Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not there has been a mass exodus from Thailand of Western men leaving the Kingdom. 

In a recent email I got, and I did a pretty exhaustive other video on this email where I discussed some things. I urge you to go check out that video but in the same email when we were making that video, I was talking about with the gentleman that is our producer here and we were going back and forth and I thought that actually is something to bring up perhaps in its own video. Within this email, I am not going to name names or anything but basically I am going to quote directly: "Isn't it better to have unmarried men here spending 100% of their money, 40K plus Thai baht every month and year after year than a tourist who will spend much more in a month but not be here year after year. Do you realize that I have been advised that over 50,000 such western men have left Thailand because of your rules!" 

I made another video on this basically where I said look these are not my rules; I am not the Thai Government. I don't make up the rules; I don't set any of the policies regarding Thai Immigration. We have to deal with them. I deal with it long after all this has been settled but the question it is a good one. I don't know if that is necessarily true. I think it poses a good question especially with respect to this COVID era we are in, post COVID or COVID response era here or whatever you want to call it. There has definitely been drops in numbers but have 50,000 men who were living here left? It is hard to say. I am going to go ahead and try to find some information on that. I will try to make another video in follow up to this one but I would probably say not people that were living here, although I bet there are numbers that have moved back, or moved out of Thailand but where I think it has probably had more of an impact is on what I would call the long stay semi-tourist retirees. I knew a lot of people and I really didn't realize it because year to year I would see them and they would say "yeah I was home for 2 months and now I am back" and they would do that periodically throughout a given year and I just didn't notice it. When you think about it in the aggregate that person spent six, seven months back in the US and they only spent five, six months here in Thailand. So the reason I am making this video is yes I definitely think there has been a decrease in the number of foreigners here in Thailand, there is no doubt of that but have there been 50,000 Western men that have left Thailand? It is hard to say. I will try to find some data on that. I will say, going back to 2018, we did videos on this at the time. It looked like demographically they were about 98 - 100,000 foreigners in Thailand in some kind of Retirement Visa, O Visa or B Visa, right around there, about 100,000. That would be a significant drop of foreign nationals actually living in Thailand if that were the case. 

Again, we will try to find that data if it can be found and we will do another video on this channel as and when we can.