‘The White Lotus’ And The Awkward Truth Behind An HBO Punchline

It’s 10 a.m. in Thailand, and Sam’s just returned home from the immigration office in Pattaya, where he renewed his tourist visa to extend what’s become a 19-month stay in the country. Thirty-nine years old and hailing from Sydney, Australia, Sam is one of many single adult men who move to countries like Thailand in search of a better life than the one they had back home.

“That’s why people come here,” Sam tells me, “because we feel special, particularly males.”

Or, in the parlance of HBO’s hit dark comedy, “The White Lotus,” Sam is a “loser back home.”

The third season of the globetrotting anthology series about rich people behaving poorly at a luxury chain of hotels and resorts takes place in Thailand. In the very first episode, one white female character who’s moved to the country with her older partner explains the concept to a newly arrived hotel guest.

“You’ll notice a lot of bald white guys in Thailand,” she says, as the camera pans across a table of smooth, hairless heads. “The locals call them LBHs. Losers back home.”

Sam isn’t bald. There’s a tousle of light brown hair (and a receding hairline) hidden beneath the black baseball cap that covers his head when we connect via Google Meet. But while he might not fit the description to a tee, Sam readily admits to being a “loser back home.” He even published a YouTube video titled “LBH – I was a LOSER BACK HOME,” in which he attempts to debunk the stereotype.

It’s that video that brings me to Sam’s YouTube page, Gone Adrift, which chronicles his life as a white guy in Thailand. A few weeks later, we’re chatting from opposite sides of the planet. Sam declines to reveal his last name, explaining that even his small modicum of online success has earned him some haters and stalkers.

“Some level of anonymity and distance from the audience is pretty important,” he said. “There’s psychos out there, bro.”

He’s otherwise an extremely open book, talking candidly about the painful personal reasons he moved in the first place and his own fraught experience searching for love in a place like Thailand. This isn’t a huge surprise. After all, Sam’s turned both his travel adventures and his dating life into fodder for a YouTube channel, which makes enough money most months to fund his modest lifestyle. He’s no stranger to talking openly into the camera, even if that means sharing personal and sometimes unflattering stories.

Sam’s situation isn’t particularly unique, either. Plenty of white men move to countries like Thailand in search of romance and cheap luxuries. It’s not a new trend, but it’s seemingly accelerated in recent years, fueled by social media influencers and enabled by a five-year digital nomad visa introduced by the Thai government in 2024.

What is unique about Sam, however, is his willingness to share both the good and the bad of his “loser back home” lifestyle — many of his videos explore the darker side of life in Thailand, including poverty and violence — which all comes together to reveal an eternal truth: Real life is never as simple or glamorous as social media (or HBO) make it seem.

Before moving to Thailand to become a YouTuber, Sam was a social worker in Sydney, Australia, where he focused on guiding people through the country’s welfare system. For the final stretch of his career, he focused on at-risk teenagers. It was rewarding work, but eventually, it started to wear him down.

“After seven years of super intense stuff every day, I was just cooked, totally burnt out,” he said. “You bottle it up and then it all has to come out at some point.” He’d lose his temper at the smallest thing, like somebody else cutting in front of him in traffic. “I’d become such an angry, toxic person in my personal life. When I’d go out drinking on the weekends, it all came out.”

Sam realized something was wrong. Then, an opportunity presented itself. A close friend moved to Bangkok, and Sam booked a vacation to visit. It wasn’t his first trip to Thailand, but this time, something clicked. He made a major life decision.

“I decided, I’m done. I’m going home to sell everything, and I’m moving here,” Sam said.

Not everyone is in a position to sell all their earthly possessions and move over 4,000 miles from home to start fresh. But Sam was in a somewhat privileged position. He was 37 years old; he had no spouse, no kids and no mortgage. Some might consider those details and see a loser, but in the moment, it was an advantage.

“Legally, I wasn’t tied to anything,” he said.

