Transcription
[Music] I don't know why I like to think different from normal people a lot normally. But every time when I talk about my thinking, many people always said, "You're wrong, you're crazy. How can you think like that?"
At the beginning, it made me feel sad, feel very ashamed, feel very low self-esteem. But I can't help it. I have to do something different because I believe in a way. For example, to be a farmer, everybody does chemical farming. I'm the first person in the village who wants to do organic farming. The whole village said, "You're crazy. We use a lot of chemical. We still have less yield. How can you grow with no chemical?" Even government officials in the province came to me and said the same thing. But after I did it for one year, the next year 30 people followed me. That made me think, oh, it's quite fun to be different.
And then after that, I started to build earth houses. I'm the first person who built earth houses in Thailand. Many people in the village came every day to see me and they laughed at me and joked around my mud pit. And they said, "You have a very good idea, but it doesn't work because when it rains, it's going to melt." Nobody helped me. They said, "I don't want to waste my energy because if I help you now, when the rain comes, it will melt down." But after I finished the first building, many people built their houses with mud like me. Now there are many thousand mud houses in Thailand.
After that, when I had my first kid, many friends who had kids at the same time needed to prepare a lot of money for their kids to buy formula, to buy baby food for the kids. But I felt like, why do we have to buy food for the kids? Because my wife has the best food for the kid already. So I decided to not give water or formula or baby food to my kid for almost a year. No, no, nothing from outside. Only milk from my wife. Many people came and said, "You're going to hurt your kid. You don't love your kid." But what happened is, now my son is 12 years old. He's taller than me and he never goes to the hospital. He never gets sick. But most of my friends who raised them in the normal way, they have to go to the hospital almost every year for a lot of sickness.
So I feel like there are many things wrong in the world right now. There are many easy ways that we can find, we can discover. And after that, I started to feel more confident in myself to be different. When I did, when I do something different or I have some different idea, people say, "You're crazy." I start to tell myself, "It's not my problem. It's their problem. They can think whatever, but I need to be, see, I need to be relaxed." So now I feel like this is the real freedom. Freedom to do what you want to do. Freedom to do what you believe in. It's not easy to find this freedom. And now I enjoy to be different a lot. I feel like this is the special gift in my life.
When my son was 7 years old, he needed to go to school. Many people have to work hard to make money to send their kids to school. I think there are so many knowledge, there's so much wisdom on this earth. Why do we need to go to school? School is so narrow. So, we decided to not send the kid to school. We do homeschooling. It's so easy. We don't need to take the kid to school every day. Don't need to pick him up every day. And the most important thing is we have a lot of fun to be together. I think this is the best gift in my life, just to be with family. We have time to be together, play together, and we learn outside of school. There's a lot of things to learn. My son, he makes cookies. Just making cookies, he learns science. He learns math. He learns business. He learns so many things from one cookie. And he has a lot of fun. And if he went to school, he would have to learn what he doesn't like all the time. So it's not fun. So I feel like my son is so happy. I feel so relaxed that I can design my life in the way I want it to be. Just be the way I want it to be.
And now I have so many thinking different from normal people. But I don't think I'm abnormal. I think I'm very normal. Like now, many people are working hard to make money. They save money for security. But I start to see differently from many people. Money is not secure. Why do we need to save money for security? I did not refuse money. I still work and use money as normal people. But I use money as a tool, like I use a knife. Why do I think money is not secure? Because in my life, I see money has so many problems. Inflation is very fast. Like when I was a kid, one bowl of noodle was one baht. One buffalo was 500 baht. One plot of land, one rice paddy, or half an acre or something like that, was 1,000 baht. So if I had 1,000 baht at that time, I would be a rich person in the village. But if I deposited that money in the bank, now I'm 52, 40 years ago. How much money would I have in the bank? Because in the bank book in Thailand, they say if you have money lower than 2,000 baht, they will take out your money for the fee to keep your account every month. So the money is gone long ago. I don't know. Even if I was a rich person, I never used my money. Where did my money go? This is one thing that tells me that money is not security. Why do I have to save money like many people? But in the same time, if I used that money to buy one piece of land at that time in the village, now the land in the village is 700,000 baht. So from 1,000 up to 700,000 baht. That's more secure. And in the same time, if I planted trees on half an acre, you can plant more than 500 trees. In 10 years, the trees are this big. It costs 10,000 baht per tree. But if it's 50 years, how big will it be? So that costs a lot of money. So many things, natural resources are more secure than money. Why do we need to save money? Why don't we save natural resources?
