said that.245
00:25:11,000 --> 00:25:19,000
Contract was already signed at this point. Money's already delivered.246
00:25:19,000 --> 00:25:25,000
And I thought, oh, son of a bitch, what the hell kind of buffalo shit have we stepped in this time?247
00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:33,000
Because it seemed like every time you dealt with anything rental anywhere in Southeast Asia,248
00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:39,000
I don't care what country, even Philippines, you're going to step in buffalo shit.249
00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:42,000
That's all there is to it. There's no avoiding it.250
00:25:42,000 --> 00:25:50,000
I did find that I had less luck with the Ferang owners or agents.251
00:25:50,000 --> 00:25:56,000
Now, this real estate agency, they were based out of Australia.252
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:00,000
There's a humongous website about how evil they are.253
00:26:00,000 --> 00:26:08,000
And that website has cost them significant revenue. And that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.254
00:26:08,000 --> 00:26:19,000
I had planned to do a paid advertising scheme on that website.255
00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:24,000
To really, really, really hurt them. But it turned out that the website kind of went viral on its own.256
00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:31,000
Just organic traffic. And they became quite well known for their shit.257
00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:38,000
So I didn't have to do it. So anyway, Jay gets up, pulls his pants up.258
00:26:38,000 --> 00:26:48,000
And we go through the house, videotape, make sure everything's as they say, everything's fine. Kindness sort of.259
00:26:48,000 --> 00:26:57,000
It was a typical Jay house.260
00:26:57,000 --> 00:27:04,000
He had bought it for pennies, excuse me, because it had been run down.261
00:27:04,000 --> 00:27:07,000
And he's too stupid and cheap to fix anything.262
00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:12,000
So he just cobbed everything together to try to get it to hold together long enough to get a tanning in there.263
00:27:12,000 --> 00:27:17,000
And then he's out. He's done.264
00:27:17,000 --> 00:27:24,000
Okay, so we get through that bullshit. We start moving in.265
00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:27,000
We had trucks and trucks and trucks and trucks of stuff.266
00:27:27,000 --> 00:27:37,000
Almost all of it had to go in the garage in the carport outside and get tarped over until we could figure out how to get rid of it pretty much.267
00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:45,000
Trucks and trucks and trucks and trucks and trucks. Endless convoys of trucks coming in. They're really big trucks, like five ton trucks.268
00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:54,000
It was just stupid because we had collected all this shit in the shop house where we thought, I thought, well, maybe I'll stay in that shop house until I die.269
00:27:54,000 --> 00:28:01,000
Until those problems came up.270
00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:07,000
And then the problems with this house began to manifest themselves.271
00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:12,000
I think the first thing we ran into was the snakes.272
00:28:12,000 --> 00:28:16,000
The place was infested with Malayan pit vipers.273
00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:19,000
I couldn't figure out where the hell they were coming from because the whole place was walled.274
00:28:19,000 --> 00:28:24,000
It was like a, I don't know, nine foot wall, ten foot wall, maybe concrete all the way around sealed.275
00:28:24,000 --> 00:28:30,000
No way under it. All the way around the property sealed.276
00:28:30,000 --> 00:28:33,000
But the snakes just kept showing up everywhere.277
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:42,000
Go Google Malayan pit viper. Oh, they're lovely snakes.278
00:28:42,000 --> 00:28:47,000
They're one of the few vipers that don't let go after they bite.279
00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:54,000
They just keep chewing and chewing and chewing and chewing. Cut their head off. Didn't matter.280
00:28:54,000 --> 00:29:04,000
And the bad, you got, you might survive the bite depending on how much venom they've chewed into you.281
00:29:04,000 --> 00:29:07,000
A kid won't survive. Cat won't survive. A dog won't survive.282
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:10,000
You might survive it.283
00:29:10,000 --> 00:29:18,000
You've got about 20 minutes to get to a clinic that has the anti-venom before you have permanent damage to that area.284
00:29:18,000 --> 00:29:22,000
Usually a limb, you know, a leg or an arm.285
00:29:22,000 --> 00:29:28,000
And you know, you might survive, but you're going to have permanent damage. You might lose that leg or arm.286
00:29:28,000 --> 00:29:30,000
Nasty snakes.287
00:29:30,000 --> 00:29:37,000
And I got poking around, poking around, poking around, and I finally discovered that in the back,288
00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:43,000
there was a hole under the house.289
00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:52,000
It was probably six or eight inches deep and probably 35 feet long.290
00:29:52,000 --> 00:30:00,000
Went under the back concrete area.291
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:07,000
And we called the government, in Thailand the government has services, snake services that are really, really, really stinking good.292
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:11,000
It's one of the few things they do well. It's one of the very few things they do well.293
00:30:11,000 --> 00:30:16,000
And so we called them hotline and they were there within minutes and they poked around.294
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:22,000
They have all kinds of cameras. They poke up in these holes and stuff. And they said, well, bad news, folks.295
00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:25,000
You got a major nest under your house.296
00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:29,000
It's just loaded with.297
00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:32,000
With these snakes, just loaded hundreds.298
00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:36,000
We had a camera in there. They're striking on the cameras.299
00:30:36,000 --> 00:30:42,000
And they had a bunch of stuff that they sprayed in there.300
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:47,000
Like half of a 50 gallon drum of snake poison, I guess.301
00:30:47,000 --> 00:30:54,000
And they said, well, that's going to knock down some of them, but they but it doesn't generally kill all of them.302
00:30:54,000 --> 00:30:59,000
You know, the ones that are at the bottoms of the piles, they're probably not going to get poisoned.303
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:05,000
And so, you know, they're going to work their ways up through the piles of the snakes and then come out again.304
00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:09,000
OK, so called them.305
00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:13,000
Call the agent.306
00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:20,000
And their attitude was, well, can't you just find a way to live with it? You know, we have snakes in Thailand, you know.307
00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:24,000
Not like this, you don't. And so they called Jay.308
00:31:24,000 --> 00:31:28,000
And Jay said, well, fix it.309
00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:31,000
And then give me the bill for it.310
00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:38,000
Like Jay, we have 15 truckloads of shit here that we got talked over all over the place outside.311
00:31:38,000 --> 00:31:40,000
We're very, very busy trying to get rid of stuff.312
00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:45,000
We're very busy trying to get enough stuff into the house that we can live in the house.313
00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:49,000
Jay, you need to deal with this. This is your problem.314
00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:56,000
You should have figured this out long before you ever let anybody rent it.315
00:31:56,000 --> 00:32:00,000
Well, I'm just busy. I got this new girlfriend, you know.316
00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:03,000
No, I can't help you. You just you just got to fix it.317
00:32:03,000 --> 00:32:08,000
And then you send me the bill. OK. Jesus Christ.318
00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:14,000
So I called in some Thai contractors who couldn't even dig a trench.319
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:18,000
