Carter’s Holiday Pick: Truthless
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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

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' 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 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 lighted my resume verbally to get a promotion. I started working at Lehman Brothers pre-9/11. This is a young Merrill, so I'm in the mailroom and I'm not making any money. And I was like, "Yo, there's an opening in the IT department."

Young Mero knows how to use computers to download pornography and use LimeWire. Young Mero does not know how to fix a broken monitor. But Young Mero pretended that he did and lied his ass off and got that job and finessed for like another two years, bro, not knowing how to do nothing. I'm Brian Phillips. This is Truthless, episode two, Flying High. The first time Mero 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? Young audience. Young audience.

Lehman Brothers is a cautionary tale of greed and excess. And what happens when you have a cafeteria that does egg dip waffles and charges nobody anything? And then you just have tons of spring water and everybody's taking smoke breaks and you're just hemorrhaging money because you're just playing with money.

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. They did what these companies do. They play with your money. And everybody knows what happened. Shit went left and they got left. And somehow, like, everybody else got bailed out. But Lehman Brothers, 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 like press the wrong button on a keyboard and bring down the world economy? Yeah.

I was on the New York Donut chat line, and I just put my elbow on the keyboard by accident, and I started the mortgage crisis. Sorry, guys. 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, but he didn't.

As long as Mero had the right experience. I had no experience doing anything corporate or like office jobby at all. I had done like retail stuff, been outside, you know, you know what I'm saying? Little street pharmaceutical, you know what I'm saying? Like that type of situation. And I lied.

Mero was a teenager at this point. He told Jose he'd been working at FedEx for years. And he was like, why isn't it on your resume? And I was like, I forgot to put it there. But I worked at FedEx for like five years. By the way, I was like 17. So how the fuck did I work at FedEx for five years? You were like a chimney sweep for FedEx. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

I'm over here lying my ass off. I don't know if the guy cared, but apparently he did it because he hired me. Shout out to Jose.

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. I lied and I said that I was like, yo, I'm familiar with like logistics. I know how to do mail stuff, blah, blah, blah. I know how to use a Pitney Bowes machine. You know what I mean? Like, awesome.

All of it was capped. Like, I was capping about everything. It was not true at all. And then I get in there, and I'm, like, just kind of learning on the fly because there was a guy there named Martin who was, like, a super cokehead, bro. Like, he used to be up there 6.30 a.m., like, just hitting the slopes. And I'm just like, yo, Martin, how do you use the Pitney Bowes machine? And he's just like, yo, let me show you. Yo, you press this button right here, and then you do the postage. You weigh it right here, and then you hit the postage button, and then press out the postage.

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. I know that you sit in front of six monitors all day. I have never seen you do anything except drink coffee and look at those monitors. This is why the financial crisis happened, because nobody knows what you guys are doing except you. Half of you are like embezzling funds. The other half of you are playing Angry Birds. So I got the job. I get in there. I start finessing. I get in good with Martin.

And Jose, who is, again, like the child of my mom's friend. So like, it was like, yo, I'm going to take it easy on you. Like, I'm going to let you make mistakes.

Jose showed Maro the ropes. He walked him through the complicated landscape of the mailroom, where a single misstep could torch the economy of Kansas. Again, like, just literally learning on the fly, fucking a lot of stuff up, like, sending a lot of stuff to the wrong people, and just, like, getting to cook because of the relationship I have with Jose, who's a friend of the family.

The mailroom 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 OK 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. The more I tell this story, the more I feel like this sounds like jail. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm trading cigarettes for information. Like, yo, how do I use the printer? Like, yo, here's two cigarettes, Newport 100s.

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 7PM 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.

So now my new boss is Ralph, who doesn't care about anything except his smoke breaks. He's like textbook Staten Island guy. So now I'm like, okay, now I got to get out of here because Jose's not here to hold me down. Martin's not enough. Like I got it. And I have greater ambitions. You know what I'm saying? Like I'm trying to move up in Lehman Brothers. Like, you know, I'm trying to be embezzling funds soon. You got to get six monitors. Yeah. Like I only got one. I'm trying to get up to like at least three. Let me get three at least.

So I'm like, all right, what's the fastest way to do that? Just look at what is opening up. Like, where do they need people? Like, where do they need help? So there was always something opening up. The turnover there was crazy. Like, there was people there that were there for 50 years, and there was people that were there for five minutes. Marrow 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. The first thing that I see that opens up is in the IT department. Like, yo, my router is busted. My hard drive is fried, whatever. Like, just straight computer tech stuff. 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 overtaxing himself. And I was just like, yo, listen, motherfucker, I'm not trying to do no more work. Like, I just cruise by here. Like, you know what I'm saying? I clock in, I clock out.

