Transcript
Mishke (0:00)
At 5 Eyewitness News. You told us that fraud and wasted money are important to you, and that's why we're going after it. I'm Kevin Doran, and every day, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS is following the money in your neighborhood, asking the tough questions, looking out for you, and uncovering fraud with your tax dollars. We're listening, and we're working hard to protect your money. Watch and see the difference on 5 Eyewitness News. Mishke here, joining the GL world to pitch my new podcast, which now comes out twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. The show features an extraordinary array of exotic circus performers, forgotten Hollywood starlets, reclusive Fortune 500 CEOs, professional taxidermists. Wait a minute. That's a different promo. Where's the promo for G elers? Here it is. Let's try this again. Mishke here pitching my new podcast. We're out of time. Could I do it again? Coming to ya from the bleak, barren inner city tarmac of University Avenue. From the mother ship, Hubbard Broadcasting. Legendary Hubbard Broadcasting. My name is Mishke. You're ding. Flipping what you call your eyefalutin hidey. Hideyoski. To each and every one of you out there. Where with this show, Misko, who knows? You don't need a weatherman to see which way the show flows. Here goes. A Washington, D.C. postal worker was found guilty this week of stealing more than $1.6 million worth of U.S. treasury and private party checks from the mail to fund a lavish lifestyle. Postal workers generally are not afforded a lavish lifestyle. So this guy went out and found his way to one, albeit illegally. The guy was an employee with the D.C. postal Service, a working man putting in his time in a civil service job, going through life, keeping his head down. Every now and then, looking at the wealthy from a distance, wondering, why do they get to have that? And here I am stuck in in this rut. Why? God. But he saw a chance to be somebody different. He deposited altered stolen checks into his bank account. And he was living high off the hog for a while. Lord, he was. But bank surveillance footage eventually caught up with him. He was shown on camera making deposits and withdrawals of these funds. He used the proceeds from his scheme, it says here, to fund a lavish lifestyle that included international travel, stays at luxury hotels, and purchases at gentlemen's clubs. High end gentlemen's clubs. You know what those are? A jury this week found him guilty of conspiracy to commit theft of mail and bank fraud. The maximum penalty, 30 years in prison. Now, I've taken a look at some of the prison options awaiting this fella. And the lavish lifestyle part, well, that's gonna be coming to an end. Based on my observations. The lifestyle where he's going could have a one word description. It just wouldn't be lavish. Spartan, maybe. Raw? Horrific. Yes, horrific. He's traded a lavish lifestyle for a horrific one. What lifestyle did he have before the lavish lifestyle? A lifestyle of envy, mostly. And therein lies the problem. If I could remove one thing from this world, it would be that sensation we all know so well. That sensation of envy. Longing for what we don't have. Longing for what we don't have and someone else does. Lord, if that ain't what does us in so much of the time. Imagine the world's crime report for this week. Imagine it right now. Every crime committed in the world over the last week. You got that in your head. Imagine the long scroll, okay? From the smallest incident of shoplifting to the greatest war crime. And tell me, what does that scroll shrink to if we remove that human sensation of envy? How many crimes vanish from that scroll if we yank envy from the picture? This guy was working for the post office. And that doesn't bring with it much in the way of what you call lavish. And he knew there were other guys out there living well, guys enjoying a very lavish lifestyle. They were in fancy hotels. That's the first thing that got to him. They were traveling and staying in fancy hotels. That image alone ate away at him. And. And they had money to go to gentlemen's clubs. High end gentlemen's clubs. Spending wildly on women lap dances, no doubt. Meanwhile, our man had trouble getting a date. It's a lot of work. It's quite an effort sometimes. He got a date every now and then. But it was hard. It ain't as much work when you have money. He thought, God, this isn't fair. What did you do to me? Lord? He saw a way out. Sure he did. He came up with a scheme. Have you ever come up with a scheme? And now because of that scheme, he'll be in that far less lavish world with that lone, exposed open toilet in that tiny cell with a roommate named Ox. It's a great tumble off that cliff of lavish. A tumble from lavish past good enough down to horrific. Horrific. It's interesting. I've learned a little secret about all this stuff. I really have. I've learned a secret about all of this. I'm never one to claim to have any great insight to pass along to the world, but I have learned a Little secret that has really helped me with this envy business. Here's the thing. I know rich guys. I've been able in my life to hang out with rich guys. And, and I know poor guys. I've spent a fair amount of time with poor guys as well. And by and large the poor guys have been happier then the well to do folks. That was insight number one for me in this world. Holy smokes. Who saw that coming? Boy, was that a wake up call. That shocked me. What was that all about? I wondered. What are the poor guys doing being happier than the rich guys? Something's all cattywampus here. I couldn't figure it out for a while. I had my theories, but we'll get to all that later. The important thing here is the rich guys were generally not as happy, not as satisfied, not as content. Almost across the board. You think when you get rich everything's going to change. But let me tell you what doesn't change. And the list is long. It's really, really, really long. What doesn't change is you still sleep for eight hours in a bed with a pillow. You don't escape that. So a