Across The Bar Podcast

Microsoft offers 60,000 employees a buyout, and Weil Gotshal shuts down after more than 90 years. Peter and Laura get into what buyouts really pay, how a powerhouse law firm collapses, and the St. Louis company that has never laid anyone off. Also this week: Anthropic’s H-1B problem, Marissa Mayer’s AI startup Dazzle, Hollywood’s vanishing women executives, and why young chefs are skipping their dues. Plus Heroes & Zeros.

Peter spotted Midtown office workers waiting half an hour for frozen yogurt at 3 p.m. on a weekday, and he has thoughts. Laura thinks it might be the new dating scene. That’s just the warm-up.

This week, a listening device allegedly found taped to a TV in an OpenAI conference room kicks off a conversation about how far corporate espionage has gone: foreign operatives landing remote jobs, honey traps in the park, and employees told not to wear company merch in public. Peter also confesses that a room full of lawyers at a conference had no screen protectors, so anyone could read their potentially privileged work.

Then: McKinsey now makes first-round candidates interview with a bot pretending to be a client. Peter objects on two fronts. Plus the Princeton chemical engineering PhD with 2,300 interviews and no job, a Cambridge professor arguing we should abolish business school (Peter’s Duke classmates won’t love his take), and why law school should be two years.

From there: ultra-wealthy households making the pool guy sign a 15-page NDA, and Peter’s advice for billionaires (hint: use an agency). With midterms two weeks out, a refresher on what employers can and can’t regulate when it comes to political speech, at work and outside it.

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A McKinsey partner went on LinkedIn to announce that the “glass cliff” isn’t real. He kept his job and lost his leadership role. He’ll also have that post as his top Google result for the rest of his life. Peter and Laura explain why LinkedIn is the one platform where your hot takes come with your employer’s logo attached. They also suggest what he should have done, which was host the authors for an internal company event, not a public pile-on.

Speaking of lunch: Ancestry’s CEO says the best leadership move is eating with your employees wherever they actually eat. That means the break room, not the executive dining room. We agree, mostly. Laura has a frequency note, and both hosts have NYC cafeteria stories, including some Gayle King salad-bar diplomacy.

Then there’s Kimberly Guilfoyle, now the former ambassador to Greece, after Wall Street Journal reporting on wealthy businessmen allegedly covering her Amex bills, flights and a trip to Davos. The career lessons are not complicated. Don’t embarrass your boss. Don’t assume something is fine because everyone around you is doing it. And for the love of God, don’t put it in an email.

Colts owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon is wearing a headset on the sideline and taking frantic notes on every play. Is she an engaged leader, a distraction, or a woman being held to a different standard? Peter and Laura disagree. Plus: evaluation apprehension, and Laura’s blood pressure.

Some AI companies want to buy your company’s Slack history for training data. Peter walks through why that is a confidentiality nightmare for employers. It also hands employees a great counterargument the next time a company tries to enforce a non-compete. A listener asks whether her son should keep his fraternity leadership role on his résumé after the Cornell incident.

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Remember when AI agents were supposed to take work off your plate? Journalist Laura Brounstein admits that she gives hers a performance review at least once a week (“we’ve talked about this, only use these sources”), while Attorney Peter Rahbar remains proudly agent-free and firmly on the cautious end of the spectrum. Together they get into why so many people who handed work to bots ended up promoted to full-time bot manager, why agents need as much feedback as Gen Z employees, and the new industry push to make AI agents identify themselves as bots. Peter’s takeaway tracks the 20-60-20 rule: the people who become best at directing and handling the results from AI, lawyers included, are the ones who’ll come out ahead.

The episode opens with Tony Romo’s exit from CBS, and Peter explains what likely happened behind the scenes: a guaranteed contract, a very public DWI, a “for cause” clause, and a network in the middle of a merger that didn’t want the distraction. It’s a useful reminder that what you do off the clock can still cost you your job. From there, Peter and Laura take on companies announcing layoffs on earnings calls with no details about who or when, a move Wall Street loves and employees dread. Nike is the latest example. Laura has lived it from the inside at WeWork. Then it’s Citi cutting its analyst program to two years to keep Gen Z from defecting to private equity, hedge funds, and AI startups, right as Wall Street heads for record bonuses.

Things get serious with a listener question about what to do if you’re sexually assaulted at work, why HR isn’t your advocate, and how to find the right lawyer.

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Laura Brounstein is back, it's her birthday, and she brought a prop: an iced matcha, in honor of the hottest workplace debate on TikTok. Is walking into a job interview holding an iced coffee a harmless habit or a dealbreaker? Co-Host Peter Rahbar has an opinion, even if it might be an "old guy take." Laura brings receipts from her Anna Wintour interview.

