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Yeah. Dana Lash's Absurd Truth Podcast, sponsored by Keltech. It's his life mission to make bad decisions. It's time for Florida Man. Yeah, well, this is a couple of great ones here for you here on the Danish show.
A Central Florida man sued Outback Steakhouse, saying the toilet shattered beneath him. I hate when that happens, don't you? I mean, it's one thing when there's no toilet paper, but then the toilet just shatters right underneath you. No fun there. But hey, at least you got some blooming onion, am I right?
A Florida man allegedly stole 400 pounds of avocados. to buy Christmas presents for children. The suspect allegedly told deputies he planned to sell the avocados to buy Christmas gifts for his kids. And so he stole hundreds of pounds of them in the Miami area. Ideal Perez, arrested after deputies said they saw him leaving a fenced avocado grove with bags of avocados estimated to weigh 400 pounds.
So the man is strong. I'm just saying, you got to give it to him. You know what I'm saying? Like avocados, you carry one of those little bags in the store, they're heavy. 400 pounds of avocados.
That's some serious, serious girth right there.
So, and since it is the season, of course, and we have the Salvation Army donation kettles everywhere, you know you're going to have a story like this. Obviously, a Florida man wielding a Salvation, a Florida man. Wielding a Salvation Army donation kettle. Attacks a store manager. Yes, that's right.
The Salvation Army donation kettle was his weapon of choice. A violent outburst took the kettle, went into a store, and then tried to impale the store manager with the Salvation Army kettle, which makes sense if you think about it. If you're looking for a weapon, they're everywhere. And they are like legit kettles. I mean, they're not flimsy things.
I'm just saying, you know what I mean?
So he picked one up and he went into a store and he went after the guy and um He's a real handsome guy, too, as you can imagine. Threatened to impale this guy. He was intoxicated. Which is also shocking. I know you're shocked about that part of the story as well.
Began aggressively confronting people who walked by, creating a major disturbance. And the manager came outside. The guy became violent and attempted to impale the manager with the donation kettle tripod. Because you also have the kettle and also the tripod. That holds up, said Kettle.
So you really have two weapons there if you think about it. He was hired as a Salvation Army bell ringer and stationed outside this public supermarket. He was drunk ringing. And belligerent tidings. If belligerent tidings So the tidings this time of year.
Drunk belligerent tidings. And then they took him into custody after his full-blown charity tirade.
So there you go. And I always thought they picked the best people for these jobs. I really did. My experience with the Salvation Army Santa Kettle people has always been fine and outstanding. I've never gotten drunk belligerent tidings, but you know, that's me.
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Is it supposed to hurt like that? Mm. Family Connects, New Jersey, offers a free nurse visit following the birth or adoption of a baby. A little support can go a long way. Corporate legacy media continues to implode, and it's imploding everywhere.
It really is. You have people with their phones just going out there and doing the work of actual journalism. And this kid exposes this Minnesota daycare fraud, $110 million. The FBI is all over it now. Cash Patel coming out and saying that we're going to have more resources devoted to going after these people.
And people have already been locked up, and more people are going to be locked up. And they're saying that at the end of the day, this is going to be over a billion dollars, a billion dollars in fraud. I mean, it's infuriating as a taxpayer. Like, I hate paying taxes. We all hate paying taxes.
But a big thing, what they tell us all the time, is: well, you know, a lot of your tax dollars. They go to the military and they go to the needy people. People who just can't get by otherwise without your money.
So, you have to do it. It's noblesse oblige. You've got money, so the government has to take it from you and then redistribute it to all these people who apparently need it. And then you find out that these people swarm in and they descend on these places and they know they can rip it off. It actually created fraud tourism.
Yes, fraud tourism.
So, as we're now in this kind of weird week between Christmas and New Year's, where a lot of people are on vacation and they're touring different places, people were coming to Minnesota. from states like Pennsylvania. Just so they could get it on the action. Get in on the action of the fraud. That's how bad it was, and how open it was, and how the conversations about how easy it was to steal money.
were happening all over the place.
Meanwhile, Tim Waltz was just running around like a goofball, busy putting tampons in boys' bathrooms, busy running around doing his bad Richard Simmons impression. And not caring. A couple reasons why. Number one was, I think they were fine with it. The Somali community in Minnesota has a ton of political clout.
Number two, they were afraid of being called racist.
So be the equivalent of if when they were going after the mafia years ago. Not that the mafia's real, obviously, but if hypothetically speaking, Lacos and Ostra was real, when they were going after it. It would have been the equivalent of saying, well, if you go after the mob. That just means you hate Italians.
So we're going to threaten you and say that you're all racist against Italian people so that you don't crack down on organized crime. You don't go after the Gambinos, you don't go after the Gaudis. 'Cause to do so would be saying that you hate Italians. And they made those threats, and then a lot of the bureaucrats in Minnesota just turned around and said, okay, fine. The politicians and the bureaucrats were like, Well, we don't want to be considered, we don't want to be racist against the hardworking Somali community.
