Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Ryan Stygar - Author of Get It in Writing (1M+ Followers) | America's Most Famous Labor Lawyer Reveals What Your Employer Hopes You Never Learn

Transcript

Ryan Stygar - Author of Get It in Writing (1M+ Followers) | America's Most Famous Labor Lawyer Reveals What Your Employer Hopes You Never Learn · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I have a case right now, we're in year four of litigation. They have admitted that they stole from the people for 12 pay periods in a row. We have the proof, we got a mathematician, got all the pay subs, like, you did this. There's no way around it. They're still fighting because they wanna pay as little on that as possible, and they're hoping that if they drag it out, they can get a discount on it. They knew that they did this, Scott.
• 0:23
  They did it on purpose. Every year, American workers lose over $40 billion to wage theft, more than all street crime combined. Most never know it happened. The system they trusted to protect them, it was never built for that. Today, a workers' rights attorney breaks down what your employer never taught you and what they're hoping you never find out. School is designed to make you a good employee. Submit to authority, accept discipline,
• 0:47
  But in school, you're a child and you don't have any rights and you are taught that over and over. And then you graduate high school and you get into the workforce. And for the first time, you're an adult and you're out there with really no guardrails. But all of your training has been, I don't have any rights. That mindset is toxic. That mindset makes people absolutely ripe for abuse.
• 1:17
  Okay, so your book, Get It In Writing, is available now. What's the one chapter or the one lesson that you wish you had as a 20-year-old? That is a really good question. I mean, it starts off with know your rights. That's part one, okay? Because coming up in school, we're always taught to be good workers. School is designed to make you a good employee. They tell you, you know, submit to authority, accept discipline,
• 1:44
  Always be honest with the teacher. Do your homework. Do it on time. Go the extra mile. But in school, you're a child and you don't have any rights and you are taught that over and over. And then you graduate high school and you get into the workforce. And for the first time, you're an adult and you're out there with really no guardrails.
• 2:04
  But all of your training has been, I don't have any rights. I have to do what the authority figure tells me. I have to work hard and then maybe I'll get a gold star. That mindset is toxic. That mindset makes people absolutely right for abuse. And I carried that mindset from high school into the workforce. And I was so scared all the time, Scott. I was so scared that I tolerated low pay.
• 2:29
  Unpaid hours, abuse, harassment, bullying, even getting hurt at work and not reporting it. And it's because I was so afraid. I was afraid to speak up. I was afraid that there was nothing I could do to make life better for myself.
• 2:46
  So really, and it's a broad question, just knowing the basics. Part one, know your rights, is where I take all those blinders, all that bullshit we were taught for years, and I rip it off and say, no, no, no, no, no. We don't have the best labor code compared to other developed nations. We don't have as much as we probably should have, but we have something. And if you know how to use it, you can live better at work. I wish I had that in my 20s. I wish I had this in my 20s. Yeah.
• 3:14
  I tell a story about my first day working on the ambulance and how it was just an absolute clusterfuck. You know, I showed up on time and on time was late and it was a whole disaster. But that ambulance company, they didn't pay me for overtime. They made me clock out for breaks and I didn't get breaks. And I just took it because I was so scared. So I wish I could give part one of this book to myself in my 20s. It would have made life a lot easier and it would have made me less afraid.
• 3:41
  Man, life is hard when you're living in fear day to day. And so one thing, if I was to say, apart from helping people know their rights, protect their money, protect their health, embrace their power, that's the big message of the book.
• 3:54
  The one big thing is I hope this book helps people not be afraid anymore. You don't have to be afraid of your boss. You shouldn't be afraid of your boss. You deal with a lot of cases of truly horrible people in the workplace. But we can talk about those people later. Those people. We'll talk about those people later. But when somebody goes into a job.
• 4:20
  In your mind, do you believe that the average company does its best? Or do you believe that the average company is usually trying to get the impact? And what I mean by this, this question, because like, if you are afraid, sometimes when you go into a company,
• 4:38
  you are going to not, you will not advocate for yourself, even though if you asked for certain things, that company would be like more than happy to give it to you. Or is that not your responsibility? Is that the responsibility of the company to tell you what you should and shouldn't do and give you like a psychologically safe environment? That is a fantastic question and it has a lot of layers. So if you want to go on a little journey with me, let's peel it apart. The first thing I would say fundamentally is
• 5:07
  On a moral basis, initiative should lie with the more powerful party. And the employer is the more powerful party. So I would say there's a moral obligation for them to be looking out for the welfare of the employee and to sort of take initiative and say, hey, this employee is working hard. Let's take care of them.
• 5:25
  Um, unfortunately that's not real life. And I mentioned that in the book in real life. Your boss is a person just like you. They're trying to advance their career. They're trying to hit quarterly targets. Maybe they're stressed about making payroll or whatever it is they're dealing with and your hopes and dreams and fears and insecurities. Just don't factor into that equation for them that most bosses.
• 5:47
  they're not necessarily malicious they're just they've got other shit going on personal shit too yeah exactly so it's not that like oh all bosses are terrible horrible they're out to get you it's that a sort of benign negligence where it's just you're not the center of their universe and so you asked is the average company trying to take care and do their best or are they trying to get the most from you
• 6:12
  I think the average company is trying to extract as much labor for you for as long as possible for as little cost as possible. Sometimes it's manipulative and shitty, like outright stealing from you and trying to be a bully. Sometimes it's just...
• 6:28
  They're stressed. They've got other shit going on. And if you don't ask for a raise, you're not going to get one because they're like, hey, you know, Ryan's fine. He's doing his work. He doesn't make a lot of noise. He's keeping his head down. He hasn't asked for a raise. And why are we going to incur more costs? You know, he hasn't asked for a vacation. Why even bring it up? You know, so it's not so much that I think all companies are out to get you. I think more accurately, most companies are not necessarily looking out for your best interest.
• 6:53
  Just it's not a high priority for a lot of them. There are bad actors. Those are the ones that I have to go up against. Those people.
• 7:03
  I know, I know, I know. I should have had a chapter called Those People, but it's a little late for that. So that's the next book. Yeah, I guess so. But, you know, so to answer the question again, you know, it's it's I think morally the initiative should be with the employer. But I can't do that. I can't write a book how to take great care of your employees and expect that to do well. The motivation isn't there. How to improve shareholder value, how to increase your earnings for the lowest cost. That book will sell. But, you know, these people are in business.
• 7:32
  And so wild that, you know, that's such a crazy point that that book won't sell. It will for some people, but it's going to sell to people who are already inclined to do that.
• 7:44
  Someone who is already thinking, hey, I'm a people first manager. I want to take care of my team because I want to be kind, but also I know I get more from people when I'm kind to them. That person is already doing their best. So if I wrote a book saying how to take great care of your people, they'll buy it, but I'm not changing any hearts and minds.
• 8:03
  when I speak to the working class person who's actually in the trenches dealing with this, that's a heart I can change. That's someone who might be living in fear, might be living thinking, there's nothing I can do. This is the hand I was dealt and I just have to grin and bear it. I want to show that person you're entitled to a certain level of respect and dignity at work. And that's a heart and mind I can change.
• 8:28
  What about the biggest companies, the Googles and the Metas? Are they not doing anything different? Because I would have thought
• 8:37
  maybe I just have this rose-colored view of the biggest tech companies on earth, and I'm sure that many people know they're horrible. I would have thought, coming from a corporate background, that those companies would have been the most forward-thinking, the most employee-focused. We've got to retain the best talent. These are the companies that are giving me unlimited vacation. But outside of these, I mean, just a comment on unlimited vacation, it seems more of like a...
• 9:05
  a perk that is not properly deployed in companies, but these people do, these companies do retain incredible talent. And I think that some of them at least do it through being an employee first organization, or at least you can't retain like a great developer. If you, if you have all this competition trying to steal them away from you. And if you do need the best of the best, I think some of these companies have to default to caring and advocating for their employees where they just leave.
• 9:35
  You would think so. It depends on the situation. I love your questions because they're all onions. There's so many layers to peel back. Because I'm very curious about this topic because, again, most of the questions that I'm asking are coming from the fact that two things are probably true at the same time.
• 9:51
  And that's something I want to point out. So, you know, if we're talking very generally, big companies don't give a fuck about their people. That's my general impression. Most of these big companies do. Can I cuss on this thing? I'm so sorry. Do not give a fuck about their people.
• 10:08
  They care about their key executives, how much bonus their key executives are making, and their shareholders. Shareholders come first most of the time. They'll freaking crucify an executive, even a star executive, if it makes shareholders happy. And that's the reality of living in an ultra-capitalist society. Shareholders come first.
• 10:27
  And workers pay the price. Now, there are companies that try to have this more forward-thinking, people-first culture. They try. But in any large organization, that's going to come with varying degrees of success depending on who your regional and district leaders are. I'll say as a general rule, generally, don't have a lot of problems with Costco. I don't get a lot of complaints about Costco.
• 10:50
  Yeah, very interesting. It's not a big tech company. Not a big tech company. And I'm not saying that I've never had an employee come to me with a problem at Costco, but just generally. That said, shout out to Costco.
• 11:02
  That said, wage theft is the costliest crime in the United States. Wage theft is a $40 billion-plus profit center for American companies. And a lot of times I have sued major corporations. I sue about a dozen major corporations in class actions every year. And what we find is ruthless, mechanical, institutionalized, and deliberate wage theft.
• 11:28
  They are making a gamble. They know that we can have oppressive policies that force people to work through lunch breaks, that force people to take unpaid overtime. They're in boot up time. So we get a free 15 minutes from them here. They're too scared to take their time off because we have ruthless metrics and we're turning people over all the time. There we go. Unlimited PTO. I got big opinions about that.
• 11:52
  But no, it's very important that we understand what a problem wage theft is, because this is part of that sort of trick that I think corporate propaganda has done. There's a lot of employees are hyper vigilant, like that person's not working as hard as me. I better get paid more than them.
• 12:08
  That immigrant got a better job than me, but I've been here first. Why did that immigrant get a better job than me? And it's like, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. These corporations have you so busy looking at each other. You're not seeing the way they are systematically denying you the wages you've earned. And it is bonkers. I have a case right now. I can't say the company because it's active litigation. We're in year four of litigation. They have admitted that they stole from the people.
• 12:33
  For I think it's like 12 pay periods in a row, they were chronically underpaying, not giving people the tips they earned, not giving them all the hours they worked. They know that they did it. We have the proof. We got a mathematician, got all the pay. So I was like, you did this. There's no way around it. They're still fighting because they want to pay as little on that as possible. And they're hoping that if they drag it out, they can get a discount on it. They knew that they did this, Scott.
• 13:01
  They did it on purpose. An SOP for them. It is. It is. It is. It is. And there is there's a reason that we go to these companies and you find in these handbooks, you know, discussing pay violates company policy. It's unprofessional and it could lead to discipline or termination. It's against federal law, by the way, but they won't tell you that. No, wage theft is a multibillion dollar problem. And these big corporations steal more from their employees than these employees could ever hope to steal from these these employers. Right.
• 13:30
  So to go back to your original question, I deal with a lot of really shitty people, the greediest, the most predatory, the most ruthless sacks of shit you've ever met.
• 13:46
  Despite that, I believe most people are fundamentally good and most people are trying their best. A corporation is not a people. It is a machine. And that machine is systematically looking for ways to get as much value from their workforce for as little cost as possible.
• 14:05
  And for that reason, I don't think people should get lulled into a false sense of security like, oh, I work for a giant corporation. They've got lawyers and HR. They're paying attention to the rules. They'll take care of me. No, they won't. And that's why some of them have lawyers and all these people sort of colluding in a way that is illegal. But they're hoping that you don't stick up your hand and say something's wrong here. Yeah. You know, I or not even illegal, but just immoral.
• 14:30
  Well, to that point, yeah, there's a certain risk cost-benefit analysis that gets run, you know. And generally speaking, they're like, we can just not give raises. If they're unhappy, they'll quit. And we'll find someone else who's fresh out of high school to replace them. Or, you know, when people start getting older, we'll just do a big layoff and we'll sprinkle in some 30-year-olds. But let's get these 60-year-olds out of here. Like, this stuff happens, Scott.
• 14:58
  I've dealt with enough of these cases. I've done enough discovery. I've interviewed these people. I've put them under oath. I've deposed them. There is a systematic institutional equation that these companies are following. And for that reason.
• 15:13
  what's the point of all of this? It is a huge mistake to simply trust that your boss or your employer is always going to look out for you and try to do the best thing. A lot of times they will. A lot of times they won't. Sometimes it's malicious, like the scenario we talked about the past few minutes. Other times it's that benign neglect. Your boss is just you know, especially if your boss is an entrepreneur a relatively new company, they're just trying to survive payroll to payroll. They're not really thinking about whether you can afford the vacation or not. And it's not malicious, it's just
• 15:43
  you need to look out for you at work. And ideally you learn enough about your rights. You can look out for each other. Cause I'll tell you this, if you're just trying to look out for you and only you, that'll get you so far, but organized collective bargaining is really the most effective way to protect yourself at work.
• 16:01
  And we talk about that in the book as well, ways to team up with your coworkers. Well, I would even say that as an employer, I'm an employer and I don't have, I don't always have the money to figure out everything that I can do for my employees. Like that takes money too, but I rather know about that ahead of time. So I'm doing right by them. So I don't deal with an expensive problem later.
• 16:21
  I'm with you. I mean, I'm an employer to small team. And sometimes that happens to me, too. Like, I really try to be the best, most generous, most flexible place to work. And it's so the highest compliment I get is every once in a while, one of my staff will say this is the best job I ever had. And that makes me almost tear up, like because you get it, dude. It's a lot of people.
