Greetings from my plastic Adirondack chair overlooking the front yard.

This video is going to be—I honestly don’t even know what it’s going to be. But let’s get started.

August is historically, by far, the rainiest month in this region of Thailand. We just hit September 1st or 2nd, so we’ve gone over the hump. From here on out, the rain will start tapering off. By this time next month, it should be drying out completely. Thank Buddha. And thank God, too, for all you Christians out there. I’m neither Buddhist nor Christian, but I respect you all.

If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve been doing this big build out back.

This last month was spent getting all the concrete poured in the back, which brings us up to here and here. Now all we have left is the front, where you can see behind me.

We poured 17½ cubic meters—probably about 20 cubic yards, as Americans would say. I needed to finish my man-cave build, which we’ll get to in a little bit, because I’m going to do two parts of this video. The next part will be filmed sitting on the patio of the man cave, where I’ll talk about some other stuff.

If you see me pointing at the screen, it’s because the phone—or rather, the camera—turns off or goes dark, and I have wake it up so I can see myself. Because I’m such a… what is it? Such a… Never mind. Anyway, I’ll explain more about that in the next section of the video.

The way I’m doing this build is that I now operate on a month-to-month cash-flow basis. I budget three to four thousand U.S. dollars per month, which gets me roughly $40,000 to $50,000 worth of work in American terms, including materials and labor. I’ve mentioned that many times.

So, we poured about 20 cubic yards in August, despite all the rain. We had to do it on and off, on and off, on and off, to get it done. I just paid the concrete supplier for all of that, and I’m going to talk about vendor credit in a moment. Now she’s going to extend us credit to do the front, which will probably be a little more—around 20 cubic meters, or somewhere between 23 and 25 cubic yards of concrete.

I told her, “Look, I want to finish my man cave, but what I really, really want is to get the concrete poured out front.” It will be sloped so that all the water runs toward the front. There will be drainage holes in the walls, and the water will drain out to the ditch. I’ll be able to park my truck here without it sitting in the mud.

Although it rains like a motherfucker for days at a time, the ground is sandy enough that it doesn’t create a lot of mud. You’re not inundated with it all the time, which I appreciate.

Anyway, that’s it for the intro. Now on to the next stage. Let’s step up the ladder for stage two of this video.

This is the patio of my hopefully soon-to-be-completed man cave, complete with a urinal.

Here we go again. Different setting. As I said, this is the patio of my eventual man cave, where I’ll be spending a lot of time in the coming months once I get it finished. It’s idyllic.

But what I want to talk to you about is how I accomplished all of this in rural Thailand, which I’ll get to in just a second.

I just saw on the news feeds that the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case—the woman who murdered her three young children, strangling them to death—has deadlocked. Her children ranged from eight months old to a few years old. The jury consists of nine women and three men.

Of course, during the entire run-up to this, millions—or maybe hundreds of thousands—of women around the world have been saying, “No, no, no. She felt bad. It’s okay. It’s okay to kill your three kids if you feel bad.” Literally.

And now the jury comes out and says they can’t reach a verdict, meaning they’re deadlocked. There are holdouts who apparently say, “Well, even though she admitted doing it—even though she admitted murdering her three children—we can’t find her guilty.”

This isn’t a trial about finding the facts. The facts are already established. She admitted it, right? She admitted to murdering her three children, and a jury of twelve people—nine women and three men—cannot decide that she’s guilty of murder.

Now, I don’t do hot takes, so you can have your suspicions about that all you want. I suspect pretty much what you suspect. What a civilization. Can you imagine American society fifty years ago saying, “We can’t decide whether this woman is guilty of murder and sentence her according to the law”?

They cannot do it. Guess why? I’ll give you one guess. You know what it is. You know what it is. And I’m not going to say anything further.

Okay, one thing further: I’ve seen hundreds of women over the last few weeks come out and say, “Women shouldn’t vote. Women shouldn’t have any say in anything.” That’s women saying it. I’ve seen hundreds of them say that.

Anyway, I’m in this build. I talked to you about the concrete, and I wanted to get this room finished for myself. It’s going to have a 70-inch screen, two La-Z-Boy recliners, my big desk, air conditioning, a whop-whop fan, a coffee maker—it’s going to be crazy cool.

But in doing the concrete around this building over the last month, despite the rain, I’ve had to work around Thailand’s weather. August is the rainiest month of the year in this region, so we’re over the hump now. The rain diminishes from here, and by October it should be finished.

So how do you do this? People ask, “How do you do that, Richard?”