Peter and Laura also discuss how tech bros are hiding where they work to get a date. The Wall Street Journal says Gen Z wants its feedback sugar-coated, but Peter argues what they actually want is just more of it, more often. Laura explains why companies can't demand personalized management without actually training their managers. Hedge fund giant Millennium is giving 7,000 employees AI "digital twins" that learn how they work, which Laura compares to chickens teaching people how to fry. And the Protect College Sports Act has Peter, a self-described sports obsessive, genuinely torn.

Finally, a serious conversation about Cornell University: the alleged sexual assault at a fraternity, the DA who declined to prosecute, the student journalists at the Cornell Daily Sun who broke the story, and what universities owe their students. Peter (a former fraternity president) and Laura debate whether abolishing Greek life is the answer.

🎙️ Across the Bar is your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist. New episodes every week. Subscribe for workplace law, career advice and the headlines that matter for your success at work.

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This week on Across the Bar, guest co-host Liz Baker Plosser is back from a week embedded in the international sauna scene, and she and Peter have plenty to say about the people in charge.

They start with the White House pulling press credentials from CNN, MSNOW, and Politico. Peter explains why that fight will almost certainly be lost in court and why the real goal may be profit, not just payback.

Then they turn to leadership. That means Governor Pritzker going public about his GLP-1 use, Adam Grant's argument that the best way to survive AI is to be more human, and why wiping out middle managers leaves everyone worse off, including the CEO.

Of course, it wouldn't be a week without CEOs behaving badly. This time it's a protein bar founder who skips the stroller because he likes to suffer, and Lululemon's Chip Wilson heading into a divorce without a prenup.

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Liz Plosser writes the Best Case Scenario Substack newsletter and is the former editor-in-chief of Women's Health.

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Liz Baker Plosser is back in the co-host seat this week and we brought in Adam Rapoport to talk about the do's and don'ts of office lunches. Bring your own bowl. Clean the dishes. Do not, under any circumstances, microwave fish or crack a hard-boiled egg within smelling distance of another human. Adam's got the full rulebook, and Peter's ready to write it into every employee handbook in America.
Then we get into the legal stuff: what a manager should do when an employee's writing reeks of AI (spoiler — the fix doesn't require ever saying the letters "A" and "I"), the Hyrox Beijing scandal that turned an elite athlete's worst day into an international controversy with real workplace-safety implications, and the growing list of employers getting called out for what they owe their people — Cigna employees petitioning to get GLP-1 coverage reinstated, and Amazon quietly tripling its number of warehouse workers on food stamps while profits climb. We close it out with the CFDA president's very physical, very filmed confrontation with protesters at a fashion show — and what happens to an executive's career when there's no security team standing between him and a bad decision.

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This week, Peter and guest co-host Liz Baker Plosser are back from summer and diving straight into the work issues confronting everyone as they return to the office.

They start with a reader comment that hit a nerve: workplace acronyms and AI-speak have gotten so bad people are starting to sound like robots in their own performance reviews. Peter gives his advice on how AI should (and shouldn't) touch your writing, and it might be a little blunt. From there, they unpack the new jobs report and the strange new normal it reveals: people are staying put, wages aren't moving, and the old stigma around job hopping — or not job hopping — has basically disintegrated.

Then, Business Insider's "best dressed lawyers" list gets the skewering it deserves, before Peter breaks down Mayor Mamdani's brand-new Office of Worker Power and why he thinks it's a political play dressed up as policy. Liz and Peter also settle the debate on whether LinkedIn has quietly turned into a dating app (the Wall Street Journal seems to think so; Peter thinks everyone should log off), and close out with Hyrox's jump from scrappy hybrid fitness race to $700 million private equity darling — plus where companies cross the line pushing employees into team workouts.

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Should employers be covering menopause benefits? Peter and guest co-host Liz Plosser (Best Case Scenario) take on a listener's question this week — and it opens up a bigger conversation about the legal tightrope employers walk when choosing employee benefits, plus the real fear a lot of women have about whether even asking for support quietly marks them as a liability. Also, Liz's tips on how to survive the current estrogen patch shortage happening right now.

From there the episode swings hard — a business school for eight-year-olds, EY paying employees up to $25K to be more human in the age of AI slop, and the great "cool boss" debate, which Peter is fairly convinced misses the point entirely. Employees don't care if you chug a beer standing on your head; they care if you actually have their back.

