In today’s episode, we dive deep into the legendary antics of Florida Man, with a couple of stories that redefine the bounds of absurdity. From a man shipping himself meth via the postal service to another who had a unique proposition for his jewelry store visitors, these tales highlight the audacity and sheer madness often associated with the Sunshine State’s most notorious stories. We also explore the recent developments on Capitol Hill, where startup ecosystems face unprecedented challenges with the current administration’s apparent preference for government control over private enterprise.
Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast, sponsored by Kel-Tec.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s his life mission to make bad decisions. It’s time for Florida Man.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right. It’s time for Florida Man, the Dana Show. My name is Craig Collins. Filling in. Find Dana everywhere. DLash or Dana Lash Radio on X on Twitter. Probably one of the best ways to stay connected. But so many ways to find her. Television, everything. She’s out there. I got two Florida man stories. The first guy was sentenced to a decade in prison for shipping himself several pounds of meth. It wasn’t just a little bit of meth. The guy decided, I guess this was back in 2020, that he would make it easy to acquire some methamphetamine, 18 pounds of it, in fact. So he just put his name, his information, and he just had it sent to him. That’s not legal. You can’t do that, not even in Florida. A few days later, investigators called the delivery service to ask about the whereabouts of the package that they had flagged as containing bad things. They went to the guy’s house. He had it there. He gets arrested. I love the laziness of this. It’s not exactly the young person version of a crime where you just tape yourself on social media doing something you shouldn’t do and you get caught that way. It’s even lazier. You just sent yourself 18 pounds of meth in the mail. You’re like, hey, nobody’s going to open that. That’s got my name on it. That’s my package. They’re just going to deliver it to the house and nobody’s going to be any wiser. That’s not a good plan. That doesn’t work. Although I feel like I shouldn’t tell you that for anyone out there that might do it because I like when criminals get caught doing stupid stuff. Here’s the other Florida man story. A Florida man was selling cocaine at his jewelry store, according to deputies. They arrested this guy. This was a 54-year-old guy named Pedro Martinez, which, by the way, is insane. As a Yankee fan, I’m kind of thrilled to read Pedro Martinez. Not that one. Not the famous baseball player and pitcher who pitched for the Red Sox and also was very much owned by the New York Yankees at times during his career. Why they chanted, who’s your daddy? That’s not the point. That’s not who this is about. But that guy who owns three jewelry stores and thought they’re never going to go after me because I got a famous name, maybe, decided that if you came in, you said the right thing, it looked like I could trust you, I’ll deal you a little bit of cocaine. I think there also might have been fentanyl, opioids, other things available. You just had to ask for the right crystals. You’d be like, I like the diamonds, but what else do you got? What other options are out there? He said he felt 100% comfortable walking in and doing business with people until the cops found out about it and you get in trouble. That’s the kind of thing that you can’t do. Held on a $275 thousand dollar bond and probably also not so happy as the actual famous Pedro Martinez who probably got some text messages I imagine at least one maybe not like a direct relative maybe somebody who doesn’t know him that well but knows him and saw a headline Pedro Martinez arrested for selling cocaine and goes like I wonder how far he fell and so you just gotta shoot over the text or shoot over the call and say hey man I hope everything’s okay with you let me know what I can do he’s like it wasn’t me which obviously it wasn’t. One other thing that I love about this, the cop said that it kind of made sense. You’re dealing with a cash-based business because by and large, this guy sold jewelry where all he wanted as payment was cash, which has got to feel wrong even for the people that just came in to buy a necklace. But because of that, it made it easier to kind of launder and hide some of these things. But you make mistakes when you try to sell said drugs to undercover cops. That’s usually a mistake. Some of the charges involve possession of a controlled substance, possession of a structure that was intent to sell controlled substances, selling of cocaine, trafficking cocaine, unlawful two-way communication devices, and much more. The guy had more than one phone. Another thing out there that I think is pretty interesting today as far as just talking points go. So Kamala Harris and her administration or and her campaign are out there saying a lot of things after hiding for a few days, which I thought was interesting. One of the most significant things that’s been said by her campaign