The Jordan Harbinger Show - 301: How to Fight an Out-of-State Speeding Ticket | Feedback Friday

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

You're not sure if the speeding ticket you got driving across the country was given because you had out-of-state license plates, you were racially profiled, or there was an equipment failure of some kind, but you're pretty sure it wasn't for speeding. You want to fight it, but you're not sure what your legal options and obligations are. Friend of the show Corbin Payne, Esq. will explain how to fight an out-of-state speeding ticket the right way, and of course we'll try to do our best to answer a stack of other questions here on Feedback Friday! And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Jason DeFillippo (@jpdef) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at [e-mail]. Now let's dive in! Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/301. On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss: Interested in doing some prison time with Jordan for his birthday this February? It'll be here sooner than you know it! Reach out to [e-mail] for details if you want to go! When you're paying so much money and time for the privilege of being part of your best friend's wedding party, is it unreasonable that, with plenty of notice, the caterer is refusing to accommodate your vegan request? Recently married, your partner has been voicing concern and guilt for living so far away from family. But due to the nature of your job (which you love), you can't move back to your home state without having to give it up. How do you make an informed decision in this situation? Driving across the country, you were stopped in Texas and ticketed for speeding even though your speedometer says otherwise. You're not sure if you were flagged for out-of-state plates or racially profiled, but you'd like to fight it. What are your legal options? [Thanks to Corbin Payne, Esq. for helping with this one!] We often advise listeners to find competent legal advice, but how do you go about choosing someone? How do you know you will get a performer and not a shyster? [Thanks again to Corbin Payne, Esq. for helping with this one!] The well-paying job where you've worked for 13 years is undergoing a transformation and trying to get rid of as many employees as possible. Of course morale is low and you'd love to quit even to take less money elsewhere, but you've got a baby on the way and your wife wants you to hang in there until you're out of debt. What should you do? Need a little help being a great dad? Ryan's Holiday's See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Feedback Friday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger, and I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. If you're new to the show, Fridays, we give advice to you and answer listener questions. The rest of the week, we have long-form interviews and conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes to authors, thinkers, and performers. And this week, we had Steve Elkins, who literally this guy discovered a lost city in the jungle that was the stuff of legends, which is mind-blowing. He heard about a lost city. It was a legend.

Everyone thought he was crazy. He uses some new technology to scan the jungle, and he freaking finds it. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. The story is incredible. It's one of my favorite interviews I've done recently. So, so interesting. And we had Simon Sinek, The Simon Sinek, with a free-form conversation about the mindset

of some of the top leaders he's connected with over the years. If you're a Simon Sinek fan, this will be right up your alley. There's plenty of new material that he's never discussed anywhere else. And it's funny, we're laughing and joking around. It's Simon Sinek like you probably haven't seen him before. And I also write every so often on the blog. The latest post is about how to ask for advice the right way. Getting a lot of requests, some better than others, for advice.

And I'm hearing people ask for advice online. I'm seeing them do this. And it's wrong. It's not actually a good question. It's not specific enough. It's not a real plea for advice. There's all kinds of little things that can trip you up. And, unfortunately, if you're asking for advice in the wrong way,

you signal to the person that you're asking that you don't really know what you're doing, that you're not really together. It's not a good look. So check that out. Have a look and a listen to everything that we created for you this week. The articles are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash articles, by the way. Of course, our primary mission here on the Jordan Harbinger show

is to pass along our guests and our own experiences and insights along to you. That's what we do here on Friday, every Friday on Feedback Friday. I just want to place one brick in the structure that makes up your life. That's what this podcast is really about. You can always reach us Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com. And before we dive into it, we are going to prison for my birthday, February 25th and 26. We're in prison on the 26th outside Reno. It's 900 bucks plus travel.

The hotel's like 50 bucks. Don't worry about that. Flight should be reasonable to Reno and the money, the 900 bucks, goes to an educational program for the inmates. It's a life-changing experience. I've written an article about it on the blog as well at Jordan Harbinger.com slash articles. A couple of spots left. And I mean like a few, like a single-digit number. We're going to cut the trip off. They asked me to cut it before, but I know there's still some stragglers sliding in. So if you want to go to prison, email me prison at Jordan Harbinger.com and we'll save a spot for you. Jason, what's the first thing out of

the mailbag? Hi, Jordan. My husband and I are both vegan. We don't make a fuss about it and can always find options or make do when we dine out with friends. One of my best friends is getting married and she's asked me to be her bridesmaid, which I'm really honored and excited about. When I asked if there will be a vegan option for dinner, she said they can't accommodate for that. Apparently the caterer is only providing a vegetarian option, but they'll be cooked in butter. So my husband and I won't be able to eat anything, and they suggested that we eat ahead of time, which I feel a little slighted about. What do you? you think? It can't be that hard to accommodate a vegan, and it's not like she didn't know this before. I'm her best friend, and I've been vegan for years now. How hard should I press the issue? Thanks, the butterless bridesmaid. Well, if you were a regular wedding guest, that's one thing. But if you're in the wedding party, you're traveling there, you're going to be there all day, you've probably got other stuff you have to do before the day of the wedding, you've got to go dress shopping, all at your own expense. It seems strange to me that the caterer or can'ts, or more likely

won't accommodate that. I get not wanting to add more stress to the bride's life. You don't want to bug her about it. You don't want to call the caterer yourself and make it confusing. But really, this is just a phone call that she has to make. In fact, it's not even an extra call. It's an item on a call she's already making. Trust me, you're on the call with the caterer a bunch when you're having a wedding. So this is like a line item on another list. And there's usually no or not much additional charge for meals for folks with dietary considerations like this. If you had a nut allergy, this would be dead simple. Hey, I got somebody that's allergic to nuts.