third of your life is suddenly identical. Identical to less affluent folks. You just got rich and a third of your life is no different. Wait a minute. What? Number two. You wake up and may or may not feel great. If you're old, you probably have stiffness, aches, pains, just like the less affluent. So far there isn't much that's different, but we'll keep going. You're able to afford a great breakfast when you're rich. But guys who don't have a lot of dough rarely complain about their breakfasts. The eggs and the bacon taste just fine. In fact, more than fine. They're good. So is the coffee. Okay, so we're now well into the morning and nothing is really different. But the rich guy doesn't have to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But without purpose, he flails. He flails. We need purpose. We need purpose or we get lost. We need a reason to get up in the morning. The less affluent person working to get the money together to support his family is operating with purpose. And it's dramatically helping his sense of well being. Versus purposeless rich guy. Now purposeless rich guy realizes this is a bit of a problem. He needs purpose and he wants to feel good about himself. And one day he, he gives a bunch of money to some charity and suddenly does feel better about himself. Less affluent guy is stuck just helping his buddy Move on the weekend, lifting boxes, hauling out garbage. But less affluent guy gave his time, which is generally considered by the great spiritual sages of our time, to be a higher form of giving than giving money, a higher form of charity, giving time. Unlike money you see, which can be replenished, time is finite. It's quite a thing to give away. It's irreplaceable. Giving time signifies a deliberate choice to dedicate a portion of your limited existence to assist someone else, showing a deeper level of care, deeper level of commitment. This is well studied in certain circles. Offering time often involves direct interaction, creating a more meaningful connection between the giver and the receiver. It's personal, and it enriches one's existence. Here's the real kicker. One of the things the less well to do guy likes to do is laugh. And his friends are good at making him laugh. He's been pals with them forever, and they're very close. And there are days when the joy they feel laughing and telling stories together is such that life almost can't get any better. Maybe they're enjoying a beer. Maybe they're in the shade near a river, watching a purple and orange evening sky. But life in that moment feels kind of perfect. And money did not buy that experience. Living dead. And in their laughter, their deep laughter, there's a kind of freedom, an inexplicable release of all cares, a kind of ecstasy. Maybe the wealthy guy has those friends as well. He might. And then again, he might have spent so much time working at the wealth game that interpersonal relationships didn't end up being as strong. Relationships take time and effort. Sometimes in life you have to make choices between going for the dough with all the time that demands and going for the deeper relationships. The wealthy have made choices that aren't always going to be the ones they'll celebrate most on their deathbed. But there's more. One day, both the wealthy man and the less affluent fellow will have certain and rather sudden epiphanies, if you will. Those epiphanies will come at random times in a day or week. The sun will deliver light in a certain way to a line of trees along a boulevard. And they will both momentarily hold their breath. It'll take their breath away briefly, before they have time to think. They will have this palpable thrill looking at this light. It will be so beautiful. But that ecstatic sensation will not last, because their thoughts will fill in that space and ruin it after a minute or so. But for a time, they will have realized how strangely wondrous the world is. How, how magical. All caused by the way the sunlight hit those trees along that boulevard. They ask themselves, have they been too busy to see it regularly? To see it week in and week out? They start to wonder. Maybe their epiphany comes when pulling over to the side of the road to watch the flight of an eagle. Maybe once again in the light, the way the light hits those white feathers, the grace of that flight. They'll forget about everything for a little while and life will just seem like a dream they were thrown into a wonderful dream. Maybe their epiphany will be a vista where the sunrise will be coming up over a small town. Maybe they're looking over the rooftops as that light comes up in the morning. Maybe there will be almost a religious sensation accompanying that vista, something sacred about the whole scene, something wonderfully, beautifully mysterious. These little epiphanies will happen more and more as they get older. And it'll make them wonder whether or not all the real majesty of life isn't sitting there available to one and all each and every day, that the real goods cannot be purchased. They're right outside our front doors. It is life itself, that pulsating mystery. Maybe less affluent guy will watch his child being born and he'll think, when will it get better than this? Maybe wealthy guy will be with his wife one night in the throes of intimacy and think to himself, wow, this feels like when we were young and first dating and had nothing and life was perfect. Life was perfect because we were in bed together and nothing else really mattered. And really nothing the wealthy guy ever did in life topped that sensation. These epiphanies with these guys will mess with their whole idea of envy. It will mess with their heads, mess with their whole notion of chasing dollar bills, mess with their sense of what the whole big ball game is all about. Now it's too late for our postal worker. He went for something he thought was the Holy Grail. And not only wasn't it the Holy Grail, it cost him dearly. Cause the envy he will now feel in prison is a very hard one to get rid of. He will be envying the free. He will be envying those who know freedom itself. Just that