• 16:46
  who are in that entrepreneur space, we want to flex and act like, yeah, we got this figured out. We make tons of money. Everything's easy. I've had seasons where I was like, fuck, how am I going to get through two pay periods? I I've got enough money for one. Where is it coming from? I, I recognize the stress that a lot of smaller employers, especially go through. So that's why I say there's this sort of benign neglect where it's like, it's not that they're out to get you. It's that you're just not the center of their universe. Yeah.
• 17:13
  Stress is hell about other things. Yeah. And it's good to know your rights and know what's available too because sometimes there's more to it than money. Maybe your boss literally cannot give you more money. But maybe they can give you more flexibility. I mean when I started my practice, we were full remote very early on.
• 17:30
  And a lot of that was by necessity because we founded the firm during COVID time, which was crazy. But we kept it that way because it was so popular and everyone was just so motivated and happy. Work was getting done. Why would we change it? And that really helped because when we were first getting up off the ground, I didn't have very much money for raises and bonuses and stuff, but I could offer flexibility.
• 17:50
  I remember, you know, you said something that, that made me remember one of my favorite bosses who I've spoken about him a few times on this show, but he has no idea that I keep referencing him. But anyways, um, he was an entrepreneur. He built a company. He couldn't do like the, in Canada, we have RRSP, uh, matching and same as like 401k matching. So for your pension, because traditional pensions really don't exist the same way they used to like whatever at all. Like the way my dad used to have, you know, 70% of his best years that does anyways. Yeah.
• 18:20
  So as opposed to, you know, setting up a pension for his 50 employees, which he could not do, he didn't have enough money to do that. He would actually do lunch and learns teaching people how to invest and build wealth and figure out how to like go into like, for example, a Vanguard ETF or the S and P 500 and teach sort of financials to people and investing. Yeah. What to do with the money. Like, I can't quite afford to match you, but I can show you how to actually invest.
• 18:45
  I respect that. I remember with my practice, it was a while before we do it now. And I'm really proud of it. We have a really generous matching program, which I'm really excited about. But I remember when I first was like, OK, I think we can afford it. Here we go. It's going to be expensive. But this is for the team. And I was scared when I did it because I look entrepreneurship. It has ups and downs. You know this, especially in my field of practice where I have a really awesome business model. You're going to want to steal this post. This is a great business model.
• 19:15
  I do a bunch of work for free. I incur all the expenses. I only get paid if I win. And if I lose, there's no recourse. Great business model. Yeah, that's excellent.
• 19:25
  It works out more often than not. It's called contingency and a lot of lawyers do it that way. And it works fine overall. But we have seasons where it's like, oof, case didn't work out quite how we wanted. You know, so for me, the big challenge starting my business from true zero, I didn't have any family connections or money when I started. I started with just me and a laptop and slowly scaled from there.
• 19:47
  Every new benefit I rolled out, I remember being like, okay, here we go. I hope we can sustain this. I've run the numbers a million times, but I don't know what next quarter is going to look like. Here we go. But man, I got to tell you, just as a small business owner, the pride I feel knowing that
• 20:04
  The people I work for can pay their rent and mortgages. Their healthcare is covered. They've got a nest egg building. They're getting free money that's matching to them. They have the flexibility. We give regular bonuses. And just they're happy. And –
• 20:20
  Man, I don't know what school of business some of the employers I sue went to where they think just beating people down and dominating them and making them afraid of you is effective. It's not. That just breeds resentment. And then they read my book and figure out all the laws you broke and then you get sued.
• 20:35
  Well, I think that we are at this inflection point in work, in opportunity where COVID started it. COVID made people realize they can work from anywhere, which then led them to understand that they don't have to work for their shitty boss that is a 20-minute drive from them. Now they can apply online to jobs across the globe. 20-minute drive. Man. So this is being recorded in Florida. I don't know how traffic is out here.
• 21:05
  20 minute drive. California. But you get the point. You get the point. Now you don't have to work for the local company. Now you can work. So that means that now the worker has more opportunity and more, they can go and work for anyone, anywhere, more than pre-COVID, not perfect world, but more than pre-COVID because of remote and stuff. But my point with all of this is just saying, you can comment on anything I'm saying, disagree with you or whatever.
• 21:32
  Oh, I'm just stewing. I disagree so much. Okay, so please. No, I'm kidding. No, you're great. No, and you bring up a really good point. I want you to finish it. This is now the opportunity for the employer to take their career into their own hands, which means that the shitty – sorry, the employee to take their career into their own hands, which means that the shitty employer, the tactics that they use, these fear-based tactics –
• 21:55
  They're not going to keep the people around anymore. And you've just diagnosed the start of the quiet quitting movement in the early 2020s. That's what it was. And, you know, there was all those signs going up. No one wants to work anymore. Help wanted. Where have all the good workers gone?
• 22:11
  They went to places where they get treated with respect because, you know, what I noticed as a workers' rights advocate is we have the technology to really liberate people and give them choice in how they work, when they work, what kind of conditions that they tolerate, how they apply their skills, all that stuff. But so often workers are last to get the benefit of those technological innovations. It's the company is looking for ways to, well, how do I squeeze more out of my people? How do I work with less people?
• 22:40
  That's usually the question these companies are asking. That's definitely the question now. Yeah. How do I work with less people? AI. How do I squeeze more of them? Well, I can have the multitask and I can put them on Zoom so they can be in two places at once. And it's brutal. But what was interesting about COVID, and this is separate from the horrible humanitarian cost of that terrible disease and the pain it caused our communities, just looking strictly at the work side of it. It was the first time that...
• 23:09
  Some of the technological benefits we've been working on actually went to the employees. Wait, you mean I can Zoom? I don't have to drive to your stupid office to go to this meeting that could have been an email? I can do it from my home? And I think it shook a lot of people awake. I mean, for me, I was an in-person guy forever. And COVID was the one that woke me up. And I was like, I can have a fully remote law firm.
• 23:35
  I can have employees in Bakersfield and Los Angeles and all over, and I don't need them to get dressed up and buy a suit and incur all the costs and fuel and go. Why? There's no point. And also we realized how few meetings we actually need. I agree completely. So now this is why I'm shocked that people still opt. You were telling me a story before we started recording about this asshole you were dealing with.
• 24:00
  That narrows it down exactly none. I only sue assholes. I don't sue nice guys. This guy was a particular asshole, and you were telling me about how it wasn't just work issues, and he basically had a woman who was pregnant.
• 24:15
  And I guess he was trying to find a way for the HR person to write up this bullshit so that he could fire her without saying, I'm firing you because you're pregnant. And the HR person wouldn't do that. So he got rid of that HR person and got a new one. But on top of that, then you layer on all these sexual assault issues with this. The point is...
• 24:34
  I don't understand how these people still exist in 2026 when the worker, when the person, the employee has so many opportunities. I think that more and more people like this are going to be weeded out and going to be exposed as shitty bosses. Because, first of all, people will read this book and know their rights. But second of all, now there's just more opportunity.
• 24:58
  I that's what I hope to do. And it's a shame because we talk about opportunity. Opportunity is extremely relative on. There's so many layers to this. So let's peel back just a little bit. So empowering people so that they know their rights tips, the scales quite a bit.
• 25:14
  Unfortunately, no amount of education I provide can change people's options. If you are a low-income person who didn't have access to education, not a lot of access to infrastructure, you're in a marginalized community, and you're in rural Alabama,
• 25:31
  very few options available to you. Can I say just in the short term? Yeah. Just in the short term. Absolutely. We've seen people overcome that. And it's not fair that you have to work so much harder to escape that environment to get somewhere that maybe someone like me just was the default. But those people have fewer options they're dealing with. I just wanna say that because I don't want people to feel like it's hopeless.
• 25:57
  Oh, it's definitely not. I'm just saying in the short term, not to diminish the reality of their circumstance. I'm saying short term just because I want people to realize, like, yes, your current situation could be absolute shit, and it sucks, and you don't deserve that. But...
• 26:13
  with proper education and action compounded over a period of time. Yeah, let me clarify what I said. No amount of education is gonna change the options dealt to you, is what I meant. You know, there's no amount of workers' rights education that's gonna change, like, hey, there's two employers in town, they're Dollar Tree and Dollar General.
• 26:33
  You know, I can't fix that for you. But when you're working there and trying to find your next move, you can get treated a little better. That's what I mean by that. And the other thing that just as an aside, non-competes in employment. Some states, they're outlawed. California doesn't allow them in employment. But most of the country, they're still allowed. And that's one of the things that I write about and I want people to understand. Because what we're seeing more and more is...
• 27:02
  Non-competes used to be something you give to a high-level executive. Like if you're KFC and you've got this team of executives and they know what the 11 herbs and spices are, non-compete NDA like – I guess that makes sense. Oh, protect your shit. Yeah.
• 27:17
  But what's happened more and more is employers figured out, wait a minute, I'm a fast food restaurant in a rural area. There's not a lot of options here, but I don't want to get into a bidding war for who's paying the highest wages. So if I make all these entry level people sign non-competes so that they can't go work for the other guy, even if they offer more money, they're stuck with me and I can be the biggest asshole ever. And what are they going to do? They got a non-compete.
• 27:41
  So helping people navigate those is part of the book as well. There are structural hurdles in employees' way that employers will throw up to make it harder for them to leave and find a better deal. And we want to fight against that. I thought there was a thing about non-competes not being legal at all.
• 27:56
  oh a simpler time yes uh and i'm like the layman i'm so no no no i'm so glad you brought it up do you want to go down this road real quick not yet soon but yes i first want to just ask headline non-competes are still legal in most of the united states okay i want to i want to understand them and i want to go through like the main things that people deal with based on some of the cases that you've taken on and just your experience i just need to ask the title of the book is called get it in
• 28:24
  What do you mean by get it in writing? Ultimately, when there's a dispute at work, and not just a lawsuit, I mean, hey, you dropped the ball. You didn't meet this metric. I don't know if your performance really merits this raise right now. Or I don't think your bonus is this amount.
• 28:41
  The paper trail is king. Typically, whoever has the best paper trail wins. And I say it's frustrating for a lot of people. It's not always about who's right at work. It's about who's most credible. And you build credibility by being able to back up your position with some kind of evidence, an email thread, a work summary, a pay stub, a performance plan. Believe it or not, even negative performance plans can help you in some cases. And we can talk about those outliers if you'd like.
• 29:09
  But fundamentally, I want people to...
• 29:13
  Take control of the narrative at work. Build a paper trail. Learn how to document the important events at work in a way that you can advocate for yourself. Because if you go to your boss and say, hey, boss, it's been a while. I need a raise. And your boss goes, I just gave you a raise. Go look at the paper. Boss, that was a year ago. I know time flies, but it's been a year. And here's the work I've done for you. And I think this merits a raise. I would like that. A lot easier when you have a paper trail than just relying on people's memory.
• 29:40
  And the other important thing about memory, let's say you've got a bully at work you're dealing with. You've got a coworker who's targeting you. You want to get that in writing. You want to talk to the employer and say, hey, here's the problem I'm dealing with. How are you going to help me? Because if you just go to HR and say, hey, Scott's really bullying me a lot. He's treating me bad. He's putting me down. And this isn't working for me.
• 30:01
  The only thing you're getting out of that conversation is, oh, Ryan's got a problem. Ryan's causing drama. Ryan's spreading rumors. And they can deny that a report of harassment was ever made. And now when they turn around and start targeting you for that, you don't have any proof that you came to them with a complaint of harassment. Why is that important? Because...
• 30:20
  unlawful retaliation is something you can protect yourself against, but not if you don't have any proof. So that's the core takeaway. A lot of this comes down to what kind of paper trail, what kind of record do you have at work? And it's not just about lawsuits, again. So it's knowledge, plus this is like, I'd say self-advocacy part of it is like understanding what you've got to do to advocate for yourself first. If I may. Yeah, yeah. Let's see. It is your book. It is. Well, it was a gift to you. I have a few in here. You better sign that after, too. Oh, absolutely. So like here.
• 30:50
  I have a sample email template reporting unpaid wages. This is get it in writing. This is your paper trail. It's not good enough to simply go to your employer and say, hey, boss, my check was short. We'll get you fixed. We'll talk to payroll. We'll get you fixed. No record anything happened. And it's just going to sit. And I have people who come to me and said, I reported missing wages six months ago. Nothing happened. Like, do you have a paper trail? Did you put it in writing? No.
• 31:14
  Of course nothing happened. There's no proof that conversation happened. There's no proof you're missing anything. Your boss isn't motivated to act. But here I actually write, here's what you write so that you're walking that line between, you know, you don't want to be combative and accusatory. Nothing's like this is what happened. You want to be matter of fact and you want to be professional and objective. And so that's just one example template I put in there.
• 31:34
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• 31:55
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• 32:23
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• 32:47
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• 33:05
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• 33:33
  My fitness pal is a success story partner and I've actually been using it myself for a while. Many of you don't know this, but it's one of the first apps that I've ever used on my own personal health, wellness, weight loss, nutrition journey years ago. Now on this show, we constantly speak about optimizing everything, right? But optimizing your sleep, your training, your mindset, your business. But the one thing that so many people skip right over is the thing that all of this is built on.
• 33:58
  It's your food. It's your nutrition. You can have everything else dialed in, but if your nutrition is off, your energy, your recovery, your mental clarity, they all take a hit. That's why I use MyFitnessPal. It makes tracking your food incredibly easy. I can log a meal in 10 seconds and the database is so big that whatever I'm eating is already in there. And here's the thing that actually got me. When I started tracking, even though I'm pretty good about my diet, I realized that if I don't pay attention, I way under eat protein. And that explains every single afternoon crash that I will be blaming on everything else but my food.
