Greetings From Northeast Rural Thailand

Hey there, greetings from Northeast rural Thailand, and I’m coming to you with something that’s just all to the good. My last post was a real downer about a health crisis—which you can read if you haven’t already—and I’m gonna save anything more on that for a subsequent update that should be up in a few days.

The bottom line is that it’s going very well, so I thought I’d stop here and just put together a post with a few things that are really what life is about here, especially my life currently, as I’m knee-deep in significant construction on a half-acre piece of property which I call the compound. Right now, we’re building a perimeter wall around the whole thing—and yeah, a half acre is pretty big. This isn’t just some flimsy fence; it’s a solid concrete wall.

But first, I’m going to begin with a little bit about the other side of it, which is some of the interior construction going on in the house.

Let me take a moment to note the header image that you see above: that’s the entirety of the cooking station here, because we haven’t yet put together a proper kitchen. Right now, we’re sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the place that will eventually be the kitchen. There are two actual structures here—the main house, and we’re in the smaller one that’s just a single room with a toilet and shower. But it’s going to be converted into a full kitchen once we’re fully established in the main house. So, I’m going to talk to you about some of the interior construction going on there.

Semi-Commercial Construction Methods

If you live in America—mostly, I believe, in most of the country, particularly out West—everybody’s familiar with wood-frame construction for residential homes. It’s all wood framing with sheetrock nailed into the studs, then you apply the tape and mud, maybe some texture, and paint it. This goes throughout the house. Even the floors can be wood sheeting. The only concrete is usually the foundation.

Here in Thailand, it’s totally different. There used to be wood construction; there’s still a lot of old houses made of wood. But it’s nearly nonexistent now. If there’s wood at all, it’ll typically be for doors, windows, and maybe some decorative stuff like carvings—more like partitions than walls. Even that’s pretty rare these days. Almost all doors and windows are metal and glass, commercial-style, where they just pull or push open. You can use various kinds of glass, like frosted, or in some cases, put up curtains or whatever.

But everything else is commercial-style too. The pillars that form the main structure of the house are reinforced concrete, and the foundation is reinforced concrete upon which tile is typically laid. In between the pillars, it’s concrete block. The structure above is a metal frame for the roof, and the roof itself is some sort of metal sheeting or tiles—that sort of thing. On the interior, the ceiling is also metal-framed, with sheetrock affixed with screws. Then they do the standard tape and mud, sand it, and paint it.

Now, what’s very different from this and, say, commercial construction in America is that in America, each crew is a specialty. You have the guys who do the metal framing, then the guys who hang the sheetrock with screws. Then different guys who do the tape and mud, and still different guys who handle the painting. What’s distinctive here—and what I’m gonna show you in this short video—is that on these residential crews in Thailand, each person does everything. Each person metal-frames, each person hangs sheetrock, each person can do tape and mud, and each person can paint.

OK, so take a look at this. What it amounts to in the end is that in this video, where we hang a ceiling, the whole thing gets done in eight hours. When you’re limited by specialties, you have all these scheduling issues—each crew could be from a different company, and they have their own damn schedules. So it could take weeks to get done what I got done in eight hours.

No Stress Food Joy

It’s a joy to put together this next section, and why it’s a joy is partly because of the ease and the pure joy of the food itself. That header image, again? That’s how we prepare food around here, since we don’t have an operating kitchen yet. That food station feeds a lot of people: it feeds us, and it feeds all the workers here.

The other reason it’s a joy is because it’s caused me to reflect on how my own food journey began back in about 2008, when I was even an influencer. I just think of all the basic bullshit surrounding that. It was, as you know, centered around the Paleo diet movement at the time, and in retrospect, there was so much balderdash about it all—so much really wasted time, effort, and money. A lot of money, because everybody had to recreate this fake-ass food environment, where we pretended that all the bullshit we were spending lots of money on and eating was really the way to go. At the same time, don’t get me wrong: I think we did far better, even with the flaws in how we were practicing Paleo, than the standard diet. But I find myself here in northeast rural Thailand, where I see a completely different way. It’s not an 80/20 thing; it’s just that the people up here have never eaten crap food. One hundred percent of what they eat is real.