Okay, great, we're going to make something for them. We have a $10 fee for that, whatever. In fact, I thought for sure that I was oversimplifying this one. So I actually called our own wedding caterer, and she was glad to hear I wasn't getting married once again, and I asked her about this. Here's what she said, paraphrased. This is not only a reasonable request,

but a lot of times vegan meals are just as easy for us as vegetarian since they require about the same level of attention. We're professional caterers, which means we have chefs on duty to cook the food just like any restaurant. The difference is that we're trying to serve a lot of people at one time as close together as possible. So if the wedding is especially large, the only thing that might change is the vegan folks might get their meal earlier, just like an airplane, right? It may be nothing fancy, it may be very simple, or we might not have a dessert on hand for them unless we have advanced notice. Even then, given enough notice, all this can be arranged. even if there's only one to two vegans at any particular wedding.

So I think in this case, the bride is likely stressed to the max. She either didn't ask the caterer or the caterer as being unreasonable. Or maybe she just thinks you're annoying that you're vegan and she doesn't want to accommodate it for some other issue. And she's digging her heels in. I don't know. That said, I would look at the deeper issue here, which is that you're a bridesmaid at your best friend's wedding.

And since this is her day, it might not be worth making a big deal out of this one. Yeah, it's a pain. It's a little unfair. it was avoidable for sure. Maybe ask nicely one more time if they can accommodate, knowing now that almost any caterer can do this without a problem,

or just bring a couple of friggin' food bars and forget about it. The food is not the important part of the day anyway. And honestly, unless you're really allergic or you feel very, very strongly about this, perhaps you could just be a mere vegetarian just for that evening. I know a lot of vegans do that.

Certainly my vegan friends are doing that. Even some of my vegetarian friends will splurge occasionally, and eats seafood or meat, it's just not worth getting into a tussle with the family and your best friend on their wedding day. That much I can say for sure. So enjoy the day. Just don't worry about it. Whatever happens, just work around it. And that's my advice. Just don't make a bigger deal out of it than needed. Yes, it's unfair. Yes, it should be a problem that's easily solved. But is this a hill that you want to die on at your best friend's wedding? And my advice would be to not do that. All right, what's next?

and recently married, living in Denver. Neither my partner or myself are from Denver, and ironically, both our families live in Texas. Recently, my partner has been voicing a lot of concern and guilt for being away from family. My partner's family is from South America, and family ties are critical. We've both weighed the pros and cons of moving in the past, but end up deciding we're in a pretty good place until my partner's guilt-slash depression started to increase. We've weighed Austin as the only practical place we might live. While I would enjoy being closer to family, my main concern is my job. I love it and the company I'm with. They're respectful, supportive, paid for my professional license, continual raises, and they've discussed an ownership slash leader

position in the long term. Overall, they value their people, and I have deeply valued this as many jobs in my profession have poor work-life balance and result in low morale. I'm in a good place in my career. Due to the nature of my work, interaction with clients and site visits are critical to my job, so I don't think a remote position would be practical or doable in the long term. I'm feeling a bit lost and uncertain how to move forward. Do you have any advice or techniques to make an informed decision? I typically stall and delay with tough decisions, and this is certainly one of those times. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks, caught in limbo. Well, whenever there's a situation like this, you need to weigh your partner's issues very carefully. Is the family thing? Is this the real issue? Is this really the cause? You know, for me, there's a part of me that's just like, tough crap, they agreed to live there, deal with it, right? And I know that you've thought about that too, but you're nicer than me. I wouldn't do that to my wife or partner either. You can end up moving to Texas and quitting your amazing job, only to find out that your partner is still depressed because they don't feel fulfilled in some other way or they just flat out suffer from depression. It might just look like the family thing is the issue now, and maybe that's not really it. Maybe that's just the conscious reason for it. You know, this has happened. all the time, you might be angry about something and you say, you know, it's because this always happens and this a-hole always forgets to do that. And then you go and eat lunch and you're like,

oh, I was hungry. Yeah, I'm not mad anymore. Oh, that's weird. Okay, so I was just hangary. I got to note that. And then next time it happens, you get angry and either you note that maybe you're hungry or it happens all over again until you learn your lesson. That can be sort of a similar phenomenon that's going on here. Oh, I'm depressed. I missed my family. I got to move. I want to move now, and then it turns out, oh, I just don't like my career track. Or, oh, I'm just unhappy with some other thing. Or, oh, I want to have kids now, and I never was able to voice that. That's what's missing from my life, not living near my uncle. You know, like, we don't know exactly what the issue here really is. Therapy is something you and your partner should do first before making

any logistical decisions about location, career, et cetera. Sometimes depression is just depression. It's a brain chemical thing. It's not caused by homesickness. Oftentimes, it's not caused by stress a lot of the time. Sometimes it is, but other times it just is. And it doesn't sound like you can negotiate any sort of remote position with work. And honestly, even if you could, this would likely hamper or possibly tank your career. And to be honest, to be blunt about it, Denver's just not that far from Texas. Your partner might want to be closer to family, but maybe they can spend a couple weekends a month down there. I just don't think it's fair for them to ask you to move, especially after you've already built your life in Denver together and there