• 34:27
  Again, MyFitnessPal is not about restriction. It's about awareness. And when you start using it, you start noticing patterns. It also connects with 40 plus apps and wearables. So it slots right into whatever it is you're already using. So if you actually care about your health as a founder, as an athlete, as someone who just wants to feel better, your nutrition has to be part of the plan. Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott, all uppercase for 15% off MyFitnessPal premium. Start tracking and see what you've been missing. Do you find that in a remote environment?
• 34:57
  people because it's remote and everything's via email versus knocking on a door and walking to an office, more stuff is tracked and AKA more employers are
• 35:09
  Acting better because there's more things that are being written down? Acting better, no. Recorded better, sort of. There's two sides to that coin. When you're remote, there's more opportunities to get a paper trail and document what's happening. And again, this isn't just about lawsuits. It's, you know, you had a big meeting coming up and everyone divided the work. Someone shows up unprepared. Scott, you never told me. Yeah. Got to go to the paper trail. Yeah.
• 35:33
  And so who told who what, who was in charge of what? That paper trail protects you. There's two mistakes I see for remote workers. Number one, a lot of Zoom meetings. And the Zoom meetings are not recorded. No one writes a summary. So I actually give tips on if you do a Zoom or a phone call, be the person who writes a recap of the meeting.
• 35:53
  And some people get down on that. Like, what are you talking about? I'm not the secretary. That's I don't want to do that because then I have to do it for everyone. No, no, no. You're looking at it all wrong. The person who controls the summary for a meeting like that controls the narrative. You just became very powerful and you look so helpful. You don't look like you're making a power play. You're helpful. And that should be the goal. Yeah. You decide what gets a bullet point, what gets a footnote, what maybe wasn't important enough to make it onto the summary. You control that.
• 36:17
  So the big mistake is Zoom and things just aren't written down. So people argue about what was said on the Zoom as if it was face to face. The other is important communications on a company controlled messaging platform like Slack. Those messages are not private. I'm not saying your boss is sitting there reading it in real time. But if they ever want to go back and see what you said, don't treat it like a private chat box. It's not. And some people do.
• 36:42
  Yeah, they start saying, man, you know, this guy's a dick. It's a problem. But also, if you have an important communication on Slack and nowhere else, and then you lose access to that Slack, you get put on an administrative leave, you get fired or just something happens to it, your paper trail is gone. So finding other ways to take control of your paper trail so that you're not putting all of your eggs in your employer's basket. You don't want to leave your fate entirely up to them.
• 37:09
  Let's go back to non-competes. Yes. So non-competes. Why did I think that they were illegal? Because you're very smart and you're paying attention, but things change quickly. Thank you very much. So, yeah, of course. Well, you threatened me before this. He has a weapon, by the way. You don't see it. It's off camera. He has a big weapon. I'm a Canadian. Like, listen, everybody down here carries. I think I'm like, maybe I...
• 37:33
  Maybe I should. That's funny. All right. So there was a push under the Biden administration. The FTC was looking at banning non-competes. OK. Lena Kahn was the commissioner at the time. Love her. She's very pro worker, very progressive. She's not there anymore. There's been a total changing of the guard. And they were trying to ban non-competes and employment.
• 37:54
  The reason they wanted to do that is about one in five American workers are actually restricted by a non-compete in some way. Most of them don't know it because you show up to work and it's kind of like that example I gave when you're in school. You just submit to authority. Jobs are the same way. Sign all this paperwork.
• 38:12
  What is it? Doesn't matter. You want to work here or not? Sign all this paperwork and buried in there. You're going to see things like arbitration agreements and non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements. And that non-compete is what restricts your ability to work. So for anyone who doesn't know, a non-compete basically says you can't work for a competing business.
• 38:30
  Competing can be used quite loosely sometimes or start your own business. Usually it's for a period of time. Non-competes that last more than, say, a year, two years, less enforceable than ones with a tight time. And they should be limited geographically as well.
• 38:47
  But that is still a powerful weapon if you're, say, a local employer and you don't want to have to get into a bidding war with local people. All these entry-level workers or lower-level or even middle-level earners, where are they going to go? You just locked them in to where they can't go to another place that pays better and offers more opportunity.
• 39:07
  Um, not without incurring tremendous risk and cost on their part. And if they do do it, if they do say, wow, the place across the street's offering $2 an hour more, or the place across the street's offering medical, I want to go there. They can be sued for breaching the non-compete. So do employers that does happen. Not, not so much in California because California is one of the few states that's outlawed non-competes and employment. Um, yeah.
• 39:32
  But that does happen. So and one way I've seen it happen is like if you have like a wrongful termination case or something and they might counter sue you and say, well, you violated our non-compete and our non-disclosure. So you're suing us. We're suing you right back.
• 39:48
  We've seen that kind of pressure tactic happen. So what the FTC was trying to do in the Biden administration was limit those because what they found was with so many workers bound by those non-competes, it actually restricted economic mobility. It restricted innovation. It prevented many great small businesses that could have been started. It artificially depresses wages.
• 40:11
  And the FTC estimated that it cost the American economy about $300 billion a year, having so many workers artificially constricted that way. Now, to be clear, this is distinct from saying, hey, you know Coca-Cola's original recipe because you're a high-level executive and Coca-Cola has a right to protect that IP. We're talking about something totally different. We're talking about a company that maybe takes 1,000 employees and says, you cannot work for any competitor or start your own business or we will sue you.
• 40:40
  And that really, really sucks because you have just locked those people into what could be a highly abusive environment. Yeah, I think that it makes a lot of sense for a CEO to have a non-compete somebody who is. If you work for Coke, don't get poached and go to Pepsi. Yeah, let me show you everything. This legislation that they were trying to pass, I didn't realize that it didn't pass. And that's that's why I thought that non-competes were illegal. But.
• 41:07
  It was toward the tail end of the Biden administration that were working on it. And I thought that was actually great. I've never loved non-competes. I've never enforced a non-compete ever. I've never been a fan of if somebody's trying to if I'm trying to work for somebody, if they have a non like I just I never liked it.
• 41:25
  Yeah, I mean, they have their place and they had their place for a long time and they've just been wildly abused. But I like retaining talent because I'm a good employer, because I, for some reason... Oh, forcing someone to stay because of a threat of a lawsuit doesn't vibe with you? You don't like that? No, to me that's tiring and stressful and exhausting. I'd rather attract good talent. I'd rather find out what that person needs in their life. And hopefully while they're working with me, we can find a way to move them closer to their own personal goals...
• 41:53
  And I don't know. I found that that's like the best way to keep good people around. It is because if someone's just staying with you because they're scared of the legal consequences of not staying with you, you're not getting good work from that person. No, of course not. They're miserable. You're not. They're not choosing you. Yeah, it's bad for everybody.
• 42:08
  But yeah, those efforts were abandoned. But that legislation – so the reason why that was abandoned, was that like just pure political? Yeah. So it wasn't legislation per se. This was being worked on within the FTC. So a federal agency with rulemaking authority, kind of like OSHA. They are not Congress. They were created by Congress, and Congress delegated some of their rulemaking authority to OSHA. So OSHA can actually –
• 42:32
  Very sad at the tail end of the Biden administration. We had some really exciting labor protections that were in the works and then the administration changed and it was totally abandoned. All of us. So OSHA was working on a consolidated heat safety rule that currently there is no federal heat safety rule basically saying, hey, like, you know, when there's certain temperatures in the workplace, workers should get breaks to limit their exposure. They should have cool down periods. Seems like a nice thing. Seems important.
• 42:58
  Doesn't it? There are some provisions of OSHA's codes that arguably capture that, but there was no uniform heat safety code. And so OSHA was working on fixing that. When the new administration took over, that went away. The FTC efforts went away. Hopefully under a new administration, we might see that. The problem is the Trump administration is not particularly pro-labor. That's not what they're interested in doing. Yeah.
• 43:25
  So yeah, you heard about that. It's an exciting idea. I hope with a new administration, we resume particularly the heat safety rule and the non-compete efforts. No, I was going to ask those non-competes, like if, if the FTC was successful, how would a company, so this is always my question. How does a company carve out a non-compete for an executive that really should have a non-compete when an FTC has a law like this, that goes into place?
• 43:54
  Well, the FTC law was never fully realized or matured, so we don't know what that was going to look like. And there would have had to have been carve-outs. There would certainly, I would presume, again, this is hypothetical because they never finished their work. You don't want this to be damaging. Yeah. So legitimate. There's a couple of ways you could look at it. And the one is you would look at carve-outs for certain high-level executives. I mean, we do that all the time. The Fair Labor Standards Act applies to most non-exempt employees, but there are exceptions for highly compensated executives for the exact reason we're talking about.
• 44:22
  There's other ways to protect. There's the Defend Trade Secrets Act. You have your own IP laws. You can still have non-disclosures. You can still have non-solicitation agreements. There's other ways to protect yourself besides a non-compete. But I would imagine that if we were to get to a place where non-competes were banned at the federal nationwide level, we would see carve-outs for certain high-level executives. Because that was the purpose of them in the first place. At-will employment.
• 44:50
  So most people think that at will employment means they can be fired for anything. Yeah. And there's nothing that anyone can do. You say that that's the biggest lie. It's the number one biggest question, biggest lie. Yeah. So what does it mean? All right. So at will employment means you can be fired for any legal reason. Okay. And employers like to forget that legal part right there. Like I can fire you if I don't like the color of your shoes. Well, shoes aren't a protected class. So sure, I'll give you that one. But yeah, any legal reason.
• 45:19
  So, and that is the default rule in 49 states. A lot of people think, oh, I'm in an at-will state. I have no rights. Your state's not special. Montana is the only one that's special. It's the only state that's not at-will. They actually have more protections in Montana. I briefly discuss it in the book, but I'm not a Montana lawyer. Now, here's the thing about at-will employment.
• 45:39
  The hard truth is most terminations are legal, even if they're unfair, even if they're capricious, stupid, petty reasons to be fired. Generally, they're legal. But if the true motivation was unlawful...
• 45:53
  you were pregnant, you requested protected medical leave, you blew the whistle on an unlawful practice, you reported some kind of safety concern. Those are just a few examples. There's a lot of examples in the book. I go into much more detail. Then an employer cannot simply say, oh, you don't want to have sex with me? Okay, you're fired and it's at will and there's nothing you can do.
• 46:12
  That's not how it works. That's like saying if if a robber robs a 7-11 and the cops grab him and he says, it wasn't me, the cops don't go. Oh, so sorry for the mistake, please on your way. And here have a Slurpee. We're so sorry to have bothered you. That's not how it works.
• 46:28
  If you're an at-will employee and you are fired for an unlawful reason, your boss is probably going to say they fired you at will, they fired you for no reason, or they'll make up a performance issue. It's probably either it's not true or they'll blow it out of proportion to justify it. Then you can say, wait a minute. Wait just a damn minute.
• 46:45
  I hurt my knee at this job. I reported that I hurt my knee. Then I asked for an accommodation to help me work with my knee while that's going through. Suddenly, for the first time in my 12 years at this company, I'm getting written up for poor performance. Suddenly, I'm the worst guy in the world. Suddenly, I'm fired at will. I call bullshit.
• 47:02
  And so that's where I want to protect people and say, look, at will employment. Yeah, it's the default rule in almost every state. Most terminations are legal. But if something feels off, I don't want you just taking your employer's word for it, because I'll tell you what, as a workers rights lawyer, I don't I get lied to all the time. We just got a two point four million dollar settlement against a guy who, to his dying breath, insists it was business reasons. It was at will employment. And I know damn well he fired my client because she was pregnant.
• 47:31
  He never admitted it. I don't need him to admit it. Thank God she had a paper trail. Thank God she knew her rights. That's why this book is here. That's incredible. It's very, it's very, it's... No, I'm just thinking about how... It's all fucked up, isn't it? So an employer, what they will do is, under the guise of at will...
• 47:56
  they'll just start to make up shit after. And I guess my question more for you as a lawyer, how do you prove this stuff is really my question. It's like, yes, if they have a 12-year track record of perfect work and then they hurt their knee and then the employer's like, well, your performance has been lacking lately, that's a little bit easier to prove. But for people that are listening to this,
• 48:21
  I think the biggest hesitation is that they don't feel confident that they're going to be able to prove that their performance is or isn't at par. And then they probably don't voice, hey, this feels off. Excellent point. I'm glad you brought it up. Because they're going to get their own head about the performance, right? So you hurt your knee.
• 48:41
  And then all of a sudden, you know, four months later, the employer, the employer is like, well, your performance isn't, you know, as good as it used to be. And as humans, we're so proud of our work. So I think that we start to like, believe it to a degree.
• 48:56
  Well, certainly in the United States, we tie our identity to our career so much. So whenever something goes wrong at work, like getting a negative performance review, it's a gut punch to a lot of people because we tie so much of who we are to our work and our work ethic and our success in our jobs that when someone tells you like, hey, you're suboptimal.
• 49:17
  you're a three out of five. Hey, we're putting you on an improvement plan. It feels like an attack. So let's do this because you brought up an excellent point. You do not need to be a perfect employee to overcome the at-will presumption. Now, let me be very clear. If you are fired for a petty, unfair, unreasonable reason that wasn't actually illegal, you're
• 49:39
  That's just life. And I have a section on negotiating severance and bouncing back from that kind of thing. I even have it's this band right here. That's your in case of emergency turn to this page. Oh, I love that. That's that if you get fired, you turn to that page and I'll tell you step by step. All right. You got fired. Even if it was legal. Let's say you don't have a case. That's fine. Here's how you handle getting fired.
• 50:00
  In case of emergency, open to this page. There you go. All right. But you brought up a great point. You don't have to be a perfect employee to prove that it was illegal. I mentioned earlier that a bad performance review can actually help you sometimes. I have a case, had a case.
• 50:16
  My client reported that he was not getting paid correctly. They had him on a salary, but the salary was too low and his work duties didn't meet any exemption. So he was actually entitled to rest breaks, overtime, all that stuff. He wasn't getting it. He reported it. Then they started writing him up and they fired him. But this is what's so interesting.