is that she couldn’t find the time to sit down with Joe Rogan. that he had offered. The platform was available to her, just like it was available to Trump. Many people actually credit the sit down between Trump and Joe Rogan as helping give him yet another boost with younger, predominantly male voters. And Harris just didn’t want to be a part of that platform. She gave $500,000 to Al Sharpton to interview her on MSNBC. That’s a real story that broken is out there. And it is so funny. Just quickly about that one before continuing to talk about the Rogan thing. Sharpton had every intention of doing an easy interview with Kamala Harris, regardless of if any money gets donated to a charity that he’s in charge of. He wasn’t going to challenge her. When you set up that conversation, the bosses didn’t want him to challenge her. So it’s amazing. that even though you’re going in for the friendliest of interviews on the friendliest of platforms, you still paid somebody off and you get caught in doing it because campaign dollars, oh yeah, you have to be public about that stuff. My other favorite part of the Al Sharpton story that’s all over the news today, although Fox News covering it quite a bit more than some of the other media places are, is that people figured this out much earlier than recently. It only broke recently. But MSNBC fought and, you know, essentially tried to bury this story until it became the Association of Journalists that cared about it and tried to say that it was wrong and a black eye as far as the integrity of MSNBC is concerned. whatever you want to say there, for the most part, when it was only like the free beacon or anyone else trying to gain information about if this was true or not, or if MSNBC was aware or not, which they claim to be unaware. Count the amount of times that a person in charge or an organization in charge, whether it’s Biden dealing with his son or MSNBC dealing with its employees, where their excuse after something incredibly embarrassing and just like downright wrong comes out is I didn’t know. Do you accept that in your own life? If someone gives you that excuse, if you have an employee who says, oh, I didn’t know, do you say that, oh, that’s okay, that’s fine, no big deal? If a parent says that about a kid that gets in trouble, oh, I didn’t know, is that something that people usually go, well, you should have, That’s something you probably should have been familiar with, but it’s amazing. But again, as Kamala Harris comes out of hiding and out of whatever version of vacation she was on, her and her campaign are saying that they did all the right things, that everything was great, and it really wasn’t necessarily her fault that they lost, which is amazingly arrogant. I think I have a little bit of audio of Harris herself speaking, and it does kind of sound like she’s drunk. I got to be honest, people are even putting up videos now where she’s holding a, you know, bottle that she didn’t have in her hand. Not exactly well done because she seems to be taking over from Biden in the slurring department and other things like that.
SPEAKER 01 :
I just have to remind you, don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before November 5th. and you have the same purpose that you did and you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Don’t let them do it. Don’t let them take it. You know what this sounds like? I remember this, actually. This happened to me. I remember a boyfriend of my mom trying to give me advice after he’d been drinking a bit. I can’t remember what kind of party or thing was going on at the house, but this guy was definitely not at the place where you should be giving a small child advice And I remember to this day, the funniest thing about it is he was trying to tell me that, like, cheaters don’t win. But he was too hammered. So he said, hey, Craig, come here. I got to tell you something. I want you to know, and I want you to think about this a lot, that cheaters… cheaters prosper when people don’t catch them cheating. I was like, what? What did you say, sir? He goes, so the point is that cheaters always win and winners always cheat. And then he walked away, and that was not the point that he wanted to make. But to this day, I will remember cheaters always win and winners always cheat as advice I was given when I was like 12 from a dude who was sloshed. That sounds like Kamala Harris. I’ll play it one more time. Picture her as the end of the Thanksgiving meal aunt who drank way too much during dinner that wants to make sure you know some stuff before you go back out into the world.
SPEAKER 01 :
I just have to remind you, don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before November 5th.
SPEAKER 03 :
You do, man.
SPEAKER 01 :
And you have the same purpose that you did.
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely.
SPEAKER 01 :
And you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Don’t let them do it, man. Don’t let them do any of that stuff. And also you have the same shoes you had before and the same shirt and you look the same. And all right, I got to go vomit. That’s what it sounds like is happening there.