weren't any issues when you made that decision also together just recently. And I understand circumstances change. You can't really say, hey, look, you have to be happy here because we agreed on it two years ago. I understand that. But you're in a situation now where it would be massively unfair to you if you had to pack it in and move and start all over again. It's probably better for them to plan and make regular trips to Texas. In fact, just planning the trips gives your partner something to look forward to on a regular basis. And if it really is the case that they're missing their family down in Texas, seeing them twice a month should help significantly, if that's possible. And you can even have other family members fly up and stay with you once a month. I mean,

this is not an insurmountable task. It's not like they live in Brazil. They don't live in China, right? This isn't that much distance. In the age of aviation, it's just a very solvable issue. And yeah, the cost will add up a bit, but I would wager that it's cheaper than relocating and starting another career. And besides, you're going to earn tons of miles. You can use those to go on a nice vacation once in a while. Before making any big decisions to move one place or another, though, you need to address the guilt issue and the depression issue first with a qualified professional. Otherwise, you're just going to be curing the symptoms and not the disease, so to speak. This is Feedback Friday. We'll be right back after this.

Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Now let's hear some more of your questions here on Feedback Friday. All right, Jason, what else we got?

Hi, Jordan and team. I was driving cross-country with a car I just purchased in Ohio. returning to Los Angeles for work. During the trip I was traveling through a part of Texas with no cell or GPS signal. I was following about three car lengths behind a truck with local plates. In what I understood was a 75-mile-an-hour zone going 73, according to my digital display. A sheriff going the opposite direction passes the truck and myself, turns on his flashers in immediately 180s pulling me over. He tells me that he clocked me doing 76 in a 60-mile-an-hour construction zone,

which I questioned, as there was no sense. signage, barrels, or otherwise, he only replied that there was a 10-mile stretch that was a construction zone on this road. I figured my Ohio tags were the reason for the stop. Why not hit someone who's unlikely to come back and fight the ticket, being the end of the month, year, decade? But when I saw the citation, he listed my ethnicity as n. Hispanic, despite every identification I've ever had denoting myself as white-slash-caucasian. Also, the actual ticket has the speed at 65, my speed at 68, and construction zone with workers present. Even without the possible questions about being profiled, nothing he verbally told me seems to match the citation I received. As I got back on the road

just about two miles from where I was stopped, I did actually see road construction with workers, barrels, and reduced speed limit signs. But I have no idea if the location on my ticket is accurate to where I was actually stopped. I know that you're a lawyer, but not my lawyer. How should I go about this, though? I feel that I need a lawyer at this point, and I'm guessing one in this Texas County, not California or Ohio. I feel like it's a My Cousin Vinny scenario at that point, and as I said, I'm out of state for work. Will I have to get back to Texas in the next two weeks? How do I go about finding a lawyer? Just Google and hope for the best? I'm quite a bit out of my depth. Finally, how can I or anyone in a similar situation, gather evidence to help their case. I just bought my car and didn't have a dash cam or

any other monitoring device. I couldn't even drop a GPS pin to research later as I had no signal. And even if I would have thought of it at the time, I'm pretty sure I would have caused more problems for myself if I'd try to photograph anything in the area while the sheriff watched me. Should I even bother fighting it or just pay up and avoid Texas entirely? Thanks. Profiled by the Popo. Well, the first thing that you should do whenever you get pulled over is turn on the voice memo app on your phone and just start recording the interaction. Usually, you won't need it, and hopefully most of the time the police will be professional and nice. You can keep the phone either on your dashboard. I would turn the screen off, so they're not like, hey, why are you recording this?

You know, it's a little agro, even though it's completely allowed. You can also just keep it on the seat next to you. It doesn't really matter. and I would also take a video, a panoramic slow pan, not quick, slow pan video of everything around you, especially if it's, hey, you're in a construction zone. It's great if you can then say, all right, I've recorded this entire thing,

and now I've got a video, and I'm doing a 360-degree pan from the shoulder of the road, and guess what? There's cows and no cars and no construction stuff anywhere, and that's a bunch of baloney, right? That's better than going, okay, I'm in court now, I have no idea where I was, and the constructions moved 14 times since then, and is 10 miles down the road, and we got to get records and see if it was there at that time.

It's just easier to show where you were. But as far as finding a lawyer in dealing with this case specifically, I asked for help from Corbin Payne. He's a criminal defense attorney and a fan of the show, and he says that he suspects, and we'll speak in the first person, he wrote this to us, said, I suspect that he is mostly correct about getting pulled over because of his out-of-state plates. The truck probably got away without getting pulled over because truckers always hire attorneys to fight tickets because tickets can really mess up their licensing. I've also seen tickets before where the officer was dead wrong in

terms of the location of a construction zone. That can be as simple as a fact that construction zones often move depending on the type of construction being conducted. The officer may be genuinely confused about where the construction zone begins and ends and simply made an error. The less savoury explanation is that speeding in a work zone and doing so when workers are present significantly increases a simple speeding fine. Since profiled is both an out-of-towner and misidentified as Hispanic, a less than savory officer may be counting upon the writer here to not return and not fight this ticket, resulting in easy money for the county. All in all, this is way too big for profiled by the Popo to handle on his own. The fact that he doesn't have much evidence