You go down here a couple miles to the big market. It’s huge. It’s got a bunch of fresh produce and some places to get meat—like chicken and pork principally—and you have fish swimming around in big tanks, so every fish you get out of that place is alive, and you come home and cook it. You do this daily. There’s no pantries or cabinets full of cans, boxes, bags…or any of that bullshit here on the compound—or in any Thai homes around here. It’s virtually 100% like that: food that you go get—real food, real fresh food, cut that day or the day before, and you bring it home. You go down to this market: there’s nothing, not one single package of anything. Hell, even the sauces that they have are prepared in homemade fashion, and they’re sitting there in big bowls. They ladle them into a bag and secure it with a rubber band. No bottles, no packages, no nothing like that. One hundred percent everything fresh. If I were to call it, I’d say maybe it’s 99.5%—compared to, say, half a percent. Yeah, a bag of crisps from 7-Eleven might show up from time to time.

To talk about fast food in Thailand: there’s something like 280 McDonald’s, about 180 Burger Kings, about 40 Taco Bells in the whole country. But there’s nearly 1,000 Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC, outlets. Now, still, fried chicken isn’t your best choice on the planet, but it is pretty good here. If you Google, you can find people asking why KFC in Thailand is so much better than in America. It’s true. As for me, where I’m situated right now, there’s a KFC about 25 km away. KFC has that many outlets because of their deals with big chains like Tesco Lotus and Big C—you know, the equivalent of Target and Walmart here in Thailand. So, where you see a Tesco Lotus or a Big C supermarket, you’ll usually find a KFC outlet. Even though I have a KFC not so far away, I haven’t gone to it yet because of what you see above.

OK, so let me illustrate some of this food in some photos.

So you saw the cooking station. We also have workers on site every day, and we feed them lunch in the fresh fashion. All that food was sourced an hour or two before. Look how lean the workers are. Note also those baskets each or them has. I’ll come back to it.

The primary dish was fish & ginger soup, by the way. Here’s my portion (less one piece of fish that had jumped into my belly already).

Next, in quick succession, here are some of the things I’ve been eating.

I asked Grok about it.

Sticky rice (khao niao or khao nieow) is the staple food of Northeast Thailand (Isan) and neighboring Laos. Unlike regular jasmine rice, it’s a glutinous (sticky) variety high in amylopectin starch, which makes the grains clump together when cooked—perfect for eating by hand.

How It’s Made (Traditional Isan Method)

1. Soak: Rinse glutinous rice several times until the water runs mostly clear, then soak it in room-temperature water for at least 4–5 hours (or overnight for best results). This is essential for even cooking. eatingthaifood.com
2. Steam: Drain the rice and place it in a conical bamboo steamer basket (huat or teeneung khao neow) set over a pot of boiling water. Steam for about 20–30 minutes (often flipping halfway) until it’s soft, translucent, and chewy. simplysuwanee.com

This method produces a fluffy-yet-sticky texture that stays good for hours. Families often steam a big batch in the morning for the whole day.

How It’s Used in Daily Life In Isan

Sticky rice is the main carb of nearly every meal—not a side dish. People eat it by hand: pinch off a small ball, squeeze it slightly, and use it to scoop up food like grilled chicken/fish (gai yang, pla pao), spicy papaya salad (som tam), soups, curries, or dipping sauces. It’s dense and sustaining, ideal for farmers and laborers.

Daily carrying tradition: Cooked rice is transferred to a woven bamboo container called a kratip (or kradib/kong khao)—a cylindrical basket with a tight-fitting lid. These keep the rice warm and moist for hours without getting hard. Farmers, construction workers, and field laborers commonly carry a personal kratip (often with some lauk or chili paste) to work or the fields for lunch. Larger family versions sit on the table for shared meals.

The kratip is a practical, everyday item—handwoven, eco-friendly, and iconic to Isan/Lao culture. Smaller decorative ones are also common as souvenirs.In short, sticky rice is the heart of Isan identity: simple to prepare, portable, and central to a hands-on, flavorful cuisine that fuels hard-working daily life.

One late entry.