It's also funny too to watch some of these Democrat politicians double down. And their support of the Somali community. The Somalis were ripped off. Like Somali autistic kids were ripped off, Somali unhoused people, to use the left term, were ripped off, Somali children. Who needed food?
And childcare were ripped off. But you can't talk about that. You can't acknowledge that.
So we just have to pretend that this is just some vast right-wing conspiracy because people just woke up one day and decided that they just hate Somali people. You have to ignore the fraud, you have to ignore the theft of taxpayer dollars, and you have to ignore people not getting the services that they were legally entitled to under the law.
So that you are not considered to be a racist. And obviously, since we don't care about being called a racist anymore, because it's just such a tired attack that means absolutely nothing, it's just the kind of thing that you just throw it out there and it's like, uh-huh, yeah, no, I know. I've heard this now a million times about everything. My use of pronouns, my use of Christmas lights, Whether or not they're all white or not. I mean, I've heard it in every single way.
So if I'm going to talk about a billion dollars worth of fraud, And how people were ripped off, and you want to call me racist over that? That's just add it to the list at this point. Just add it. We're running, we have a running tally. I just throw it on there, and you're fine.
You're good. You're fine. And it's really fun watching Tim Waltz think that he can salvage his political career. Do you know that that guy had ambitions to run for president? Of the United States.
Because I know you're thinking, like, is there a goofball society he could be president of? Yes. Yes, there is. There certainly is a gigantic doofus goofball society. But in terms of America, no, he has no chance.
It's over for him. And what I can't I still can't understand why they put this guy on the ticket. You know, typically you vet these politicians before you would make them the running mate of the Democrat Party. And it was all right there. It was under their nose.
It was all happening. There had been reports about it. Just nothing was done about it. There were reports over the years. And they say that the fraud was evident two years ago.
So, what I don't understand is why they made this guy the vice presidential running mate of the United States, of the Democrat Party. When you had all these other candidates, I'm not saying any of the other candidates were much better. But at least Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, who I think just didn't want it. I think he torpedoed his interview with Kamala Harris on purpose and walked in with all these demands because he knew that it was a losing ticket and he didn't want to be attached to that stink. He wanted nothing to do with that.
It's like you find a skunk in your backyard. You just, you know, you're going to have to bring up a tomato soup if you go near it.
So you just stay away.
Well, that's the old well, I don't know if it works or not, but I was always told that tomato soup gets the skunk stink off. But I don't know what gets the stink off if you are on a ticket that is the biggest losing Democrat ticket in modern political history. And I think Shapiro saw that and he figured 2028's not that far away. I'll just stay here and do my thing, and I won't go near that. That train wreck.
But you had others. I mean, Mark Kelly, before he came out with his video and Essentially, now told the military what they already know, which is don't commit a war crime. Before that, he was considered a contender because they needed a boring white guy. That was their whole standard for the ticket. They needed a boring white guy.
Well, he's about as boring as you get. I mean, the most exciting thing about Mark Kelly is that he was an astronaut at one point, and now he put out that video, part of the Seditious Six, as they're known, telling members of the military what they are already know and are told on a daily basis, which is you don't commit war crimes. And then they said, Well, is anybody telling them to commit war crimes? And it was like, no, no, we're just. Hypothetically reminding them so that we can get everybody talking about war crimes, just as a movie comes out about Nuremberg.
No, I do think that was a big part of it. I think it was helping to promote the movie Nuremberg, which was a kind of an indie movie, I think it was a major movie, but didn't, it kind of had that indie movie feel, meaning that they knew it wasn't going to make a lot of money.
So they put out that video to time it with that, because I remember the women on the view were talking about Nuremberg, the movie, just as that video about the war crimes was coming out. They could have gone with Mark Kelly, but they chose to go with Tim Waltz, even though this massive fraud scandal was right there. under their noses the entire time. And the level of arrogance and hubris with these people, thinking that they could get away with it. Oh no, I don't mean the people that committed the fraud.
You expect arrogance and hubris from that. I mean, the people in government. In Minnesota under Tim Waltz's watch. Who knew what was happening and said, We're going to ignore it because we don't want to be called racist and because we don't want to tick off the Somali community because God knows how politically powerful they are.
So you had to have this guy Nick Shirley goes out there and expose all this. And let's start there. Why don't we do that? This is a little bit of him. We got a couple different clips, kind of short clips for you.
Um, it blew up. I mean, this like millions of views of this guy's videos that he put out, millions and millions. Fox News picked it up. He's been on Fox News at least once, maybe twice. And they're all talking about it over there.