I had to dig the trench for them, help them lay the concrete.320
00:32:18,000 --> 00:32:25,000
We concreted over that whole 35 foot strip.321
00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:31,000
So what happened was we sealed off, we hermetically sealed the whole area under that house.322
00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:33,000
And none of them could get out.323
00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:38,000
We made the ditch around so deep that they couldn't get under it.324
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:41,000
And they all died under their probably of starvation.325
00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:46,000
And it stank for several months.326
00:32:46,000 --> 00:32:50,000
Now, in the U.S., what would you do? You'd sue them. You'd have them in court.327
00:32:50,000 --> 00:32:53,000
Hell, the government might have them in court.328
00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:55,000
Not Southeast Asia. It's not going to happen.329
00:32:55,000 --> 00:33:02,000
There's no recourse. There's no meaningful, effective recourse.330
00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:06,000
So you muddle through this shit.331
00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:13,000
OK. It was right about in the middle of that that we noticed that now in most Southeast Asia countries,332
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:17,000
everybody has a big water reserve tank.333
00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:20,000
Could be fiberglass, could be stainless. They're huge, big tanks.334
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:24,000
Some of them are on the roof, some of them are just sitting on the ground, whatever.335
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:31,000
And the idea is that the water fails, municipal water fails, so often,336
00:33:31,000 --> 00:33:36,000
like many times a week sometimes,337
00:33:36,000 --> 00:33:43,000
that you better have a reserve tank so that when the city water stops flowing,338
00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:47,000
you've still got water for cooking and showering and stuff like that.339
00:33:47,000 --> 00:33:52,000
Now, those things are set up with automatic fillers.340
00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:59,000
You got a pipe coming in from the city water, goes to the tank, has a float valve in the top of the tank.341
00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:04,000
This was a especially big tank. It was342
00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:12,000
I don't know, probably six foot diameter and probably nine feet tall, big tank.343
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:17,000
And I noticed one day as I walked by it that it was overflowing.344
00:34:17,000 --> 00:34:20,000
I had, oh, been there, done that.345
00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:26,000
Let's see the check valves in these things, the float valve in the top of the tank.346
00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:30,000
It's like a toilet, like a toilet tank.347
00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:37,000
They get crusty up and they stop shutting off.348
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:40,000
And so they begin to just leak and leak and leak and leak and leak.349
00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:45,000
The tiniest little float can set up a pretty big water bill.350
00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:51,000
And they're, you got to replace them periodically.351
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:59,000
Most of them are made purposely so that you cannot open them up and like lap the surfaces,352
00:34:59,000 --> 00:35:03,000
the valve surface to just get the crap out and get them working again.353
00:35:03,000 --> 00:35:06,000
They're purposely set up so you can't do that.354
00:35:06,000 --> 00:35:09,000
So you have to check them out. It takes five minutes to get them out.355
00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:12,000
You know, you got to go up there on a ladder and you go on the top of the tank356
00:35:12,000 --> 00:35:18,000
and you take out the valve and you go to the hardware store and you buy a kit.357
00:35:18,000 --> 00:35:20,000
You know, it usually includes the valve and a float.358
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:23,000
Okay, really easy. It's like seven dollars.359
00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:25,000
You know, it's not a big deal.360
00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:30,000
And I had had to replace quite a few of them.361
00:35:30,000 --> 00:35:32,000
You know, I'd been there nine or ten years by then.362
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:34,000
And it's a common thing you do.363
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:38,000
It's just part of living in Southeast Asia, you just do.364
00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:41,000
But I didn't have time. I was still dealing with these snakes.365
00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:45,000
And we're still trying to concrete over the big crack under there and stuff like that.366
00:35:45,000 --> 00:35:56,000
And I called the agent, told him. They called Jay. Jay called me.367
00:35:56,000 --> 00:36:02,000
And once again, just like the washing machine thing years and years and years before,368
00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:05,000
Jay is, what did you do back there?369
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:08,000
Were you messing with that thing? Did you touch that thing?370
00:36:08,000 --> 00:36:11,000
Why were you touching that thing?371
00:36:11,000 --> 00:36:17,000
I said, Jay, I never once even had the remotest thought of opening up the top of that tank372
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:20,000
and crawling down in there just so I could play with that valve.373
00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:23,000
You know, Jay, that's not something that normal people do.374
00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:26,000
Well, I don't know. I think you did something to it.375
00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:32,000
You know, I came to realize I never knew this before.376
00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:35,000
I never suspected it. This is a Jewish thing.377
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:40,000
I didn't know anything about Jews. Didn't know anything.378
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:47,000
Nothing. Now I do. It's a Jewish thing.379
00:36:47,000 --> 00:36:55,000
Oh, God. So, a day or two later, Jay showed up with a kit.380
00:36:55,000 --> 00:36:58,000
Went back there. He couldn't put it in, so I put it in.381
00:36:58,000 --> 00:37:02,000
Water shut off. Everything's fine.382
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:05,000
And then he got the water bill.383
00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:16,000
And it was, again, it should have been 150 baht for the month, something like that, for the water bill.384
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:23,000
That month, well, it had been leaking probably for, God, that was a year, you know, before we were moved in there.385
00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:26,000
We'd only been in there three or four days.386
00:37:26,000 --> 00:37:30,000
And the water bill was, I can't remember, it wasn't very high.387
00:37:30,000 --> 00:37:33,000
It was a couple thousand baht, something like that.388
00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:37,000
And he presents it to me and says, well, you've got to pay this.389
00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:41,000
I said, Jay, you know, this has been leaking not for three days.390
00:37:41,000 --> 00:37:46,000
And even if it was only for three days, it wasn't our fault.391
00:37:46,000 --> 00:37:50,000
Well, maybe you were messing with that valve. Maybe you did something to it.392
00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:54,000
You know, I had the valve and I opened it up. I said, Jay, you can look right there.393
00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:57,000
You can look. You can see the surfaces in there.394
00:37:57,000 --> 00:38:00,000
They're all crusty with scale and crap and rust.395
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:04,000
And they've been that way for a year or maybe a lot longer.396
00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:10,000
And so that was a big fight. And I refused to pay it.397
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:17,000
And it was a big fight. It was a big fight with Jay and with the agent.398