SPEAKER 05 :
And now all of the news you would probably miss. It’s time for Dana’s Quick Five.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, some of these you probably won’t miss because I’m sure they’re going to be talked about a lot. Busiest Thanksgiving ever. Air travel, 18 million plus Americans taken to the skies to visit family, to visit loved ones. Apparently not listening to the social media people that are saying a boycott, boycott, boycott. If they don’t agree with your politics, which is good. Sit across the table, have a conversation, maybe learn some things from some of the individuals in your life that voted a way that you couldn’t fathom. I love that idea. But lots and lots of people traveling this holiday season. So it’s going to be busy, going to be stressful. Good luck to all involved. Americans will throw out 316 million pounds of food on Thanksgiving. And just after it, there’s a big take about how this is somehow relevant as far as climate change or anything else is out there. I don’t care. I don’t want to dive into that world at all today. But I will tell you that 316 million feels like too much. It feels like we should find a way to be closer to the exact amount of food that you need for whatever the amount of people is you’re having over. But it would also be really upsetting if you ran out of food on Thanksgiving. Like, if any day for you to not want to be under on any sort of assessment, that would be the one. That would be the whole holiday itself. So I don’t blame us for not being perfect about this. We could probably do better than 316 million pounds of food, though. Regular sleep patterns increase the risk of stroke, heart attack, all kinds of things. I love when there’s studies out there that you can’t do anything about. This feels like one of those. If you have an irregular sleep pattern that’s work related, you’re a person like me that has, you know, an odd professional schedule where sometimes it’s earlier, sometimes it’s later. This is the kind of news you don’t need. This is the kind of study that I could just like look at and be like, I would rather have been blissfully ignorant of this. Thank you, sir, for telling me anyway. If you can fix it, though, go ahead and fix that. Try to have your sleep pattern be normal because it can increase your risk of bad things happening. Again, a fairly obvious study, but out there anyway. Also, I love this one. It’s just shaming us in whatever way it is. One in four people are still carrying some weight from last holiday. You’re still a little bit heavier than you were when you started out the holiday season last year. And so you’re not dropping that weight, I guess. Something’s going on that’s wrong. Again, something I don’t need to know. If I haven’t fixed that by holiday season this year, it seems like I’m okay with that weight. So leave me alone, darn it, I guess is my response to it, but I’m amused by it. And of course, be healthy, be responsible. Important to say that out loud too. One other thing that I’ll probably get to more later, people are now naming their babies after dogs. Dog names are becoming more and more popular, according to the Internet. Some of them are not really dog names, though, so I guess that’s good. But I just find this to be idiotic and hilarious that there’s a debate as to whether or not your child should be named a similar thing, what you name your pet. But I want to compare it now to something else that was going on that I do like a lot. This is Joe Rogan. He sat down with a venture capitalist named Mark Anderson. Actually, before I even get to the stuff about Elon Musk, because it’s not as important as mainstream media wants to tell you it is, even though it is important, and I think Elon can do a lot of good, this is more fascinating. Again, Mark Anderson, well-off, venture capitalist, privately funded or helped fund a whole bunch of startup companies, very interested in the AI space, as it seems almost everybody is right now. And on Joe Rogan’s show, he said he was invited to a meeting at the White House with the Biden administration, where they told him and people like him, people who helped fund our economy through the decision-making and the companies that they wind up propping up, what they were and weren’t allowed to invest in, which is surreal as far as a conversation must go for this person in this world that he’s in. Here’s a little bit of that audio.
SPEAKER 06 :
I think it was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I’ve ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans, and it was … What kind of … Can you talk about it? Basically, just full government control, this sort of thing. There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They told us, they just said, don’t even start startups. Don’t even bother. Wow. There’s just no way. There’s no way that they can succeed. There’s no way that we’re going to permit that to happen. wow yeah they said this is already over it’s going to be two or three companies and we’re just going to we’re going to we’re going to control them and and that’s that like this is already finished oh my god now when you leave a meeting like that what do you do you go endorse donald trump what
SPEAKER 03 :
I love that response, by the way, too. You go endorse the other guy because the nice thing about the founding fathers is they created this check and balance system that allows you to throw your weight behind somebody who’s not going to do the stuff that this administration just told you they’re going to do, like they’re going to be in power forever. But that is insane. And again, it’s not surprising. A whole lot of people know this happens and know this happens all the time. But I do ask a simple question when I play that audio and realize that that story is now out there in that way by someone that says they were in the room when this happened, is how lazy this version of trying to control everything has become. How many people in power don’t care if you find the truth out? Because it’s brazen to invite a bunch of people into a room and who have the financial means to ignore you no matter what you’re threatening to do and, granted, not ignore you entirely because I’m sure they could actually harm you if they wanted to do it, but invite you into a room and tell you what you are and aren’t going to do and then assume when you walk out of that room, even if you tell people, who cares? It doesn’t matter. And I wonder if because it’s a lot of, you know, California based venture capitalists, they just assumed everybody was on their political side of the aisle. So you can say the quiet part out loud and not be afraid of it being a story that breaks in the mainstream. And Joe Rogan, I will argue till I’m blue in the face now, is actually mainstream media. He’s not called that, but that’s not a bad thing inherently, right? Because the places where we actually go to get real information, where most of us pay attention, those are truly what is mainstream media today. All of the legacy media, all of the crap media places out there that are biased at not giving you unfiltered information, they are becoming less and less popular. So anyway, I just think it’s so interesting that someone can go on and have that conversation and be willing to tell that story publicly. And I doubt the Biden administration will even respond to it. They’ll just ignore that it’s a thing that’s out there at all, which is crazy. But here’s the other part, the part about Elon Musk. I just thought this was pretty funny when they were joking about this.
