— Now I’ve gone and done it and life will never be the same…

Thailand’s night markets, where the vibrant atmosphere and tantalizing aromas beckon entrepreneurs and food enthusiasts alike. But before you dive headfirst into this thriving scene, there’s a crucial prerequisite step that can make or break your night-market dreams.

Since going very hard for a short time at the chatbot project, getting it done well beyond my wildest expectations, and loving it…I’m hooked. I’m hooked on the work of it, the validity of it, the value of it, and so many other things contribute to that hooking. For one, just my living arrangement…a large studio above the pool in a Thailand beach resort and tourist town—where everything I need is within a few steps. The distinctions between work and sleep…or play or diversion or healthful things…is blurry. It’s as though they’re all part of the same picture where every element, no matter how small, is essential to the meaning and experience of the whole.

My habitual practice and refining of geoarbitrage is the icing on my own cake.

… I’m not beholden to anyone or anything, but to that one all-powerful entity each of us is accountable to and none of us can escape: ourselves. And the struggle is how good we are at acknowledging the plain facts of reality, then acting, and executing accordingly.

You’re only fooling [or hurting] yourself persists as a timeless slogan because that’s what it means; it’s eternal in the human experience. And perhaps it’s why we have this ancient wisdom that transcends traditions and denominations, expressed in the Christian and Jewish ones.

… Pretty core and important is this notion, if it’s the 27th tidbit provided us in the whole big gig.

So whether you believe in a literal God, or not…not believing doesn’t absolve you of accountability to “God,” even if it’s yourself in its image, and reality is the only law you must abide and be judged by.

Reality is sufficient, and the penalty for being convicted of gross and/or chronic violation of it is the same for everyone: death. Or, at least, death before it’s otherwise your time to go.

… Alright, philosophical waxing in the bag, let’s get down to brass tacks.

I published a post in early February, Easier, Faster, Cheaper: This American is Starting a Business in Thailand. It’s about being enamored of the Thai Night Markets that grace the country from top to bottom and side to side. There’s nothing quite like them, and they’re everywhere—even in the smallest towns—loved by the Thai people and so wholesome culturally and healthfully. You won’t find a corporate franchise operation like a Sewen, Staabaa , or Mudownow in a single one of them anywhere.

100% mom & pop.

They include the various food kiosks…everything you can think of, Thai food and in some measures, international…more varied international in the cities. By international, sushi gets top bidding on that, but don’t be surprised to see a kebab, taco, or burrito stand. Oh, and they do a pretty fine rack of BBQ ribs, not so far off from Tex/Mex style. There’s a lot more. Accompanying all the food kiosks—which they can certainly bag-up as take-out for you—are all the sit-down tables and chairs, even covered for the rains sometimes.

The biggest draw, however, are the wide array of vegetable, fruit, meat, eggs, and seafood stands. It’s all fresh—you call them farmers markets in the West—and you’re buying local, which is such an unappreciated and essential part of—or unequivocally should be—a universal cultural humanity that a big corporation with all its cynical investors could never touch. I’ll give you an example.

That’s Doomberg, a financial analyst with a very expensive Substack newsletter (like 30 bucks per month). He’s talking about how residents of a rural area finally got another big windmill farm nixed because they fucking hate the things, because they degrade their quality of rural life…business, social, community, familial.

Does that Fuck from Omaha give a shit? Fuck no, he doesn’t. So he goes after these things with heavy and aggressive legal in order to force people who don’t want them around to have them anyway…and don’t give me your libertarian bullshit about landowners make the rules. This is big energy with a monopoly granted by the state making the rules.

“On wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

On that particular one, he’s fighting for $85 million in tax credits (that’s not a deduction, that’s a direct credit to a tax bill, so if you’re in a 25% bracket, that’s $340 million of tax-free income).

What a pissant. He’s just as loathsome as Gates, Schwab, and Soros. He just doesn’t look the part, is all.

So, getting back to business that enhances the experience and wonder of living a human life (what other is there worth living?) do ya feel me?

I hope so, because I mean it. I’m tired, though energized. Life’s too short—and getting shorter—to fuck around with being an asshole, part of the problem rather than a help and solution to those you’re privileged to influence and touch.

… So yea, on the back of my experience building a house with local village labor in rural Thailand, I want to build night markets in rural areas. By Thais, for Thais. The ones in the cities, like around here, either contemplate farang business or are almost exclusively for farang. There’s one just 2–3 blocks away, a big one. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a menu or signage in Thai, or even English. It’s for the nearby little Russia.

This one is across the street from me and 30 meters up. The basics went up in under a month.

Built by yet another Russian or two (Thai labor, of course). I stopped by one day and tried to strike up a conversation, but as is typical, Russians aren’t very talkative. Could be, they almost all suck at English so feel intimidated or inferior. English is the international language, like it or not; how do you think the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tourists communicate with the Thais? English.

That said, I’ve sold four substantial items on Facebook Marketplace over the last year and three of them were purchased by nice and friendly Russians for the asking price…

… So what of the project? It’s all on paper and drawing board and all I have to do is package it into a nice business prospectus and distribute it to monied construction and development guys in my USA-family network, potential investors up to 49% combined.

But I don’t want to. For one, been there done that…twice. Didn’t like it, even though I always retained majority and control. I just don’t want to be beholden to anyone for anything, circling back to how I kicked this post off. I want it to be 1000% mine, and due to a single privilege Americans have to any other farang in Thailand, we have the right to own a company outright, 100%. For others, they have to have 51% Thai ownership (which means you don’t really own it).

