Day T13-14: I Got Pai'd on the Weekend

February 1, 2025

Starting the day with trading at the Pirannha Park

Thanks to Jen and her friend, they managed to hook me up with three nights free stay in the Pirannha Park during peak season. This was greatly appreciated since the prices of anything in town were exhorbitant. The only catch was the park was significantly out of town, about 10km or so and all uphill. It was for that reason that I decided, with the help of Jen's friend, to store the Montague at his villa and just get around using scooters.

All I can say is that my mind was blown away by Pai and the potential that it offered. This place is a magnet for tourists, and it's not just the "typical backpackers" that are in abundance, but many other people of all age groups and backgrounds also. It's a digital nomad's paradise. Jen took the lead and showed me around all over town. She was greatly familiar with the place and knew almost everybody in Pai. Her story is that she escaped the Shanghai lockdown, including the quarantine camps, and came to Pai as a form of healing. She met her Israeli partner of several years but as it turns out, he ended up moving to Japan just now to start a business. She is in another transition now as a result. For now she'll continue to stay in Pai but she's already looking at a move to Tokyo.

Pai strikes me as the perfect place for a transition or to heal from trauma. At some point you move on.

Because of how many people Jen knew and the connections she made in the town over a long time, the visit entailed a whirlwind of meeting people and going to one event after another during the weekend. She is a fireball of social connections and she exudes an infectious vibe of positive energy. In her own words, "I am the human Facebook" Unfortunately I lost track of all the details despite trying my best to remember. It was for that reason that I resolved to be better at capturing key moments and so I developed a new system to take notes.

Given everything there was to know about Jen and how much she thrived in this town of Pai, the question had to be asked. So I asked her, "How did you survive the Shanghai lockdown and the quarantine camps?" She was ok to talk about it, and the answer was complex but it made me realize: people are designed to be social and not to be locked up in some cage within a cage. What happened with the lockdown was an abmonination. As I see it now, they should be tried in the international criminal court for war crimes. But no, those who ordered the lockdown got promoted to the highest echelons of the CCP.

Jen did point me to her Instagram where she has all the details saved of what happened during 2022. I could see that a lot of painful memories were resurfaced for both of us. She used the present tense while telling the story and it felt like this just happened. So clearly this was not over yet internally and there was unfinished healing work that needed to happen.

But between bits and pieces of storytelling and catching up, I was shown around the town. In her words, "You're gonna get Pai'd"

This is the main weekend market in the park. As we walked along there were all sorts of ad-hoc music performances, singing, and dancing in the streets

As part of the experience, I was encouraged to try an ice bath. For beginners such as me, they keep it at 5 degrees celcius. The way this works, you slowly get into the water: feet first, then sit on the bench, then submerge entirely. It is numbingly cold in a very literal sense yet it must be mind over matter. As time goes on the body feels the numb sensations. The key to all this is breath work. Jen helped train me on this and it was almost natural since all of my fitness training at the gym came in handy.

The mind is truly an amazing thing. Through a combination of breathing and control, you can train yourself to lower your heart rate and get used to the cold enveloping sensations. It has all sorts of powerful healing effects. I lasted over 5 minutes whereas the guy running the place told me that most beginngers can't handle more than a few seconds.

After this it was a shower at room temperature but it feels incredibly warm having just come out of the ice bath. Then it was a sauna and a steam room with the opposite extreme given the extreme humidity, another shower, and then back to the ice bath again.

We then walked along the street several times and got caught up in impromptu dance performances. Jen somehow found her way to one of the singing bands and took over the entire performance with a microphone. She has always been a creative artist and was completely in her element.

One of the things I noticed was just how adhoc the conversations and plans were. All three of us were now together and went for a Thai massage. That in itself was excellent, then someone by the name of Julien just happened to drop by and promote his business. He called himself the 'hippie crypto trader' and was running workshops to get people trading. When he explained it to me, he started using market terminology like 'bull flag' and 'breakout pattern' and 'parabolic rise' and I completely grasped it. He kept asking, "Do you understand what I'm saying?" while it was evident I did, but I think he was more confused with the fact that someone else in Pai actually knew how the market worked.

I tried to explain my own trading system to him with monthly profit targets across stocks, options, and futures. He said, "Well that's certainly sophisticated. To be honest it sounds complicated as fuck. Cmon man, simple life. Simple life! When I trade crypto it's only in the morning then I chill by the river all afternoon. Anyone can do this, why don't you try it out too?" I showed tentative interest and added his Telegram. If I do, it's going to be a conservative portion of my portfolio.

I got the sense that he goes all in on this. He even told me "I lost millions with crypto before but I gained it back. I since learned not to hold onto money too tightly and not focus too much on money. Crypto is in its infancy now brother, it's all in the bull phase."

More power to him, but I sure hope he's not running his workshops to get people to jump headfirst on this rollercoaster. Jen's friend Tony I was with had a few words to say and he has the complete opposite view. He believes that crypto is nothing more than a speculative asset that holds no real value. It is a dangerous investment in other words, and it makes sense to hear this coming from a guy who focuses entirely on real estate.

As for me I'm somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't rule out crypto entirely but going all in like Julien really does scare me.

