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
Every morning, Marrow would ride in from the Bronx to this gleaming corporate office tower right across the street from the World Trade Center, with its lobby polished to a high sheen, its security guys with wands, its screens with stock prices whizzing by like Matrix Code confetti, and its unbelievably lavish cafeteria, and all the rest. And Mero had no idea what anyone there was actually doing.
Jose showed Marrow the ropes. He walked him through the complicated landscape of the mailroom, where a single misstep could torch the economy of Kansas.
The mail room was somewhere in the bowels of the building. And of course, it was way less fancy. In my imagination, it smelled like envelope glue and cardboard and ink. And there were manila envelopes everywhere and a million packages flying in and out. And it was super confusing. It was like navigating a maze.
But Merrill was okay because he was in good with Martin, the friendly cokehead who taught him the ropes. And most importantly, he was in good with his boss, Jose.
I wasn't surprised to hear that Marrow landed on his feet in the Lehman Brothers mailroom, because Marrow happens to be the Kid Marrow, the comedian, writer, Showtime host, and all-around entertaining dude. He's currently a host of the 7 p.m. in Brooklyn podcast alongside NBA legend Carmelo Anthony. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
Mero's a Dominican-American guy with a smile that lights up the room and a completely infectious laugh. The first time he told me his Lehman Brothers story, I was talking to him while he was at a Mercedes dealership, literally in the middle of buying a new car for his wife, and he kept getting interrupted to fill out forms and select his infotainment trim level.
Did you know Mercedes these days come with both AM and FM radio? And he kept me laughing the whole time. And I just remember thinking anyone who can be this charming while filling out auto dealership paperwork would not have trouble finding friends in any mailroom or parcel dispatch situation on the planet Earth.
So despite having invented all that FedEx experience to get the job, Merrill was doing okay. But then he got some really bad news. Jose had decided to leave Lehman Brothers. And Jose's replacement was going to be this guy, Ralph, who was not a family friend and who was not nearly as warm and forgiving.
Mero wanted to fly a little higher. He wanted to move up. And so when a promising job opening came along, he decided to go for it, even though it wasn't exactly the job he might have chosen.
Did he know how to fix a router or a hard drive or computer tech stuff in general? No knowledge of this shit whatsoever. To get the job in IT, Merrow first had to survive the application process. He devised a three-pronged plan to get through it. Prong number one, get Jose to vouch for him.
He explained to Jose that the IT job was a way to further his career goals of making a lot more money while not, eh, overtaxing himself. And I was just like, yo, listen, motherfucker.
Prong number two, get his new boss, Ralph, to vouch for him. This one's trickier. He'd won over Jose by invoking his laziness. To win Ralph over, he needed a different strategy.
Ralph might not have been interested in aiding and abetting laziness, but he was more than happy to send an unqualified technician into the IT department of one of the driving engines of the global economy if it meant helping Mero get laid.
And as Mero tells it, Ralph very much understood the assignment.
Prong number three for surviving the application process, brazenly lie about knowing computers. Mero lied. Mero got the job.
Up next, Mero does his first job as an IT specialist who knows nothing about IT. And we have a serious talk about the importance of honesty in capitalism. After several commercials. The kid Marrow was moving up in the world.
Lehman Brothers was one of the highest-flying corporations in finance, and Marrow had lied his way out of the mailroom and gotten a new job in IT, a subject he knew practically nothing about.
Marrow made his way up to the 38th floor. His heart was pounding, or at least mine would have been. Everything at Lehman Brothers went through computers, and a significant part of the world economy went through Lehman Brothers. This was more than a simple hard drive swap. For all Marrow knew, if he screwed this up, there'd be a coup in Japan the next morning.
Like, is this the right number of pins on this thing? Yeah.
You're like knocking the top of it. Like she's going to hold like Scotty on Star Trek.
Showing 21–40 of 74 · page 2 of 4
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