00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:22,000
They thought I should pay it also.399
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:25,000
Jesus Christ.400
00:38:25,000 --> 00:38:30,000
So we finally got the snakes plugged off and they're dying, stinking.401
00:38:30,000 --> 00:38:34,000
And we didn't see any others that came from the back there.402
00:38:34,000 --> 00:38:37,000
It turned out that the whole area was sneaky as hell.403
00:38:37,000 --> 00:38:44,000
And the other types of snakes would come in pretty much nightly.404
00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:49,000
I tried to get in the house. You had to keep the door led out to the patio, to the pool.405
00:38:49,000 --> 00:38:53,000
You had to keep that closed all the time. Snakes would be in the pool swimming back and forth.406
00:38:53,000 --> 00:39:01,000
It was just a snake heaven. The area, the whole neighborhood was just snake heaven.407
00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:03,000
And of course, nobody had told us.408
00:39:03,000 --> 00:39:08,000
We asked around and everybody said, yeah, yeah, this is where the snakes live, you know.409
00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:15,000
OK, so as we're going along, we're finding that virtually nothing in the house works.410
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:19,000
The washing machine didn't work.411
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:30,000
Oh, God. He had taken out the perfectly good on-demand water heaters in each bathroom.412
00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:40,000
And for God knows what reason, he replaced them with a huge water boiler, single unit thing that went in the back of the house.413
00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:44,000
Similar to what you have in America, the big old tank heaters, you know.414
00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:53,000
This is an outdoor version. Huge, expensive, power guzzling piece of shit that ran all the time.415
00:39:53,000 --> 00:39:56,000
It heated the water all the time.416
00:39:56,000 --> 00:40:06,000
And shortly after we were in there, we kept wondering why we were getting all these white flakes out of every water faucet.417
00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:10,000
Well, it turned out that he had that thing cranked up so that it was boiling all the time.418
00:40:10,000 --> 00:40:17,000
It was boiling all the time. It didn't just heat the water. It was boiling 212 degrees all the time.419
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:25,000
And then that water would get turned on and it would shoot through the PVC. None of the PVC was designed for that.420
00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:28,000
None of it was hot water approved.421
00:40:28,000 --> 00:40:40,000
And so it was cooking the insides of these PVC pipes. And so all this white sludge shit was coming out.422
00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:45,000
And it would try to come out the faucets and it couldn't because they had filters and so...423
00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:50,000
Ah, geez.424
00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:54,000
We argued about that endlessly. Never did get a result.425
00:40:54,000 --> 00:40:59,000
We turned it down to the point where it wasn't boiling anymore.426
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:10,000
And that helped, but the pipes were so damaged by that point that they probably are still today leaching the white flakes.427
00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:20,000
The next thing I think was that we went shopping one day. It had a really nice electric gate. Huge.428
00:41:20,000 --> 00:41:24,000
God, it was a massive gate in the front.429
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:31,000
And really heavy thing. And on a hot day you couldn't touch it. It was so hot you couldn't touch it.430
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:39,000
You have to have gloves or something. And girlfriend couldn't move it. It was so heavy and so massive.431
00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:44,000
I don't know what it weighed. A thousand pounds? I don't know. I could barely move it.432
00:41:44,000 --> 00:41:53,000
I would have to put my foot up against the wall, get a hold of one of the wrought iron uprights, and then pull with all my might to get that thing to roll.433
00:41:53,000 --> 00:42:01,000
But anyway, it was electric. It's supposed to be. It usually was.434
00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:09,000
So you click the clicker. He didn't have a clicker. We had to pay for that. That was a thousand bucks.435
00:42:09,000 --> 00:42:14,000
And you click the clicker. You want to go to the store, you click the clicker, the gate opens.436
00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:19,000
You drive through, you click it again, gate closes, you go shopping. Okay, pretty simple deal.437
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:32,000
So one day we did that. Went shopping, came back. Motorbike. We had a trailer on the motorbike and it just loaded down hundreds of pounds of food, half of it perishable.438
00:42:32,000 --> 00:42:41,000
And click the clicker. Nothing happened. Couldn't get in. We looked around. Oh, all the power in the whole neighborhood is out.439
00:42:41,000 --> 00:42:48,000
Well, that was a couple of times a day. Thai power, you know, a couple of times a day. No power.440
00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:56,000
Usually it's back on five minutes, eight minutes like that. Okay, this day we sat out there in the baking sun. There's no shade out there.441
00:42:56,000 --> 00:43:04,000
We sat out there on a motorbike for, as I recall, about two and a half hours.442
00:43:04,000 --> 00:43:11,000
And all of our food melted and then went off. Gate wouldn't open. Power wouldn't come back on.443
00:43:11,000 --> 00:43:24,000
In homes that have big heavy gates like this, they're routinely set up in such a way that the motor that operates the gate is installed very close to the gate itself.444
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:42,000
Usually on one side or the other. And when the power goes out, now these are a worm drive kind of a thing. You can't, when the power goes out, you can't manually open that gate. You can't move.445
00:43:42,000 --> 00:44:00,000
The deal was that you had a little teeny tiny gate, maybe six inches, eight inches by eight inches like that, like a cat door. Okay. And that was down in the corner of the gate closest to the motor.446
00:44:00,000 --> 00:44:15,000
The motor's on the inside of the gate. And this little cat door thing is in the gate. And all you do is you open that little gate. You got to lay down there in the gutter with the snakes.447
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:29,000
And you stick an arm through. And then there's either a flip, a switch you can flip or a lever you can push or pull or a thing you can unscrew.448
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:44,000
This one had a key hanging there on a little chain. And you insert this key into the motor to unlock the, what it does is it disengages the motor from the worm drive.449
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:50,000
And you just turn it, turn it, turn it, it backs the motor away from it.450
00:44:50,000 --> 00:44:54,000
And then the gate will freewheel.451
00:44:54,000 --> 00:45:04,000
You just close that little cat door thing and you get up and you open the gate. It takes two, three minutes. Anybody can do it.452
00:45:04,000 --> 00:45:13,000
In this case, the little gate was welded closed.453
00:45:13,000 --> 00:45:18,000
Jade did it, whatever. No idea. Welded closed.454
00:45:18,000 --> 00:45:25,000
So we sat out there for the two and a half or whatever, two hours and 45 minutes I think. And all of our food spoiled.455
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:28,000
And we're hotter than hell just dripping with sweat.456
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:32,000
We didn't have any friends anywhere around there that we could take our groceries to.457
00:45:32,000 --> 00:45:40,000
Because we don't know, maybe in 20 seconds it's going to, power's going to go clickety and the gate's going to open. You know, you don't know. You're waiting, waiting, waiting.458
00:45:40,000 --> 00:45:46,000
By the time you finally figure out it ain't ever going to open, you know, all your food's bad.459
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:52,000
So we lost, I don't know, 100 or 200 dollars in perishable food.460
00:45:52,000 --> 00:46:02,000
And finally the power did come back on, opened the gate, went in, threw all the food away, except for the non-perishable stuff.461
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:12,000