I don't want to be over here changing paper and printers and shit and delivering water. I'm not trying to do none of that. Let Martin do all that. He's coked up. I don't want to do any of this. Martin's got the energy. Yeah, yeah. Martin's on go. Martin is on go all day. I'm trying to just chill here and, like, talk to girls on the phone. 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. Like, my girlfriend had come in, like, to pick me up from work, like, twice. And she was, at the time, like, she was back. You know what I'm saying? So, like, I tell the ref, I'm like, yo, you see how bad she is, bro? Like, I'm trying to keep this job, bro. I'm trying to impress this girl. You know what I mean? Like, I gotta, and that appealed to his, like, you know what I mean? Because this guy, this guy was, like, central casting Italian Staten Island guy.

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. I appealed to like, you know, his machismo and shit. I was just like, yo, this broad is really hot, Ralph. You know, like I'm trying to keep her in the mix, bro. You know what I'm saying? Like, I got to keep her around.

And as Mero tells it, Ralph very much understood the assignment. Yeah, you little shit. Yeah, I know what you're trying to do, bro. Yeah, but hey, hey, hey, listen. Listen, bro, I don't do blow, all right? I'm not an alky, but everybody's got their vices, bro. And yo, listen, I'll be honest with you, bro. Getting a little bit of trim on the side, it's one of my vices. So I feel you, dude. I'm putting a good word for you.

Prong number three for surviving the application process, brazenly lie about knowing computers. Mero lied. Mero got the job. And I Euro-stepped the hole. Like, yo, you got to fill out paperwork and show that you know what you're doing. Nah, I just got walked right up into that motherfucker. Like, yo, here.

Up next, Marrow 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. I remember my first job was to remove the hard drive from a tower.

And it was like, yo, so-and-so on 38, their hard drive is fried. They need it replaced. Here's the new one. Just go replace it. And I was like, all right, cool. 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 computers.

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. Dog, I opened up that tower and I was like, I don't know what I am doing right now.

I went back down and I asked one of the other guys. I was just like, yo, I was like, I want to replace this hard drive, but I'm like, I want to make sure that it's the right one. Like, I'm just bullshitting like crazy. Like, yo, is this the right... Like, do the specs line up right? Like, is this the right number of pins on this thing? Yeah. And I'm like, listen, did he ask for this specifically? Because, you know, we want to make sure that the guys get the stuff that they're asking for. And so then now make this guy come up with me. I was like, yo, is this...

Because I opened it up already and I'm like, bro, when I say that I'm just like word salad-ing my way through this, I'm just like, sir, so when you say your hard drive is fried, like it's burnt, like it's messed up. Like smoke is coming out of it. Like smoke? It's smoking? Did you see any sparks or any electricity or anything of that nature? I'm talking like I'm a fucking fire safety expert. Meanwhile...

I'm just doing this so that the guy that I'm with from downstairs can just do the job. You know what I'm saying? So the other kid does it, puts the hard drive in, boop, boop, boop. I just put the screws on the tower and close it back up. And I'm like, all right, job here is done. You're like knocking the top of it like she's going to hold. Like Scotty on Star Trek. Yeah, sure. I'm like, good to go. You're good now, sir. So then I leave and I'm like, yo.

I was like, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that again. You know what I mean? So then I'm like, how do I finagle the bagel now? Like, how do I keep myself in here without having to do this again? Because this is high pressure, bro. That was a high wire act that I just did. Marrow had gone up for the IT job mostly because it wouldn't be all that much work compared to the mailroom under its new leadership.

Now he realized that he had to avoid even the small amount of work that was expected of him at all costs. Maybe I'm going to mess something up and like, like you said, like, you know, press the wrong button and like crash the economy of Taiwan or some shit like by accident. So I was just like, all right, bro.

Again, appealing to people's laziness. I was like, "Yeah, I don't like to write, so I will just fill out all these work orders." 'Cause back then it was like everything was paper. You give like the pink copy to Ralph, you give the yellow copy to so-and-so, you give the blue copy to this person, then you file away the other copy.

He told his coworkers, "Hey, you know what? You go up and take care of this operating system crash." Which, he'd add, "I could totally do, by the way. But because I'm so nice, I'll stay here and fill out all the paperwork so you don't have to do it."

If his co-workers complained, he'd just point out that at the time, he was smoking a lot of weed at work, and he probably shouldn't be wandering through the hallways on his own. So I made that my job. Every time a guy had to go upstairs and fix a thing, I'd be like, yo, yo, yo, they want me to go up to 36 and, yo, Mr. Wong, two of his monitors are on the fritz, bro, but I ain't really trying to do all that, man. I'm high as fuck.