Then things get heavier. The Met Gala trustees overrule Anna Wintour on John Galliano as this year's honoree, and it becomes a case study in what happens when nobody around a powerful person is willing to push back. The Good Good Golf CEO is gone after that Callaway ad. And Uber's layoff memo manages to make 3,300 job cuts sound like something employees asked for — which Peter is not going to let slide.

Summer's basically over, and everyone's dealing with it differently — some people are faking Wi-Fi outages to steal one more day off, while Peter's out here treating a plane's spotty signal as a built-in excuse to actually get work done. That tension — who owes their employer visibility into their time, and who's allowed to go quiet — ends up running through the whole episode. It's there in the conversation about Slack, where companies are now feeding entire channels into AI so nothing stays private, "side-slacking" during meetings has become its own art form, and Peter's blunt reminder is that none of it — Slack, iMessage, Zoom chat — comes with any real expectation of privacy. Even your emoji reactions aren't safe; used the wrong way, they can become evidence in a harassment case.

That same question of who gets to decide what's disclosed and what isn't shows up again with the Wall Street Journal's decision to quietly bless AI-written op-eds — including one from a billionaire who compared using AI to using a calculator — a stance that puts the Journal sharply at odds with outlets that have banned the tools outright. And it's there in two harder stories: Disney's new policy stripping spousal health coverage from employees whose spouses have insurance of their own, which Peter calls what it is — a pay cut dressed up as cost-cutting, and a strange look for a company that's built its whole brand on family — and the Neutrogena backlash following Hayden Panettiere's death, where old comments about a "morality clause" invoked over her postpartum depression disclosure are forcing a real reckoning about what brands owe the people who represent them.

Guest co-host Liz Baker Plosser fills in for Laura this week, and the two also get into an $18 billion Meta settlement over kids and teens on social media, plus heroes and zeros closing out with a shared tribute to Dolly Parton.

Laura is on a well-earned summer break, so Peter's joined by special guest co-host Liz Plosser, former editor-in-chief of Women's Health and the voice behind the wellness Substack Best Case Scenario. First up, the GLP-1 conversation nobody knows how to have at work — commenting on a colleague's weight loss feels harmless until it isn't, and HR is starting to notice. Then, the reader question of the summer: is it actually okay to quit if you have been left on the "decoy plane"? Peter and Liz dig into the lates Presidential story and whether managers are responsible for the safety of their employees, plus Liz's own wild Air Force Two detour involving a cracked windshield and a very unglamorous curbside drop-off at the Delta terminal. From there, the etiquette of writing your own goodbye message (hint: nobody wants your ten-page victory lap), whether LinkedIn's new "AI slop" flag will actually clean up your feed, and a sobering look at the 61 S&P 100 companies that have quietly dropped board diversity criteria altogether. Liz also settles the office gym debate once and for all — yes, you should go, and yes, it's fine to say hi to your CEO at the water fountain.

Subscribe to Best Case Scenario: https://lizplosser.substack.com

Peter's joining from Sardinia this week, which means the vibe is loose but the topics are not. First up: Gen-Z parents have entered the chat at work, showing up to job interviews and calling managers to contest their kid's firing. Peter and Laura's rule is simple — unless your child is in a literal coma, hang up the phone. From there, we turn to HR, a department that's had a rough couple of years and is now watching AI quietly take over its job. Peter, of all people, makes the case that this isn't entirely bad news — right before explaining exactly how it goes horribly wrong. Then: tenure, the thing every professor was told was untouchable, turns out to be very touchable. A West Point professor challenges a gag rule and wins; a tenured economics professor at the New School gets laid off anyway, and the whole academic world is having a small crisis about what "lifetime job security" actually means. We close things out with LinkedIn's new ranking of top colleges for career success — Princeton's #1, feelings were had about alma maters — and a real conversation about whether the rankings measure anything a 17-year-old should actually care about.

A Netflix production exec named is suing after getting fired following a corporate retreat where he disclosed medically supervised ketamine treatment for depression during a trust exercise — and also, per Netflix, drank a Guinness standing on his head. Peter and Laura dig into where the actual legal exposure sits: if the termination was really about the medical disclosure, Netflix has a problem; if it was the sum total of "behavior unbecoming of an executive," that's a different story entirely — and a reminder that company policy travels with you to every offsite, happy hour, and business trip.

Then: a Wachtell Lipton partner and associate caught mid-makeout on a Bryant Park bench by a stranger with a camera, nine blocks from their office. He's married, she has a partner, and he's a partner at the firm to her associate — a combination that got him left off the six-lawyer defection to Gibson Dunn and landed him on administrative leave instead. Peter on why judgment, not just skill, is what firms actually pay for.