• 50:42
  They wrote him up for sleeping on duty. He was night shift at this establishment. I don't want to give away too much. He was night shift at this establishment. He slept. Well, he had been written up a few times for it. And never had he been fired. Suddenly, he reports missing wages. Now they want to fire him for this?
• 51:01
  Yeah. So the reason that and there's actually another case in here about a Kaiser nurse who won a 40 million dollar verdict for retaliation, harassment, wrongful termination. And she had been written up for some little lapses in judgment. Nothing serious. Just, hey, you know, we're writing you up for this and that. When the company tried to say, oh, we wrote you up for these violations and that's why we fired you as a lawyer. I go, wait a minute. Wait a minute.
• 51:27
  Before the protected activity, before this person requested an accommodation for a disability, before they got hurt at work, before they reported missing, before all that, yeah, you didn't love this and you wrote them up, but you never fired them. Suddenly they do the protected thing and now it's a terminable offense.
• 51:44
  Huh. I wonder what really happened there. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. So, and that's why your paper trail is so damn important. Scott, you have to be able to take control of the narrative because you know, if they want to push you out, they're going to say you're too slow. You're not performing anymore.
• 52:00
  Going back to the hurt knee example, I'm a little slower because I hurt my knee. Thank God I knew my rights. I requested an accommodation in writing and got approved for an accommodation. Part of your accommodation might be more reasonable metrics that you're measured by, accounting for your disability. You can still be a productive worker. And that makes it harder for them to say, oh, your metrics are just so terrible. Here's another example. I had a retaliation case for someone who was on maternity leave.
• 52:26
  They fired her two or three months after she got that from leave. The official reason was she had a decline in all of her accounts. Like she wasn't selling the way she was supposed to. And they had real metrics. They're like, oh, my God, she fell off a cliff. They took her leave time, her three months, and factored it into that assessment. So the time that she was on protected leave, not working, they factored it in and said, look how terrible your numbers are.
• 52:53
  It's not the padding, the numbers. Exactly. Extremely dishonest. And here's the thing. If you're, you might hear that and go, that's preposterous. Why would they make that argument? Well, they didn't think they'd have to deal with an actual educated professional. They thought that that was going to be enough to be like, Hey, let's tell her she sucks. Let's throw some numbers, show her her sales are bad, and then just get rid of her because we don't like dealing with these FMLA leave things.
• 53:16
  And they're hoping that they can scare someone enough and that they don't know enough about their rights. Most workers don't even know that they can get protected leave, let alone that they can be protected from retaliation when they come back. It just so happened that person followed me on Instagram and knew a little bit about it. So they were able to ask for help. Listen.
• 53:34
  I also have on the other side of this coin, I know that I think you've said on podcasts before, you're like, you want to advocate for the worker because everybody advocates for the worker and the devil has enough advocates or something like that in terms of- The devil has enough advocates. Yeah, that's why I never played devil's advocate. Yeah. But-
• 53:50
  I just want to ask from an employer perspective, say somebody is really not, say you are like not a behemoth corporation and you are an entrepreneur and you are now scared to fire somebody who's not performing. What do you have to do to make sure that you do it ethically, legally, properly?
• 54:08
  There's a few ways of doing it. I'm an employer too. I'm a small employer. And I want to speak to that too, because I think that that's something that hopefully, hopefully a lot of people that are listening are like, listen, I'm on the other side of this and I don't want to do anything wrong. And this employer, this employee is genuinely not doing the job that I need them to do. And how do I navigate this properly so I don't have to deal with,
• 54:35
  The documentation is good for everyone. Get it in writing is good advice for everyone. You know, documentation is key for everybody. Communication is key for everybody. If you're trying to avoid a problem, first of all, just don't break the law. You know, don't don't fire someone because you think they're getting older, because they're disabled, because you think they're going to take pregnancy. Don't do that. That eliminates some problems right there.
• 54:58
  The labor code is complex. You're going to make mistakes. You are going to make mistakes as an employer. I don't expect you to be a labor code expert. Be nice. Be reasonable. Be nice. And then most employees, if you make a mistake, you're like, Scott screwed up. But dude, he's always honest. He's always doing his best. Let it go. Generally, I don't sue people who...
• 55:19
  employers who people like. You know what I mean? But also, again, you have the right to let people go. There's no law that says you have to keep an underperforming or bad employee. You just can't make up a bullshit reason to try to get away with
• 55:34
  breaking the rules. So if you're trying to get rid of an underperformer, document the underperformance. Be specific. Don't just say, oh, your communication's bad. Oh, you did this. Be specific. Say, on this date, we gave you this assignment. It was due at this time. You did not communicate with us. You did not ask for help. The due date came. Last minute, you're asking for a two-day extension. It doesn't work that way because the client deliverable was on this day and you never communicated with us. See how much better that is than just, oh, poor communication.
• 56:01
  Communication two out of five being specific. And what's cool about that is the employee is going to be like, fuck, you got me. I messed up. I'm sorry. And then you get to make a judgment calls the employer. Do you see promise in this person? Like, Hey, I was specific. I communicated what the deficiency was. Do I think this person's going to get better? If the respect is there and they seem like they want to do better than give them a shot, but give them measurable performance, put them on a performance improvement plan and say, look, I'm not going to get better.
• 56:29
  I want to see you meet your deadlines for the next three months. And if you have a problem, I expect some kind of heads up. Don't put us in a situation where we're scrambling to the client. You know what I mean? A lot of employers don't have the patience to do that, but it's really the better way to do it.
• 56:45
  Just be a good person. Yeah, if the respect's not there, if they're genuinely slacking up, let them go. It's okay to fire bad employees. And frankly, and this surprises people as the workers' rights advocate, look, I'm a businessman too. You should fire early and often. If you bring on someone, they were very charming in the interviews, they had the great credentials, and then the first week you're like, oh my God, this person thinks this place is a vacation. Just get rid of them.
• 57:11
  It's okay. Yeah, because I think that some employers are scared to fire. You know, it's so funny. I go to... I do go to parties sometimes. I'm not entirely a board. Not always in a suit? No. I go to parties sometimes and I'll have people...
• 57:27
  Say like, oh man, these bullshit wrongful termination lawsuits, you're not one of those guys who just files against everyone. No, of course not. I wouldn't do that. I only get paid when I win, remember? Why would I file a bogus suit?
• 57:42
  have this narrative that, oh, and I'm not saying there aren't bad actors. There are bad lawyers out there and there are bad employees who will sue over frivolous claims. That does happen. I don't think it's as pervasive as some people think. Most of the claims are meritorious.
• 57:59
  I think there's a certain lack of accountability with some employers, if I may say so, where they get sued and just they the guy who paid that giant settlement. I guarantee last night he went home and told all of his friends how unfair it was. And this attorney, Ryan, asshole, really shook me down. He didn't give a fuck. Yeah. Because he doesn't have the self-awareness to accept that he made a mistake. Maybe you're not the smartest guy in the room all the time. Maybe you fucked up, dude. So yeah, there are bad actors.
• 58:29
  Generally, if you're doing your best, if you're being honest, if you're keeping a paper trail, you don't have much to fear. For the employee, shifting back to who matters for this podcast, you're going to get fired. You're getting called into a meeting with the boss in HR. So you're like, okay. No one likes that meeting. No one likes that meeting. What should you do?
• 58:53
  So you're getting like you are getting fired. I'm scared. I'm about to get fired. Like someone comes to your desk, say, hey, can you come into my office? You look over. You see the HR person sitting in the office. And the reason I ask is because the hey, warning shot meeting versus hey. Okay.
• 59:11
  pack your things and go meeting. They're different meetings. Let's do both meetings. Hopefully, again, this doesn't happen to anybody listening, but it will to someone at some point. And it's a very stressful moment for that person. Let's talk about warning shot meeting first. Okay. Let's go with the basics. Do not...
• 59:27
  Freak out. Do not get angry. Do not get defensive. I'm not saying that what's happening to you is not unfair. Maybe it is unfair. Maybe it is bullshit. Don't scream this is bullshit and crash out. That's going to make things way worse. Okay? They might hit you with a write-up, like a disciplinary notice, depending on your mistake. And they're probably going to ask you to sign it. A lot of people are scared to sign that because they think, oh, I'm admitting it's true. What do I do?
• 59:52
  If you don't sign, they might fire you for insubordination or they'll write refuse to sign. And it's just another set of problems. My recommendation is go ahead and sign that stuff. There's usually a provision that says, hey, by signing below, I'm acknowledging, you know, only if that isn't there. Just sign your name and write acknowledged only. Don't try to get cute with, you know, under duress or, you know.
• 1:00:14
  And then after that, if you disagree with the write-up, you can do a rebuttal. A lot of times they have like a spot on those write-up forms they give you, or you could just do it in an email or a letter, whatever works, and just say, hey, following up on the meeting, I understand the company's concerns. There are some issues I disagree with, and I wanted to share my side of the story and just lay it out objectively.
• 1:00:33
  You know, the company says I missed these deadlines. That's not the whole story. I took on extra work for Bob when he was on leave. I was managing multiple calendars at once. So to prevent this from happening again, I would like some assistance. You know, something like that. A rebuttal is good. If they hit you with a performance improvement plan. Sorry, going back one bit.
• 1:00:54
  going ahead and signing acknowledged only rebuttal is so important. Even if you agree, you made a mistake show that you're cooperative because you're controlling the paper trail. You're showing that you are reasonable. You are teachable that way. God forbid. If there's another problem, a few months down the road, they don't look and go, we've written this guy up already. Let's fucking can him.
• 1:01:14
  Like, no, no, we wrote him up. He took accountability. He tried to get better. And yeah, he's not perfect, but this is clearly a teachable guy. I've seen that in cases, by the way, where, you know, I crack open the HR file and see everything they say about my clients. And I've even seen that before where my clients engaged in the rebuttal process and they'll even write, look, guy makes mistakes sometimes, but he's teachable. Yeah. That's a great note to have in your file. And that protects you later if they want to say, oh, we're just fed up. We can't. You said here my client was teachable.
• 1:01:43
  Oh, all of a sudden he turns 60 years old. He's not so teachable. What happened there? Is it really performance or is this age discrimination? This protects you. The other thing, there's the rebuttal process. If they hit you with a performance improvement plan, look at the metrics. They're going to say things like, hey, you're going to have a weekly meeting with your boss. These are the targets we want you to hit. Watch out for vague metrics.
• 1:02:07
  Big red flag. Highlight this on your thing. Watch out for vague metrics. Vague metrics are a warning sign that they're really looking for an excuse to get rid of you, and they don't give a fuck if you get better. That happens. That does happen. So you are going to want to insist on specific, measurable goals.
• 1:02:26
  How many units do you want me to sell? How many calls a day do you want me to make? When do you want these reports to? What do you want covered in them? Because if they hit you with just very broad, you know, improved communication, you know, navigate client better, they can always move those goalposts and say you didn't meet them. So insisting on specifics helps a lot.
• 1:02:45
  Oh, and last thing. Sorry, Scott. You got pulled into that meeting. Where you are getting fired? You got pulled into the warning shot. Oh, the warning shot. Okay, yes. Dust off your resume. Apply to jobs like crazy. Because it's usually the first domino to fall. You could be fine. But it's better to have the options and not need them than to be totally caught off guard.
• 1:03:05
  So what happens in that firing meeting? The firing meeting is tougher because no amount of begging, pleading, threatening or crying is going to change it. If you freak out, have a meltdown, threaten to sue, whatever it is. How could you do this to me? I've given you my best 20 years here. They've already made the decision. And frankly, the person giving you the news may not even be empowered to change anything about it. They're just the messenger. So crashing out is just going to make it worse.
• 1:03:32
  Um, unlike the warning shot meeting where, Hey, if they write you up most of the time, safe to sign, just write it to knowledge only in the firing meeting, don't sign shit. They're going to get real pushy. You're going to feel like you're in a timeshare meeting. They're going to be like, just sign here. You know, you got to sign or blah, blah, blah. What are they going to do? Fire you again. You're already fired. You're like, Hey, I'm not signing any of this shit until I have time to read it and think about it. Let me go. Well, you won't get your final paycheck.
• 1:03:58
  Fucking try me. That's illegal. But OK. Noted that you intend to break the law. I'm going to take this home and understand it before I sign it. Because a lot of times what they put in there is some kind of waiver of your rights. Don't give up your rights for free. That is the time to start thinking, hey, can I negotiate for some severance? But don't do it in the termination meeting. You want to get a cool head and come back. Don't sign anything. Don't freak out. Don't threaten. Even if you're planning on suing, don't tell them that.
• 1:04:28
  There's no benefit in telling them that it's there's nothing less scary to a corporate lawyer than some irate, hysterical employee saying, I'm going to sue you. Be like, OK, well, I'm going to start burning your slack messages just in case, you know, they're not supposed to do that. But I live in the real world.
• 1:04:45
  Yeah. Threatening to sue, negotiating for severance on the spot, typically not advisable. You want to recover from the shock of the moment and get a game plan. So get out of the high pressure environment. Well, you're playing. A lot of employees are tempted when they're in that termination meeting to get answers. You're going to want some kind of confession, like tell me why you're firing me. Why are you firing me? For starters, your employer is never going to look at you and say, well, we're doing it because you're gay.
• 1:05:12
  that what they're not going to do that even if the real reason they're firing you is illegal they're they're not going to say that so the the big mistake and i saw this once i worked with someone briefly who came to me she was wrongfully fired while she was being fired she turned on her phone and was secretly recording herself like she like put it under the desk and so all you could see was this upward angle of her just yelling at her and
• 1:05:36
  employer. Like, why are you firing me? You did it because you knew I was pregnant. I'm pregnant and you're doing this. How can you do this to me? You're firing me. And the boss is like, no, it's just, it's not a good fit. You're not coming in on time. You're not like...