And I had a lot of tools left over from the rebuilding of the shophouse.462
00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:20,000
And I had a big old grinder. I went out and grinded, ground all the weld off of this little cat door.463
00:46:20,000 --> 00:46:30,000
And oiled up the hinges. Everything's fine. Opens easy. Repainted it. Got a little padlock for it.464
00:46:30,000 --> 00:46:37,000
Little combination lock. You know, just like brand new, just like it was supposed to be. Okay.465
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:40,000
Done deal, right?466
00:46:40,000 --> 00:46:46,000
So now if the power's up, when we can come home, we can get in, right?467
00:46:46,000 --> 00:46:53,000
Okay. So it was probably two weeks later. Came home, bunch of groceries.468
00:46:53,000 --> 00:46:58,000
And the power was out. Couldn't get in.469
00:46:58,000 --> 00:47:03,000
And I thought, oh, you smart, smart boy, you've taken care of this.470
00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:08,000
I just didn't even swear. Nothing, you know, no big deal. You just get off the bike and you walk over there471
00:47:08,000 --> 00:47:15,000
and you open the little padlock thing and you open the little cat door thing and you lay on your back472
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:18,000
and you stick your arm all the way through there.473
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:26,000
And you get the little key off of, that was hanging off of the motor. And I did all that.474
00:47:26,000 --> 00:47:36,000
And then suddenly I realized there's no way on earth that even an octopus could reach the place475
00:47:36,000 --> 00:47:43,000
where that little key had to go into the motor to disengage it.476
00:47:43,000 --> 00:47:57,000
This was the wrong motor for this installation. This was 180 degrees reversed motor.477
00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:02,000
So we lost all the groceries again.478
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:09,000
And when we finally did get in, I called the agent said, hey, you know, being locked out, it's not going to work.479
00:48:09,000 --> 00:48:18,000
For some reason, somebody put the wrong motor in here and there's no way to reach it, to disengage it.480
00:48:18,000 --> 00:48:28,000
Okay, we'll call Jay. So they called Jay and Jay called back and he said, well,481
00:48:28,000 --> 00:48:36,000
you know, that was a really good deal on that motor. That guy gave me a really good deal, you know.482
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:40,000
Isn't there some way we can make that work?483
00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:44,000
I said, okay, Jay, you tell me, you tell me how we're going to do that.484
00:48:44,000 --> 00:49:02,000
His first suggestion was for us, not him, for us to buy a diesel gen set and put it outside the gate.485
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:09,000
And hook it up to the gate motor.486
00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:17,000
And then when the power is out, we could start that diesel generator and power that gate.487
00:49:17,000 --> 00:49:22,000
And he had three or four equally brilliant suggestions like that.488
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:27,000
I just want to choke him. Just want to fucking throttle the stupid son of a bitch.489
00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:31,000
And I said, Jay, don't you think it would be a little better deal.490
00:49:31,000 --> 00:49:35,000
You call the guy who sold you that motor, you tell him it's the wrong goddamn motor.491
00:49:35,000 --> 00:49:41,000
And he'd swap it for the one that is reversed.492
00:49:41,000 --> 00:49:48,000
Okay. Maybe you'll have to pay a little bit to do that.493
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:56,000
But you aren't going to pay anything near what you would pay to mount a diesel generator outside that gate.494
00:49:56,000 --> 00:49:59,000
Well, I don't know. I don't know if I could do that.495
00:49:59,000 --> 00:50:05,000
I don't think I'd get a very good deal on trading in that motor.496
00:50:05,000 --> 00:50:12,000
I said, do you fix it? Fix it or we're done?497
00:50:12,000 --> 00:50:22,000
I had a list of probably, I don't know, 40, 50 things we had fixed.498
00:50:22,000 --> 00:50:28,000
And there was no end in sight. Just every day, every day, every day, every day.499
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:36,000
Jay had gotten this house at an incredible discount because it came from a Thai guy who had run out of money.500
00:50:36,000 --> 00:50:41,000
He hadn't been able to fix anything for like the previous 10 years.501
00:50:41,000 --> 00:50:45,000
And so he didn't. So every time something broke, he just ignored it.502
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:56,000
Some wonder he had any goddamn electricity left in there at all.503
00:50:56,000 --> 00:51:10,000
And Jay's response was, well, okay then, but you're losing all of your deposit.504
00:51:10,000 --> 00:51:17,000
And that was huge. That was huge.505
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:24,000
At that point, I went berserk. It was all I could do to keep from going to his house and just killing him with my bare hands, go to prison.506
00:51:24,000 --> 00:51:32,000
Don't care. He worth it. I'd be doing society a really, really big favor.507
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:41,000
So we went and got an attorney instead. The attorney told us what to do.508
00:51:41,000 --> 00:51:49,000
It turned out that the contract that they had had assigned was a completely patently, blatantly illegal contract.509
00:51:49,000 --> 00:52:06,000
And Thailand was just then, they had just started a new program, cracking down on illegal contracts because they were tired of this shit from phalangs.510
00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:15,000
Now phalangs, a lot of them go into business in Thailand or some other Southeast Asian country because in many, many, many, many cases,511
00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:20,000
maybe the majority of cases, they got run out of wherever the fuck they were in some Western country.512
00:52:20,000 --> 00:52:25,000
I'm pretty sure Jay got run out of New York City.513
00:52:25,000 --> 00:52:30,000
For just being a dishonest, thieving fucking piece of shit.514
00:52:30,000 --> 00:52:39,000
Don't worry, I name him in the website.515
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:45,000
So we put pressure on Jay and the agent.516
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:51,000
And they agreed in writing to let us stay there.517
00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:58,000
And all we would lose would be the one month of deposit.518
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:04,000
They didn't have any choice. We hit them by the balls. We just hit them by the balls.519
00:53:04,000 --> 00:53:09,000
We figured, okay, they're going to keep that last month of deposit.520
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:18,000
And so we will handle that by not paying any utilities bills at all, not electric, not anything.521
00:53:18,000 --> 00:53:23,000
And we'll take what we want.522
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:25,000
And that's what we did.523
00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:37,000
It still turned out that they owed us, even after all that, they still owed us, I don't know, some thousand bucks or something like that.524
00:53:37,000 --> 00:53:49,000
And we just ate that, except that we cost them many, many times that amount with the website.525
00:53:49,000 --> 00:54:00,000
So this is just a summary, just a glossing over of this particular last problem with Jay.526
00:54:00,000 --> 00:54:04,000
This probably is like 10% of all the trouble we had with him.527
00:54:04,000 --> 00:54:18,000
And it's probably 30% of all the trouble we had with all other rentals that I had with all other rentals, regardless of country, Laos, Cambodia.528
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:28,000
I had some, a few, a very few deals that just went off as scheduled, you know, as planned per the contract, per the agreement.529
00:54:28,000 --> 00:54:32,000
I had a few of those. How many? What percentage?530
00:54:32,000 --> 00:54:37,000
25%. The rest of them were a fucking in one way or the other.531
00:54:37,000 --> 00:54:41,000
And I canvassed hundreds and hundreds of people.532
00:54:41,000 --> 00:54:56,000
You know, how have, how has, what's your experience been like with any realtors or agents, you know, whether Thai or Cambodian or Vietnamese or whatever, or Phuong or, you know, what's been your experience?533
00:54:56,000 --> 00:55:00,000
And theirs ran about the same as mine.534
00:55:00,000 --> 00:55:05,000
About 25% turned out to be just straight up deals, you know.535
