Brian Phillips
speaker
74 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Brian Phillips’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hey, Conspiracy Theories listeners, if you missed my holiday break update, this is the first week of our four-week hiatus, but we're still bringing you something I am sure you'll love. Today, I'm sharing an episode from one of my favorite podcasts, Truthless. On our show, sometimes we discover the official story isn't always the truth.
And on Truthless, bestselling author Brian Phillips interviews fascinating people about the outlandish lies they've told. Be sure to subscribe to Truthless wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll share a link in the show notes. New episodes of Conspiracy Theories will resume December 25th.
All right, let me tell you a story. So a long time ago on the island of Crete, there was this guy called Daedalus. Daedalus was an inventor. If he lived today, he'd have one of those social media bios that just says like, I make things, you know, the kind that, like, web designers love to have. I make things.
Daedalus actually did make things, and one of the things he made was this unbelievable maze, this labyrinth so complicated no one could find their way through it. He made this labyrinth for the king of Crete who needed a way to imprison his own stepson. This stepson, you see, well, not a bad kid, but he had a complicated medical condition that unfortunately made him about 50% malevolent bovine.
That's right, the Minotaur. the original cowboy. So long story short, a hero called Theseus comes along, solves the maze, kills the Minotaur. The king's upset and he gets suspicious. Did Daedalus tell Theseus how to get through the labyrinth? Daedalus didn't, but the king doesn't believe him. So he takes Daedalus and Daedalus's son, who is 0% cow, and locks them both in a tower.
Daedalus is like, well, this sucks. I don't want to live in a tower. Fortunately, Daedalus is a genius, so he figures out a way to escape. What he does is he invents wings, just casually builds some wings. He and his kid, a boy called Icarus, are going to fly right out of the tower. So Daedalus straps the wings on Icarus and he's like, okay, flying is easy.
You've just got to remember this one weird trick. Don't go too high because if you get too close to the sun, it'll melt the wax on your wings and you will fall. So Icarus takes off and it's so fun. He's got puffy white clothes. clouds all around him, and the blue sea down below, and he's just so happy. He's so happy, in fact, that he keeps flying higher. And, well, you know how this goes.
He gets way too high. And just like his dad warned him, the sun melts the wax on his wings, and his story ends with a little cartoon slide whistle like...
I'm Brian Phillips. This is Truthless, Episode 2, Flying High.
Hi there, this is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. Our new series, Season 4 in the Burden Feed, is Get the Money and Run.
The first time Marrow told me about where he grew up, this is what he said. I grew up in a neighborhood so rough, if you look it up on Google Maps, you'll get shot through the screen. This was in the Bronx in the 80s and 90s. Safe to say, Marrow never expected to get a job at one of the world's glitziest investment banks. But that's exactly what happened.
Can you just like tell our younger audience, like what was Lehman Brothers?
Before filing for bankruptcy amid the wreckage of the 2008 financial crash, Lehman Brothers had about 25,000 employees and $640 billion in assets. That's a lot of eggnog. I mean, it's one of the biggest investment banks in New York, like before the financial crash, right? Yes, it was one of the biggest. I looked it up after talking to Mero.
Lehman Brothers was the fourth biggest, actually, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers was in operation for more than 150 years before it got obliterated by the subprime mortgage crisis.
And somehow, like, everybody else got bailed out, but Lehman Brothers just got, like, the tsunami just, like, took them down. Like, they're just gone. It was a wrap. Of course, it's worth noting that Lehman Brothers was also substantially to blame for causing the subprime mortgage crisis.
When you first told me about this story, I was like, okay, the 2008 financial crash, did he press the wrong button on a keyboard and bring down the world economy?
When Mero applied for the job at Lehman Brothers, though, it was way before 2008, more like 98, 99. His mom had this friend, and the friend had a son called Jose, and Jose ran the mailroom at Lehman Brothers. And thanks to the family connection, Jose said he'd give Mero a job as long as Mero had the right experience.
Merrow was a teenager at this point. He told Jose he'd been working at FedEx for years.
You were like a chimney sweep for FedEx.
The mailroom at Lehman Brothers ran on this thing called the Pitney Bowes machine. I had to look this up. The Pitney Bowes machine was this mail processing device. Looked like a couple of like big printers stacked together.
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