A Quick Rant on the Paleo Bullshit and Thai Reality

Let’s do a quick little rant about all this. I’m reflecting back to what I began with—my thoughts on a lot of the silly shit we did in the early days of Paleo, which I referred to as the Paleo Daze.

One thing that frustrates the hell out of me: I’ve been living in Thailand for six years now, and I’ve never seen a low-carber in Thailand. Yet, I see relatively few fat people. What I do see are a lot of people doing what they should be doing—eating mostly in the traditional ways, which means lots of carbohydrates, hundreds of grams a day, mostly from rice. They eat their traditional dishes and never, ever add fat to anything. I live amongst people who, even in their 80s, have never in their lives added a drop of fat to anything. Salad dressing? What the fuck is that? They eat lots of greens, but they eat them as a complement to their food—they take a bite of their meal, then crunch on a piece of lettuce or some other green they use in their cuisine. Zero added fat. And to add fat is the most unnatural thing; there’s no getting around that, because that shit did not exist in nature. There’s fat in food—plenty of fat in your foods. There is no need to ever add a bit of fat to anything you ever eat.

I see people in their 80s, lean and healthy, all over the place. They’ve never had processed food. They’ve never had food cooked in fat or deep-fried. They’ve never had any kind of fat added. They’ve never taken a bottle of any kind of fat and dribbled it on anything—never. And their body compositions show it. I think they should eat more protein—that would be well advised—but still, most of them just don’t have the problems.

You wanna see fat people here in Thailand? Go to the hospital. You see all the fat—not really fat, but overweight, plump women who sit around all the time, eat every two hours, and chow down on plenty of stuff in bags from 7-Eleven. That’s where you can find the fat people. Otherwise, with the old people—there’s a lot of old people here in their 80s and 90s—it’s a different story.

OK, one more thing—one more thing that irks the motherfucking shit out of me. The entire Western low-carb variety—whether it be Paleo, whether it be Atkins, whether it be ketogenic, what have you, whatever it is—these people are dishonest. And do you know why they’re dishonest? Because this observational data is out there. These people are not vegetarians or vegans or anything like that; they eat animal protein with every single meal—every single meal, no exceptions. I’ve never seen people sit down and eat anything close to a vegan or vegetarian meal. I just wish they’d eat a little bit more protein. And this is out there—they’re lean and healthy, yet they eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrates every day. So what do these low-carb varieties do? They lie by omission, because this data is out there and they ignore it. Even if you ask them the question, they ignore you. Think about that.

Building The Wall

So we’ve got this one-rai homestead here in northeast rural Thailand, which in size equates to less than but close to a half an acre. To further allow you to imagine that, it’s about one-third the size of a football field, including the two end zones. That’s a pretty damn big area, and we’re encircling the entire perimeter with a concrete wall—not just some flimsy fence.

Why do that? One reason is to give you the sense of it being your own compound, a secure space to work within. But the other big one is to keep out all the stray dogs and especially those goddamn wild chickens that are everywhere. They just waltz onto your property like they own the place, and if you’ve put down mulch around a tree or garden plants to retain water, they’ll kick it all over the fucking place. They’ll shit all over your tile patio. They’re just awful creatures—really awful creatures. Annoying as hell, they don’t shut up. There’s nothing good about them except laying eggs or being cooked up in a pot, in my view.

We’re building this wall, and I’ve got several short videos up to show and explain the process. In one of them, I address the cost, since some people have asked me how much it’s running—must cost a fortune, right? Well, I don’t know the exact figures offhand, but figure out what it would cost to encircle a same-size property with concrete block back in America. I’m talking reinforced concrete pillars, reinforced concrete foundations, concrete block walls, and then topping it with more reinforced concrete on the cap. And you have to apply stucco over the whole thing, at least on the interior—that’s all we’re doing, just the interior—and then paint it.

So that’s what we’re in for. I say to people, well, check out what that would cost in America to pull off something like that, then divide that number by probably 40 to 60, and you might be in the ballpark. With that, I’ll show you some videos.

1. This will be a review because I posted it already. Here it is again, so they’re all in the same place.

2. Now we’re rollin’ big time.

3. Putting the cap on it.

OK, that’s it for now.