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The title of this video may not be immediately clear in what the content is going to be about. Basically I was thinking the other day, I was talking to an old time expat, over here an old age Asian hand, been out here multi decades over 40 years this guy. We were kind of joking around and we came up with this notion of "an Age in Asia". What this means is for example I am 41 years old but I have been in Asia for 15 years, actually 15 and a half years if you are counting the time I spent in Korea before I came to Thailand; so Thailand 15 years, Korea, all of Asia 15 and a half years, whatever. We were kind of joking around because it is kind of an odd phenomenon where older guys mostly men, because that's who I deal with who retire here primarily, these older folks, they are older than me, they have a lot more life experience than me and then I end up being the person that is advising them or telling them 'that's not such a good idea' or maybe 'that's not what you want to be doing'. It's a very weird place to be and I was talking about this with my friend and he said 'well your age in Asia is a lot older than these people.' Just because they are 65 and you are 41, yeah don't disrespect them or anything, but they don't have the time in Asia that you do. You have more experience here and you have got some insight that they don't have and incidentally that's probably why they are hiring you if it's in a professional context but understand that that is just a phenomenon that goes along with being a long-term expat that you are going to end up in these weird positions where you are like an older person in many ways compared to someone who is physically older than you because they haven't lived here as long. I thought there was some validity to that. I thought that hey this notion of yeah I may be 41 years old, and then we were kind of trying to come up with a metric like 'how old is your age in Asia?' so if you double whatever your time in is so he said well you are 15 years in so you are 30 in Asia, and actually I thought that was pretty spot on. Looking back on how I thought about the world and things at 30 and how I think about the world and things just in terms of Asia, I am kind of like a 30-year-old in many ways and he had been here 40 odd years and I said 'well you're like 80 something years old' and he said 'well that isn't too far off' and it wasn't in his particular case, not too far off. 

But on the other side of that metric though is okay you have been here a year and I am not denigrating anybody, I've met plenty of people who are "fresh off the boat" who have really interesting insights into how Thailand works, I'm not saying that necessarily but for the kind of know it all class out there if you will especially on the internet, it seems to be out there in the trolling community, I often am curious when I hear somebody or something that says 'oh well this works this way' and I'll happen to know that maybe it doesn't work that way at all or there is a totally different reason for why it operates the way that so and so is saying it operates. Then I will dig a little deeper and I'll find out, I'll be like 'well how long have you been here?' Well I have been here 18 months'. So in our 'Age in Asia' metric, that my friend and I came up with, that would make you a three year old and you are kind of talking like a three year old about something you don't really quite understand.

Again this is not meant to be a pejorative thing. What it was useful to me in my thinking was when I look at someone and talk to someone and find out how long they have been here this 'Age in Asia' metric, I felt was somewhat useful to understand exactly, okay this is sort of the level of insight I should expect from this person based upon their time being out here.