• 1:05:48
  It was a 20 minute recording and there was an argument that maybe she was fired because she was pregnant. But watching that recording, she looked extremely aggressive. The employer looked reasonable and not once did he confess to anything. So he's sitting there saying, no, it's just a bad culture fit. You're not getting along with people. You're not showing up on time. And she's yelling at him and secretly recording. Yeah.
• 1:06:12
  That recording, she thought, was a slam dunk. I don't know why. I was like, this makes you look terrible. This actually makes the employer look reasonable. It makes you look unreasonable. And what was the point of this? They didn't admit to anything. So what's the point of that? When you are in that hammer falls down termination meeting, don't argue, don't cry, don't beg, don't threaten, and don't try to get a confession. You can ask, hey, why are you firing me? Note the reason.
• 1:06:37
  I would love to know why they said you were fired. If they say it's performance, fine. Write that down and we'll talk about it. But don't grill them and try to get them to admit that they broke the law. That's not going to happen. So when you're fired, what happens if you saved screenshots of an important WhatsApp, Slack, text conversation with an employer?
• 1:06:58
  But later the chat was deleted for both of us. So can screenshots still be used as evidence in court? And then what if someone edits or fakes screenshots? How does the court verify whether or not these are real or not? So I get screenshots, fake emails. Have you ever seen cases like this before?
• 1:07:14
  Yes, I've actually seen a few situations where this comes up. So screenshots work. You know, I've seen a few things. And yes, I know there's going to be comments. It might violate your company policy. But, you know, you're in a freaking dogfight. Company policy is the least of my concerns right now. If I have a screenshot of a Slack message where it's very clear that your employer is rejecting your efforts to engage in a disability accommodation conversation, for example...
• 1:07:40
  That is far more serious than, oh, you screenshotted the slack. You broke policy. You rascal. I'm not really concerned about that. The screenshots can work with any form of writing, any form of...
• 1:07:56
  Photographic evidence, screenshot email. We typically do a deposition and we bring someone in who we would say, hey, are you familiar with this photograph? Yes. How? I took the photograph. How'd you take the photograph? I screenshotted on my phone.
• 1:08:12
  okay what app were you viewing at the time and we can actually look at the metadata on the phone and verify it's real unfortunately a conversation that we as lawyers are starting to have now is artificial intelligence and how it's used to manipulate evidence and we are i think
• 1:08:28
  more ahead of the curve than people might expect. At least my firm is, we're very forward thinking with tech. We are very much paying attention to what is the metadata of any piece of evidence? Who are the people involved? Can anyone sort of fortify or cut down the credibility of something we're looking at?
• 1:08:44
  That's a lot of legalese to say. Any piece of evidence that gets brought up, we are going to verify its authenticity in some way. And there's a number of ways to verify authenticity. And one side can challenge the authenticity. I didn't write that. That's not real. That's made up. Okay, you can say that. But if the metadata says this is real, if it's contemporaneous, if this person's saying it's real and they have a lot of credibility, then we're not going to worry about that so much.
• 1:09:11
  But excellent question. When in doubt, screenshots are great. I've even seen employees, like they had an important email that they couldn't go. They just pulled out their phone and took a picture of the email. Of the screen. I've had that happen. And then the fucking corporate dunce will be like, oh, they shouldn't have done that. And I'm like, okay, cool. It sort of helps my case. And no one cares about your stupid policy. But go on.
• 1:09:33
  Odoo is a success story partner. Now, before I say anything else, just let me get the pronunciation right, because they told me that like five times I need to get this right. It is Odoo. Oh, do. Here's why I actually care about this one. A few years ago, I was running my company with a video editor, one city, a designer in another city at a VA overseas. Every Friday night, I was logging into three different platforms to pay them. It was different fees, different invoice formats, a Google sheet. I was updating at midnight to track who got what that was my payroll.
• 1:09:58
  Odoo is the platform I wish I'd had five years ago. It's not a tool. It's basically an operating system for a business. Accounting, invoicing, project management, inventory, HR. There are over 45 applications, all connected, all running on one platform. And here's the part that got me. The same platform that runs your books can also build your website, e-commerce, signatures, the whole stack. It's one login, one source of truth,
• 1:10:19
  And the kicker is that the first app is free for life. Unlimited users, hosting included. And after that, one subscription unlocks everything else. So if you are stitching six tabs together to run your company, like I think most of us are sometimes, just go look at this thing. Odoo.com. Start with one free app. Huel is a success story partner. Now, I'll be honest with you. I am terrible at eating well when my schedule gets packed.
• 1:10:38
  I'll look up, it's two in the afternoon, I haven't even had a real meal, and then I'm just useless for the rest of the day because I'm hitting a wall. So I started keeping Huel around. It's been an absolute game changer. They just launched into Target stores nationwide, which is huge. You can walk right into your local Target right now, grab the Black Edition ready to drink and the Daily Greens ready to drink. The Black Edition, this is a full meal, 35 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, gluten-free, and it's under five bucks. I grabbed one of these in-between recordings, done, I'm good for two hours. And the Daily Greens is more of a health thing.
• 1:11:06
  42 vitamins, minerals, and superfoods in one bottle. It's developed by a registered nutritionist. 25 calories, 4 grams of fiber, and 1 gram of sugar. I'll have one first thing in the morning. It's the easiest win of my day. Now, 15% off for new customers. Use my code Scott at Huel.com slash Scott and do the post-checkout survey. It helps to show. Go to Huel.com slash Scott.
• 1:11:25
  Code Scott. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now, customers are using traditional search less and less to find the businesses they want to buy from. Now, when a buyer or a customer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? They're looking for a product. They're looking for a service. And they're going into some AI chat tool. And they're saying, hey, help me find the best one.
• 1:11:44
  If your company isn't showing up, you're missing out. And most companies have no idea if their business is showing up or even how to show up. And by the time they figure it out, they've already lost a deal to somebody that figured out AI. This is what AEO is, Answer Engine Optimization. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your buyers and your customers are looking for. It could be before the first click,
• 1:12:07
  before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. So check out HubSpot.com to learn more about AEO. HubSpot is the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. We spoke about at will. We spoke about non-competes. We spoke about getting fired. Let's talk about harassment and then let's talk about
• 1:12:28
  uh wages and money these are all obviously things that you know your content is incredible like outside of the book like your content in general i love your content i appreciate you man thank you i respect what you do and i think that the reason why well two two points i thought of first i'm shocked that a book like this doesn't exist already so was i
• 1:12:51
  That's wild to me. I was genuinely surprised. When Penguin came to me with this and said, hey, we want you to write something, I was like, I'm not familiar with anything, which I am an expert in this. I feel like if it existed, I'd know. But yeah, I might have missed it. And I went and I was like, holy shit, no one gives you this. No. But that's also why I think your content does so well. It's because-
• 1:13:12
  There's not a lot of people that advocate for the employee that teach them what. I don't know. It's just kind of sad to me. It's kind of sad that not like because as an employer, I also want to learn again. Maybe I'm just like an odd one out. I hope that I'm not. But I also want to learn like what you should and shouldn't do and how to do things properly.
• 1:13:31
  Like that just seems like a great way to run a business. I don't know why it's such a novel. Forward managers. One thing, you know? Yeah. This stuff doesn't get taught. You go into a bookstore, you'll find a million books on, you know, how to find your passion, how to make more money, how to be a big business entrepreneur person. Cool.
• 1:13:49
  I'm not one of those people who necessarily thinks entrepreneurship is the end-all be-all. I'm not the guy who thinks, oh, if you're a business owner, it's better than being an employee. Like everything is relative. I agree with that completely, yes. There are employees who make more money than I can ever dream of. Ask a brain surgeon who is a W-2 employee how they're doing. You know, they're fine. The point is it's not a very sexy topic for a lot of people, just advocating for yourself at work. A lot of people –
• 1:14:15
  It's a market that gets missed. But man, I don't know if you've looked around. People are getting squeezed. Our paychecks aren't covering the cost of living. Gas is going up. Oh, I know. People are stressed. I mean, people can barely afford to pay for the fuel to go to the groceries that they can barely afford to their rent that they can barely afford to their job that, oh, we're implementing AI and a thousand of you aren't going to be here next month. It's fucking scary out there. It's super scary. I mean, yeah.
• 1:14:43
  At this point in my life, I make decent money. I keep thinking to myself, you know, the benchmark when I was growing up was to make 100 grand. That was like the six figure, right? Yeah. And that's not really a lot for most people in like a major tier one U.S. city with kids and their sole income anymore. It doesn't hit like it used to. And that's saying, and then somebody's listening to this big, bro, what are you talking about? I make 60 grand.
• 1:15:09
  Or I make $55, or I make minimum wage. And you're complaining about $100. I'm not complaining about $100 from a perspective of, oh, it's such a little amount. The point is it doesn't buy anything anymore. It's scary to see $100. $100 used to be this sort of...
• 1:15:24
  You've really matured in your career. You've put in maybe 10, 15 years, and you hit that sweet management spot that comes with a six-figure paycheck. And you're like, I'm good. I'm good. This is what all the bullshit I tolerated for so long and worked for was. Now, God forbid you get there. It's getting harder to get there than ever. Even if you get there, you go –
• 1:15:45
  I thought life was supposed to get easier. I mean, it is easier than it was entry level. But, you know, now I'm at that age where I need more medical care and I can't afford it on this. Like it's tough. And let's go back to minimum wage. The federal minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009. Has it not? $7.25 an hour.
• 1:16:06
  Is that the minimum wage? That's the federal minimum wage. Oh, okay. Now, you'll get a lot of people get snarky with me. No one I know makes minimum wage. Well, okay, I've never actually seen a bobcat. It doesn't mean bobcats don't exist. So fuck you a little bit. But also, you know, the states are empowered to have their own minimum wage. That's why the minimum wage is higher in California. And then the municipalities have their different minimum wages, you know. So what's happened is some states have picked up the slack already.
• 1:16:33
  Other states, Texas is one of them, where they just sort of do whatever the federal is doing. It's still $7.25 an hour for a lot of those people. As a Canadian, what really threw me was when I first, as a young kid, would go on trips down to the U.S. and in Canada...
• 1:16:49
  Waiters and waitresses and servers, they get paid minimum, like actual, like whatever, like 12 bucks or whatever it is per hour, plus tip, okay? But then you come down to the US, and some people, I guess, it's legal to pay a server like three bucks or something like that. The tipped minimum wage. I love this.
• 1:17:06
  And that threw me off. Part two of this book is for you. I have a whole chapter on tips, tipping and what your rights are there. So the tipped minimum wage also has not increased at the federal level since the 90s. I think I was four years old the last time it was adjusted. So the federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. What is that? That was...
• 1:17:28
  fucking nothing in the 90s. It's even less than nothing now. So what that law said generally was you could pay a tip earning employee $2.13 an hour. And so long as they made at least $30 a month in tips, you could take their tips and apply it to your minimum wage obligation. So you still have to pay the minimum wage, but you get to use their tips to supplement it.
• 1:17:52
  Which is really a shame because the tips are their property. So what's happening here is the employee is working their ass off to earn tips that they then essentially surrender to the employer and the employer gives it back to them in the form of that minimum wage. So do you see what's happening there? It's a little crazy. You're at $2.13 an hour. They take your tips, stick it in there to meet your minimum wage, and then whenever you make over that is your tips.
• 1:18:15
  That is horseshit, which is why a lot of states have actually banned the practice or some states have raised the tip minimum wage. So you'll go to some states where instead of $2.13 an hour, it's $3.00 an hour, $4.00 an hour, $5.00. But they can still take your tips. But like the thought of that?
• 1:18:33
  of paying somebody $2 an hour. Like it doesn't, it's not, it's not, it doesn't make sense to me. Like I can't, like, sorry, in my brain, I can't compute paying a human being $2 an hour and expecting them to live.
• 1:18:51
  I mean, you could make an argument for actual non-tipped minimum wage still being such a small amount of money that no human could live on that. But that is like whatever, a two-axe. It needs to change. I understand there's this balancing act of, oh, the burden on businesses.
• 1:19:09
  I agree with FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I know you're Canadian. He's a very famous American president. I know, FDR. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But anyway, I agree with him that no business that relies on paying such low wages has a right to continue operating. If you really can't pay a decent wage to your people...
• 1:19:32
  I'm sorry, big hot shot business owner who's so important. Do the work yourself until you can afford to pay someone. That's what I did in my practice. I did the work myself until I made enough money. I was like, I can pay someone a decent wage where they can afford to live in San Diego, California. And guess what? Minimum wage doesn't cut it. My lowest paid employee gets $35 an hour plus benefits.
• 1:19:51
  That's because we live in San Diego. I don't live in fantasy land where I'm so special and important that I don't have to do the work and I have people for that shit and I pay them nothing. Fuck employers who do that. That pisses me off. If you have a restaurant, you are not above cooking, cleaning, waiting tables. That's your restaurant. Take some fucking accountability for your business. And if you think that, oh, I'm just going to get some kids to do it for cheap –
• 1:20:19
  The minimum wage was never made just for kids in high school. There's this new idea coming from some people that, oh, it was never meant to be a living wage. It's for kids. It's French. That's not what it was. When the minimum wage was first introduced in the 1930s, it was expressly, specifically made to be a living wage for a decent standard of living. That is what FDR said to Congress. And that was the point.
• 1:20:46
  And that is what gave our labor force the ability to go back to work. We climbed out of the Great Depression and we got our economy running just in time to beat the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Nazi forces in Europe. I mean, holy shit, democracy was on its heels at the time. And America had its pants down. I mean, the Great Depression fucked this country up. And putting in robust labor protections and taking care of working class people...
