Disney's Villain

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Speaker 33 Cause

Speaker 33 media.

Speaker 33 In June of 2024, Michael Scheuer had a disagreement with a coworker.

Speaker 33 It isn't clear from the court records, so I couldn't tell you exactly what was said.

Speaker 33 He says there was a difference of opinion over a workplace matter, but he's in federal prison and two of his coworkers now have restraining orders against him, so I'm inclined to believe there may be more to the story than that.

Speaker 33 But that's all we know.

Speaker 33 That minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schreier's life.

Speaker 33 Losing his job was not only financially devastating, it was the death of his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation.

Speaker 33 And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow.
You have to to figure out how you're going to pay the rent, how you're going to get health care, how you're going to find a new job.

Speaker 33 I can't speak for everybody, but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's also embarrassing. It hurts your feelings.

Speaker 33 Your ego takes a real hit.

Speaker 33 And for some people,

Speaker 33 that just isn't something they can move on from.

Speaker 33 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 33 This is kind of a silly one.

Speaker 33 Nobody gets hurt. Nobody dies.

Speaker 33 Nothing really bad actually happened.

Speaker 33 I know I said last week that I ended up with the episode that came out because I was reaching around for something quick, because the story I was trying to write just felt unwieldy and I was having trouble forcing it into the right shape.

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 that's where we still are this week.

Speaker 33 I'm still really fighting with something I think is going to take a few more weeks to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative, so here we are again at the 11th hour, and I have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds and ends about a story that spans 50 years.

Speaker 33 And so I'm scrounging around for something else.

Speaker 33 I'm not asking for your sympathy or anything. You probably have a real job where you make something or help people.
And my job is just telling you a horrible little story.

Speaker 33 But all I can tell you is the truth. And the truth is, sometimes I have no idea how I'm going to force any more words out of my brain and into this microphone.

Speaker 33 So all I've got this week is Michael Scheuer.

Speaker 33 And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody.

Speaker 33 He wasn't a member of any hate groups, as far as I can tell. Until last summer, he had no history of any criminal conduct.

Speaker 33 I couldn't find so much as a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean.

Speaker 33 He was a family man, married for nearly 10 years and the father of three young children.

Speaker 33 But the course of action he decided on after he got fired last summer is what makes him a weird little guy.

Speaker 33 And I think he's actually a tiny example of one of the emerging weird little guy archetypes.

Speaker 33 I don't have a name for it yet. I don't really have the weird little guy taxonomy mapped out, but patterns are starting to appear in these stories.

Speaker 33 There are distinct types of weird little guy.

Speaker 33 And one of them is a kind of guy who can't accept when he's wrong.

Speaker 33 More importantly, he can't accept being

Speaker 33 wronged.

Speaker 33 And God help you if you have even a passing encounter with this kind of guy.

Speaker 33 For some of them, the perceived slight is so minor that it's not something I think I would ever think about again, let alone devote the rest of my life to getting revenge over it.

Speaker 33 If you've listened to the whole catalog of this show, you've heard about some of these guys. I'm thinking about people like Frank Sweeney from the pair of episodes back in September.

Speaker 33 Frank was a lifelong neo-Nazi, sure,

Speaker 33 but mostly he was a con man.

Speaker 33 He ended up in prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons, things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns that he didn't actually own and then accepting numerous buyers' money for these imaginary collectors items.

Speaker 33 Later in his life, he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy, purebred, tailless cats.

Speaker 33 He conned the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that he was helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy that he'd befriended in prison.

Speaker 33 He once tricked a mob lawyer into flying him across the country and putting him up in a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about a Chicago mob boss he'd once shared a cell with.

Speaker 33 He loved loved to lie.

Speaker 33 But more than that, I think the defining characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is his sense of self-righteous indignation.

Speaker 33 When he felt like someone had wronged him, he made it his life's work to get back at them, to hurt them back the way they'd hurt him.

Speaker 33 And he did it in some really bizarre ways.

Speaker 33 In the early 90s, when he was living in an apartment in New Jersey, a family with children moved into a neighboring apartment.

Speaker 33 And once he decided that the neighbors were intentionally disregarding his request to keep their children quiet, he made it his life's mission to destroy the entire family.

Speaker 33 He spread rumors that the father had HIV and that he'd given it to his children. He shut off their power at random.

Speaker 33 He filled the lock on their front door with staples so they couldn't get into their home. He had their mail routed to a random address in Iowa.

