Across The Bar Podcast

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.

Your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist.

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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. 

Your weekly drink with a lawyer and a journalist. Link in bio 🎧

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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. 

Please watch and subscribe to the Across the Bar Podcast! 

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.