00:55:05,000 --> 00:55:10,000
Maybe tiny little squabble over some stupid little thing, but basically straight up deals.536
00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:19,000
And all the rest, 75%, were a royal fucking of one type or another.537
00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:28,000
Do some kind of a Google like Bangkok538
00:55:28,000 --> 00:55:33,000
rental539
00:55:33,000 --> 00:55:41,000
deposit not refunded or something like that.540
00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:46,000
Bangkok is where you're going to find the most of those cases.541
00:55:46,000 --> 00:55:51,000
Do some kind of a string like that. You'll find no shortage whatsoever.542
00:55:51,000 --> 00:55:54,000
But you're only going to find543
00:55:54,000 --> 00:56:08,000
reports from guys who have left Thailand, because if they're still there, they cannot report that. Thai law is such that you cannot leave any kind of a bad review544
00:56:08,000 --> 00:56:19,000
against anybody. Not only can you be sued, they will win because the law says, quote, the truth545
00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:24,000
is not a factor.546
00:56:24,000 --> 00:56:30,000
It says that. Look it up. Google it.547
00:56:30,000 --> 00:56:42,000
And the other side of it is that not only will you be sued and you will lose, but you will also go to jail because it's also a criminal offense.548
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:48,000
So if somebody walks up to you on the street, they got a knife, they got a gun.549
00:56:48,000 --> 00:56:51,000
And550
00:56:51,000 --> 00:56:56,000
they stick one of those things in your ribs and they say, give me your money.551
00:56:56,000 --> 00:56:59,000
I'll kill you.552
00:56:59,000 --> 00:57:03,000
And you give me your money, you watch.553
00:57:03,000 --> 00:57:05,000
Whatever. Girlfriend.554
00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:08,000
That's probably a good thing.555
00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:11,000
You really want to punish them, you know, give me your girlfriend.556
00:57:11,000 --> 00:57:15,000
And they take all that stuff and they run away. Okay.557
00:57:15,000 --> 00:57:22,000
There's four security cameras that have caught that. You got 19 witnesses that saw it.558
00:57:22,000 --> 00:57:24,000
Cops come.559
00:57:24,000 --> 00:57:30,000
They believe everybody. They catch the bad guy. Get your stuff back. He goes to jail.560
00:57:30,000 --> 00:57:33,000
You can't report it.561
00:57:33,000 --> 00:57:37,000
Because that is their interpretation of562
00:57:37,000 --> 00:57:46,000
the situation.563
00:57:46,000 --> 00:57:53,000
Now you think about that one really hard because that was one of the biggest things I struggled with564
00:57:53,000 --> 00:57:55,000
in Thailand.565
00:57:55,000 --> 00:58:00,000
Most of the countries are like that a little bit. They never heard of anything called the First Amendment.566
00:58:00,000 --> 00:58:04,000
What is that thing? It doesn't make any sense. What do you mean?567
00:58:04,000 --> 00:58:14,000
That's a fart in the wind.568
00:58:14,000 --> 00:58:21,000
That was a big struggle for me to try to keep my mouth shut.569
00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:27,000
But I still made the websites on all these people who fucked me.570
00:58:27,000 --> 00:58:29,000
And I571
00:58:29,000 --> 00:58:36,000
went ahead and uploaded them to various servers, but there were no incoming links to them. So they just sat there. Nobody could see them.572
00:58:36,000 --> 00:58:49,000
Sometimes I would send the URL to the person who had stolen from me, like I did with this agent and with Jay.573
00:58:49,000 --> 00:58:57,000
And maybe they ran around to attorneys and the police and said, Oh, this guy said this. This guy said that. You know, nobody ever got a hold of me about it.574
00:58:57,000 --> 00:59:06,000
All I would have had to say was, well, who can see it? Nobody can. It's not public. Only they can see it.575
00:59:06,000 --> 00:59:17,000
And it would have stopped right there until such a time as I made an incoming link to it and made it public, which is what I did the day I left.576
00:59:17,000 --> 00:59:20,000
Now other countries,577
00:59:20,000 --> 00:59:32,000
most of them are not that crazy. Philippines is about halfway to that level of craziness about defamation.578
00:59:32,000 --> 00:59:37,000
Thailand is over the top.579
00:59:37,000 --> 00:59:51,000
Just over the top. So again, my advice is to, if you're going to go to Thailand, especially any of these countries, I don't care.580
00:59:51,000 --> 00:59:55,000
Get yourself581
00:59:55,000 --> 01:00:01,000
an abode of some type or another. Have an attorney check your contract.582
01:00:01,000 --> 01:00:11,000
If you're going in a condo, you go up and down the hall, you knock on the doors with your Thai translator and you say, Hey, you ever have any trouble in here? Well, they're probably not going to say anything anyway, but sometimes they will.583
01:00:11,000 --> 01:00:20,000
Yeah, this guy down the hall, he's a fucking drunk. He's just loud all the time. You do it like that. You try to go on three months leases. You try.584
01:00:20,000 --> 01:00:26,000
God, they hate that. Oh, God, they hate that. They want to lock you in as long as they can. They'll try to get you in even two or three years.585
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:33,000
Try really, really hard. Even if you go to pay extra, try really hard to go three months, six months.586
01:00:33,000 --> 01:00:44,000
God, tops, really. None of this one year, two year bullshit. If you've been there for a while, you know, a couple of renewals587
01:00:44,000 --> 01:00:53,000
and the place is okay and the broken stuff is getting fixed and stuff like that. Then you think about a year, two years, whatever you think about it.588
01:00:53,000 --> 01:01:03,000
None of this first and last in two months deposit. Fuck that shit. That's just a money grab. That's just a goddamn scam.589
01:01:03,000 --> 01:01:19,000
And they're all trying to do it now. Once they started doing that, with the exception of this house of Jay's, I just told them, No, we're done.590
01:01:19,000 --> 01:01:26,000
No, we're not going to do it. And either I walked away or they said, Okay, okay, okay, your terms are okay.591
01:01:26,000 --> 01:01:33,000
Like that. There's no such thing as a credit check that I know of. I don't think there's any way to do it.592
01:01:33,000 --> 01:01:43,000
The banks can do it kind of sorta in a crappy way. When I had rentals, that's the first thing I did. I did a credit check.593
01:01:43,000 --> 01:01:52,000
And that told the story pretty much every time. But American banking is, you know, it works. It's well, no, it doesn't work. It's fucked up.594
01:01:52,000 --> 01:02:01,000
But that end of it works really well. For like, it was like nine bucks or something, you know, you make them pay the nine bucks, you do a credit check.595
01:02:01,000 --> 01:02:11,000
If it comes back, shit. Sorry, you're done. No, no, I'm not going to rent to you. I found that my judge of character was pretty bad.596
01:02:11,000 --> 01:02:22,000
Quite a few times I would get a rental applicant and I would, Oh my God, these are great people. Oh, I don't even need to do this credit check.597
01:02:22,000 --> 01:02:31,000
Do I? No, these are wonderful folks. On the early days, I would just say, Well, I don't need a credit check. It's okay.598
01:02:31,000 --> 01:02:42,000
Well, I had one of those for a really nice permanent mobile home near a place I had built a little airport in Idaho.599
01:02:42,000 --> 01:02:50,000
And they didn't even pay the first month. And I went to talk to them. Well, thank God they had stolen the entire trailer.600
01:02:50,000 --> 01:02:56,000
I had that airport at the time. I put a reward for anybody flying around this area. You see this is what it looks like.601
01:02:56,000 --> 01:03:03,000
You see that son of a bitch. You tell me you get this reward. And they caught it. I thought, well, that's a long shot.602
01:03:03,000 --> 01:03:09,000
And it was like two weeks later. Somebody found it. He said, Yeah, it's like five miles out in the freaking woods.603
01:03:09,000 --> 01:03:16,000
So how the hell did you ever spot that? You know, well, I don't know. I just, you know, but it was the one.604
01:03:16,000 --> 01:03:23,000
And we went out there and got the cops on them and eventually got compensated for all that shit.605
01:03:23,000 --> 01:03:37,000
And then I had other cases where I had this sleazy, slimy, people miscreants showing up to want to rent my place.606
01:03:37,000 --> 01:03:44,000
And I just say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry. Not going to work out. And they say, please, please run our credit.607
01:03:44,000 --> 01:03:48,000
Please run our credit. You know, you want nine bucks, we'll give you 20 bucks. Run the credit.608