When I built my house about five or six years ago in Sisaket Province, I had only recently come to Thailand, and it was during the height of COVID. I had a pile of money in the bank, so it was easy: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, pay the bills, and keep moving. It took two and a half months to build that house.

I’m now in month five of this project. There was ongoing work before that, but that’s another story. The point is that I now have to operate on a cash-flow basis. I budget roughly $3,000 to $4,000 per month, and that gets me $40,000 to $50,000 worth of work in American terms.

You have to pay all those pussy boys with steel-toed boots who are union members. Union, union, union. And you have to pay for their Ford F-250 or F-350 truck payment every month, too. Don’t forget that.

I have real workers here. They’re jacks-of-all-trades, and they put American tradesmen to fucking shame. They really do. The range of things they can do is incredible.

I’ve talked about this a lot, but I grew up in the construction trades. When I was a kid in America, my father was a contractor, so I know what I’m talking about.

American tradesmen are fucking pussy boys. They’re wanking little pussy boys. “Oh, my pussy foot hurts.” Fuck off. Fuck off. You want to see real hard workers? Come to Thailand.

These guys aren’t just plumbers, roofers, or tile setters. They do fucking everything. Every one of them does it all. They put all you American pussy-boy tradesmen to fucking shame.

Okay, I got that off my chest. I fucking hate them, and I grew up with them.

So how do you do this?

As I said, I operate on a cash-flow basis. I budget three to four thousand dollars a month, but sometimes the work gets slow because that’s not a lot to spare when you’re covering both materials and labor.

What I do is put on my smiling face and get credit from local suppliers—many of them. I can call up, place an order, and settle the bill later.

My biggest account right now is about $6,000 in credit. I just paid her $1,000, so I’m currently at about $4,000 to $5,000. She’s happy as shit because, if they trust you, this unsecured vendor-credit arrangement works well for everyone. They can do more work more quickly, and so can I. It’s very much a win-win.

I also had another concrete contractor extend credit to me for all the work in the back. I just paid her off—close to $1,000—all the money for all the concrete from last month. Now she’s going to front the cost for the concrete out front, and I’ll pay her next month when my money comes in.

That’s basically how you do it.

But how do you do it if you want to live here?

The first thing is that you need some sort of Western-style income that you can bring into Thailand every month. What’s the minimum to live here? I’m not talking about building anything—just living. About $2,000 a month, and you can live here great. You’ll be fine. It’s modest, but you won’t want for much.

You do have to figure out how to deal with the girls. That’s up to you. They’ll still take all your money if you’re not careful, as sexy and cute as they are. They will take everything if you let them.

My long-standing saying is this: Girls ask you for something all the time. You say no seven out of ten times, and yes three out of ten times. That’s the way to do it.

So, yes, you need a Western-style income—about $2,000 a month minimum. As you go up from there, if you can muster $3,000, you’re living great. Then $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000—you can build. You can find a great gal, find a piece of property in Isan, and start building.

My X feed has changed quite a lot in the last few months. It now feeds me content from other guys like me who are living in Thailand and doing things out here in the rural areas. Most of them are different from me.

There are two English guys in particular I know of: Khun Chav and Jungle Banana. They live here in the region. Khun Chav is about an hour and a half away by car, and I’m thinking about contacting him and going to see his operation.

They’re more horticulturists and pastoralists—plants, animals, and so forth. That’s great. I love seeing it. I watch all their videos.

I’m more of a physical-structure, build-structures kind of guy. As for horticulture, my gal, Far, and her sister, Wow, know everything there is to know about trees, plants, and all the rest of it. I don’t need to get involved. It’s great to watch, and I’m basically a cheerleader for all of it.

I hope this video gives you some idea of how one guy who decided—or perhaps just fell into—living in Thailand accomplished all this.

My visits go back forty years, when I was twenty-five years old in Pattaya, and several more times between then and when I was thirty or thirty-one. Of course, back then it was all girl-focused. For sure. For sure. You’d be insane if it wasn’t.

But now I have the most wonderful woman in the world because she’s a fundamentally good, solid person in every way. It’s a continual joy. I could not do this without her. I’d be back in Pattaya, getting on ThaiFriendly and whatever.

But she’s more than enough for me. And that may be another critical element: Don’t come up here and don’t invest this kind of money unless you have a really, really solid gal.

Here’s how you tell. You go back to the area where she was born, and around here you find all of her family and many of her friends going back to when she was a child. I can tell you from my own experience that there isn’t one single bad apple among them. They’re all great. I love them all.

I’ve basically put myself into an entire family situation. All the shit you see on social media comes from sour or butthurt guys who didn’t do it right.

There is a right way to do it, and it can be incredibly rewarding.

That’s my story. Talk to you next time.