• 1:21:13
  Suddenly we've got the most roaring economy on the planet. We became the arsenal of democracy. And then sometime about 30 years after that, within 30 years after that, we forgot that it all starts at the base. You have to take care of working class people first. If you have a consumer-based economy like we do...
• 1:21:30
  You need people being able to afford to live. A hundred percent. Henry Ford had it right. I mean, I understand that he had, he's a controversial figure and I'm not, I'm not honoring the man. I'm just honoring this idea. Henry Ford wanted all of his factory workers to be able to buy his cars. And that makes sense. Because who the fuck are you selling to if people don't have any money?
• 1:21:52
  I mean, you can get away with selling to the top 1% for a while, but look at Vegas. That's what they tried, and it's not working. It doesn't work out so well. No. You know, I've always found – so everything that you said about how you started your practice, that's how I started this business. I do everything myself until I can hire good people. Bootstraps, bro. That's it. Way to go.
• 1:22:07
  That's it. I've never raised money. I mean, there's a place in time that's a whole other conversation for raising money for business, but you bootstrap it, you do everything yourself. I've done everything in this business from shooting video, coding a website, writing copy, graphic design, editing audio video, until I can find somebody who I can pay a decent amount to do it.
• 1:22:25
  I do that for two reasons. Number one, because I like to be competent and I like to know what I'm actually doing so I can hire the best. But also as a business owner, it's a lot less stressful for me when I can pay somebody more because then I don't have to worry about their work. Yeah. Oh, people don't, people can't give you a hundred percent if you're paying them so little that they go to their, you know, shitty little one bedroom apartment with a roommate that they hate and they can't get good sleep and they're not in a safe area and they can't eat well, they can't take care of their health. Like...
• 1:22:53
  It's a disaster. It's a humanitarian failure. It's a moral failure. And it's a business failure. It's just lose, lose, lose. If you can only build a business by hiring people on minimum or less than minimum wage. You're not ready. I was going to say, do you think the average entrepreneur that does that, they've just gotten worse, lazier. I don't know what it is. It's something.
• 1:23:16
  I think it's entitlement. I, I just, I, and granted I grew up, I am from a very expensive city, San Diego. I joke with people that living in San Diego. It's, it's, it's, if life is a video game, San Diego, you're on hard mode and you are stuck on hard mode. Yeah. It's, it's crazy. I got those $2 million bungalows. It's nuts. Um, but you know, the point is, um, yeah,
• 1:23:39
  It's a lot of the people I sue. They genuinely think that they're too special and too important to do the work sometimes. Or they just feel like they're better than their employees for reasons I can't articulate. And they really think that they're entitled to just pay dog shit wages and no one should ever complain about it.
• 1:24:00
  Listen, there comes a point where, yeah, you're the business owner, you're hiring people to do a job, and they are going to do some of the grunt work you don't want to do. But you need to pay them for it. You have to pay fair wages. Let's talk about money and let's talk about harassment. Yes. Okay. Let's talk about harassment first. What is illegal behavior when somebody is just an asshole? And what is actual harassment?
• 1:24:23
  okay great question because it's actually not illegal to be an asshole uh which thank god because a lot of us would be in prison because we're you know asshole isn't like a yes no thing it's it's a spectrum and it depends very much on a number of factors uh have you eaten recently you know are you dehydrated did you sleep well you know that's gonna your asshole quotient changes day to day um
• 1:24:47
  But no, it's not illegal to be an asshole. It's not illegal for someone to just not like you. And bullying itself is not illegal. Where it becomes illegal is if the bullying conduct, the harassing conduct, is motivated by a protected characteristic. Are you being targeted...
• 1:25:05
  for a reason you cannot control? Are you being targeted because you are a certain kind of person that other people are not? And overwhelmingly, the number one group that I see targeted in this way is women. Because incorrectly, in my opinion, because I've grown up around strong women and I work with strong women, incorrectly...
• 1:25:27
  Bullies will see women as a easier target, so they will target them for harassing behavior. I see that all the time. So what is harassment? Legally, harassment is severe or pervasive conduct directed at you because of your protected characteristic.
• 1:25:44
  So in English, that means severe would be outrageous conduct, stuff that has no place in civilized society. So if you're going around the office and you're calling the women chicks, bitches, a skirt, things like that, I've seen that's outrageous. Twenty six. Some guys think it's ironic and funny and it's not like cosplay as madmen.
• 1:26:07
  Yeah, we're seeing a little bit of that. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what corner of TikTok made that cool, but we do see that in my office. The other one is pervasive. So if it's let's say it's, you know, severe can be something like touching you, you know, a pat on the butt would be a severe form of harassment. Pervasive would be maybe it's less severe, but it's occurring over a period of time.
• 1:26:30
  You know, I had a case where this wasn't the only thing the guy did, but he was always trying to look up my client's shorts, always trying to ogle them, always trying to catch them. Like they worked in this area where there was like changing rooms. He was always trying to get a peek. And that became pervasive harassment because he didn't put his hands on anybody. He didn't verbally attack anybody, but he was creating a situation where just every day he was making people feel unsafe. So severe. Yeah.
• 1:26:59
  or pervasive could work. Severe and pervasive is more common what we see. And again, it has to be motivated by a protected characteristic. Your sex, race, gender, national origin, religion, disability status, age. Like there's more to it than people realize incorrectly. If you slap someone on the ass, it doesn't have to be motivated by a characteristic.
• 1:27:20
  So there's a couple of things there. So it would be just a plain assault, a battery, depending on your jurisdiction. In mine, it would be a battery. So that is an issue on itself. But, you know, it's still going to be sexual harassment motivated by gender if we have a boss who's doing it for their own sexual gratification or to demean you or to put you down in some way. So there is a spectrum. For example, if someone's being fired because they're pregnant...
• 1:27:46
  By definition, that is still gender-based discrimination. That's still sex-based discrimination. Yeah. And by the way, so incorrectly, a lot of folks think, oh, well, I'm a white man. That means I don't have any protections because I'm not a – incorrect. You're white. That is a race. You're a man. That is a gender. We do see discrimination against those groups. We do see harassment targeting people for that groups. The honest truth is it's just not as common.
• 1:28:12
  It's just not as common, but it's equally serious. It's equally illegal. And I do get a lot of mail-on-mail harassment. I tell a story here. It's titled, Hey, Gaywad. I had a guy who was harassed by a manager macho guy, thought he was just the shit. And he called my client Gaywad all the time. Hey, Gaywad. Hey, Gaywad. And he would make jokes. He'd hold up little tools and say, Hey, Gaywad, want me to spit on this first?
• 1:28:39
  The implication being he's going to shove it up his butt. That is... People are really fucked up. People are... Well...
• 1:28:47
  That's a whole culture issue, particularly. I mean, it's everywhere, but particularly in blue collar work, that's a problem. This sort of jockeying for dominance and status by demeaning people sexually. That is an issue. And that is a form of harassment. So even though my client was a heterosexual white male, he's still covered by that protected characteristic. He's being targeted because of his sexuality.
• 1:29:14
  Because of his status as a man, the boss there is thinking, I can humiliate and degrade this guy by attacking his gender and his sexuality. And now this is also important. That boss was not romantically interested in Michael. He was not gay, but it was still sexual harassment. You report sexual harassment to HR and they don't do anything. Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  What do you do next? That's tough. So there's a couple of things I want you to do. Yeah, well, report it in writing. Okay. That way they can't deny that it happened. And I have templates to tell you how to do it. A lot of times they'll say, all right, we're going to take this seriously. We're going to investigate. If a reasonable amount of time passes, you should follow up and be like, hey, what's going on? This is still happening. I don't know what to do. If you are actually physically unsafe, police.
• 1:30:00
  Seriously, if someone's putting their hands on you or trying to corner police, okay? If it's still going on, I want you to consider a couple options. Option one, it's free. You can look at the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. You can look at your state equivalent. In California, it's the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, also the Department of Industrial Relations, the Department of Civil Rights. Most states have the equivalent. Those are free, but you don't get a lot of help. You can also talk to a workers' rights lawyer like me.
• 1:30:31
  And if you have your paper trail, you're going to be in a way better position to have one of those free government agencies help you or someone like me help you. And by the way, that first case evaluation is free. You don't lose anything by talking to a couple of lawyers and saying, hey, I'm getting harassed at work. I reported it. Here's a copy of my report. They didn't do anything. I followed up. It's still happening. What can I do? Most lawyers who are well practiced will say, well, you've got a paper trail. You've got something here.
• 1:30:56
  Or they'll tell you not. Yeah, or they'll tell you not. Or maybe I've actually had clients come to me and just say, what do I do next? Because it's very fact specific. And I'm always measuring how much danger are you really in? Because what we do, it changes a lot if you're merely annoyed versus, hey, I'm in danger. Big difference in how we handle it. So getting your paper trail, always give them a second shot. Hey, what's going on? It's still happening. After that.
• 1:31:22
  free government resource, EEOC, state level equivalent, or talk to a workers' rights lawyer. Let's move on to money. So we spoke about wage theft, and you went and you sort of explained how that's happening, what to do about it. But say somebody is paying or thinks they're being paid less than a co-worker who's doing the same job. Is that legal, illegal? What should they do about it? When is it legal? When is it illegal? And how do they find out?
• 1:31:48
  I think this happens a lot in companies. I think this is, you're worried about somebody. I mean, this is what, isn't there like stats about if you're a marginalized group, you're getting paid X percentage less than your coworker or your peer doing the same job. We haven't got good data in a while, but the most recent is that female staff tend to make, depending on where you're looking, because it's so easy to just say, oh, they make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.
• 1:32:18
  depending on what kind of work you're looking at, like it'll change, but the general like broad level, we're looking at between 70 and 80 cents on the dollar. And that's like for equal level work. Okay. Yeah. So again, like you'll have people freak out and say, I work in government. That would never happen. Blah, blah, blah. It's like that. That's why we break this up by sector, you know, but anyway, all that to say, yes, it is a problem. The number one way to identify and prevent and fix it is to talk about your pay.
• 1:32:48
  that is the number one way to do it. Because how are you going to know you're getting ripped off if you don't talk about it with people? Is it illegal? It is not illegal to discuss your pay. No, no, no, no, no. Is it illegal to pay somebody who's doing the same job differently? Okay. So if you are performing the same work and you have equal qualifications and you are being paid less for a discriminatory reason, illegal. Now, depending on what state you're in, if you are having...
• 1:33:14
  substantially similar work, substantially similar qualifications, and there's disparate pay, it may trigger an equal pay violation. We got to look at the reason. If it's because you're genuinely difficult to work with, your performance isn't there, legal. If the other person has a master's degree, you got a bachelor's degree, legal. You got five years experience, he's got seven years experience, legal. You're a man, she's a woman, not legal. He's 60, right?
• 1:33:43
  You're 25. It's illegal. We got a problem here. And it's not the way you might think. You might think, wait, the 60-year-old's been here a long time. They should be great. A lot of times what I'm seeing, I see this a lot, Scott, we'll have very tenured employees who've been around a long time, maybe 60 years old, getting paid the same or less than someone who comes in at 30.
• 1:34:06
  And there's a lot of reasons. They started lower. They started a long time ago. Their raises just didn't keep up. But that's a form of pay discrimination too. And then you can look and say, wait a minute. I'm much more experienced. Why am I getting paid less than this new, less experienced person? And there's another one that I talk about in the book. This was a big one. A woman worked for Disney. High-level executive. Very established manager. Very high-level person. She was a black woman.
• 1:34:35
  she found out that not only was she being paid less than the other managers in her division, but across all the managers, she was being paid less. And not by a little, a lot, between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, depending on which manager you looked at. And the company could not come up with a non-discriminatory reason for it.
• 1:34:56
  Why am I being paid so much less than these men, than these white people? Why? Couldn't say experience. She was the most experienced. Couldn't say education. She was just as educated as everyone else. Couldn't say performance because she was performing just as good as everyone else. Why the fuck is she being paid so much less? Because whether they're overtly racist or just implicit bias, someone made the decision that her time wasn't as valuable.
• 1:35:20
  And that's unacceptable. And you have to speak about your salary to figure out if that's the case. The only way she found out was by talking to people. But the way companies get away with this, and not just discrimination, by the way. Let's say there's no discrimination. Just someone... I'll give you a scenario. So a 60-year-old was hired years ago at a salary. New employees coming in at 25.
• 1:35:45
  can do the same job, obviously way less experience, but now the market's more competitive. So I have to offer that person $25,000 or $30,000 more. Significant delta.
• 1:35:58
  But I'm not thinking I'm discriminating. I'm just thinking I'm attracting the best talent. I have no malicious thought in my head at all. I'm like, I got to just close this hire because I need this person. And look, there's a lot of situations that will come up where these sort of things can happen. And they're not – I'm not always going to scream ageism, racism, sexism every time. There's a lot of reasons it comes up. But fundamentally, the problem we're trying to solve – look, there's the discrimination issue like the girl who worked for Disney that I talked about. And then there's what you talked about.
• 1:36:28
  If you are trying to advocate for a better deal, if you are trying to have a life where you are paid fairly for your work and you have, you know, acceptable work conditions and you are being honored for the value that you bring to an organization, you've got to talk about your pay. Because that guy who's 60, he might be thinking, yeah, I'm doing well. I'm doing great. If you're finding out, wait, the going rate for entry level is what I'm making. I need to have a conversation with somebody because I'm not being valued here.
• 1:36:56
  And either I need to get a raise or I need to move on. What was the inflection point in your life that made you want to advocate for these people? You know, Scott, I've, I've always been the kind of person who likes helping people, um,
• 1:37:12
  And there's a few reasons for it. I haven't really dove into my psychology. I enjoy helping people. It makes me feel good. I think it's my purpose on this earth is to help any way I can. When I was a firefighter, I loved firefighting because I got to be a protector.