he can provide could be problematic, but the officer is actually supposed to leave some of that. First, they're supposed to state where the stop occurred and to state it with some specificity. They have zero power to write tickets outside of the county where they're employed, so they have to at least state that. Using that information, a local attorney should be able to determine whether that occurred in a construction zone or not. Additionally, more and more police departments are outfitting their officers' cars with video or photographic recording as well as GPS units. To get this information, profiled would have to go through the court system and make the appropriate filings. That's the sort of thing a local attorney would know how to do and a non-lawyer would

not. So my recommendation to find a local attorney would be to call the number for the court and ask to speak to one of the clerks. This isn't one of the county clerks. That's a different office. This is a clerk of the court, and they tend to be extremely well connected to people who know everyone. Explain that you're out of state, you got a ticket, and you want to hire a good attorney in that county to represent you. That's it. Don't go into details. Don't badmouth the officer. Just stick with the bare minimum. Because the clerks have roughly the same amount of paperwork to process whether you win or lose your case, and they don't work for the police or the prosecutor, they don't have a dog in the fight and they can give you good information. Call the attorney ASAP,

and the two of you can discuss what your desired outcome is. The attorney will be able to give you a idea of the outcome in the case and you can decide what you're comfortable with. In most instances, they can seriously lower the charges and the costs without you even having to be there. If you do want to fight, they can also reset a case for a date that's more convenient for you to actually be present if you have to go back to Texas. Also, GPS works pretty much wherever. I just want to sort of correct that. GPS, the whole thing was designed to map the whole earth. There shouldn't be blank spots in GPS. I'm sure technically there are, and maybe those actually are in big cities with tall buildings that block the signal. But I don't think GPS in the middle of nowhere. The whole

point of GPS is you can map things in the middle of the ocean with nothing there. Maybe your phone couldn't pick up an accurate GPS signal, in which case that's a little bit problematic. My Garmin watch has a GPS coordinate widget that shows you exactly where you are at any time, anywhere on planet Earth as long as it's got a signal from the sky. I think he misunderstood how GPS works and thought that since he didn't have a cell signal, he didn't have GPS because out on the planes in Texas, with no obstructions, you have a better GPS signal than anywhere else that you can get one. Exactly.

Yeah, that's kind of the idea is you're supposed to be able to be in the middle of the desert in Chad and go, this is exactly where I am down to about 10 feet, right? Right. So that's the whole point of GPS. Yeah, if you don't have a phone signal and your phone, the dots move. moving around all weird or the map's not loading, that's one thing. But you can still drop a pin right there. And then when you get back to having cell signal, it'll load the map and it'll show you, oh, you're in the middle of nowhere. Here's your GPS coordinates. Here's the exact spot,

give or take, five, ten feet where you were on the highway when you got pulled over. And you can actually, there are apps that do this. You can tag the video with the GPS coordinates. So if you film where you are and you've got GPS coordinates in the video, they can't say, video could have been anywhere. It's like, no, the phone knows it's right here. Your squad car GPS says it's right here. That's a video of where this person was pulled over and there's no construction. Yeah, if he's taking a video on his phone, it would automatically tag that in the XIF data for any videos or photographs. So all he had to do is literally take a picture of the ground and it would have the GPS cord and it's built into the actual image itself. Yeah, I think if you do a panel, a slow

pano, especially if you get the squad car behind you, you just got to look like you're not doing something weird, but you can just sort of pan past the squad car and then pan and film the rest of it. And if he's like, what are you doing? You can say, well, I'm filming the location where I'm at, because I don't see a construction zone. I mean, he's probably not going to get upset if he's professional. If you're worried that he profiled you and he's looking for trouble, just wait until he gets in the car and takes off or so repetitiously sort of film the whole area. You're allowed to film anything. Cops have body cams for a reason. They're not allowed to act in secret. And here, honestly, who knows what the hell happened? He might have been a racist.

this sort of rednecky cop or he might have just been a guy who didn't know where the construction zone was and thought you had a tan so you were Hispanic. Who the hell knows, man? I don't know. I try to assume the best, but it is a little weird how this all went down, honestly. All right, what's next? Hey, Jays, you often advise listeners to find competent legal advice, but how do you go about choosing a lawyer?

I won't bore you with the details, but in multiple real estate and business deals over the last several years, I found that lawyers are just a money suck, pulling in thousands of dollars in retainers and producing nearly zero results to show for it. And don't even get me started on my divorce. How do you know you will get a performer and not a sheister? Thanks. And for Jason, deliveroo! Signed, sick of lazy lawyers.

That's following us for the next decade. Dude, it hasn't let me go for years. I thought this was a good question to put right after the first because we had Corbyn on the line anyway. And a lot of people might be going, oh, hire a lawyer for that. That's a bunch of garbage. hired a lawyer once and it was a bad experience. So Corbyn, once again, defense attorney in front of the show, came to us with an answer to this

specific issue. He said, this might be an issue with unmet expectations. That's certainly what it sounds like. The best way to avoid that is to be explicit about expectations up front. Be detailed and feel free to engage with the attorney on what they're charging. Feel free to dispute the bill on the back end as well if you're not satisfied with their performance. So don't just pay the whole thing. Pay the whole thing. Pay. the retainer, pay all the bills, and then three months later, be like, by the way, this sucked and I want a refund. That won't happen. Dispute at the right time and keep it civil. Not, I'm not paying you. This is ridiculous. Ask them to sort of justify what's going on here. Most lawyers will go, oh, no problem.