Speaker 33 And he subscribed their nine-year-old son to pornographic magazines.

Speaker 33 And that's unhinged behavior. That is an unnecessary escalation to the problem of a noisy fourth grader.

Speaker 33 And it was all because he felt entitled to complete silence in his apartment and total obedience from his neighbors.

Speaker 33 And two decades after that, when he was already a a very old man, a stranger made a passing comment about how he'd parked his car at the post office parking lot.

Speaker 33 And instead of just letting it go, like almost anyone else on earth would,

Speaker 33 he spent three years stalking that woman and her entire family, sending them threatening postcards, spreading rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior, that they were drug addicts and criminals and they were doing tax fraud.

Speaker 33 Three years

Speaker 33 because she commented on how he had parked his car.

Speaker 33 And then there was Walter Fitzpatrick from those episodes back in November.

Speaker 33 He was the sovereign citizen who tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse in rural Tennessee because they wouldn't help him indict President Barack Obama for treason.

Speaker 33 And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long history of this kind of grievance-motivated behavior.

Speaker 33 He'd been banned from his congressman's office office after the receptionists had to get a restraining order against him because he refused to accept that they just couldn't help him get a new trial in his Navy court-martial.

Speaker 33 And then there are the weird little guys who try to use the courts to get their revenge, becoming vexatious litigants filing lawsuit after lawsuit against anyone who says no to them.

Speaker 33 Guys like Robert Mahler from a few weeks ago, the one-time arms dealer who shipped hundreds of guns to neo-Nazis in South Africa.

Speaker 33 In his quieter, older years, he seems to work out his anger by filing a constant stream of nuisance lawsuits.

Speaker 33 He filed a lawsuit against the hospital that didn't perform his elective surgery at the exact time they'd scheduled it for.

Speaker 33 Lawsuits against the guys from the table tennis club who asked him to stop coming around because his behavior was frightening.

Speaker 33 A lawsuit against the state because he didn't think it was fair that he got a traffic ticket. A lawsuit against a restaurant for asking him not to let his dog touch the food on the buffet.

Speaker 33 Like I said, I'm still working on the taxonomy here, but I think these are all, to some degree, the same kind of guy.

Speaker 33 The common denominator is that they can't handle discomfort. They can't handle someone telling them no.

Speaker 33 They can't handle being wrong. They can't handle not being the protagonist of reality.

Speaker 33 This is their story, story, and we're just the characters in it. We're supposed to behave the way he wants us to.

Speaker 33 And if we don't,

Speaker 33 his reaction is not going to be normal.

Speaker 33 And that's the mold that I think Michael Scheer fits into.

Speaker 33 He isn't, all things considered, really the kind of guy I'm interested in.

Speaker 33 This isn't the kind of story I would normally choose for an episode of this show.

Speaker 33 Because like I said, he wasn't in any kind of hate group and he didn't hurt anybody.

Speaker 33 But I am interested in this kind of guy, the kind of guy whose reaction to a pretty normal life event is decidedly not normal at all.

Speaker 33 The kind of guy who showed no other outward signs of being violent or hateful, but when confronted with an obstacle, suddenly reveals a previously hidden and very peculiar interest in mass shootings and swastikas.

Speaker 33 But I guess we should start at the beginning.

Speaker 33 Michael Scheuer loved Disney.

Speaker 33 It had always been his dream to work for the company. After graduating from Kent State in Ohio, he moved to Orlando to try to get his foot in the door.

Speaker 33 He started as a janitor and worked his way up.

Speaker 33 And on this front, I guess you do have to hand it to him. It looks like he did the work.
He had a dream and he did the work to try to make it come true.

Speaker 33 He had a college degree, but he was willing to take an entry-level job picking up trash at a theme park if that's what it took to be close to Mickey Mouse.

Speaker 33 He continued working at Disney while he earned his business degree. And slowly but surely, he worked his way up from groundskeeper to cast member and eventually got an office job at Disney.

Speaker 33 By 2018, he was working as a financial systems analyst.

Speaker 33 When COVID hit, his job was one of many that were cut by the company. And he spent the year that he was laid off trying anything he could to get back in.

Speaker 33 And he was eventually rehired as part of the team doing technical support for computers installed on Disney cruise ships.

Speaker 33 And in 2024, he was working on the team tasked with designing and updating the menus and menu signs used at Disney theme parks and resorts.