• 1:37:28
  I got to protect people on their worst day. And that's why that career spoke to me. As a lawyer, I get to protect people from bullies. But I get to go a step further. When I was a firefighter, if I got called to a heart attack, for example, I can help someone, but I can't punish the heart attack. As a lawyer, I get to go a step further and say, not only do I get to protect people who've been abused at work, but I get to go around and really kick the abuser in the face and teach them a lesson, which feels really good. Inflection point.
• 1:37:58
  You know, I'll be honest with you. I was bullied a lot when I was a young kid. My parents had a really nasty divorce. Yeah.
• 1:38:06
  I didn't have safety like the way I needed to. I just I just never really felt safe. I felt uncomfortable and anxious and scared all the time as a kid. And other kids sniffed that out on me and preyed on it. And I just I got kicked around a lot. So I really know what it feels like to feel small and powerless. And then I came out of school. I had no money.
• 1:38:31
  I was working towards this career in fire. I was low man on the totem pole. Again, I had no status. I had no power. I had no money. And I was just at the whim of any employer I went to. And any deal I got, I had to be grateful for no matter how predatory or abusive it was. And if someone treated me bad or disrespected me, I had to smile and pretend it was funny, even when deep down I was really hurt.
• 1:38:54
  I know what it feels like to be powerless. I know what it feels like to feel like this is just how it's going to be and it's never going to get better. So fundamentally, I mentioned a while ago, my big message is I want to help people not be afraid anymore. I want to show people that, hey, maybe Attorney Ryan isn't coming to save you in your specific circumstance, but here's the tools you need to protect yourself. So inflection point.
• 1:39:16
  I can't point to any one instance. I'll just say I've always enjoyed helping people and I know what it feels like to feel powerless. Tell me the story about Joshua Bell.
• 1:39:27
  Oh, that's a really good one. Okay. So the highlight of this story is a toxic environment, an abusive work environment will erode you. And what it does is it plays a trick on you. And this happened to me. It tricks you into thinking that you're stupid. You're not valuable. You're not special. You're not worthy. You're not worthy.
• 1:39:47
  that you're lonely because you deserve to be lonely. Like a bad environment will do this to you, but it's not you. It's the environment. And so why does Joshua Bell come into this? For those who don't know, uh, Joshua Bell is a very famous, uh, musician, violinist. He travels all over the world. He's done work with Hans Zimmer. Uh, he, he did some of the music for angels and demons, a major film. Like he is a big deal. If you want to go see Joshua Bell perform, uh,
• 1:40:14
  you better have some money to go see this guy perform because it is an honor. It is a big deal to see this guy. But he teamed up back in the late 2000s and did a little experiment. They thought, what if we took this legendary performer and put him somewhere very ordinary? Let's put him in the metro in D.C. And they just gave him like a light jacket and a baseball cap. And he just played for about 45 minutes.
• 1:40:38
  And what's interesting about this is people are thinking, hey, we're bringing an actual legend into this area amongst the common people. Like, are people going to gather and be moved to tears? Like, what's going to happen here? It'll be amazing. What actually happened was more interesting. No one gave a flying fuck about this guy. Everyone was commuting or doing their own thing. I think I might get my numbers wrong. I think about a thousand people passed by.
• 1:41:03
  Over the course of this less than an hour of that, I think maybe a dozen stopped and listened to him and only two or three even recognize the guy. He made less than a hundred dollars in tips for that. I mean, does that mean that he is not an amazing violinist? Does it mean he is not worthy of attention, that he is not capable of commanding respect and moving a room to tears?
• 1:41:32
  The context really mattered in that situation. In that context, he fell into white noise. He was treated as unimportant. It wasn't personal. He was in the wrong place. But you put that man where he belongs. He didn't belong in the fucking metro. He belongs in Carnegie Hall.
• 1:41:48
  You put him in the right environment, everyone is listening to this man. And everyone is honored to get to listen to this man. And I tell that story because everyone has talents, unique abilities, or even if you're thinking, well, I don't really have a talent, Ryan. You have something to offer this world.
• 1:42:07
  There are people who will love you and enjoy you and you will enjoy being with them. But if you are in the wrong environment, you're always going to feel off and you're going to start doubting yourself. And if you're doubting yourself on a day to day, if day to day you feel like I'm not special, I'm not worthy, I guarantee you're in a bad environment. Was the firefighting station a bad environment for you?
• 1:42:28
  The last one was, unfortunately. It's painful to admit that. I'm getting better at it. That's your inflection point, to be quite honest. It might be. You're very perceptive, Scott. It's something I've worked on recently is acknowledging some of what happened in the fire service because –
• 1:42:49
  Well, let me take the scenic route. It's all I ever wanted since I was a kid. I just wanted to be a firefighter. That's all I wanted. I knew that's what I wanted to do. I never had any doubt in my mind. And what was funny is I'd wrapped my whole world around doing that, that when I got there, I...
• 1:43:07
  I still had insecurities and angst and, and, you know, problems. I was, I was very young and I was like, wait a minute, I've got the badge. I've got the, the truck, I've got the tools and the team. Why am I not fulfilled? I thought that once I got here, everything would be okay.
• 1:43:24
  I had focused so much on becoming a firefighter. I hadn't done a lot of inner work, you know, and I think there's a broader discussion about what makes you successful there. But what had happened was I really loved the career. I had moved around different departments, different stations, loved the brotherhood, the adventure, helping people just, you know, hanging out around the station. It was great. But then I got into one station that had a pretty toxic environment. A lot of the people there just weren't happy.
• 1:43:49
  it was a lot of unhappy firefighters, a lot of older guys who were just jaded. They weren't happy with their family life. They weren't happy with their career. I got assigned to an officer who I call Joe in the book, who was a very troubled man. He was a miserable prick is what I would probably say. Uh,
• 1:44:10
  But because he was so unhappy with his own life, he looked for an easy target to express that anger to. And it was me. I was the youngest guy there. I was the newest guy there. I had the least status there. So he picked on me. And so...
• 1:44:24
  You know, I loved the fire service. It's a wonderful career and I have so much respect for the people who do it. And it's a great job. Thank God for firefighters and the people who do it and the families who support the firefighters who do it. But I was getting to a point already where I was like, man, I can't, I can't commit to weddings. I RSVP to things and then I don't show up because of staffing pattern and wildfire schedules. I don't have any control over my life. So I already was like, damn, am I, is this really what I thought it was going to be?
• 1:44:50
  Is this going to give me the life I want? And then I ended up in a toxic environment where up until that point, I had always been celebrated as a positive guy, a team player, a hard worker. Suddenly, none of that was acknowledged. I was just getting bullied and criticized and attacked by a guy who was miserable. And because he was miserable, he wanted me to be miserable. And that was my Joshua Bell moment where I was like...
• 1:45:15
  This doesn't work anymore. I'm in a toxic environment. And even though this job is something I love doing, Joshua Bell loved playing that violin, but he was doing it in the wrong place and it didn't have the effect he wanted. That last year was tough, but ultimately I'm really grateful for it, Scott. In the time, it was uncomfortable. I remember I had stomach aches.
• 1:45:33
  At the station that that last physically. Oh, yeah. Any time I woke up, I was like, what is Joe going to do to me today? What bullshit is he going to pull today? What what is going to happen today? And God forbid we go to a fire and I get hurt. I know that guy's not going to stick his neck out for me. Like, I don't feel safe going to fires with this guy. I had stomach aches and. In a weird way, I'm grateful.
• 1:45:55
  Because if I hadn't gotten that uncomfortable, I don't think I ever would have made the change. That's what I think too. Like I'm just thinking about what you're describing, you're describing your own experience. But by living through that, now you understand the experience of people that come to you for help.
• 1:46:10
  Yeah. Oh, I do. I do. I've been there. I was a firefighter. I've worked in construction, landscaping. I worked in an office sales environment. I've had a lot of different work experiences. So, you know, I'm glad I did because there's a lot of lawyers who just come through undergrad law school and they're lawyers and that's the only experience they have. I can empathize with my clients in ways a lot of other workers' rights lawyers can't.
• 1:46:33
  I also think that when somebody's going through that, you start to question, even if somebody is not explicitly gaslighting you, sometimes you start to question your own self-worth and that environment, like, because this is actually probably something that you deal with. You get people coming to you because they see your content and they've been dealing with something for so long, but they've almost tricked themselves into thinking that it's
• 1:46:58
  I have people who are all apologies when they come to me. They feel guilty asking for help. They feel like they're doing something bad by simply saying, hey, I don't think I deserve to be treated this way. Because it's exactly what you pointed out. Over time, they start to think I'm treated this way because this is what I deserve.
• 1:47:15
  I'm paid this way because I'm not as smart as my boss. My boss gets the car and the house. I don't, cause I'm not as good as him. And they really start to think that, but I'll tell you something that's really magical. You know, we talk about the dark side. There's something I love about this career.
• 1:47:30
  I have a case that I settled yesterday for over $2 million. We talked about it a couple of times. And I keep bringing it up because this is actually probably my favorite client I ever had. A wonderful woman. She's just so strong and vibrant and wonderful in so many ways. And she's so brave. But the version of her that came to me for help two years ago versus the version of her that I got to call and deliver the news, totally different person. Yeah.
• 1:47:56
  Because when she came to me, she was at her lowest point. She had just got fired. She was about to have a kid. Her husband was sick. He couldn't work. And she just got abused by who she thought was one of the most powerful men in town. And she didn't know what to do. And she was scared. I watched her really find her voice and grow into someone much more assertive over two years. Because over the two years of the litigation, she realized, this guy's not invincible.
• 1:48:21
  Oh, my God. Like she gets to see him in a deposition for the first time. It's the most vulnerable she's seen. He goes, he's kind of a bitch, you know, and she found she found her confidence again. And I get that joy sometimes. I get the joy. I.
• 1:48:37
  of watching someone come in and I can see all the gaslighting sort of wash away from them over time. It's a really cool feeling because I noticed you have Atomic Habits on the shelf behind me. James Clear, amazing book. And one of the ideas, he says, is that every action we take is a vote for the kind of person we want to become. And we don't realize it, but every time we accept abuse, every time we accept a shitty deal like that from an employer, every time we accept that or tell ourselves, well, this is just how it is,
• 1:49:06
  The vote you are making is to be the kind of person who shrinks when you're attacked. And over time, you start to see yourself as a small person. But every time you push back, every time you stand up, every time you take that risk and say, hey, wait, you're not going to speak to me that way. You're voting to be the kind of person who is more confident, who stands up a little taller, who's a little more willing to go out and take risks and take the things that you want in life.
• 1:49:31
  It's scary, but man, I'm so freaking proud of her. I'm so proud of the people who come to me and ask for help. Is that one of the most important takeaways from the book? There's the tactics in here. There's the templates, but...
• 1:49:46
  is that the change that people have to start to go through? None of this is any good if you live in fear. The final, so there's four parts of the book. There's know your rights, part one, protect your money, protect your health, embrace your power. I chose those words very carefully. I think one of the last lines I say in here is the age of fear is over. We know our rights and we're not afraid to use them. Fear is the number one barrier to people getting treated fairly at work and getting the deal they deserve. Fear is the number one barrier
• 1:50:14
  Asshole bosses, I can't control them. I can't. But if you are too scared to make a change, if you're too, you know, I was afraid to make a change too. I thought my whole life I just wanted to be a firefighter. What am I going to do? What if I fail? What if I take on all this debt from law school and it doesn't go anywhere? What if, what if, what if?
• 1:50:34
  I'm so glad I took the risk. I'm so glad I didn't let fear make that decision for me. If this book does one thing, it's make people not afraid anymore. Okay. I want to do a couple of quick true or false. So this will help frame up some common misconceptions. Um,
• 1:50:51
  I'll just I'll run through these quickly. If you quit your job, your employer can withhold your last paycheck. No. Oh, my God. No, no, no, no. And I'll tell you this. In California, it's even worse. So, you know, at the federal level, you know, you got to get your final paycheck. That doesn't change. Even if they fired you for cause, even if, you know, you deserved it, you still have to give you that final paycheck. But in California, we got a really cool rule that I hope becomes federal law one day. In California, we have something called waiting time penalties.
• 1:51:20
  And it punishes employers who, out of capriciousness, meanness, revenge, withhold your final paycheck. Interest. Worse than interest because interest is, what, 10% usually is what we go for. In California, if you are fired, you are supposed to be paid your full final wages on that day.
• 1:51:37
  If they don't do it, then every day that it is late, you accumulate a penalty equal to one full day of wages, including a planned and regular overtime. So this gets very expensive very quick. It's capped at 30 days. But I have had cases where an employer wanted to stick it to one of my clients and withheld the pay or whatever. And after penalties and everything else that came out...
• 1:51:59
  What would have been maybe $1,500, their ego cost them $35,000. And I don't feel bad about that at all because no one asked you to be a petty little prick and withhold someone's pay. No one asked you to do that. You did that. If you discuss your salary with your coworkers, you can be fired.
• 1:52:17
  They can fire you, but that's going to be a violation of the National Labor Relations Act. And it's going to be a violation of some state laws as well. Don't forget that the United States is a layer cake. We have the federal protections that kind of form the base and they apply to everyone and then the states can build on it. So, yeah, employees have a federally protected right to engage in concerted activities for mutual welfare and protection. And that includes the right to discuss pay.
• 1:52:41
  HR is there to protect the employees. No, HR is there to protect the company. And here's a quick test that you can do. If you want to know who is your ally at work, it's very easy. Who signs their paycheck? Is it you? If it's not, then they're not on your side. I'm sorry. And look, it's not that all HR is out to get you. I have good friends in HR. One of my sisters is in HR. It's a great profession, but they are there to protect the company. That's their job.