Here's how this went down. I do this all the time and the lawyer will say, you know, the reason that this cost extra is because I actually had to do A, B, C, D, E, but I didn't bill you for the three phone calls we had afterwards because, honestly, it took me longer to find the place. And I did a whole bunch of extra work, but now that I know how to do it, it'll be quicker, so I only build you for one hour and for none of the calls. That kind of thing is very routine, and a good lawyer will often round down because they want repeat business, man. Lawyers love repeat customers. A good lawyer will take it to heart and strive to better meet your expectations on the next job. If it's sort of a one-off, like they're fighting some sort of ticket or something like that,

often the fees are flat anyway. You might have also hired an attorney working in a legal mill. In other words, the attorney's dealing in volume, which is never good. They're trying to take on as many clients as possible and get the work done as quickly as possible. Quality is at best of secondary concern. Usually that sort of attorney is going to pass the paperwork along to a secretary, a paralegal, and basically just rubber stamp the end product after a quick once over. Legal mills tend to be middle market in terms of positioning and pricing. Oftentimes, it's better to go with a more upscale firm with attorneys who spend a lot more personal time,

on their clients matters. That, of course, tends to be more expensive, but you get better value dollar for dollar. The alternative is to go down market and find a young up-and-coming attorney who's really hungry and is willing to give you a competitive rate in exchange for top-notch service.

Those are different options, right? So you either go down-market, find somebody who's new and really hungry, and they really want to be your lawyer and they're going to work their butt off, or you go top-end and you get the best guy for the job, best gal for the job,

gangster sort of lawyer, you're going to pay for the privilege, but they're going to make sure it kind of gets done right. They're going to make sure that you're happy. Middle market is where you lose. That's where you end up paying for their marketing and you end up paying for the margin that they need in order to be economical because they advertise on television or whatever it is. So either all the way up or all the way down within reason. And three, meet attorneys socially. I've met a ton of people socially. And Corbyn says I've met a bunch of people through church, trivia leagues, biking clubs, the gym. who eventually hired him to work for that law office. Corbyn says that there's something strange, but as an attorney, I find I do a better job representing people who have some of the same

interests and hobbies in common with me, which, by the way, that's natural. You want to do business with your friends, you'd do a better job. More of a relationship tends to develop between the attorney and the client when you have similarities, and there's much more comfort on both sides for both the client and the attorney to have great feedback about the work product. In fact, you probably already know a lawyer or two without even knowing it. Real estate law isn't the most glamorous of jobs. By the way, that's the job I had. So I know that to be the case.

Real estate lawyers don't necessarily go around bragging about their careers, which is why I just say I was an attorney on Wall Street and not real estate finance, because nobody cares also. And if you don't know someone like that personally, I'd be willing to bet you know someone who knows an attorney. So start asking around. Eventually, somebody's going to refer you to a conscientious attorney, and that attorney will either be able to represent you or will steer you in the right direction.

And just a side note from me here, if you get the feeling that an attorney you are looking to hire is not conscientious. Like they flake on an appointment. They don't call you back when they say they will. It takes five days and three follow-ups to get an email reply. Trust that they are going to be worse once they have your money. Not necessarily doing it on purpose, but they might be spending too much time on sales. They might have a crazy litigation schedule, and that will, of course, always take priority over somebody who's a new inquiry or an inquiry or something that can wait.

So just be very, very cautious. Somebody getting back to you within a few hours is not necessary, but a lawyer should at worst get back to you within a day or two if they have to be in court. Somebody who takes five days to get back to you, not a good sign, trust your gut, and just move on. That's been one of the most frustrating things. Aside from blatant incompetence or scamminess, the worst thing you can find is a lawyer that doesn't answer phone calls or emails in a timely manner. You have to be careful. If they're not good at email but they like to call you, that's one thing.

But if you can't reach them by phone or by email and they won't text you back, there's something wrong there and you should move on. It doesn't mean they don't care. They might just be too busy. But do you want to be the bottom of the totem pole when this is such an important issue in your life? No. Thanks to Corbin Payne, criminal defense lawyer, friend of the show.

for the help with this one as well. We'll be right back with more Feedback Friday right after this. Now back to the show for the conclusion of Feedback Friday. Jason, what's next? Hi, Triple J. I'm currently feeling stuck in my work. I work for a rail transportation company as a train crew employee. It's not a bad job and used to be better. The company is undergoing a transformation and currently trying to get rid of as many employees as

possible and the ones that are left are being made miserable. The managers don't lead, but micromanage and, and bird-dog us and are mostly toxic and just spend their days covering their own butts so they don't get canned. It's basically everyone out for themselves, and the morale is very low. The union is of no help because they're just trying to survive. The work schedule isn't predictable, one day working at 2 p.m. and the next at 2 a.m. But the problem is, I've been there for 13 years and make six figures a year. I have a wife, a mortgage, and a new baby on the way. I just got my Class A commercial driver's license and have been working part-time driving a dump truck.

It's enjoyable, but it only pays half of what I make now. We would be okay on that salary, but I want to give my wife and kids a comfortable life. I came from a poor single-parent household where money was always a concern. I feel very trapped. My wife's job has good benefits, and she wants me to tough it out until we get out of some credit card debt. I currently take a couple medications and go to a therapist, but it doesn't feel like it's helping. What do I do? Stay with a toxic environment with big money, or take lower pay with lower cash.

Thank you. signed, feeling those golden handcuffs. Ugh, this sounds like a miserable environment. I was all like, quit now, take less money, until I saw that you're expecting a baby. I get it. Oh, yeah, that's tough. That's tough. Yeah, I get it.