After that, another woman walked in and wanted a massage. We didn't know her but we all introduced ourselves and it turns out she does inner child healing with a focus on PTSD. Well that was timely or what. I got her contact. There is still a need to do this at some point. The plan to do it earlier got sidelined, but I still managed to see a talk therapist in Bangkok last trip.

The next day I was introduced to another community that runs events throughout the week at some garden only accessible by scooters on offroad routes. You could call it a secret garden.

Where we all met and had a community lunch

The way it works, people will volunteer to take care of different tasks like preparing community meals, organizing events, and stuff like that. The event is very informal and low key, basically a chance to meet a whole bunch of new people and share a meal together. Afterwards, everyone helps out by washing dishes.

After meeting many new people and sharing interesting topics, we then all got into a circle and we each went around with the 'talking stick'. Whoever had the stick would share something then pass it on. This immediately reminded me of First Peoples Principles that we have back home and is also used in my classroom.

When it was my turn I shared my deepest and darkest secrets with a group of people that I'll likely never see again. Such is the beauty of this arrangement.

Later on, Tony came back and shared a lot with me about his wealth creation and how he fundamentally relies on real estate and nothing else. Again I was knocked for trading stocks, options, and futures, this time from him. It really set me in the middle with both Tony and Julien at opposite ends of the continuum. His argument against it was, "What makes you think you can possibly compete with institutions who have the game rigged with their algorithms and teams of quants? Maybe you'll make money for years with your trading system, but all it takes is one longtail event (black swan event like covid) or highly improbable scenario to wipe out all your capital in one night."

He went on to say, "You're a math guy so you'll get this. When you go into the casino with $5000, you bet $5 on the roulette wheel, say it lands on black. If it doesn't, you bet $10. If you win then you're $5 ahead. And so on. You could do this for a few hours, make several hundred dollars every night and walk out of the casino each time. You could do it for years and keep building up your bankroll. Even guys on YouTube promote this nonsense and call themselves the 'Greatest of All Time'. But they'll never say that at some point you'll lose the bet 10 times in a row, then all your bankroll is gone. And how often might this happen?"

I said, "More often than you might think."

He said, "Bingo! Hitting red 10 times in a row has a 0.1% chance but that's all it takes to wipe you out. And it happens multiple times a day in the casino across many roulette tables." He was no doubt talking about the Martingale Strategy which I was deeply familiar with already.

He went on to say, "So you're going to come across an event like this in your trading at some point. Covid was a perfect example. I lived through multiple recessions and lost it all on one occasion. That's why I gave up trading and stuck to real estate only. I now own a farm back home with multiple rental tenants. How I got richer was that I took over the farm from someone else who was in debt after the recession, took on the debt, and bought the entire thing at a massive discount then started leasing it out to tenants. The property value soon recovered and skyrocketed and I'm now making a fortune on just the rentals. This is how the rich get richer. They take over the land when the owners are in debt. And you would not believe how much of this happens in Thailand, the amount of debt here is staggering and out of control."

Unfortunately he was also in a legal battle with his ex-wife who wants her hands on the farm too. She left him suddenly and her plan was to take everything from him but he was too smart for that and built in multiple lines of defense. I asked, "So why is she in Pai anyway?" He said, "Your guess is as good as mine. But she's going to lose the legal battle, go bankrupt, and see me with my Thai girls, so she can continue to drink poison."

This was proving to be a most interesting conversation but the sun was going down and a decision had to be made. We weren't getting any leads on selling the bike in Pai, and the guy back in Chiang Mai said he was interested. So we agreed that I'd take the bike back from Tony's villa and make plans to put it in a private car back to Chiang Mai the next day.

Jen then led the way and I followed her while she rode the scooter. We made several stops before.

All told it was an absolutely fabulous time at Pai. I was starting to fit in already and many people asked why it was such a short trip. The sad reality is that while a month vacation might be the envy of the world, time is very limited. You have to make the most of it. It makes me wonder how two weeks or less would be even possible to do a trip like this at all. The answer is simple: for most people, it's simply not going to happen. They'll stay behind the four walls for the rest of their lives.

What this Pai trip did teach me is that alternative lifestyles are indeed possible. I was encouraged to try just trading and making a living off this from a digital nomad perspective.

While enthralled by the idea and more confident that I actually *could* do this, a part of me believes what Tony has to say. The trading system might be working now, but it's those freak events or sudden bear markets that scare me and make me want to rely on a full time job as a fallback plan. But then the question has to be asked: how is that working out? Like really? The current bearish situation in China has gotten to the heads of employers and put them on insane power trips. They know that people like me are afraid of bear markets and so the job becomes something we all depend on. It took me nearly three weeks to recover from the survival mode of a worsening job situation.

So who knows really. I did run the calculations. With my trading system, I could be a multi-millionaire in the future but that ultimately does rely on a full time job, at least in the interim, before gradually scaling out of that job and then ditching it entirely.

Then again, maybe bear markets aren't to be feared entirely. At least this trip was opening my eyes once again that China isolates people on purpose and there is more abundance in the world than we might otherwise realize.

Today's ride: 12 km (7 miles)
Total: 416 km (258 miles)

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