Speaker 33 In 2024, Michael Schreier's wife gave birth to their third child.

Speaker 33 I don't know if Michael Schueer took advantage of the full eight weeks of paternity leave that Disney claims to offer, but I do know that he took paternity leave because it was just a few days after returning from that leave in June of 2024 that the incident took place.

Speaker 33 What exactly happened is in dispute.

Speaker 33 According to his defense attorney, his version of events is this.

Speaker 33 Quote,

Speaker 33 shortly after returning to work, Mr. Scheuer voiced a difference of opinion to his supervisor about a new process of menu creation.
He believed his team agreed with him, but his supervisor did not.

Speaker 33 He met with his supervisor and a disagreement occurred. Mr.
Scheuer had a panic attack during the meeting. The next supervisor up the chain of command stated to Mr.

Speaker 33 Scheuer that he did not threaten his supervisor, but that Mr. Scheuer was going to be suspended.

Speaker 33 A sworn statement from the supervisor in question, though, reads,

Speaker 33 In June 2024, Michael Scheuer was terminated from employment due to misconduct against me, in which he threatened me at work.

Speaker 33 And the government was prepared to present a witness who would testify that his behavior had been aggressive and threatening in the meeting that led to his termination.

Speaker 33 And maybe that comes down to semantics. Maybe she perceived his conduct as threatening without him actually making a direct threat.

Speaker 33 That is technically different in the eyes of the law, but I think any reasonable person can understand that if you make your supervisor feel like she is in danger,

Speaker 33 you might get fired.

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Speaker 33 He was initially just sent home and suspended. But after he sent an email to Human Resources described only as, quote, 24 questions pertaining to the suspension, which I'm sure had a very normal tone,

Speaker 33 the decision was made to terminate his employment with Disney.

Speaker 33 And this is the point at which he crossed the weird little guy Rubicon.

Speaker 33 He was upset.

Speaker 33 It wasn't fair. This was his dream.
He loved Disney. He loved working for Disney and he needed that job.
He needed the health insurance. He had a family to take care of, for God's sake.

Speaker 33 They just didn't understand.

Speaker 33 If they would have heard him out, they would understand that they were wrong to fire him.

Speaker 33 But they wouldn't take his calls.

Speaker 33 He claims that he was unable to find an employment lawyer willing to take his case.

Speaker 33 He says he, quote, filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but did not get a quick response.
He felt isolated and depressed.

Speaker 33 He did not understand why nobody would speak with him.

Speaker 33 And this is the explanation his attorney offered for what happened next. Quote, he turned to what he thought would get Disney to respond to him.

Speaker 33 I'm not an expert in employment law. But I did look up how long it usually takes to get a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission if you file a complaint online.

Speaker 33 The law says they have 10 days to send notice of the complaint to your former employer. And then, once they do that, the employer has 30 days from that date to respond to it.

Speaker 33 The average complaint takes about 10 months to resolve, start to finish.

Speaker 33 But he didn't even wait 30 days before he decided to change tactics.

Speaker 33 He started trying to get Disney's attention his own way

Speaker 33 less than three weeks after he was fired.

Speaker 33 And so you might be thinking, oh, he probably sent some weird emails to his former coworkers, right?

Speaker 33 Maybe he started showing up outside the office or making a lot of phone calls.

Speaker 33 And those are all reasonable guesses. Those are things you might do if your stated goal was to get someone's attention.

Speaker 33 No,

Speaker 33 what he decided to do is much weirder.

Speaker 33 And honestly, I don't understand why he thinks we would believe his claim that this was the only thing he could think of that would get them to call him.

Speaker 33 Again, from his lawyer, quote,

Speaker 33 he started altering Disney's menus to try to get their attention and respond to him.

Speaker 33 Now, remember, that was his job before he was fired.

Speaker 33 He worked on the team responsible for designing, editing, and updating the files used to print the menus at restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels.

Speaker 33 Once the files were approved by the team at Disney, the physical menus were printed by a Minnesota-based print and marketing company called Taylor Corporation.

Speaker 33 Just a few weeks after being fired, Scheuer logged into the online application used by the print company to manage the menu files.

Speaker 33 A lot of the news coverage about this case refers to what he did as hacking in, which I didn't realize is technically the correct word for what happened.

Speaker 33 Hacking doesn't necessarily require any particular set of skills or, you know, it's not like a 90s movie where they're tippy-tapping on the keyboard as all the numbers flash on the screen.