I see you're being squeezed from both sides, and while I can never tell you what to do, that's never stopped me before, right? So here's what I would do if I were in your shoes. While I can never tell you what to do, let me tell you what to do. I mean, look, everybody knows this is just my opinion. It's just that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about these problems for a lot of people. So I feel like, we're in a good place to look at this. And I'm not emotionally attached to this.

I don't care how much you're going to miss your coworkers. That information is missing, right? I'm not worried about your wife getting angry. It's an afterthought for me. So I'm coming at this with like a little bit more of a logical and unemotional solution focus here. I was going to say, you're the SPOC to this question. Yes, for all of these kinds of questions. And I think that's why people value it because these situations are not usually emotionally charged

for me. So here's what I would do if I were in your shoes. I would sit down with your wife and explain how horrible your current job is and how you feel about it and how it's harming your sanity. Do not sugarcoat it. Do not downplay. Well, it's a little bit rough right now. It's a little bit negative. She needs to know exactly how bad it is. And you don't have to advocate for anything, but you have to communicate clearly. Because if she's just like, oh, he's sick of getting up early, I understand that, but we have a baby coming. She needs to know like, look, this is killing me inside. Everyone's negative, they're always out trying to stab me in the back. I dread every single day. How much longer do we need to do this? I think you've probably done this already and been clear, but if you haven't,

now's the time. And then in that same conversation, what I would do is outline exactly how much debt is left to pay off. If you got 20K and credit card debt, I would say, okay, we have 20K, here's where the interest is taking it, that upward projection, and figure out the precise time given you paying X percent of your paycheck towards that debt, figure out the precise time that you'll be able to leave that job that you hate. So then you'll get an exact date. And by the way, side note, I hadn't really put this into words before now, but I would call whatever credit card companies and banks you have that you owe, and I would do your damnedest to try and get the APR down and say, look, if we agree to this repayment plan, can you lower the interest to this percent?

Negotiate this. Because if you're paying 20 percent, 21 percent, whatever it is, on these credit cards, you may be able to call and say, can you bring it down to 11 if I agree to pay 600 bucks a month? You know, they will often say yes because their choices to maybe get stiffed, right? You can tell them, I'm having a lot of trouble and I've got a baby on the way. Can you help me out? Often they are more than willing and they have the flexibility to be able to do this. So negotiate all the cards. If you need help with that, look online. You can also write and check it out. I would look at the Alex Kutz episodes, which will link in the show notes and try to negotiate those cards. Also, Ramit Saiti, good friend of ours, friend of the show, been on the show before.

Check out his book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. He's got a new edition, I think, that came out in 2018 or 2019. Updated scripts, everything you need to say to negotiate credit cards and other things. Go grab, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. We'll link to that in the show notes as well, and just grab it and buy it if you don't have it. Call those cards and negotiate. You could save thousands of dollars. But more importantly, if you negotiate these down, the interest down, it's less time that you have to spend in the job that you hate. So this isn't just money you're saving. It's time because if you calculate how much it's going to take to pay off this debt, how long it's going to take, if the debt and interest are lower, if the interest is lower, the debt's lower,

which means it's less time you get to spend in the job that you hate. So you set a target date, target month, target week, target pay period, whatever it is. And this is the date that you get to leave that job. And I would project out an extra month or so, a couple pay periods, just in case like, oh, hey, look, we had to get a C-section for the babies, so that was a little bit more expensive. So what you don't want is to go, great, it looks like it's going to be February 20th, and then you push it back by another pay period, and then you've got to push it back by another pay period. That's going to be demoralizing for you. Project out an extra month or two, and then if you get to leave early, great, because nothing

went wrong. But if things start going wrong, you're not moving your date. You're not adjusting your date, right? That's not going to be depressing for you. It's like getting out of class early. feels good. But if you get out of class late, feels miserable. We all remember those days, right? So you'll be making less money when you take the new job, but the thing is you'll be in a better place, I would argue, to take care of your family if you're happy and you're healthy rather than

just making more money. And there's some myth here that we all believe, myself included, that more money is better in every case. And this is often true as long as we value our sanity and our quality of life at zero. I don't advise doing that. I think that doing this is a huge mistake. Quality of work life directly affects your home life, your marriage, parenting, relationships, et cetera. That is not a mystery right now, right?

This is 2020, we know that if we're miserable at work, we're miserable at home. We've all seen that happen with our parents, probably. We get it, right? We know this. You probably feel it yourself. You need to make sure that you're taking care of yourself as a human, not just grinding yourself to the bone

so that you can get a bigger TV, you can take the kids to Disneyland every year. Babies are expensive, but let me be honest, you don't need to make six figures to raise a single child with your wife. You just don't. Making a good salary,

but not a great salary, it's far better for you and your family than being miserable, but making great money. Trust me, I worked on Wall Street, I've seen all of this firsthand. I've seen what happens when people sell their quality of life for money.

It's not pretty. They have nice boats, They're miserable people a lot of the time. Don't do that to yourself. I got an email today. I'm on Ryan Holiday's Daily Dad email list. I highly recommend this for Dad's new and experienced. The Daily Dad, it's a couple paragraphs of just thoughts on dad life.

Comes every day. And there was one recently that was like, hey, do you remember your parents not having much money as a kid? And some of us do and some of us don't. But what do you really remember? Like, oh, we couldn't afford this. Unless you were in a legit poverty, you probably didn't care as a little kid. You just didn't care.

