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Nasir and Matt get together in San Diego and talk about outrageous non-compete agreement that Amazon had temporary employees sign. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. My name’s Nasir Pasha. This is our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist. As you know, my intro is all messed up – because it’s usually perfect – only because Matt and I are recording in the same room in sunny San Diego on top of the Symphony Towers at the University Club. MATT: Yes, and a longer table than before. NASIR: Yeah, a nice and long boardroom. I’m looking out towards the east, towards Balboa Park area, kind of. MATT: I’m just looking at the wall for whatever reason. NASIR: Well, yeah, well, you’re in San Diego so you get to have the views all the time. I need to let it sink in a little bit. MATT: That’s true. NASIR: It’s been a while. MATT: I can see Petco Park, a plane, Coronado Bridge, businesses. NASIR: Legally sound smart businesses? By the way, what did you think about pashalaw.pizza? MATT: You said that to me. I didn’t think it was a real thing. NASIR: It’s real. MATT: Hold on. NASIR: I thought you were just joking as if you didn’t think it was real. No, it’s real. MATT: Uh, man, this is actually pretty funny. NASIR: It’s a good time to talk about. All these top-level domain names are still coming out. I love it. Pretty much pick a noun and it’s available or it’s going to be available soon. MATT: Ah, and this just links to all the podcasts that we’ve had that have mentioned, have a tag of pizza? NASIR: Yeah, pretty much. MATT: Actually way less than I expected. NASIR: I was going to do a link that just searches “pizza” but then that would have been way too many because, for example, this one, just by saying “pizza,” now is on that list because of our transcript. MATT: Oh, okay. I was going to say that makes sense because I know it’s definitely been… NASIR: Actually, we’ll change that. MATT: The four that are on here are all titled with “pizza” in the title so I guess that’s why. NASIR: Yeah. In fact, actually, I’m going to just change it now as we’re talking. MATT: This photo is so funny. This pizza looks pretty good, too. NASIR: It’s the Pasha Law brand. By the way, it does search all pizza anyway. MATT: Does it? NASIR: Yeah. MATT: Okay. NASIR: All right. Everyone enjoy that. And that’s our show! MATT: I really thought you were joking this whole time. Can’t even go on, but we’re going to have to go on because we have a pretty interesting topic for today. We’ve talked about… Actually, I think Amazon was maybe one of the first companies we’ve… NASIR: Oh, someone’s breaking in. Someone almost broke into our podcast, probably a fan. MATT: Yeah. NASIR: I appreciate you guys listening in but, you know, you have to give us space to record. MATT: Take the unruly fans outside – same unruliness that former employees of Amazon are going through with this non-compete that they’ve had to sign off on some of them to get severance pay. Also, that’s temporary workers, nonetheless. So, basically, you know the deal with Amazon, they sell anything and everything online, they have people that work for them in the warehouse and take the products and put them in boxes and, you know, make sure they go to the right people. A lot of these are seasonal jobs – around Christmas time’s big, that’s probably the most seasonal one. But they’re having some of these employees – maybe even all of them – sign this 18-month non-compete agreement which, all right, that’s ridiculous right off the bat. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: What’s it preventing them from doing? Amazon bars their former employees from working for companies with products or services that compete with Amazon’s. So, that’s pretty much as broad as you can get. Just looking at the words, it’s broad, but knowing what Amazon does, it’s so overly broad. I can’t imagine any court upholding this sort of – not even in...