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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah. And it's it's so wild because it was like so much of it wasn't even like real money. I mean, yes, it was it was like idea money. I used to call it idea money. Yeah. If you're selling an eight ball, like you've got a product.
To an extent, that has to be like you have to kind of stand behind that. Right. Like that has to be good. You have to be giving people what they're paying. Like this was like some guys buying a Mickey Mantle baseball based on guessing in advance what group of old people weren't going to be able to pay off their mortgages in time. Exactly. That was the bet.
It's one of those things that like if you just explained it to a normal person, even even pre 2008, if you just explain to a normal person how this worked, they'd be like, no way that is. What is that fake? And that is never going to work. You explain it to like a finance genius and they're like, of course, and I can make it even more complicated and fake.
I think we can open source kicking like 5000 people out of their houses.
Yeah, in the end, you were like the most honest guy at Lehman Brothers.
It used to be that whenever I thought about the Icarus story, I thought there were two ways to look at it. You could either concentrate on the flying or you could concentrate on the falling. And whichever one you focused on probably told you something about yourself. And I think that's probably true when we're talking about, you know, world finance.
There are a lot of people for whom it doesn't really matter. It just doesn't really factor in that the industry screwed up the world and kind of pile-drived itself into the sea in 2008. Because all those people are focused on is the cars and the yachts and the cocaine on the table and the unrestrained excess that came before the crash. And frankly, also after the crash. Music
Anyway, these days, when I think about the Icarus story, what strikes me is that he really didn't have that much to do with it. He didn't invent the labyrinth. He didn't kill the Minotaur. He was just in the mythological mailroom, got swept up in events that were bigger than he was, and tried to have a good time.
And when I think about it that way, I think, wow, I might like that story better if he escaped. You know, regular people get caught up in history, and we try to make our way as best we can. We get caught in mazes and locked in towers, and we don't know what we're doing, and we make some dumb choices, sure. But I'm writing this in front of one monitor,
And I think I speak for all of us who are not masters of the universe when I say that sometimes it's nice to hear a story where at least one of us walks away from the crash unscathed. Truthless was written and reported by me, Brian Phillips. The executive producers are Juliette Littman and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Connor Nevins. The show was produced by Mike Wargon and Vikram Patel.
Fact-checking by Juliana Ress. Copy editing by Anna Doan. Talent booking by Kat Spillane. Sound design by Kaia McMullen. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music in Truthless comes from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker.
If you have a great story about a lie and you might like to appear on a future episode of Truthless, shoot us an email at truthless at spotify.com. Thanks for listening.
Okay, this is a true story. I have a friend who once faked his own death so he could have more time to watch his favorite TV show. In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies they tell, from forging new identities to taking their love of Game of Thrones a little too far. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips.
Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Showing 61–74 of 74 · page 4 of 4
← Previous