It really didn't affect your daily life, even when you were a little older. When you were a teenager, maybe you realized, ooh, I don't have the same stuff as everyone else or preteen. But really, you remember good experiences. You remember your dad playing with you. And if you had a lot of that, you had a better childhood, almost objectively. Right. You had a better childhood.

Your dad was a happy guy. He came home and he played with you in the sandbox. If your dad was miserable and worked all the time, you remember some of these positive experiences, but they're fewer and far between. That's not good. So your kid's not really going to care. There's going to be less stress money-wise, but if you're making half of what you're making and you're not really putting as much away, your quality of life's going to be very similar.

So you've got to really do the math here and realize that retiring a little earlier is not worth being miserable in your day-to-day. It really isn't, especially if your wife has an income, you guys are going to be just fine. There's a lot more to life and being a good husband and a good parent than your paycheck. If you sacrifice your sanity for the paycheck, there's not going to be anything left of you for your wife and child when you get home, man. There's just not. I saw this. My dad went through a really stressful period at work and he worked all the time. And I remember it really clearly. My mom and I were really unhappy because he was really unhappy. He was kind of a tyrant. It wasn't a good

situation. Luckily, before and after that, he was better. And then when he retired, all of the all that work stress melted away, and he turned into a different person. You know, he really did. He's a different person now. And you've got to realize that that's going to be you. If you're stressed all the time and you're watching your six all the time because you're going to get fired, your manager's going to kick your butt, whatever it is, it's not good for you. It's not good for your wife. It's not good for your kid. It doesn't matter if you have more cash to get them to a private school.

The stress is going to outweigh any benefit you get from the money. The strategy of calculating exactly how much time you have to spend in the current job also has the added benefit of what you might. might say having the keys to the prison. Once you figure out exactly when you can leave, you got a fairly concrete date in mind, going to work day to day, it's not going to be as horrible. You won't dread it as much because every day you trudged through is just one less day you have to do it in the future. So you go to work, your manager gives you a bunch of garbage, you find out that you got to do this other overtime thing. You weren't planning. All these people

are complaining and whining and you're just going, I'm only here for nine more months. So, yeah, that's a bummer there, Jim. Oh yeah, I'll get right on that, sir. Thanks. You're not going, this is my life for the foreseeable future. You're just saying, well, cross this day off the calendar, mark another X in it. You can let all of it roll off your back because you're going to be out. You're going to be out and you know exactly when. Keys to the prison. Trust me, man. Been there. Really huge benefit that's underrated. Congrats on the new baby, by the way. We'll link to the Daily Dad. We'll link to Ramit's book and we'll link to the Alex Kootz episodes in the show notes as well. Life Pro Tip. I got some awesome insurance. They're not a sponsor or anything they should be.

We should go after him for this. But we will link to the provider in the show notes, they ensure all of our camera and recording equipment, the lighting, the laptops, the iPad, the microphones, they won't cover cell phones. But if you travel with any sort of equipment, and I mean, like, let's say that you travel with your laptop all the time, or you travel with a couple bits of gear all the time, we're paying for like $15,000 plus $1,000 worth of equipment, we're paying $350. And they pay for the replacement value of the item, and they cover mysterious disappearances. It took me a long time to find insurance that would cover this. So if we check a huge box of gear and the airline loses it, they'll cover that. Most insurance

will not cover that. They only cover theft when you can prove like this was stolen, not like, oh, the airline lost it, or it was in the hotel's storage room and now it's not. That's considered a mysterious disappearance and you're basically screwed. And my cat had spilled water on my laptop. They covered the whole thing after we filled out paperwork and provided documents. And I think we got the check in like three days or two days. It was really, really fast. The provider is for photographers, but any recording, any sort of specialist who does any kind of media or anything, and frankly, any freelancer can cover their stuff. I think even if you just have a couple of laptops or your family travels and you've got a bunch of laptops and you have an iPad and maybe you've got a couple

other things, it's well worth it and the premiums are low. It's just nice to be able to go, yeah, this got lost, but it's completely covered. It's just peanuts. To cover 15 to 20K worth of stuff for 350 at replacement value and to get paid right away is really, really nice. And I didn't know this. Most people I know who I hire freelancers and otherwise, they don't have any insurance on their stuff. So if their car gets broken into or their car gets stolen and they get 15, 20K worth of the stuff taken out of the back, they can't work anymore. So this is a worthwhile investment and you pay over time. So it's a very worthy investment. That's photographer's insurance. We'll link to the provider in the show notes and happily refer you over there. We don't get anything for this, but now that I've

finally found a provider for this and had a chance to make a claim, I highly recommend it. Recommendation of the week, the patent scam. This is on Amazon Prime Video. We found a treasure trove of sort of like low-budget documentaries, if you will. Patent scam is this very nerdy but funny guy. he gets sued by a patent troll. And he decides to do a deep dive on the patent troll industry. So he really deconstructs this. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that you've never heard of. This is the world that patent trolls thrive in,

created for them by the U.S. patent system. It's corny, but it's informational. It's very interesting. And it turns out that there are patent trolls that are suing Puma, Nike. I think Apple's the biggest target for this. And they'll say, oh, you know, you have violated this patent on using lists that are on the internet. It's like,

how do you patent having a list of things on the internet? How do you patent having a hyperlink and using it on a website? So they're suing tons of businesses and they make millions of dollars because it's cheaper to settle in almost every instance than it is to go to court over this. They're all in the same district. They're all filed in the East District of Texas. There's two judges there that also happened to have their sons founding the law firms that do patent litigation. Oh, that's convenient. It is, right? And so he even did a deeper dive.