Speaker 33 No, it just means any unauthorized access to a computer, device, or network. And he definitely was not authorized to be logging in.

Speaker 33 But the company had actually just forgotten to change the password to the administrative account.

Speaker 33 And once he logged into that administrator's account, he created a new employee profile for himself using a fake name. And then using that account with the fake name, he logged in and he went to town.

Speaker 33 He replaced all of the font files for all of the menus in the system.

Speaker 33 And this sounds like hell.

Speaker 33 He didn't just change the fonts that were used in the text of the menus. He changed the source files for all of the fonts in every

Speaker 33 menu.

Speaker 33 So all of the names of the fonts still appeared to be correct, but those names were now connected to a corresponding file for a different font.

Speaker 33 And he changed most of those fonts to wingdings, the font that's just weird little symbols.

Speaker 33 And because he'd altered the font files themselves, the system then started pushing out this change to every single one of the thousands of files ever uploaded to this system.

Speaker 33 And this rendered the entire application completely useless for at least a week.

Speaker 33 And so because this took the entire system offline and rendered every single file useless, obviously they noticed this immediately.

Speaker 33 Disney pretty quickly tracked down the source of the problem and they changed all the passwords so this couldn't happen again.

Speaker 33 But that didn't really stop him.

Speaker 33 So now that one avenue had been closed off, he just moved to a different strategy. If he couldn't log in, he would make sure no one else could either.

Speaker 33 He started small, targeting those immediate supervisors, the ones who'd fired him, and he used their login names and entered random incorrect passwords, making these repeated bad attempts to access the system, which would then trigger the accounts to be locked out.

Speaker 33 At first, he was just doing this manually.

Speaker 33 So you have to imagine him sitting alone at his computer while his chronically ill wife is trying to take care of their three young children, one of whom is a newborn baby.

Speaker 33 And he's just sitting there at his computer again and again and again, typing in a random keyboard smash password and hitting enter over and over and over again so that his old boss can't access her email.

Speaker 33 Throughout August and September of 2024, these these attacks escalated, and he eventually wrote a script to automate the process of making these thousands and thousands of login attempts.

Speaker 33 On one day alone, he made 8,000 login attempts across accounts belonging to the four people that he thought were responsible for firing him.

Speaker 33 And he eventually branched out to 14 different accounts. all of which belonged to members of the team he'd worked on before he was fired.

Speaker 33 Over the course of about a month, he made 100,000 login attempts, locking these employees out of their accounts for days at a time.

Speaker 33 And around the same time he's ramping up these attacks on his former coworkers' accounts, he found a new way to mess with the menus.

Speaker 33 Disney had changed all of the passwords, so he couldn't access the application that was used by the Disney production team anymore.

Speaker 33 But the company that actually prints the finished menu files had their own system.

Speaker 33 All finished menu files had to be uploaded to the print company through a secure file transfer protocol.

Speaker 33 So he made his own menu files and uploaded them directly to the printer.

Speaker 33 His initial attempt to get Disney's attention had made the menus unusable. They had nonsense fonts, they wouldn't load the image files, or they just came up as blank pages.

Speaker 33 So everyone noticed this. This was a very obvious attempt.

Speaker 33 But this time around, he was a lot more subtle. If you're just looking quickly at these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong.

Speaker 33 Honestly, they might have even made it all the way through a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous.

Speaker 33 Because he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by a dollar or two.
He removed an asterisk. He changed the QR codes.
They're just little changes.

Speaker 33 Almost like maybe he didn't want them to notice this time.

Speaker 33 And honestly, some of them are kind of funny. I mean, overall, yes, this is a bad situation.
He should not have done any of this.

Speaker 33 But if he just stuck with immature little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone.

Speaker 33 Because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a cafe at Disney's Old Key West resort, or changing shellfish to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast tea from Assam tea to just ass tea.

Speaker 33 That's

Speaker 33 a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu.
That's

Speaker 33 whatever.

Speaker 33 But unfortunately, most of the changes were not funny swear words.

Speaker 33 Most of the changes were modifications to the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations, removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food allergens, like peanuts.

Speaker 33 On other menus, he altered the region listed for wine selections.

Speaker 33 That one sounds mostly harmless to me. I'm not a wine snob, so I don't really care where the grapes were grown.
I'm not going to pretend I can taste the difference.