01:03:48,000 --> 01:03:56,000
So whatever. OK, do it. I did it. And they came back just golden. Just freaking golden.609
01:03:56,000 --> 01:04:02,000
I actually sold a couple of houses to people who, who that exact scenario happened.610
01:04:02,000 --> 01:04:08,000
And they paid everything exactly on time and they were perfect and they never complained and they were just perfect people.611
01:04:08,000 --> 01:04:20,000
And that showed me all about my my judgment of character, which probably tells me why I'm single.612
01:04:20,000 --> 01:04:29,000
And the girls are going, yeah, yeah, yeah, you be a idiot. And I'm going, yeah, yeah, I'd be an idiot.613
01:04:29,000 --> 01:04:36,000
It's funny because the last few nights, I've been scrounging for some kind of background images for these podcasts.614
01:04:36,000 --> 01:04:42,000
And I've been going through this long, long, long, long folder of ex-girlfriends.615
01:04:42,000 --> 01:04:51,000
I don't know how many are in that folder. Probably 150. The last episode, let's see, this is 23.616
01:04:51,000 --> 01:04:58,000
So on 22, I posted a few pics of some of them. This one, I suppose, I'll do the same thing.617
01:04:58,000 --> 01:05:04,000
It's really tedious to post those. I'm not going to do very many of them. I don't like doing it.618
01:05:04,000 --> 01:05:16,000
But anyway, the whole point is I've been looking through those as I've been doing this and I'm thinking, oh, my God, oh, my God, I remember her.619
01:05:16,000 --> 01:05:23,000
Oh, God, you're a fool. You're a stupid fool. Why did you let her get away?620
01:05:23,000 --> 01:05:32,000
Well, in some cases, you know, 60 seconds later, I think, oh, I remember. Oh, yeah, I remember now.621
01:05:32,000 --> 01:05:36,000
She was this and she was that. Oh, yeah, that was a good decision. I dodged the bullet on that one.622
01:05:36,000 --> 01:05:46,000
But in a few of them, maybe a handful or two of them, maybe two handfuls of them, I can remember the relationships very well.623
01:05:46,000 --> 01:05:55,000
And I remember ending them for the dumbest, stupidest reasons on the face of this earth.624
01:05:55,000 --> 01:06:04,000
And, you know, that was a tiny little love tap there that I just did a minute ago. No, I deserve to have that done with ping pong paddles.625
01:06:04,000 --> 01:06:14,000
You know, if you're a girl and you've been watching these tapes and you hate my guts because of this, because of me dumping girls and you got five other girlfriends,626
01:06:14,000 --> 01:06:20,000
you come to whatever country I'm in, I'll buy each one of you a ping pong paddle and some handcuffs.627
01:06:20,000 --> 01:06:28,000
You handcuff me to a pole outside and you beat me senseless with those ping pong paddles because I deserve every stinkin' whack.628
01:06:28,000 --> 01:06:40,000
I'm first to admit it. A couple of them, I remember, I'm going through those pictures, they just about make me cry because I had something.629
01:06:40,000 --> 01:06:49,000
And I think, I think they were good girls.630
01:06:49,000 --> 01:06:55,000
And I ended it for the stupidest reasons.631
01:06:55,000 --> 01:07:00,000
So, anyway, whatever. See, it always comes back to girls.632
01:07:00,000 --> 01:07:03,000
Always does.633
01:07:03,000 --> 01:07:09,000
Okay, so we've given you kind of an overview of renting in Southeast Asia. All the countries are just as bad.634
01:07:09,000 --> 01:07:15,000
Thailand is right up there at the top. Bangkok is right up there at the top of Thailand.635
01:07:15,000 --> 01:07:22,000
I've been in the Philippines for a while, getting ready to leave.636
01:07:22,000 --> 01:07:27,000
And I've gotten screwed here twice already. Well, I've only had two places.637
01:07:27,000 --> 01:07:33,000
Screwed both times. Screwed. Pretty well screwed. I didn't know if there was any point in going through it.638
01:07:33,000 --> 01:07:39,000
The second one, I, stupid dumb piece of shit that I am, I got an agent.639
01:07:39,000 --> 01:07:43,000
I got the agent because she was a friend of the owner.640
01:07:43,000 --> 01:07:47,000
I said, oh, well, okay, that's okay. That gives her some cred, you know.641
01:07:47,000 --> 01:07:50,000
Okay.642
01:07:50,000 --> 01:08:03,000
An agent took my rent money and deposit and they took a whole bunch of money for to install the internet and a whole bunch of money for my key card, stuff like that.643
01:08:03,000 --> 01:08:12,000
And the money for the rent did get passed over to the owner only because the owner happened to be sitting there when I gave it to the agent.644
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:19,000
And the owner is like, right there, you know, okay, okay, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me.645
01:08:19,000 --> 01:08:27,000
All the other money that the agent was supposed to use for my internet and my key card and all this other stuff, she left town.646
01:08:27,000 --> 01:08:37,000
She just, she just molted, took all the money.647
01:08:37,000 --> 01:08:48,000
As it so happened, she didn't know this. As we were sitting somewhere, having some meeting over documents, God, there was a thousand documents.648
01:08:48,000 --> 01:08:50,000
Jesus.649
01:08:50,000 --> 01:08:57,000
But we were sitting there and she had her passport out for some reason, I guess to copy the number off of it to do something.650
01:08:57,000 --> 01:08:59,000
I don't even know what.651
01:08:59,000 --> 01:09:07,000
And I had my phone in my hand and I've got an S23 with a really, really good telephoto.652
01:09:07,000 --> 01:09:22,000
It'll go 10 times, 10 power optical and 100 power digital, which is rather stupid, but 10, really, really clear 10x 10 power optical.653
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:30,000
And I sat there and I eased it over. Your passport was there. Click. And I got it. Okay.654
01:09:30,000 --> 01:09:35,000
So I had a picture of her passport. I made a website detailing all the money she had stolen.655
01:09:35,000 --> 01:09:39,000
All she, it only takes a half hour to make a website.656
01:09:39,000 --> 01:09:45,000
And she had some accounts that she had been using to do this deal.657
01:09:45,000 --> 01:09:50,000
And she had long since stopped answering them. She wouldn't reply to the owner.658
01:09:50,000 --> 01:09:55,000
She wouldn't reply to me. She wouldn't answer her phone. She just gone with the money.659
01:09:55,000 --> 01:10:01,000
It was about a, let's see, about a month wages. She just took it.660
01:10:01,000 --> 01:10:10,000
The land, the owner had paid her for some services and she just took that money too. Just gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.661
01:10:10,000 --> 01:10:14,000
Goddamn.662
01:10:14,000 --> 01:10:18,000
So I made this website.663
01:10:18,000 --> 01:10:25,000
And I took the URL, the link to it. It was public. I just, I didn't care. I just made it public.664
01:10:25,000 --> 01:10:32,000
And I sent her the link. She said, here you go. Enjoy for the rest of your life. Bitch.665
01:10:32,000 --> 01:10:40,000
And next week on Monday, I'm going to the police because I got enough on you. Put you in jail.666
01:10:40,000 --> 01:10:49,000
And like 10 minutes before I was due to arrive at the police station,667
01:10:49,000 --> 01:10:57,000
I got a message saying that she had dropped off the cash at the building.668
01:10:57,000 --> 01:11:04,000
That's just merely a tip of the iceberg with regard to the shit that she did.669
01:11:04,000 --> 01:11:11,000
So renting anything in any Southeast Asian country is just going to be a shit storm. It's just going to be that.670
01:11:11,000 --> 01:11:20,000
I do know a few guys who retired and retired really well.671
01:11:20,000 --> 01:11:28,000
And they simply went to Thailand or some other country and they bought, didn't rent. No, no, no. They bought. They stayed in a hotel.672
01:11:28,000 --> 01:11:37,000
They bought. They found a reputable realtor. And that's hard. That's really hard.673
01:11:37,000 --> 01:11:46,000
But they did it. And they bought a nice home, not a condo, not a condo with a bunch of drunken neighbors and sex pats and shit like that.674
01:11:46,000 --> 01:11:55,000
They bought a nice home, end of the street, nice neighborhood, hired private security.675
01:11:55,000 --> 01:12:04,000
They probably had three attorneys on board to get all the I's dotted and the T's crossed and all the weirdo contracts and shit like that.676
01:12:04,000 --> 01:12:11,000
And they lived out happy, happy years. Now they still had the problem with failing everything,677
01:12:11,000 --> 01:12:20,000
failing wiring and failing piping and failing everything and bullshit.678
01:12:20,000 --> 01:12:30,000
They still had to go through all that. There's no escaping that. But all the other shit, they largely escaped it.679
01:12:30,000 --> 01:12:37,000
The biggest problems that most of them reported were noise from neighbors. Usually chickens.680
01:12:37,000 --> 01:12:46,000