He goes, here's an update. The two judges that worked in this district, their offices are across the street from the courthouse. They've since retired and gone into business doing, guess what? Patent law consulting. So they are basically working on this. And you can't file stays or moving the venue or changing the jurisdiction because they'll just say no. I mean, there's just very few instances of blatant sort of collusion corruption in the

legal system other than this. And there's legislation, thankfully, from a few states that are working to fight this, but it's very dangerous. I don't know if you, you remember this, Jason, when Adam Carolla, Apple, and a bunch of other people got sued because these patent-troll companies, they have no business. They don't do anything other than buy patents for really cheap. And then file lawsuits. They'll file like 30 lawsuits a day or a week. No, I donated a thousand. to Adam Carolla's patent fund to fight these guys when that was going on. It was a big deal because they were basically saying you can't have playlists in a podcast player because they own the patent on it. And it was ridiculous. So it goes down to a lot of software patents, which is the big

thing because software patents are inherently dumb because the patent office doesn't know how to file anything that deals with software because it's a bunch of patent clerks. Yes, I know Einstein was a patent clerk, but still, they're not software engineers. And they're also on a quota. They have to approve like four patents a day or something like that. Oh, man. So they're just going, oh, a unique way to save customer data in the cloud? Cool, you patent this. And then they sue Salesforce for having a way to save customer data in the cloud.

And then they go sue Zoho and then they sue da-da-da. And meanwhile, they've never made this. They just came up with this vague idea. So they're filing these patents too. They're saying, oh, if we get this patent approved, we can then sue all these companies. So they'll file hundreds of patents. some will get rejected, some will go through, they'll buy patents from other people, and then they'll file lawsuits. That's the whole business. It's such a scummy, crappy thing. I kind of think we should do a

whole show on this, actually. It would be really interesting. Do you did hear the Supreme Court has ruled that patent holders can no longer choose where to file infringement suits, though? Well, they didn't say they couldn't. What happened was a certain jurisdiction. I can't remember what it was now. They said, this is the new law. And then the district attorneys, the patent litigants, the patent litigations, They fought it, and they said that's unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court said, no, it's not unconstitutional for a state to say you have to file a lawsuit in our state and not in the area that's convenient for you as a litigator. Because what was happening is they'll sue Apple and then 10,100 small businesses in Michigan, Connecticut, and Nevada, they'll sue them in the Eastern District of Texas. So then they have to hire a defense firm in Texas to fight this, and the jurisdiction is unfriendly

for defending against patents. So they end up settling there. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. You now have to sue them where the defendant is supposedly violating the patent. That's what the legislation said. They fought that new legislation. They said that's unconstitutional. Obviously, they lost because that's a ridiculous argument.

But it's scary. It's not every jurisdiction has this. So you can still get sued in plenty of states and then have to defend yourself in freaking Texas. So it's a multi-billion dollar industry. It's insane. It's really crazy. So the patent scam on Prime Video, we should do a whole show about this.

It is fascinating. I would love to. I would absolutely love to. Maybe we can get Mark Cuban on because he's about as vociferous about this as I am. I hate patent trolls so much. Well, it's scary as a small business owner. I think the average settlement is like $340,000. Yeah.

So they can come after somebody like us and say, hey, look, you can't podcast. and then we go, well, crap, I can sell my house and still do business. But then I, you know, I'm screwed. Like, what are you going to do? It's terrifying. Yeah, Adam Carolla spent over a million dollars out of pocket. That's after all of the donations that everybody sent in. And fortunately, he could absorb it and they eventually settled.

But it was an unsatisfactory settlement. But yeah, I mean, most people would have been out of business by that point. Hope you all enjoyed that. I want to thank everyone that wrote in this week. We're going to prison. If you want to join us, Prison at Jordan Harbinger.com. A link to the show notes for this episode can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com as well. Quick shout out to Jason Radenbach.

Thanks for writing in men and suggesting another nickname for the audience. I still haven't come up with anything. I'm still sort of floating around in there. So if you have an idea on what you should be called, you know Lady Gaga calls her fans Little Monsters. I think Dax Shepherd uses cherries because of armchair expert, very clever. I'm just not that clever when it comes to that sort of thing. So I'm open to ideas.

You can always email me, Jordan atjörbinger.com. go back and check out the guests, Steve Elkins, who discovered a Lost City, and Simon Sinek, as well as the article about how to ask for advice. If you haven't seen that yet, if you haven't heard those yet, if you want to know how I managed to book all these great people, it's because of the network, man, I'm telling you, check out six-minute networking. It's free. It's at Jordanharbinger.com slash course.

Don't do it later. Dig the well before you get thirsty. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. It's all free. It's at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. And I'm also on Instagram and Twitter at Jordan Harbinger. It's a great way to engage with the show. And videos of our interviews are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube.

Jason? You can check out my tech podcast, Grumpy Old Geeks. We discuss what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame, along with cybersecurity apps, gadgets, books, and more. That's Grumpy Old Geeks and Deliveroo. This show is created in association with Podcast One. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, edited by Jace Sanderson. Show notes for the episode by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola.

Keep sending in those questions to Friday at Jordan Harbinger.com. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own, and yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, so do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love, and even those you don't. Lots more in the pipeline. Very excited to bring it to you. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you

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