Finally, the real conversation: a Fortune piece on Gen Z workers napping in movie theaters and crying in Aritzia fitting rooms to cope with workplace stress. Peter and Laura get into why this generation is hitting a harder wall than the ones before it — less in-person conflict practice growing up, employers openly talking about replacing them with AI, and a job market that made the entry-level seat itself feel like the finish line

This week we start in the West Wing, where the man responsible for scrolling President Trump's speeches across the teleprompter turned out to have a lucrative side gig: allegedly trading on Kalshi based on what he already knew the President was about to say. It's the kind of insider trading story that writes itself — except it's paired with something arguably worse, reports that early access to the President's Truth Social posts is being sold to companies for somewhere around $100–200K a pop. We get into why any regulated firm even considering paying for that access should think hard about what a state attorney general, or a very different administration two years from now, might make of it.

From there we head to the EEOC, which just voted 2-1 to scrap the EEO-1 reporting requirements that have quietly tracked workplace demographics for six decades — and is doing it on a 30-day comment period instead of the usual 60. We talk about what it means when the agency in charge of equal employment opportunity stops measuring who's actually employed at companies.

Then there's Frank Bisignano, the head of the IRS, who — according to a Wall Street Journal report — allegedly used JPMorgan's own security apparatus to keep tabs on his internal rivals during his time there. We break down why that story matters well beyond his old job, and the basic access controls every company, not just megabanks, should have in place.

We close things out with something a little less felonious: how to actually plan a corporate retreat people want to attend instead of one they've been dreading for weeks — including why the boss should probably stay out of the planning committee.

Apple and OpenAI used to be in business together. Now Apple's accusing its former partner of coaching employees to walk out the door with company files — and Peter's got thoughts on exactly how not to do that when you leave your own job (hint: never sync your work iPhone to your personal iCloud, you absolute rookie). Meanwhile, Meta's facing a lawsuit alleging its layoff algorithm had a very specific taste for people with disabilities and medical leave — which raises the fun question of who you actually sue when the firing squad is a spreadsheet.

Then a federal judge takes a flamethrower to the Trump administration's IRS settlement, referring the president's own lawyers to the bar for what she calls a fraud on the court — Peter calls it "the most fun decision of the week." And because summer isn't all lawsuits, Peter and Laura close out with the internship crisis nobody prepares you for: what to actually do when you're bored out of your skull and too scared to admit it.

Corporate espionage, algorithmic layoffs, a judge with zero patience, and career advice for the terminally bored intern. Your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist is served.

Read the Demis Hassabis Proposal for a Frontier AI Framework: https://tinyurl.com/4hkhbj4n

Remember when every AI company was telling you your job was toast? They've quietly changed their tune — Anthropic just leased a whole building in Hudson Square and is hiring by the hundreds, OpenAI did the same in SoHo weeks earlier, and suddenly it's all "efficiency" and "job creation." Peter's not buying the whiplash and explains why so many layoffs blamed on AI have nothing to do with AI at all. Then Wall Street gets serious: Goldman just told employees they can only use prediction markets for sports and entertainment, and hedge funds like Point72 and Balyasny said forget the nuance, no prediction markets at all — Peter breaks down why this is the right call and why the "sports exception" won't survive the year. From there, things get personal: a New York Times op-ed says we should all be dating our co-workers again, and Peter and Laura find out live on mic that they completely disagree about it. Plus, the real reason your boss is so obsessed with getting you back in the building (hint: it might say more about them than about productivity), and the right way for interns to send a thank you note that actually gets remembered — a group email is not it. Legal takes, career reality checks, and the usual amount of bickering, all in one episode.

Peter and Laura are recording on the last day of June — drinks in hand, holiday weekend approaching — and the Supreme Court just had one of its biggest weeks in years. They break down what the rulings actually mean for you, your company, and the stability of the business environment Americans have long taken for granted. From the gutting of Humphrey's Executor to birthright citizenship to Citizens United getting even more toothless, the throughline is clear: power is consolidating in the executive branch, and the ripple effects on business, regulation, and predictability are just beginning.

Then: remember the salami incident? A few weeks ago we told you about the JPMorgan employee who got a $4 million FINRA arbitration award after being fired over a $600 expense report. Now JPMorgan and other major banks are so annoyed by the outcome that they want to rewrite the rules of the very system they created — the same system they forced their employees into in the first place. Peter breaks down what that means for anyone working in finance and what you actually can and can't negotiate in an employment contract.