Dogs come in second. Usually chickens. And we've gone through that before, you know, the nationals, they don't hear chickens because they were681
01:12:46,000 --> 01:12:54,000
the first thing they heard when they were born, you know, and they just after about the third crow, they're like, oh, that doesn't matter.682
01:12:54,000 --> 01:12:59,000
That doesn't mean anything. And they just turned it off. They turned off that circuit in the brain. They don't hear chickens anymore.683
01:12:59,000 --> 01:13:08,000
So if you complain about chickens, they're totally clueless because they don't hear them.684
01:13:08,000 --> 01:13:17,000
And they largely don't hear the dogs either. So a few of those guys have had, you know, they weren't moving around.685
01:13:17,000 --> 01:13:27,000
They got to the country. They had one home. They just stayed there and they're happy. And they don't have girlfriends.686
01:13:27,000 --> 01:13:35,000
That makes them far and vastly happier. I'm sorry.687
01:13:35,000 --> 01:13:44,000
Ah, geez. I was out today. I went out to eat, walk around, and I got hit on probably not too much today.688
01:13:44,000 --> 01:13:52,000
It was a rainy, nasty, slow Sunday. I probably got hit on three times in the space of three hours.689
01:13:52,000 --> 01:13:58,000
And I didn't even smile back. I just...690
01:13:58,000 --> 01:14:06,000
Because that circuit is forged in my brain now and will be forever and ever probably.691
01:14:06,000 --> 01:14:18,000
Let's see. So here you got a pretty girl smiling. She looks really true blue. She's polite. She's modest. OK.692
01:14:18,000 --> 01:14:24,000
And then right over here, straight line.693
01:14:24,000 --> 01:14:30,000
You got scamming, bullshit, sleeping with your friends.694
01:14:30,000 --> 01:14:39,000
And now that's a straight line for me. Straight line. That's the shortest line between those two points now for me.695
01:14:39,000 --> 01:14:44,000
Now, we talked about this before too.696
01:14:44,000 --> 01:14:51,000
We talked about the difference between Thai girls and Thai girls, Philippines girls.697
01:14:51,000 --> 01:14:59,000
And I tried to do a stupid graph thing and I screwed it up. OK. Just, you know, take that out of your brain, throw it away.698
01:14:59,000 --> 01:15:04,000
It didn't work. I did it wrong.699
01:15:04,000 --> 01:15:12,000
What I was trying to say was that in Thailand, you got a graph.700
01:15:12,000 --> 01:15:22,000
That's the bad girls down here at the bottom of the graph. OK. There's data point number one.701
01:15:22,000 --> 01:15:31,000
And it's a straight line up to the good girls. Like that straight line. So along that line, you can put a point anywhere you want.702
01:15:31,000 --> 01:15:40,000
It's going to be, you know, pretty evenly incremented bad. Little better, better, better, better, better, better, better, better, better, better.703
01:15:40,000 --> 01:15:45,000
All the way up to you get to a good girl. That means when you get to the good girls, there's hardly any good girls.704
01:15:45,000 --> 01:15:53,000
You know, you only got one or two data points up there at the top that represent the good girls. The rest of them are all kind of semi shit.705
01:15:53,000 --> 01:16:00,000
Now, in the Philippines, you've got, you start out with a bad girl, single data point down here.706
01:16:00,000 --> 01:16:05,000
And you got the good girl data point up here. OK.707
01:16:05,000 --> 01:16:10,000
You've got you don't have you don't have that nice straight line in the graph.708
01:16:10,000 --> 01:16:23,000
You've got bad, bad, bad, really freaking bad, scammer, thief, slut, prostitute, any bad thing you want.709
01:16:23,000 --> 01:16:30,000
And then right there at the end, when there's hardly any girls left, the graph goes straight up to the good girls.710
01:16:30,000 --> 01:16:40,000
And you might have three or four or five or six data points up there representing the good girls, not one like in Thailand.711
01:16:40,000 --> 01:16:52,000
So the bad girls. In Thailand are worse.712
01:16:52,000 --> 01:17:00,000
Well, kind of. Visualize the graph. God dang it. Jesus.713
01:17:00,000 --> 01:17:07,000
The whole point is that in the Philippines, yeah, there's a shitload of bad girls, really, really, really, really bad ones.714
01:17:07,000 --> 01:17:11,000
There's not much in between in the Philippines between the bad ones and the good ones.715
01:17:11,000 --> 01:17:17,000
You know, there's not much in between. You know, there's not a lot in there. It's like the good ones.716
01:17:17,000 --> 01:17:26,000
I don't know if you can follow this.717
01:17:26,000 --> 01:17:55,000
Your chances of finding a good, loyal, helpful, decent, sober, non-druggy girl in the Philippines are far higher than they are in any other country.718
01:17:55,000 --> 01:18:02,000
In Southeast Asia?719
01:18:02,000 --> 01:18:10,000
I can't find one because I gave up looking. I don't have any more patience to. I don't have any more try left in me.720
01:18:10,000 --> 01:18:19,000
I just don't care. I just stay alone. I'm not going to try. I'm not going to go through any more horrendous disappointment.721
01:18:19,000 --> 01:18:29,000
I can't see myself trying anymore. Thailand, in all Southeast Asia, just ruined me. If I would have come to...722
01:18:29,000 --> 01:18:37,000
When I was on the plane going to Thailand, I got seated next to a lovely Filipino girl.723
01:18:37,000 --> 01:18:43,000
And she did everything she could do for the 13 stinking hours to talk to me.724
01:18:43,000 --> 01:18:53,000
And my gut instinct was that she was really a keeper. She was a nice, nice, lovely girl.725
01:18:53,000 --> 01:19:02,000
But I wasn't interested because I wanted to eye adventure. Philippines wasn't exotic enough for me.726
01:19:02,000 --> 01:19:13,000
I wanted as exotic as it gets, you know, back streets of Saigon, shit like that. That's what I wanted. I wanted crazy shit.727
01:19:13,000 --> 01:19:20,000
I was not ready to settle down with a nice girl in the Philippines. I thought I was. That's what I thought I was looking for.728
01:19:20,000 --> 01:19:29,000
But I had to go through all this other good-and-shit first, I guess, to get to the point where I was ready.729
01:19:29,000 --> 01:19:41,000
And I wish I knew who she was, you know. So I don't know. I have no idea what I'm doing.730
01:19:41,000 --> 01:19:54,000
Lots of guys, lots of Westerners, Phelanx. Before they're, you know, like a freaking year, six months or a year before they're even going to come down to Southeast Asia, they get on the dating sites.731
01:19:54,000 --> 01:20:08,000
And apparently a few of them find one that turns out to be kind of sort of quasi good. I don't know how the hell they do it because I never found one.732
01:20:08,000 --> 01:20:20,000
But a very few guys do that. Okay, so they go along. Girls don't ask for money. First time they do, you block them.733
01:20:20,000 --> 01:20:31,000
If you want to offer money, that's a different thing. It's up to you. It's your call. If they ask you for money, you block them every time.734
01:20:31,000 --> 01:20:47,000
Because they're asking a hundred other guys every week. Guaranteed. Even the Filipinos. Well, kind of especially the Filipinos.735
01:20:47,000 --> 01:20:59,000
Anyway, the one, the very few that find a good one like that, they show up here. She meets them at the airport. They hang around for a few months, go hang with the family.736
01:20:59,000 --> 01:21:07,000
After three to six months, maybe a year, the guy is sure. You got to be careful because the girls are sure in 10 minutes.737
01:21:07,000 --> 01:21:16,000
And that's partly because they're desperate. That's also partly because that's just the way their minds work.738
01:21:16,000 --> 01:21:36,000
Survival is not nearly as guaranteed here as it is in the West. So if you're out in a war zone, active war zone, with a girl, bonds are going to form far quicker and maybe be far more lasting739
01:21:36,000 --> 01:21:45,000
than if you just met for church picnics in Ohio.740
01:21:45,000 --> 01:21:52,000
So some of those guys come down here and their lives are just wired. They end up getting married. They end up staying happily married.741
01:21:52,000 --> 01:22:03,000
I told you that I used to canvas guys all the time. I never stopped. In Thailand and other countries. Are you happy with your wife, with your girlfriend?742
01:22:03,000 --> 01:22:14,000
Do you know anybody who's happy with their wife, with a girlfriend? And it was almost totally no. 99%, I would say. 99%.743
01:22:14,000 --> 01:22:24,000
No, not happy. No, it's not working out. They don't know what to do because they've been through the same shit that I went through and they don't want to go looking again.744
01:22:24,000 --> 01:22:36,000
But I do the same canvassing in the Philippines. What percentage say they're really quite happy?745
01:22:36,000 --> 01:22:47,000
The ones that talk to me, I would say the ones who've been who've been together for a long time or married.746
01:22:47,000 --> 01:23:00,000