Like, I don't want him to see me high and shit. So if you, I'll do the paperwork because I know you hate the paperwork. Mero, like Icarus himself, had gotten way too high. So like, I just did that, bro, for like my entire Lehman Brothers career and

Until the last Christmas party. I bet all the other tech guys loved you because, like, nobody wants to do the paperwork. Nobody, bro. And I'm doing this shit all wrong. I'm writing names, bro. I'm fucking high as fuck. I'm just like, yo, yeah, Captain Crunch on 38. You fix it, monitor. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, fuck that. You're like, yeah, we changed out the warp crystals on the dilithium drive. Yeah, yo, yo. Got some new photon torpedoes in the modem.

Wait until you see that EMP cannon I put on his hard drive expediter. You know what I'm saying? At a certain point, I started telling the guys one by one, being like, I'm not going to say their names out because I don't know what they do. They could still be there. Maybe not at Lehman Brothers, but somewhere. But somewhere. Merrill Lynch, you know what I mean? In the same building.

So, like, one by one, I started telling these guys, like, yo, listen, bro, I'll be keeping real with you. Like, I know you smoke weed. I'll give you weed. You know what I'm saying? If you just don't tell nobody that, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. You know what I mean? Like, yo, so... This is also how I keep my job as a podcaster. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how long would you think a person could keep a tech support job at a massive global investment bank while being stoned most of the time and not knowing how to do any tech support? If I tried that at my job, I think I'd get caught in like four days max. So for two years, Brian, I did this shit for two years. Two years. Two years, dog. Before you get caught. This is two years.

For half of an entire presidential term, for someone's whole junior and senior years of college, Merrow kept walking this tightrope. The 90s rolled over into the 2000s. The stack of incorrectly filled out paperwork kept getting taller. The pressure kept mounting. Merrow kept lying at work. And this was not as chill a thing to do as it maybe sounds, but

Because the truth is, a lot of things about Lehman Brothers were just pretty terrifying. The atmosphere was incredibly high stakes, but under the surface, also incredibly feral and chaotic.

Dog, listen, if I was a check fraud type of motherfucker, dog, the type of checks that were flowing through... Dog, I saw checks that were just lost. There was like a box of mail that was just like, yo, mail that we don't know. Like, it's like they fucked up the name. They messed up the address. Like, we got to figure out where this goes. You know, standard mailroom shit. And it's just a briefcase full of gold. Dog, it's like a...

It's like the deed to Saudi Arabia. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, like, what the fuck is this? Like, I'm opening this shit up because I have now I'm like, I got to open this up. Like, you know what I mean? Like, like under the auspices of like, yo, we don't know what this is. It could be anthrax. We got to check it. Blah, blah, blah. Right, right, right. Opening it and seeing a check for like eight and a half million dollars. You know what I mean? I'm like, who sends a check for that amount of money?

Don't you like carry that over at least? Like you're putting that in the mail? Dog! Like it's fucking insane. That just shows like the amount of like money and like fucking around that was going on in this place. Dog, I went to the Christmas party and I think I sold half a brick in this Christmas party.

Like, there was no spouses allowed. There was no plus ones. Bro, this is a different era. This is full Wolf of Wall Street. Full, full, full. Everybody's doing blow in the bathrooms. There's mad sex workers in there. It's just mayhem. And this is Young Mero. I'm on the black. I have a firearm in my house that's not legal. And I'm looking at these people like, yo, y'all are crazy. Like, what?

Yo, they're bugging. You're just doing coke at the table? What finally saved Mero from getting caught, what came to his rescue in a way, was maybe not exactly the thing you'd expect. He was saved by a world historic event. And then that 11 happened. So, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know, silver lining? Ugh!

I didn't have to lie anymore, dog. They moved me to Jersey City and I went back to the mailroom with a raise. It's just crazy how life just looks out for you. It's crazy. It's fucked up. I'm like, yo, as a New Yorker, I'm like, yo, dog, you making 9-11 jokes, but yo, 9-11 really saved my ass. It made me employable. It kept me employable.

Before 9-11, Lehman Brothers' global headquarters was at Three World Financial. So you can picture the building, maybe, if you've seen 9-11 footage. There's Tower 1 and Tower 2, the two big World Trade Center towers. And then nearby, there's the smaller skyscraper with the green roof.

That's where Mero worked. Thankfully, he wasn't there when the planes hit. He'd been off work visiting his family in the Dominican Republic. He got back from his vacation on September 9th, but he hadn't gone back into work yet for one very good reason. Again, I'm so lazy that I came back September 9th. I'm chilling at home. My cousin, Carlos, is working there.

And he's like, yo, when are you coming back, bro? Like, they're asking about you. And I'm like, yo, I'm coming back. I'm like, I'm going to come back next week. Tell them I'm like, I got food poisoning or some shit. So the very good reason Mero didn't go into work on 9-11 is... I was too lazy. I watched 9-11 like it was a fucking movie from the roof of my building, smoking a blunt. Like, holy shit.