Speaker 33 But he swapped out the actual locations for places where well-known mass shootings have occurred. In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent.

Speaker 33 He swapped out Willamette Valley on one wine for Appalachie High.

Speaker 33 An unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia, but it only just happened the week that he did that.

Speaker 33 On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika.

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Speaker 33 He would later claim that he never actually intended for any of these altered files to get printed.

Speaker 33 He said that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer.

Speaker 33 He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies. He just wanted Disney to call him.
He didn't want these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just wanted attention.

Speaker 33 But that claim falls apart by the time he switched to a new mode of attack.

Speaker 33 He uploaded altered files directly into the server that functioned as the print queue for the company that printed the menus.

Speaker 33 So by that point in the process, the printer is receiving what they believe to be a file that has been proofed and approved and is ready to print.

Speaker 33 And they did in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs.

Speaker 33 Although by the time they did print these, the investigation was coming to an end and the affected items were destroyed before they were shipped out.

Speaker 33 And he wasn't hard to catch.

Speaker 33 Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected, Disney launched an internal investigation.

Speaker 33 Multiple employees interviewed during this process brought up the fact that Michael Scheuer had just been fired.

Speaker 33 Further investigation showed the attacks had all been made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address.

Speaker 33 But when they looked further back in the company logs, they found that before he was fired, Michael Scheuer had accessed his work email from home. And when he did that, he had his VPN on.

Speaker 33 So he managed to mask the true IP address of his home computer. But because he used the same VPN throughout, he was still using an IP address that was provably connected to him.

Speaker 33 On September 23rd, 2024, multiple members of the menu production team were locked out of their accounts. Again,

Speaker 33 someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access their accounts using incorrect passwords.

Speaker 33 At 1241 p.m. that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Scheuer's front door.
They had a warrant to search his home and seize his computers.

Speaker 33 At 12.46 p.m.,

Speaker 33 the wave of login attempts suddenly stopped and it never started again.

Speaker 33 Two minutes after that, Michael Scheuer answered his front door.

Speaker 33 He claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there.

Speaker 33 But he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening.

Speaker 33 I have no idea what that means. That never comes up again.

Speaker 33 He told the FBI agents that, sure, he definitely used his home computer to access systems related to his job when he still worked there, and maybe he logged into some work-related stuff after he was fired just to...

Speaker 33 get his old pay stubs, things like that, but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be there asking him questions like that.

Speaker 33 And when they explained to him why they were there and what they were investigating, he outright denied having done anything of the sort.

Speaker 33 And then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because they were worried about him.

Speaker 33 The FBI took his computers with them that day, but they didn't make an arrest.

Speaker 33 A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and checked himself into an inpatient mental health facility.

Speaker 33 Meanwhile, the FBI was still building their case against him, including getting a search warrant for his Google account.

Speaker 33 Then, on October 22nd, 2024, a month after they searched his house, Michael Schreuer received an automated notice from Google that they'd been served with a warrant for his account and they would be complying with the order to turn over his account information.

Speaker 33 Now, I imagine that's a really scary email to get.

Speaker 33 I'm not sure what my initial reaction would be in that situation.

Speaker 33 The right answer, if this happens to you, is to call a lawyer.

Speaker 33 The extremely wrong answer is to then type, please explain this to me, at the top of the email, and then forward that email to the FBI agent who was just at your house, and then follow that up with another email the next day demanding that the agent loop in the victim of the crime on the conversation so you can get some answers about what's going on here.

Speaker 33 Perhaps an even worse course of action in this situation would be to then drive to your former boss's house in the middle of the night and stand on his front porch making a thumbs up at his security camera and then just walking away.

Speaker 33 It's hard to say what you would do in a stressful situation that you have never experienced before. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here.
I like to think that I would just call a lawyer.

Speaker 33 I don't think that I would do all that other stuff.

Speaker 33 But that is what Michael Scheuer did.

Speaker 33 The day after he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the FBI wrote up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline they'd had in mind was irrelevant now.

Speaker 33 This guy was behaving unpredictably, and they needed to go ahead and make the arrest.

Speaker 33 Probably in large part because he made that strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house, and then then the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors, he was held without bond.

Speaker 33 After two months in jail, he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer hacking and identity theft and was sentenced to 36 months in prison.

Speaker 33 During the three-year period of supervised release after he gets out, he's not allowed to have any contact with any of his victims. So that's those 14 co-workers and

Speaker 33 the Disney Corporation.