• 1:53:10
  If your boss is a bully, that's illegal. Depends on why they're bullying you. If they're just an asshole who's rough around the edges and they treat everyone that way, not illegal. But if you find they're targeting some people more than others, they like to pick on the older women in the office. I had a boss once who would just watch the black employees very carefully, extremely suspicious stuff. It depends on what their motivation is.
• 1:53:38
  If you're on a PIP, you should try to comply with it and just keep your head down.
• 1:53:41
  Yes and no. Do your best to comply and don't make any noise because you're in a red flag situation. But you should take the extra step. Take some initiative. Apply to other jobs like crazy. Right to work means your employer can fire you for any reason. A very common misconception, and I'm so glad you brought that up. So right to work laws actually have nothing to do with termination. And that surprises a lot of people because a lot of folks are like, wait, my boss told me it's a right to work state so I could be fired for anything. Your boss is an idiot. They don't know what they're talking about.
• 1:54:11
  Right to work laws only mean that union membership cannot be required for your job. Union participation can't be requirement. That's why some people joke right to work means right to work for less because it's seen as an attack on union power. It just so happens by pure coincidence. OK, half the states are right to work states. OK, California is not a right to work state, by the way, which means union membership can be compulsory in that state. When I joined the fire service, I had to pay my union dues and I didn't have a choice because it wasn't a right to work state.
• 1:54:41
  Um, it's just by pure coincidence. Every right to work state is also an at will state, but they're totally different laws. They have nothing to do with each other. If your employer says you signed an arbitration agreement, you've given up your right to sue. You've given up your right to sue them in court for covered claims under that arbitration agreement, but you can still take them to arbitration. And what's really fun about that. I don't like arbitration. The rules are loosey goosey. Um, I have a whole section on arbitration. I'm not really a fan.
• 1:55:11
  When you go to arbitration under employment, the employer pays the fees for that. So they really feel cute because they kind of got out of a collective action. They've put up a hurdle in front of you. But at some point, they've got to pay that arbitrator. So a lot of times if there's an arbitration agreement, look, I'll go to arbitration. I have three arbitrations coming up this summer that I'm going to go represent employees, and I'm going to win. At least I'm pretty confident I'll win. Yeah.
• 1:55:36
  It's not the end of the world. If you can avoid them, don't sign it. But if you have to, talk to a workers' rights lawyer and make sure that they have experience arbitrating claims.
• 1:55:47
  You need money to hire a good employment lawyer. Absolutely not. So this is actually a really fun one because I get a lot of people who I'll say, hey, this is a case I worked on. And people say, well, it must be nice to have money. Or like, you're a shark. How do you take advantage of these people? I would have no clients if I charge fired, unemployed people hundreds of dollars an hour for my work. That wouldn't make a lot of sense.
• 1:56:08
  I get paid when I win and I cover the costs of litigation. So I have one case where it's been very expensive. We had to hire expert witnesses, filing fees, deposition fees. I pay salary for my team who's working on the case. I'm in this case for like $50,000 before we're even talking about my fees. I cover that expense for my clients. It's a risk I'm willing to take for them.
• 1:56:29
  You got to come to me with a real claim. If you're come to me just very wishy-washy, I don't like my pay. My boss is a jerk. Not good enough. I need to see that something illegal actually happened to you and then I'm willing to take that risk. At will employment means you have no rights. Nope. I practice in an at will state and we do very well there. If you report something and nothing happens, there's nothing else you can do.
• 1:56:52
  Uh, nothing else you can do. It depends on the company. Usually you can escalate it. You can do the followup that we talked about earlier in this podcast. Uh, but if you actually truly do hit a wall, now it's time to talk to state agency or workers rights lawyer like me. You also have the option of leaving. I mean, some people have more options than others. We, we talk about that, but if it's really a dead end and you don't want to go the pursuing a claim route, try to leave. When should you stay? And when should you go?
• 1:57:22
  That's really a question that only a person who's in there really knows because it depends on a lot of things. I will say this. If you are starting to have physical symptoms, you wake up in the morning and you have a stomach ache. You can't sleep. You dread work. Your palms are sweaty. You're uncomfortable in your own skin. No appetite. Leave because this job is affecting your health.
• 1:57:46
  Seriously, if you start having physical symptoms like that, leave. Sunday scaries happen to everyone. I love my job and I get Sunday scaries sometimes. But if it's every night is Sunday scaries, it's time to leave. And certainly if this is obvious, but if anyone is like sexually harassing you, pressuring you for that kind of leave. Oh, and if your paycheck bounces, leave. Leave. Definitely leave. Yeah. Yeah. You'd be surprised how many people stick around in that situation. I've had that happen before.
• 1:58:12
  Just to bring this home, tell me one last story, just the craziest story that you've ever had to deal with.
• 1:58:20
  Crazy is relative because they're all a little crazy. Let me think on this a minute. I mean, there's two that come to mind. There's a wage an hour one and a sexual harassment one. The wage hour one, this is just outrageous and bonkers to me. I don't know how they thought this was okay. It was this franchise restaurant. And what they did is they hired mostly high school kids. And they told the high school kids that they could come in on weekends to volunteer and
• 1:58:45
  for a job and if they came in to volunteer as a reward for their good work ethic they would get a gift card to the restaurant that violates so many rules and the the fact that they thought this was okay is just bonkers beyond all reason uh so that was pretty outrageous the other one sexual harassment oh my god it's always a married guy um married guy
• 1:59:08
  it's always a married guy married guy in his 50s uh decided he was in love with my client uh would like make her come on like business meetings with her which was really just he would take her into this hallway and just talk at her for hours uh and then he would have her go on shopping dates with him and pick out outfits for him uh purportedly to go on events and things but really he would try to pressure her to come in and and you know take his shirt off around her
• 1:59:38
  Like getting a little aggressive. Then it gets worse. One day they're walking in this office hallway and she's got like a skirt on and he's getting really brazen at this point. He grabs her skirt and flips it up in the air and says, hey, what color are your panties? And flips it up. Thank goodness she was wearing shorts, but she like swatted him. It's like knock that off. Oh, my God. Reports it to one of the office managers and she gives the guy an earful. He backs off for like two weeks. Then.
• 2:00:07
  don't remember what prompted this it's crazy one day my client just gets a text message from him it's about this long i'm holding up like three inches is that three inches yeah i lie about it so much i don't know what three inches oh no anyway
• 2:00:25
  that part out anyway um it's it's this long text message and it is crazy it's i don't know what he was thinking he said expressly i want to bend you over and smack your ass and i want to come inside you and you're gonna call me daddy and when you call me daddy that makes like it was just crazy so after a two-week hiatus
• 2:00:46
  This is how he re-enters the scene. This is, he came in just, I'm back, like the Kool-Aid man, just this outrageous text message. It was so graphic. He sends it. And then like five minutes later, he's blowing up my client calling, delete that message, delete that message. Oh my God. Like freaking out. But the damage is already done. And that was the last straw. That was the one where she was like, I quit. I'm done. And she ended up calling me.
• 2:01:10
  And we got her, I can't say exactly, but we got her six figures ultimately. It was a pretty grotesque harassment case. She was really afraid of that man, by the way. Part of the reason she tolerated this is this man was very wealthy. He was very well connected. And he made it very clear that if he wasn't happy with anyone in the office, he would destroy them and they would never work again. Which is why people get put in this position where...
• 2:01:34
  intolerable behavior becomes tolerated because there's so much fear but i gotta tell you just like my client who we settled this week i was so proud of this specific client because the version of her that came to me was so scared very submissive to authority you know didn't know her rights and at the end of it she was like that guy's a coward yeah
• 2:01:54
  That guy's a bitch. We kicked his ass. And she is so much more assertive now. And she's so much more fearless. Anyway, the reason that case is outrageous is the guy is married and he sent a text message like that. I don't know what he and the deposition was so funny. I pulled it up immediately. I was like, hey, let's read this text message. And his lawyer was like, the document speaks for his self objection. I was like, all right, I'll read it.
• 2:02:16
  I want you to just give advice to people who are listening, who are in a situation where they're feeling harassed or they feel like something's off. Maybe they can't know exactly what it is, or maybe they just feel like this isn't the way that work should be.
• 2:02:35
  And they're scared, like they're not gonna verbalize that they're scared, but you know, you know, when you're scared of something that's going on at work and you're scared of someone and you're scared of someone ruining you or your career or you're standing in the community. There's a million different reasons why you are listening to this and you are thinking about your situation at work and the thought of taking action
• 2:03:02
  gives you anxiety, gives you stress, and you're in your mind trying to figure out what feels worse, continuing on or taking action against this person or this company, it could be both, that is making your life a living hell. What is your message to that person?
• 2:03:20
  Uh, I want to hit a few things. There's, there's three broad points that I think I want to hit. First, I want to address the fear. I want to address the trying to decide whether to take action or leave and then why you're so afraid to take action. So first I want to talk about the fear. Um, I've been there.
• 2:03:35
  You are feeling that fear because your nervous system, your body is trying to protect you. Being afraid doesn't mean you're a coward or you're weak or you're small. It is just an old evolutionary trait that we all have. It is trying to protect you. It doesn't make you a coward. You are still brave. You are still strong. You are still worthy even when you feel fear. Do not let the fear cause you to think any less of yourself. Okay, moving on.
• 2:04:00
  Part of the reason you're so scared about what to do in this situation is because you do not know what to do. You're scared because you are not aware of your options. And you might be thinking that it's very binary. Either do nothing or, you know, burn the boats. We're suing. We're direct confrontation.
• 2:04:16
  There is a spectrum of action you can take depending on the level of threat you're against. And it doesn't have to be that confrontational. That's why I have sample emails and templates, because I know you don't know what to say. I'm going to tell you what to say so that you can push back gently without getting into too much hot water. Not more than you can handle.
• 2:04:33
  Pushing back a little bit on that spectrum, it's like weight training. Every time you learn to assert yourself on a small level, start small. You don't have to go big guns blazing, just little things. You exercise that muscle and you're going to start feeling a lot more firm. When is it time to take action?
• 2:04:53
  I've said before that when the physical symptoms are there, but maybe sooner. I mean, honestly, the minute your money starts getting fucked with, the minute you're starting to doubt yourself, the minute your mental health is starting to decline, it's time to do something. Because just like my client, like, it's only going to get worse. She pushed back a little bit, thank God. He behaved himself for two weeks and then came back worse than ever. Um...
• 2:05:15
  So if you're afraid, I get it. Don't think less of yourself for being afraid. You're afraid because you don't know what to do. Learn your rights. Seriously. It's worth the time. I know we're all busy. Get my book if you can. If you can't, get on YouTube University. Follow Lawyers Like Me. It's free. I put a lot of free information out there because you're going to be less scared when you know what the steps are.
• 2:05:34
  You take everything you've learned over your career and with all the people you've advocated for. It doesn't have to be career advice, just life advice, because I think there's a lot of important lessons about how you approach challenges in life, how you approach fear that you've articulated, that you speak to people about.
• 2:05:51
  and you want to take one of those lessons and you want to pass it on to your child, what would that lesson be and why? It's an excellent question because I'm still a student too. I'm figuring things out. I've been angry when I should have been calm. I've been anxious when I should have found peace. I've been in my head when I should have been present. So what am I trying to pass on to my child? I want to teach them, first of all,
• 2:06:22
  Your success in life and how you measure how well you're doing, it has so much more to do with how you treat other people than anything else. It's, yeah, I hope you make lots of money because that makes your life easier. But the ruthless pursuit of money and status is going to leave you feeling very hollow at the end of the day.
• 2:06:40
  How you treat yourself is going to affect how you treat the world around you and how you see the world around you. So above all things, I want to teach them acceptance of who they are. Not worry so much about what other people say you ought to be or what they think about who you are, but what do you like? What makes you happy? And then showing up, be a good friend to people. Because if you want good friends and good friends are proven to impact your health and your longevity and all kinds of great things, the best way to be a good, to have good friends is to be a good friend.
• 2:07:09
  But it all starts with how you talk to yourself. Positive self-talk. This isn't delusion. You're not being, you know, a narcissist if you're just being kind to yourself. Because I'm serious. The way you treat yourself, your inner monologue, that your inner work, is going to reflect in how you treat others. I mentioned before Joe was terrible to me. It's because his internal life was hell. I know that man was vicious to himself inside of his head, and that's why he treated me the way he did.
• 2:07:38
  On the flip side, the kindest, gentlest people I know, they're kind to themselves. You're going to make mistakes and it's okay to make mistakes. You don't have to be perfect to be good.
• 2:07:48
  You don't have to be the best to be great. Just, man, the harder I work and the farther I get along in my career, the more I realize that all of this constant being so hard on yourself, it doesn't get you anywhere. So, you know, work hard, do your best, appreciate progress, pursue peace above perfection. This ruthless pursuit of you have to be the top 1%, the best, the best, the best, the
• 2:08:17
  Enjoy the journey a little bit because if you're enjoying yourself, if you're kind to yourself, if you're engaging in some progress, you are going to be kinder. You are going to be softer. You're going to be more trustworthy. People are going to feel safe around you, and you're going to have better relationships in the long term. So it took me a while to get there, and that's not really something I've condensed into a headline, but that's what I'm working on right now.
• 2:08:38
  And I've seen results. And I want my kid to have that too. So the book, Get It In Writing, is out now when this is live. When this is live. Yeah, it will be out. It's available pretty much everywhere books are sold. Yeah, it's easy to find. I don't have a preferred retailer. Go wherever you like. Where else do you want to send people? To consume more content? Obviously get the book.
• 2:08:57
  Oh, of course. Well, I'm at Attorney Ryan on Instagram, Facebook and threads. Yes, I brave the threads jungle. I'm on TikTok. I don't really post there anymore. It's at Attorney Ryan there if you want to see the graveyard of my old content. And then I'm on YouTube at Ryan Steiger.