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As we have started seeing things open up a bit more, I have been having frankly more conversations with just folks I meet sort of around out and about. It has been a little while; it has been a little bit I won't say unsettling or unnerving but it has been surprising because I guess I have been kind of used almost being a recluse the last couple of years due to all the restrictions on what you can do, where you can go. And then hardly anybody was coming into Thailand which had a substantial impact on things so yeah I guess I am just talking to more people. 

There is one thing that I have kind of noticed which is there seems to be a lot of incorrect thinking maybe or just maybe not fully grasping sort of the way Thai culture operates, sort of the way it is. What I would call this, when thinking of Thailand, I like to use the term "conservative tolerance". The reason for this is Thailand is far more conservative than most people make it out to me or think it is. I can understand this especially based on the fact that many folks are tourists to Thailand and they only interact with Thailand in a beach setting or kind of a beach party or the entertainment, the nightlife, the bars, the pubs that as a foreigner that is their only real interaction with people and that environment in the Kingdom. As I have noted in other videos and as I have heard discussed from many old hand kind of expats out here over the decades that have been here for multiple decades, and I have been here for a decade and a half, oftentimes the ones have been here a long time will say look I mean sort of the entertainment zone mentality whatever you want to call it, it only exists in like maybe 3% of the total population, probably more like one and a half, 2%. The fact is Thailand is very conservative, very, very conservative by any metric. A perfect example of this is alcohol consumption. It's not uncommon here in Thailand that many people you'll meet, I would almost say maybe even more then every other person you meet, more than that probably, substantially more than that, I don't know where the cutoff is but substantially more than every other person you meet just doesn't drink alcohol at all, they don't drink alcohol. Again Thailand's culture and its religion, there are multiple religions here in Thailand but the dominant religion or the majority of folks are adherence to Buddhism and that is just not something that's part of their culture. A drinking culture is not part of their culture. That's just one example. Many Thais are very conservative by any measurement you would make in any country. They are conservative. 

Which then sort of begs the question: "Well then why is Thailand such an easy-going place? It has kind of been described I have heard as the Wild East; it's kind of an anything goes, “laissez-faire” kind of live and let live kind of mentality.” Well it springs from the fact that it's not only conservative, they are very tolerant people. People of Thailand are very tolerant and this “conservative tolerance” that I frankly was one of the big things I came to love about Thailand because in many ways, I, this is kind of a personal thing, but I feel like I am a pretty conservative person when you get right down to it and the paradigm of this kind of "conservative tolerance", I find it interesting. Actually my brother once told me, he said I was kind of an odd duck which is the first time I have been called that, but he once told me I was kind of an odd duck because I had the temperament of somebody that in the American sort of paradigm you would call sort of a liberal but I very much had the ideology or the ideas, if you will; I ideology isn't the right word, I had the mindset, my thinking, the structure of the way that I think about things is very conservative and it is very much a conundrum to combine those two things. A lot of times I have at least seen most westerners you know if they are conservative then they have kind of a conservative temperament for lack of a better word. Then at the same time, "liberal" have kind of a liberal temperament and my brother just noted he said, "Look, your mindset is conservative but your temperament is very liberal; it's just kind of the way you are." I think he thought it was strange and maybe that is why Thailand seemed to fit me like a glove because that's very much the way Thailand is, it has a very conservative mindset. What a Thai thinks about for themselves, their own family, their own home is very different than what they will tolerate someone else doing. They take kind of the live and let live attitude and it is none of their business and I really like that about Thailand. This notion of "conservative tolerance" is something that quite frankly I think more countries can learn from.