"What the fuck is going on?" And then my cousin called me, "Yo, you going to work? Yo, you at work? Yo, turn the TV on." I'm like, "What?" I'm like, "Ah." Turn the TV on and I'm like, "Oh, what the fuck?" And I immediately go to the roof of my building and I'm in the Bronx. So I just see a pillar of smoke. I'm just looking downtown, I just see a pillar of smoke. I don't see nothing else. Then I run back down to my apartment and I'm watching the TV. I'm like, "Oh shit. What the fuck?"

Mero and his cousin stayed on the phone, though really, what could they say? At one moment, there's like a pause, and he's just like, yo, yo, you think we still got jobs, though? I was like, motherfucker! I was like, yo, we just moved to World Trade Center! What the fuck are you talking about? Do we still got a job? Do we still have a country? Now I'm high. I'm watching this smoke. I'm coming down. I'm seeing the news. I'm on the phone.

I'm smoking weed, and it's, you know how weed goes. It's like, it's either you're either chilling or now you're paranoid. Yeah. Now I'm paranoid. I'm just like, yo, what the fuck? Are they coming for me? Is this about the mailroom? Yeah, yeah, is this about, did I open the wrong Saudi Arabian package? What happened? Yo. Doug. My father said the most calming, this was a verbal Xanax.

I called my pops, I was like, yo, I was like, "Pa, yo, you saw this shit, bro?" Like, "Yo, they bombed the fucking thing, yo, they flew a plane into this shit." "Yo, da!" I was like, "Yo, I'm in the Bronx, dude, da!" And he's just like, "Papi, calm down." I said, "No, we calm down, bro." He's like, "You tell him that?" He's like, "Papi, pa, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,

Trate tranquilo. The Bronx, nobody want to, who going to, what the fuck they want to blow in the Bronx? The Bronx who? I was like, nah, you're right, dad. You're right. Safest place in America. Safest place in America on 11 was the fucking, was the Bronx. I was like, yo, you know what, dad? You're absolutely fucking right. Let me put a lawn chair out in front of the building and smoke the rest of this blunt.

Three World Financial, where Lehman Brothers was headquartered, became uninhabitable after the Twin Towers fell. So the company reassigned Merrow to Jersey City and moved him back to the mailroom with a raise. So he was making the same money he was making in IT, but now no one would ever find out he'd been bluffing around computers for two straight years.

And you already knew how to use the pinny bows machine. So it was just like, he was like going home at that point. Yes. It was like Carmelo Anthony signed up with the Knicks. Mero quit Lehman Brothers pretty soon after that, though, because the commute was annoying. And the Lehman Brothers bros, the Lehman bros bros, kept wanting him to go out with them after work.

They'd be like, yo, let's go out after work. And I'm like, yo, y'all are making $150, $250, $350. I'm making $35 a year. All right? Like, I can't pick up the tab, okay? And I'm not a drinker like that. I'm a smoker. So, like, why am I going to Moran's with you guys after work? Fuck that. I'm just going to hang out on the block with my friends, take my shirt off, and drink some Paul Masson in front of the building.

And so, after two years, a major terrorist attack, and a transfer to Jersey, Merrow never got caught for lying his way into the IT department. And he'd end up quitting the bank a few years before the financial crisis burned off Lehman Brothers' wings and dropped it into the sea.

But he'd seen enough waste and entitlement and magical thinking and dudes barricading themselves behind multiple rows of monitors and acting like masters of the universe during his time there that when the crash did hit, he wasn't exactly surprised. And then like you see like the upper level guys, like the C-suite guys, and like you go up there and it's like, dog, why do you have a $15,000 pen?

That doesn't even make sense. Why do you have a Mickey Mantle baseball, you know, that you retrofitted to hang in a disco ball that you paid $150,000? Like, it's just, I just saw money, like, just flying out the window all over the place. And I was like, nah, man. I was like, I don't know about finance like that, but I do know how to sell an eight ball, dog. And I like, I know something's up here.

This is not sustainable. Yeah. And 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. Yes. 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 guy's 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. That was it. I didn't even, like, I didn't know it to that extent. I just knew something. ♪

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 5,000 people out of their houses. And that was it. I was just like, yeah, that's why there's so many of y'all up here. Cause y'all just telling each other lies. And then the next guy's lie has to be better. Yeah. In the end, you, you were like the most honest guy at Lehman brothers. I'm the guy with the gun and the Coke and I'm the most honest guy in the building. What the fuck is going on? What's wrong with this picture?

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 expectations

excess that came before the crash, and frankly, also after the crash. 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.