William Heinecke is an American-born billionaire in Thailand.

Heinecke has been building his fortune in Thailand and throughout Asia for nearly five decades. The son of an American Foreign Service member and a Voice of America journalist, Heinecke grew up in cities across Asia and attended high school in Thailand. More interested in go-karting than studying, he convinced the editor of Bangkok World to run his column on go-karts in exchange for selling ads. He earned commissions, and within months he was making more than most full-time reporters. At age 17 he became the paper’s advertising manager. A year later, after he graduated,  he started a business selling office cleaning services and radio advertising. He was too young to get any loans, so he came up with a clever scheme to raise money, getting sponsors to pay for him to race his car from Singapore to Bangkok.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzynam/2013/05/16/bill-heinecke-billionaire/

… So given all the foregoing, what have I gotten myself into? The better question to ask is, what have I not gotten myself into? The only thing worse than fucking up, is fucking up and not learning from it. And worse than that?

Going and doing it again, expecting a different result (reference the colloquial definition of a mental condition).

And part of the lesson must be: did you love it?

So many people, in recounting their successes, never address that.

Okay, but did you love it!?

If you can’t say yes, and enthusiastically so, then you’re on the wrong bit, mate.

Money is worthless in a shitty life.

You know another thing that makes you hate success and the wealth that comes with it, driving inescapable feelings of self loathing?

Taking the easy road. Taking the shortcuts. Going for the quick score. Using schmoozing to get what you can’t through right, determination, had work, and dedication. You suck, and you know it.

Yes, “you did it,” alright. You don’t love it. And now you’re haunted by the plain reality of it. As you might suspect, I’m big on the voice of conscience, an ear for it being sorely missing in today’s declining culture.

… So cutting to the chase, where I am now is that I’m going to self-fund the night-market building projects.

And how will I do that?

You’re looking at it.

On the heals of the success in getting my chatbot online, when I worked like I hadn’t in years—and in mind-bendingly complicated stuff—it dawned on me that I can just keep going. Well, mostly. I’ve got to be a bit more health oriented about it…e.g., I’m 23-hours into my latest fast right this minute. I have very new and exciting insights to share about fasting, just for one example.

In short, I’m sitting on a gold mine with the content under this blog’s belt. I need to start mining it and offering it up. To land those sales, I need a lot more eyeballs looking at the offers. To do that, I have to become an internet marketing guru—when resisting that has always been part of my essential shtick.

I sent out an email last week to three dudes, two of whom I’ve known for over 3 decades.

Subject: I’m ready to go to the Dark Side

I closed it by reiterating that I want to do it legally and ethically, but, [tongue-in-cheek] just barely…like “Barely Legal Porn.”

Well, my bark has always been worse than the bite; and after all, there’s still that pesky voice of conscience and that determines whether I love it!

Or not.

And since there’s no alternative, no other way, I’ve got to find ways to do this soundly, which is that folks are happy paying what they do for membership subscriptions and products. That’s how it has always been.

I just need a lot more of it.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Up to now, one reason I never engaged in all the heavy marketing and growth techniques is because they’re mind-numbingly, excruciatingly boring to me. It’s not that I can’t do hard and meticulous work. I do it all the time, and writing is tough, and especially when you have to produce it every day, as I’ve been doing for 20 years here. But there needs to be some pleasure in the doing it, and not just the success result at the other end of it.

Well guess what?

AI has changed that for me, because it has given me the challenge of using a tool where there is skill and mastery in using it, and you can watch it before your very eyes.

How you ask an AI something is every bit as important as what you ask it, and I’m getting good at that. It’s called prompting. Like I’ve said before, it’s like a musical instrument. If you’re talented and trained, it produces beautiful music. Or, you can pound on it like a child pounds on a piano’s keyboard. In both instances, sound is produced. Similarities end there.

Folks have no trouble understanding this when it comes to a musical instrument, or any tool that requires training and skill.

But AI? Somehow, they expect it to be omniscient, or something. You can even test this yourself in obvious ways. Knowing what you want, just ask in a quip, terse, short way, see what you get. Then, in another session, where it has no reference to the previous conversation, go out of your way to ask artfully and skillfully.

Then see the difference and understand what I’m trying to get across.

So that bottom line, for me, is that I love the challenge of crafting prompts, and especially, a series of them in the same thread of conversation, where I get a cornucopia of all the stuff that I utterly loath doing.

You know what one of my favorite uses of AI is? Making to-do lists, and it’s unbelievable how thorough it is…it never misses a damn thing. I find it easy and enjoyable to artfully tell it what I wish to achieve, then ask it to make me a list to get it done.

And what do I get? I get an amazing, comprehensive list.

What do I hate?

Making lists.

Do you understand? Do you get it? Have you tried this?

I’m going to be writing a series of this whole process.

I have excellent input from all three of the dudes I wrote to, and that consultation is ongoing, according to their grace.

I’m going to report regularly, provided there’s something to report. I’m thinking each Saturday will be perfect. Simple format.

1. Overview of where we are. Current Status.
2. Near-term objectives. What are we aiming to accomplish in this round?
3. Testing. What’s the test, how is it designed, what are the parameters?
4. Test results.
5. New overview of where we are, better or worse. New current status.

And of course, for each report, #1 is the #5 from the previous report.

It will be an ongoing and continuing thing, because the whole purpose of doing this is to raise the capital for what’s even deeper in my heart to do: design, build, and manage rural and small-town night markets by Thai people, for Thai people.

This series could go on for many years to come.

This series will be for members.