Speaker 33 In the grand scheme of weird little guys,

Speaker 33 this is all pretty minor. Nobody really got hurt.
It cost about $150,000 to reprint the affected materials, and Disney estimates that the ordeal cost them about $600,000 in total.

Speaker 33 I have to admit, I don't particularly care if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars.

Speaker 33 If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten seriously hurt.

Speaker 33 But

Speaker 33 they didn't. And according to Michael Scheuer, he knew they wouldn't.

Speaker 33 I don't know that that's true. It's impossible to say at this point.

Speaker 33 But again, in the end, nothing really happened, did it?

Speaker 33 I initially came across this case during my regular search for newly filed cases containing certain keywords I like to look for.

Speaker 33 I think in this case it was the word swastika,

Speaker 33 but I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi. I don't have any other evidence that points to that swastika being a larger part of his life.

Speaker 33 When the FBI came and took his computer away, there was a file on his desktop called swastika.png.

Speaker 33 He must have googled the word swastika and then saved the image that he wanted to use on the menu.

Speaker 33 It kind of reminds me of early 4chan culture. I don't mean the 4chan of today.

Speaker 33 I mean way back in the day, before those guys were genuinely sincere neo-Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts, a lot of them were just shit talking.

Speaker 33 They wanted to be extreme, they wanted to be edgy, they wanted to post the most shocking, fucked up stuff they could think of because that was funny or thrilling or interesting, I guess.

Speaker 33 So I'm inclined to believe he put the swastika on the menu because it was the worst thing he could think of.

Speaker 33 Not because he actually liked it.

Speaker 33 I mean, I hope that's the case.

Speaker 33 I'm a little less generous when it comes to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.

Speaker 33 That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest.

Speaker 33 I don't know that that's something that would come immediately to mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing preoccupation with mass shootings, you know?

Speaker 33 But that's just my gut. There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations.

Speaker 33 This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed out at work and it sent him into a tailspin that ended in federal prison.

Speaker 33 The only glimpse into Michael Scheuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit post he made just a few days before the FBI showed up at his house for the first time.

Speaker 33 On a subreddit for people with social anxiety, he made a post with the title, Reaching the End? Question mark.

Speaker 33 It's long, but it reads in part,

Speaker 33 The people involved in firing me treated me like a criminal. Me, who is afraid of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.
I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me.

Speaker 33 Not one person from work reached out to check on me. I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a man and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone.

Speaker 33 Maybe the other part is because because I'm an awkward asshole. I have no friends.
No work connections. Nothing.
I've already determined I will never work again.

Speaker 33 Nobody cares about me.

Speaker 33 He goes on to say that he started therapy earlier that year, but when he got fired, he realized it was too late.

Speaker 33 Too late for what is unclear.

Speaker 33 Too late to change. Too late to make anything of his life.

Speaker 33 It has a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a desire to harm himself.

Speaker 33 On the contrary, he seems fixated on harming others, writing, quote,

Speaker 33 Every day since I was fired, I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged.

Speaker 33 But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem.

Speaker 33 Maybe it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's everybody that's been afraid of me.

Speaker 33 And And there it is, isn't it? He said it himself.

Speaker 33 Because I feel

Speaker 33 so

Speaker 33 wronged.

Speaker 33 It's remarkably self-aware.

Speaker 33 It reminds me a lot of what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening postcards all those years.

Speaker 33 He just admitted it.

Speaker 33 He said that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed. And it made him feel better to know that he was causing her distress in return.

Speaker 33 Being a weird little guy is something that exists on a spectrum, I think.

Speaker 33 Some of them are truly monsters. They kill, maim, torture, and terrorize.
They carry out mass shootings and blow up synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war.

Speaker 33 They want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot it out with the police, or they just want to gain enough political power to punish their enemies.

Speaker 33 Those are the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.

Speaker 33 But there are weird little guys out there who are much, much littler.

Speaker 33 Guys whose behavior fits the archetype but only registers a little blip on the radar.

Speaker 33 And those are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet one day.

Speaker 33 God willing, most of us will never meet a mass shooter.

Speaker 33 But you probably will eventually encounter the kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer.

Speaker 33 So he puts a swastika on the menu at the Mickey Mouse Cafe.

Speaker 33 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 33 The show is edited by the wildly talented Maury Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.

Speaker 33 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.

Speaker 33 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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Speaker 38 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

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