That doesn’t mean it was easy. It took 13 weeks to pack up the things he wanted to keep and get rid of everything else. He filmed the entire process and published it on YouTube, priming the algorithm for his Thailand adventures.

Sam excitedly titled one of those videos, “My LAST Week in Australia! (I’m leaving for THAILAND),” but in real life, walking away from his life in Sydney was surprisingly difficult.

“I struggled through that,” he said. “I don’t want to sound like I idolized possessions, but every time you say goodbye to that couch or that movie poster that you’ve had on your wall, it eats you a little bit. I’m selling all the shit I love.”

Ironically, if it wasn’t for his anger management issues at the time, Sam doubts he would have been able to go through with such a huge life decision. He was only able to push through the discomfort and fear by harnessing his frustrations with his own life.

“I weaponized that anger and I turned it into a mission,” he said, “and that mission was to move to Thailand.”

Ultimately, Sam knows he made the right decision. “Nineteen months later, I don’t have tantrums in the street anymore. I don’t yell at people. I’m such a happier person.”

A vacation in Thailand is nothing like the real thing. You stay in a hotel surrounded by English-speaking staff and readily available Western food. If you’re anything like Sam was back then, you’re also drunk for much of the trip and throwing money around in the way only a tourist traveling through a developing country can.

Sam didn’t realize this at the time, but when he moved to Thailand, it quickly became clear that the 10 weeks he’d spent in the country (divided between five separate trips) amounted to “jack shit.”

Before, he’d only seen tourist Thailand. Now, he was seeing the real thing.

“The first four weeks were profound,” Sam said.

He still recalls the moment he got off the plane. Reality set in as he realized he’d be staying in Thailand, “potentially forever.” Throwing his money around was no longer an option, especially since Sam wasn’t showing up with a fat bank account to live off of. He was going to try to get by on the meager salary of an up-and-coming YouTuber — in a recent video, Sam reveals he earned $1,126 Australian dollars (or $710 in U.S. currency) that month, nearly half of which goes to his rent.

But beyond his financial struggles, Sam also encountered a cultural barrier beyond anything he could have imagined. Thailand is one of the few countries in the world that was never colonized by Western forces. So unlike other neighboring countries where American culture is often dominant, most people in Thailand “couldn’t give two shits” about Hollywood movies.

“They listen to Thai music, they watch Thai TV shows, and they eat Thai food,” Sam said.

That’s particularly true in Pattaya, a smaller coastal city about 100 miles south of Bangkok, where Sam chose to live. Once a fishing village, Pattaya has become a tourist town full of hotels and high-rises. Many of the Thai people who live there come from even smaller villages and farming communities. They don’t speak English and have no frame of reference for Western culture.

That’s not particularly surprising. This is Thailand, after all, not Miami Beach, but it still came as a shock for Sam.

“It’s very foreign, and that takes a toll,” he said. “Those first few weeks were tough, man. I felt a base level of anxiety at all times.”

The underlying assumption of the whole “Loser Back Home” conceit is that moving to another country where you stand out and your money goes a lot further makes it easier to meet women. There’s even a subculture of young men who travel the world for that exact reason, calling themselves “Passport Bros.” Sam doesn’t deny there’s some truth to the myth, but adds that there’s a more complex explanation hidden beneath the surface.

“The only reason you stand out is because you are also foreign to them as a white dude and they can’t gauge how wealthy you are,” he said, noting that it’s not that these women are gold diggers. “You might have funds, and you might be worth marrying.”

But that’s all beneath the surface. For a certain type of Westerner who’s just arrived in Thailand, it can feel like paradise.

“It seems like fantasy land,” Sam said. “Say you’ve just had a nasty divorce and you’re miserable and you come here and there’s a whole culture of people that are excited to see you. They’re happy and polite, and they want to drink with you and go on dates with you. Yeah, that’s a good feeling, but there’s way more to it than that.”

That is, of course, an oversimplified view of any country or group of people. The attributes Sam describes are what a lot of single white men go looking for when trying to date Thai women.