This is going to shock you. I would say 70%, far higher than in the West.747
01:23:00,000 --> 01:23:09,000
I mean, astronomically higher than in all of other all the rest of Southeast Asia, but higher than in the West, I think.748
01:23:09,000 --> 01:23:16,000
I never asked anybody in the West because they didn't care.749
01:23:16,000 --> 01:23:24,000
The thing about the Philippines is that there's a bunch of really crazy shit here and we're going to go through that in some detail.750
01:23:24,000 --> 01:23:34,000
It's not nearly as exotic as the rest of Southeast Asia. You know, you get down some of the outback of Cambodia. Oh my God.751
01:23:34,000 --> 01:23:42,000
There's exotic stuff in Philippines. You know, it's not.752
01:23:42,000 --> 01:23:47,000
It's not or that a Colorado, for God's sake, you know, but.753
01:23:47,000 --> 01:23:54,000
There are some interesting, fascinating kind of sort of exotic things here.754
01:23:54,000 --> 01:24:01,000
There's technically much more English in the Philippines than any other country except Singapore.755
01:24:01,000 --> 01:24:05,000
Hong Kong wasn't all that good for English.756
01:24:05,000 --> 01:24:09,000
Myanmar, forget it. Laos, forget it.757
01:24:09,000 --> 01:24:13,000
Thailand is a little bit English.758
01:24:13,000 --> 01:24:19,000
In the tourist towns, there's more English than in Bangkok.759
01:24:19,000 --> 01:24:28,000
Technically, there's a lot of English in the Philippines, but it's not useful English because they were taught English in school.760
01:24:28,000 --> 01:24:34,000
Yeah, they know the words. They can read and write English pretty well, but they cannot speak it.761
01:24:34,000 --> 01:24:42,000
They can understand it fairly well, but they cannot speak it because they were only taught pronunciation by.762
01:24:42,000 --> 01:24:45,000
The Filipino teacher.763
01:24:45,000 --> 01:24:54,000
Who can't pronounce their words either. So the mispronunciation and the bad accent just gets passed, passed, passed, passed.764
01:24:54,000 --> 01:25:04,000
I eat out most meals, probably, probably two, probably average two times a day.765
01:25:04,000 --> 01:25:08,000
Here's how it goes. I go to a restaurant.766
01:25:08,000 --> 01:25:12,000
Look at the menu, decide what I want.767
01:25:12,000 --> 01:25:17,000
And I say, I don't try to say it anymore. Whatever the dish is, I don't say it.768
01:25:17,000 --> 01:25:23,000
Sometimes I'll say Big Mac.769
01:25:23,000 --> 01:25:30,000
And they mostly will understand that. Well, they'll understand if you point to it on the menu.770
01:25:30,000 --> 01:25:36,000
They will only mostly understand Big Mac. I would say.771
01:25:36,000 --> 01:25:40,000
I know 80, 90 percent of the time they get the Big Mac thing.772
01:25:40,000 --> 01:25:47,000
And then instantly they will rattle back something.773
01:25:47,000 --> 01:25:55,000
And it could be, do you want fries with that? Do you want a drink with that? Do you want all a cart? Do you want this for dining?774
01:25:55,000 --> 01:26:01,000
But you will have absolutely no clue what they're saying. No clue. And you'll say, I'm sorry.775
01:26:01,000 --> 01:26:09,000
Again, again, slowly, slowly. And they're just blablabla. And you say,776
01:26:09,000 --> 01:26:15,000
I'm sorry. I'm going through my database here trying to figure out what you might have said, but nothing's coming up.777
01:26:15,000 --> 01:26:19,000
You know, I don't know what you're saying. I don't get one word of what you just said.778
01:26:19,000 --> 01:26:25,000
Would you like to try it again? Blablabla. OK.779
01:26:25,000 --> 01:26:32,000
Sometimes what I do is I just say, OK, please, please, please don't talk. Don't talk. Just listen. Just stop.780
01:26:32,000 --> 01:26:40,000
Listen. I want Big Mac. I want apple pie. You know, like that.781
01:26:40,000 --> 01:26:47,000
No, don't talk. Don't talk. And I don't want the fries.782
01:26:47,000 --> 01:26:56,000
And I want the drink. And I want one drink. I want one apple pie. I want one, you know, like that.783
01:26:56,000 --> 01:27:01,000
And I will say, this is for dining, for here. I want to eat here. This is for dining.784
01:27:01,000 --> 01:27:07,000
I'll find about three different ways to say it. And they usually get it.785
01:27:07,000 --> 01:27:12,000
And I say, OK, thank you very much. And I step back.786
01:27:12,000 --> 01:27:19,000
But in times when I'm losing my patience.787
01:27:19,000 --> 01:27:27,000
And they start into that crap where they're just saying some bullshit. You got no clue.788
01:27:27,000 --> 01:27:30,000
What they're talking about.789
01:27:30,000 --> 01:27:34,000
And you've got the menu out there and you say, look, I want this. I want this. I want this pizza right here.790
01:27:34,000 --> 01:27:39,000
Look, you see the picture? OK, I want small or I want, excuse me, large, whatever.791
01:27:39,000 --> 01:27:44,000
I want this thing. And they're blub blub blub. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, please.792
01:27:44,000 --> 01:27:48,000
I don't know what you say. Please don't talk. I don't want another thing.793
01:27:48,000 --> 01:27:55,000
I don't want another thing. I only want this. Blub blub blub.794
01:27:55,000 --> 01:27:59,000
And after about five times that, I just get up and leave.795
01:27:59,000 --> 01:28:02,000
Because they won't process the order. They won't go beyond that point.796
01:28:02,000 --> 01:28:07,000
They're asking me something, but I have no clue what it is. No clue.797
01:28:07,000 --> 01:28:10,000
When I've had girlfriends here, I said, you know, can you translate, please?798
01:28:10,000 --> 01:28:13,000
And of course, then it's a snap. They translate.799
01:28:13,000 --> 01:28:21,000
But English is not nearly what it's made out to be here.800
01:28:21,000 --> 01:28:26,000
You want a girlfriend who speaks some English, go hang outside the call centers.801
01:28:26,000 --> 01:28:29,000
Wait for the lunch break. Hang out. Find out where they're eating. Go sit there.802
01:28:29,000 --> 01:28:32,000
Wait for them to sit down. Just sit kind of sort of around you.803
01:28:32,000 --> 01:28:35,000
You know, you'd be a little bit of a leper.804
01:28:35,000 --> 01:28:38,000
But they'll have some English. It won't be very good.805
01:28:38,000 --> 01:28:48,000
But so if English is important to you and you will discover that it's more important to you than you think.806
01:28:48,000 --> 01:28:52,000
Some guys are like, oh, I don't care if we can understand each other at all.807
01:28:52,000 --> 01:28:56,000
We just have sex all day, you know, we don't need to talk.808
01:28:56,000 --> 01:29:01,000
OK, yeah, that works really good for about three days.809
01:29:01,000 --> 01:29:05,000
Voice of experience. And then you want to talk about something.810
01:29:05,000 --> 01:29:14,000
Do you want to go here to eat? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? You know.811
01:29:14,000 --> 01:29:17,000
So language is more important than you think.812
01:29:17,000 --> 01:29:22,000
OK, so we've covered rentals.813
01:29:22,000 --> 01:29:31,000
I think basically I'll get asked questions. What about this? What about this? What about this?814
01:29:31,000 --> 01:29:33,000
And I'll answer those as they come up.815
01:29:33,000 --> 01:29:38,000
And I'll probably think of other things that I'll just toss in there, you know, just to confuse you.816
01:29:38,000 --> 01:29:43,000
I don't know how many more of these we got left. I would say maybe five.817
01:29:43,000 --> 01:29:54,000
Before I have run out of, you know, material. And then I either got to think stuff up or.818
01:29:54,000 --> 01:30:04,000
Stop. So, you know, upper 20s, probably episodes, something like that, 27 maybe like that.819
01:30:04,000 --> 01:30:08,000
All right. Well, I hope you learned stuff.820
01:30:08,000 --> 01:30:13,000
Any questions, hit us on on the well, Twitter anymore.821
01:30:13,000 --> 01:30:17,000
I love that stupid little bird. Stupid little bird.822
01:30:17,000 --> 01:30:23,000
What the hell? I killed him. I killed the fucking bird.823
01:30:23,000 --> 01:30:27,000
No, I mean, really, he's dead.824
01:30:27,000 --> 01:30:31,000
Now it's called. XXX or something.825
01:30:31,000 --> 01:30:37,000
Twitter's name has changed. It's not Twitter anymore. It's XXX or some stupid fucking.826
01:30:37,000 --> 01:30:44,000
I don't even know what they just got a bunch of big X's everywhere. Look, there's just big X's.827
01:30:44,000 --> 01:30:49,000
What the hell Elon's thinking of? Really? I don't understand that guy at all.828
01:30:49,000 --> 01:30:53,000
Well, I mean, he's a hell of a lot smarter than I am.829
01:30:53,000 --> 01:30:58,000
So, you know, I guess he's right. Right.830
01:30:58,000 --> 01:31:03,000
I don't know. I missed the bird.831
01:31:03,000 --> 01:31:08,000
OK, we're we're done for now. Thank you very much.832
01:31:08,000 --> 01:31:14,000
And good evening and good night.833
01:31:14,000 --> 01:31:34,000
Oops. Oops. Where are you?