sense of freedom, of walking where one wants to walk. Turning corners at will. Walking down streets a person feels like walking down. Finding wooded areas to explore. Watching wild rivers that just capture our imaginations. Deciding to take a drive, maybe to the ocean. These are the treasures laid out for one and all. This is our birthright. And in prison, our guy will know none of it. All because of Envy, that nasty, nasty thing that. That I wish was never invented. The devil himself must have created that one. Envy. Few things do us in with more surgical precision than that. I'll be right back with a twist on this postal workers story. A twist you don't see coming right after this. There are reasons to call my personal injury attorneys, Bradshaw and Bryant, and this is not one of them. A man in New York just sued a social media company after he walked straight into a street sign while distracted looking at his phone. He claimed the phone app that he was using had a bad design to it. Thus it was dangerous and that's why he walked into the street sign. That man is a ninny, Hammer. He's a mutton head. He's an adult brained klutz with retread for gray matter. Now if you think you were honestly, truly, actually injured by some careless, reckless soul out there, that's when you contact Bradshaw and Bryant. They have been taking care of the injured for years and years, getting them the financial compensation to get them back on their feet. People out there can be callous, but you can square things with superheroes by your side. Bradshaw and Bryant, they seek justice for the injured and they get it. Learn more at Minnesota Personal Injury.com. If you ask me, the saddest part of this entire story involving the postal worker is that the guy committed these crimes with his eyes on being able to enjoy high end fancy gentlemen's clubs. The wealthy guy can pay women at the high end gentlemen's clubs to make em feel good. This postal worker, it says here, blew a ton of cash at high end gentlemen's clubs, but he had to go home each night realizing he was buying a kind of artificial fondness. Less affluent fella had to find his intimacy the old fashioned way through actual courtship. That's harder. The payoff is greater though. The rich guy can't even be sure the woman who eventually becomes his spouse or love interest really cares for him versus just being hungry for the lifestyle that this relationship bought her. Tough to know a person's intentions when they gravitate to you after learning you have a lot of dough. Less affluent guy doesn't have to worry about all that. Our postal worker wanted high end gentlemen's clubs. Dear God, if our man only knew about these joints. I could have saved him so much trouble. I could have told him about the Seville in downtown Minneapolis. You know about the Seville? What a wake up call that would have been for our man. That's not what he imagined when he was stealing those checks. He had it all wrong. I spent some time with one of the top high end strippers at the Seville, asking her all about that world. I wanted to know what goes on in there. What goes on in the super expensive high end gentleman's clubs where they say if a woman isn't a 10, she. She cannot be hired? Where they say only the best of the best can work there because the clientele is the wealthiest of the wealthy. It's a hard gig to get, she told me, but oh, who was it? Lucrative. 300 bucks an hour plus tips. And the tips were lavish. Absolutely lavish. Inside those walls, women were walking up to these high rollers, asking if they would like a dance. Would you like a dance? And everything would come off but a skimpy bottom. Other women work in the VIP room upstairs for 300 bucks an hour. Were spending loads of time with a single guy. Drinks flowing, tips piling up. Our man, the postal worker, wanted to be incredibly wealthy so he could head to places like the Seville in downtown Minneapolis to live it up with beautiful women. Beautiful women. I remember talking to Holly. She was the queen of the Seville. Extraordinarily gorgeous. Began working there at 26 years of age. And by 36, when I sat down with her, she had purchased a beautiful home in the western suburbs, right on a lake. I visited her there. The place was astounding. And she also owned a condo down in Florida. All from what she took in at the Seville. Before going to the Seville. What was she doing? A secretary for health partners. Broke. Living the grind. Our man, the postal worker, wanted to be incredibly wealthy so he could head to places like the Seville and live it up with people like Holly. When I interviewed Holly, she told me she never had to work another day in her life. At 36 years of age, she was set. Never had to work again. She had managed her money well. The men at the Seville over those 10 years had rained down cash all over Holly. Suitcases full of it. Gifted her with jewelry, expensive jewelry. Holly was a star at the Seville. And here's the strange thing. By the time I was interviewing her, the men had grown to love her so much, she didn't even need to take her clothes off anymore. The needy men who came in with their thick wallets wanted her ear. They probably all wanted her heart as well. But they were not going to get that. Yeah, she no longer really needed to take her clothes off anymore. Because the men she dealt with were mostly sad, wealthy, troubled souls who needed far more than a beautiful, well toned nude body. They needed something else. They were lonely. They needed advice. They needed a hug. They needed to find a way to learn to be with a woman again after spending too much time with money and attracting the kind of women who didn't much care for them beyond their money. The men had all gotten rich, but at what cost? They were messed up. And Holly was now their confidant. A sultry, sexy therapist. 36 years old and thinking of quitting altogether, but still going in once a week to put in her hours and cater to those who loved her. So mostly up in the VIP room, where the rule remained the no sexual touching, but where Holly could spend hours with these guys. Hours.