In his experience, many Thai people are deeply impoverished and in serious debt. In that situation, marrying a rich white guy might be the only solution. “You might be able to help their whole family and pay some hospital bills.”

Sam experienced this for himself soon after he moved to Thailand. About 10 weeks later, he went on a Tinder date with a Thai woman named Lele and instantly fell in love. Lele was different from most of the Thai women he’d met. She spoke English and owned an apartment and a car. “Those three things are quite unusual here,” Sam said. She was a year older than him and “gorgeous.”

But on their second date, Lele revealed the truth behind the fantasy. Her sister had married a Western man who murdered her and then apparently killed himself in prison. Afterward, she became financially responsible for her orphaned nephews, who were still living with their grandmother in a small farming village. She’s also inherited the apartment, which was falling apart.

“That’s an unexpected gem that you might not get in the West on date No. 2,” Sam said. “‘By the way, there’s all this trauma and tragedy in my family history, and I’m the only one in the entire family that’s doing anything about it. Do you want to go on a third date?’ And I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, I’m all in.’”

Sam quickly got very involved, traveling to Lele’s hometown to meet her family and working nonstop to fix up the apartment. He documented all of this on his YouTube channel, and his followers donated several thousand dollars to help out.

However, Sam also admits that sharing this story online helped him, too.

“It’s very hard to get started on YouTube,” he said. “I told the tragic story of this family, and it tracked really well with the audience.”

But that only lasted for so long. Eventually, Sam’s YouTube audience stopped caring. “You can’t just keep flogging that same story,” he said.

At a certain point, he realized that the relationship had to end as well. Sam didn’t have enough money to solve Lele’s problems, and he figured that by stepping aside, his girlfriend might be able to meet someone else who could. At least, that was his logic for breaking up.

“I could only provide love or financial support, not both,” he recalled with a grimace. “Because if you want financial support, then I’m working seven days a week on YouTube. If you want love, I’ve got no time to do any work. So it’s one or the other, buddy.”

Sam says he has no regrets about the relationship. He’s proud of the help he was able to provide. Then again, a look at his YouTube page might suggest he’s doing just fine. Among the recent videos he’s posted about his finances and his thoughts on “The White Lotus,” there’s an obvious pattern: parties, alcohol and beautiful young Thai women.

Is this the reality of Sam’s life? Of course not, but over the last 19 months, he’s learned what works on YouTube and what doesn’t.

“I’ve done a string of exposés and sad stories,” he said about his early YouTube content after moving to Thailand. “Those videos track terribly. They don’t trend well at all.”

Instead, people want to see “happy stuff” — pretty girls, beautiful beaches, delicious food, etc. Sam knows he’s feeding into the fantasy of life in Thailand that so many Westerners have in their heads. YouTube is primarily for entertainment, he argued, and that means his videos need to be entertaining, even if they don’t always reflect real life.

“I never set out to mislead,” he said. “I don’t tell any lies. If the people watching these videos listen in and do some thinking and don’t just follow what’s being seen, then they’ll be able to unpack an accurate picture of life as an expat in Thailand.”

Sam’s life in Pattaya isn’t glamorous, and while moving to Thailand helped cure his anger issues, it’s posed a new type of mental challenge: loneliness. He still doesn’t speak much Thai, which makes it almost impossible to get to know his neighbors.

“It’s so easy to communicate with someone from a culture that you’ve grown up in,” he said. “It’s harder here.”

Still, when I ask if he’d do it all over again, or if he’d encourage someone else to move to Thailand, Sam doesn’t hesitate.

“Absolutely do it,” he said, before adding a very personal caveat. “What you should not do is come here with the intention of surviving off YouTube revenue as your sole income source, because the likelihood of that working is like one in a hundred.”

“Thailand’s a bit tough,” he continued. “There are a lot of people who have retired here on a pension from their country, and they’re living very simple lives. I live a pretty simple life. I eat simple food and do simple activities — low-budget stuff in line with my monthly earnings, which are not big yet, but maybe one day. It’s slowly growing.”