SPEAKER 04 :
Could you imagine if you’re running an agency and you have to have a meeting with Vivek and Elon? Yes. And you’ve got to open your books? Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s like office space where they brought in the bobs for consulting. Right. What do you do here? Exactly. That’s exactly what it’s like. What are you going to do here? What have you guys been doing? Where’s all this money been going? I thought it was interesting. A few different politicians, including some that will also be involved in Doge, have put out their template for how to get rid of the massive amounts of waste that exist within our government and the amount of people that think you could save a couple trillion dollars. I’m not saying billion, I’m saying trillion correctly, not the way Biden does it when he misspeaks, but a couple trillion dollars easily by looking into all these different places where funding is going and shouldn’t be going or where excess funds are just left and people wait to the last minute to use them on whatever they want, the use it or lose it version of government that exists a whole lot of places. There’s so many different avenues. to recover money or to stop just throwing it into a bucket that’s essentially useless to the average American. And again, not that this is surprising, but it’s amazing how easy it is for the people on the inside to tell us that part too. Once they know that this is something that’s going to be attacked, once they know that this is something that’s going to be paid attention to, and I’m not accusing… anyone involved of being you know on the take per se uh but the fact that this is like the the worst kept secret in dc or in general i guess with the american people now is something to to pay attention to as it occurs as well it’s something to really take note of how long uh you’ve been taken advantage of and how sort of you know unapologetic they’ve been about doing it And at the end of the day, when it’s all said and done, how easy it was to not do it, how easy it was to go the other road. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and anybody involved in that organization or that brand new government oversight are going to discover how deep the well goes. And it’s going to be shocking. And a whole lot of people are just going to tell you it’s not true. I know that this is going to happen, by the way. I know that sometimes I’m even a victim of wanting to believe this. And this is why you have to always do your own research. No matter how much people make fun of that, you have to dive in. You have to pay attention to every single aspect of something. Because when it gets deep enough, people just won’t believe it. People just be like, oh, this is too crazy. This is too much of this. So it’s probably not true because just the size of it seems insane. And yet it’s going to wind up being true. We’re going to wind up staring in the face of ridiculous amounts of corruption and bureaucratic overspending. And I mean, there’s one other good example. I use this example a lot. I know when you say the name Hunter Biden to someone on the left, they roll their eyes like, oh, God, you’re talking about Hunter Biden again. But one of the more I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it. Things to me in the last few years has been the outing of all the stuff that Hunter did to get money from foreign governments, all the different, you know, laws that it seemed like he broke and how Washington’s main defense for it. This administration’s main version of, you know, it’s not as bad as you think it is, was that Biden didn’t know about it, essentially saying out loud that people can do this stuff. You can enrich yourself on the back of a family member who is politically relevant by promising political favors. And that’s totally OK, totally legal in Washington, as long as you don’t tell the family member what you’re doing, which also seems insane. I’m not saying I believe that excuse, but it’s once again why I think that corruption has just gotten sloppier. It’s just become a thing that they do less well than they did before, because to say that we don’t have a problem with this as long as Joe didn’t know is essentially saying we found the buried bodies and we know who murdered these people. We just don’t know if the one other person involved knew about it. And for that reason, no crime has been committed at all. It’s it’s crazy.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to today’s edition of Dana Lash’s Absurd Truth Podcast. If you haven’t already, make sure to hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