So now when I have money, I just buy land, buy land and develop the soil. Make the soil good. No burning, no chemical on the soil. The soil gets better and better, becomes fertile soil. And then it starts to save a lot of seeds, a lot of plants in there. Underground, there are a lot of yam and taro roots, all kinds of roots underground. Above the ground, there are a lot of grass and vegetables and big trees and good shade. So I think this is security in my life because whatever happens in the world, I'm okay. I have a fish pond. I have a lot of fish. I have 100 chickens. I have two cows for milk, 15 liters per day. If the economy collapses today, if war happens now, many people have to be in line asking for food. But I feel like I don't need to go. I have enough food here. If somebody comes to rob me, they might take some fruit, some chicken, or some cows away. But nobody knows where the yam and taro roots are hiding because they are underground. This is security. So I feel like this is the real heaven. We can make a heaven, a heaven to live on this earth.
Thai people like to make a lot of merit, donate a lot of money. So when they die, they can go to heaven. But I think they maybe cannot go to heaven because when they die, they cannot bring their cell phones with them. They have no GPS. They might lose their way. But why do we need to die before we go to heaven? We build a heaven now and live in the heaven. We have food. We have good shade. We have good soil. We have good water. We have good family. This is more than heaven. Even people who live in the heavens would be jealous of me because in the heaven, there are no trees, only crowds. It's very hot. But here it's so nice and we have a lot of fun. The kids are running around and playing all day long. We have a lot of food to eat. To build heaven, everybody can do it. But to be rich, not everybody can be it. So why do we choose to do something hard? So this is the way I think now. I feel like I think differently from normal people, but I don't feel like I'm not normal.
And now I start to look at people, the whole world. Why do people have to work so much? And everybody works hard, but not for themselves. I can see many people in Thailand, they work very hard, they get money, but how many people who use their money from their hard work to buy organic food to feed themselves? Because health, our health is the most important thing in the world. When they go to the supermarket, they go to the farmer's market, they see farmers selling rice, organic rice for 50 baht per kilo, and they think and think it's too expensive, and then they don't buy it. But when they go to the coffee shop, one cup of coffee, 150 baht, it's not food. But they pay without thinking. So what are we working for now? We're working so hard for what? For ourselves? No, we are not doing anything for ourselves. All the work we do now, most people work just to change the natural resources into money. But not many people who work to create more natural resources for this earth.
Think about how many million people in the world right now, and everybody works more than eight hours per day. But how much resources do we have on this earth now? Now we have nothing left. We have less than 50% of trees in the world. We've dug up all the minerals and we've used them up. The more we work, the more we ruin everything on this earth. Now the land has become dead soil. You cannot grow things easily anymore. Now the water, all the world cannot drink anymore. We need to buy water to drink. The bottle of water is the indicator to tell us this is the biggest crisis in the world. We work too much until we ruin everything that feeds us. We have no good soil, no good water to drink, no trees, no animals. Thailand used to have more than 20,000 varieties of rice, but now we have less than 200 varieties. We've ruined everything. And everybody said, "I'm working for my kids, more for my children." But what do we have for our kids to eat, to live? Is anybody asking their kids, "Do you like to eat money or do you like to eat food? Do you like to drink water or do you like to drink money?" We don't have any resources left for them anymore because we work too much in a way that's not for us.
So I feel like we need more new people, more new thinking. Different thinking is the thing that we need now. Because we go to school. The school teaches us to learn the same thing, do the same thing, think the same thing. When everybody thinks that money is security, everybody starts to work hard to change all the resources into money. But not many people think differently that we need to build more resources for this earth. So now I think it's time to start to think differently. We need more people to think differently. More different, more ideas is diversity of thinking. Diversity is security. Diversity is freedom. Diversity is happiness. No, diversity is nothing. Whatever we think, just be proud of yourself. We can be different. We can be different sex, different color, different religion, different ideas, different thinking. That's the beauty. That's what we need. We need to be different. We don't need to be the same because we need security. We need diversity. We need a sustainable way of living. Thank you.