Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "false competence" and "fake lawyers". Originally I was going to title this "Fake lawyers in Thailand" but I think it's a broader topic. I thought of making this video after watching a recent clip that involved the Joe Rogan Experience, the show The Joe Rogan Experience where he was interviewing Jordan Peterson. We will go ahead and put a link in the description below to that specific clip so you can go ahead and check out that source material for yourself. I thought the interview was interesting and people can feel what they feel about Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, it is not really the thrust of this video but there was some insights in there that I thought were really compelling. Most notably Dr. Peterson was talking about sociopaths and basically sociopaths out in the broader world and that there is a tendency, not even a tendency it's a phenomenon among sociopaths it appears to sort of fake being competent. They will do this basically, it's kind of an almost parasitical function where they are kind of being a parasite on society, and Dr. Peterson explains that there are ways in which that can occur and that society has a certain level of tolerance for that behaviour under certain circumstances. It was interesting, it was a rather insightful back and forth between those two; again we will put the link to that in the description below. 

But I thought of thinking of this in the context of fake lawyers because boy have I seen a number of them over the years. In the United States, this phenomenon is often times referred to as notarios, basically people that are pretending to be lawyers especially for example in the USA Immigration space. I have seen this very much in the US Immigration space out here; not quite as prevalent or maybe I haven't noticed it as much recently at least here in Thailand probably because I am doing other things rather than just watching every moment about fake lawyers out here but it is a phenomenon. I think that sort of false competence that Dr. Peterson talked about that is exhibited, basically it is a situation, it is a con man thing. It is where somebody is pretending to know what they are talking about to gain whatever advantage over someone else. Maybe it's money, maybe it's leverage over them in some kind of deal, something, but there is a claim of competence that is simply not there and it is being done, this claim is being made as a way of fooling someone into doing something they probably wouldn't otherwise do if they knew that this person had no credentials, had no competence. Now again I have been a bit leery of the over-reliance, like the credentialization of everything. That was really something I didn't like to see the last couple of years where people who are asking commonsensical questions were just dismissed out of hand on the basis that they didn't have credentials to ask those questions. It is not what I am talking about here. What I am talking about here is exactly what the title implies, "fake lawyers", people who are conning the public and I have seen it happen. I have seen it happen over the years, people pretending to be lawyers out here. There is one guy, literally just a total fraud, pretended to be a lawyer here for years. I am not going to name names but most people that have followed this channel or have been around Thailand for a number of years probably know who I am talking about and that person wasn't the only one. I know of multiple ones out here. Quite honestly they shared a lot of the same characteristics as sociopaths when I kind of looked back on it after watching that clip so this was kind of the reason for making the video. 

But long story short, yeah fake lawyers are something to really watch out for. Again I don't have any problem with folks choosing an Attorney that's different from me. I'm not the only Attorney out there and in fact I don't do everything. I tend to be a generalist but there are specialties out there I can't perform. For folks out there in the general public, your Attorney should be someone you are comfortable with, whoever that is but you should definitely make sure they are in fact what they claim to be especially out here in Southeast Asia, and ascertain whether or not they are in fact really credentialed to provide the services they claim to be able to provide.