And finally, a fascinating and unsettling piece from the New York Times: companies are putting AI into their org charts — and it's backfiring. Employees are checking AI-generated work less carefully than work from human colleagues, not more. Peter has seen it firsthand with clients sending him AI-drafted contracts full of hallucinated clauses and made-up cases. The lesson isn't that AI is useless. It's that handing it the wheel without supervision is a genuinely dangerous move.

🎙️ Across the Bar is your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist — covering workplace law, employment issues, and the stories shaping professional life.
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The World Cup is taking over America — and it's actually a masterclass in everything that makes a great employee. This week, Peter and Laura are joined by Ed Foster-Simeon, President & CEO of the US Soccer Foundation, to talk about what youth sports really build in young people, why coaches are some of the most underrated leaders in our culture, and what this historic tournament could mean for the next generation of workers.

Then things get a little wilder. A JPMorgan employee was caught on video dumping trash on the street during the Knicks championship parade — and walking off with the garbage can. In broad daylight. On camera. At one of the most photographed events in New York City history. She lost her job. The can was $168. There are lessons here.

Speaking of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon made a major move this week — naming two co-presidents as potential successors. It's a reminder that the best leaders are always thinking about what happens after them. Peter breaks down why succession planning isn't just for Fortune 500 CEOs, why the Bob Iger playbook is a cautionary tale, and what every business owner and team leader should have in their drawer right now.

Also this week: former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has assembled Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft behind a new nonprofit called RAISE — committing $500 million to train workers for the AI economy. It's the conversation companies should be having with their employees instead of the one Meta is having. Because over at Meta, morale has reportedly never been lower — after the company rolled out keystroke tracking and forced AI transitions and acted surprised when people didn't love it.

And finally: AI isn't freeing up your time. It's eating it. Peter and Laura dig into the rise of the infinite workweek — and why the pressure to always be doing more is burning people out faster than ever.

🎙️ Across the Bar is your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist — covering workplace law, employment issues, and the stories shaping professional life.
🔔 Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

The New York Knicks just ended a 53-year drought — and we're breaking down what their championship run means for New York. Then we shift to the workplace: summer office fashion do's and don'ts, why Costco's model of paying workers more and its CEO less is actually a masterclass in business strategy, and why remote work keeps beating the odds despite every "return to office" headline. Plus — CEOs are now hiring matchmakers to find traditional wives, and Peter Thiel's secretive Dialog society is raising serious questions about power, influence, and what elite networking looks like in 2026.
All of that and more on this week's episode of Across the Bar — your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist.
In this episode:

⚖️ Knicks Championship — and what it means for New York

👔 Summer Office Wardrobe Do's & Don'ts

🛒 Costco's worker-first pay model and why it's good for business

🏠 Remote work is still winning — here's why

💍 CEOs hiring matchmakers for trad wives

🤫 Peter Thiel's Dialog society — power, secrecy, and influence

Subscribe for weekly episodes covering workplace law, employment issues, and the stories shaping how we work.

The workplace is full of surprises this week — and we've got all of it covered.

Peter Rahbar and Laura Brounstein dig into six stories at the intersection of work, law, and culture, from prediction markets to newsroom meltdowns to what your out-of-office message says about you.

Prediction platform Kalshi just announced it will require users to disclose their employer before placing bets in markets flagged for insider trading risk. A positive step — but will people be honest, and will other platforms follow suit?

Microshifting. The Wall Street Journal is calling it the next big workplace trend, but is it really just flexible hours with a rebrand? Peter and Laura break down when it works, when it doesn't, and why your best leverage for any scheduling accommodation is being someone your boss can trust.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon announced that general counsel Kathy Ruemmler — who was supposed to leave the firm this week following her links to Jeffrey Epstein — is now staying on as an adviser. And it turns out his own chief of staff raised objections. Peter and Laura ask the obvious question: what's the calculus here, and what message does it send?

At CBS News, Bari Weiss has reportedly barricaded herself in a key-card-only sixth-floor suite — physically separated from the staff she's supposed to be leading through one of the most turbulent moments in the network's history. Peter and Laura on why that move is a classic sign of weak leadership, and what to do when your boss starts going squirrely.

Out-of-office message philosophies: how much is too much? Two paragraphs on the importance of rest? Your bunion surgery? Just enough is just enough.

And finally: a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the Trump administration's $100,000 H-1B visa fee, ruling it was effectively an unauthorized tax that only Congress has the power to impose. A win — but Peter explains why the real damage to America's talent pipeline goes far beyond any court ruling.

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