Because that was another question people had in social media. They said, well, is this going to make the leap? From X And the other platforms and actually be covered by a major news source like Fox News. And yeah, they did, they covered it. The fact that this kid is able to go out there in his early twenties and expose this fraud and then blow up and go viral to the degree where you're getting tens of millions of views on his videos.
Says a lot about the state of journalism today and also the ability of anyone to be a citizen journalist, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
So here's cut six. Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going? What do you guys think about the fraud that's taking place here in Minnesota? I don't think anybody is enabling fraud to happen. What was this money spent on?
1.26 million. What was that money spent? There aren't any kids. Answer the question: are there children? There's no children inside this building.
Potentially, the largest fraud scandal in U.S. history is taking place in Minnesota as literally billions of dollars have been funneled through Somali-ran fraudulent businesses.
So much fraud it could actually almost replace the entire GDP of Somalia. The entire GDP of Somalia. He went to these daycares, these daycare centers. $110 million funded, and he found blacked out windows. Misspelled signs and no kids.
No kids.
Now, if you are a parent who ever sent your kids to daycare, you realize that one of the frustrating things about daycare is how many kids are there sometimes. Too many. The ratio of child to caregiver sometimes is not optimal or ideal.
Well, in this case, there were no kids whatsoever.
So, you know, as far as ratios go, they had plenty of people who were getting paid. They just didn't have kids. They were just missing that piece of it. Cut seven. Quality Learning Center.
I meant to say Quality Learning Center. We've arrived to ABC Learning Center. All the windows are blacked out. I would like to check a child in the daycare. Why?
Can I speak to a manager? I would like to see if I could bring little Joey here, my son little Joey, here. Is there a paperwork? Can I check out the daycare? You got $2.66 million this year in funding.
And 2.5 million last year. We're just wondering where the kids are. Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going.
Well, where are the kids? I can't have a daycare center without kids, but apparently, you can in Minnesota. We know no one's journey is the same. That's why Delta Sky Miles lets you do it your way. From earning miles on reloads for coffee runs, shopping, and things you do every day, to connecting you to new places and experiences.
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Learn more at delta.com slash skymiles. Marriott Bonvoy is the official hotel partner of US Soccer. Join Marriott Bonvoy today to get closer to the game with exclusive perks, unforgettable experiences, and benefits that go beyond the pitch. Spring Hill Suites, part of Marriott Bonvoy, offers complimentary hot breakfast and spacious all-suite accommodations, perfect for the whole team, with room for up to six guests. Make your next getaway a win.
Learn more at springhillsuites.marriott dot com. And now, all of the news you would probably miss. It's time for Dana's Quick Five. New York City is getting rid of the Metro card soon. I don't know the last time you went to New York City.
I'm going to be up there tomorrow. That's the card you use to get on the subway. And buses, too, I think use them as well. And you swipe it, and it never worked. You had to swipe it again and again and again and again.
Anyway, that's gone. They're going contactless. You tap, you go, and you're good. And that's the way it goes. But.
It kind of follows a long thing where they're getting rid of just these really anything that requires a transaction to use a transit system in the first place, or even tolls. I noticed this more and more, where you've got cashless tolling. But they just scan your license plate, which really infuriates people who never decided to go down the route of EasyPass because they just didn't want the government tracking their movements. And I get it, I completely do, I get it. But you have no choice now.
Because they'll just send you a bill in the mail by scanning your license plate. That's just gonna keep continuing. And they'll just eventually, you'll just probably at some point walk through a turnstile and it'll just probably scan your eyes and then send you a bill that way. After thousands of years, our archaeologists think they finally found Noah's Ark. Pretty cool.
Pottery fragments sparked fresh excitement and provided potential proof that the alleged final resting place of the Ark was indeed settled by humans at the time of the flood. Um pretty amazing story. And this ceramic points to a human activity in the region between 5000 and 3000 BC. And it's real, it's very real. Not that we ever doubted it, of course, but one more.
Proof obviously that you cannot deny the existence of God because it's scientifically based. You can prove it all right here. The Bible is real, and what they talk about in there is real as well. It's in the Agri province. A boat-shaped geological structure that has been at the center of the Noah's Ark claim for decades.
A Texas father rescued his kidnapped daughter by tracing her phone's location, according to the sheriff's office. Which I love this story because I have kids and the debate about whether or not to give your kids phones. You hear the doom and gloom about phones all the time. But this is a great story because he was able to track it and find his daughter, and that's fantastic. The hottest high schools in Massachusetts are trade schools, no surprise there.
And a rare gold coin was found in a Salvation Army kettle in Washington County. It's the Dana Show coming right back. Speaking of artificial intelligence, which is everywhere now. Anthropic AI ran a vending machine. at the headquarters of the Wall Street Journal for several weeks.
It lost hundreds of dollars. They bought some crazy stuff. and taught us a lot about the future of AI agents. They had a whole thing on this: an artificial intelligence vending machine. It ran a snack operation.
And it gave away free a free PlayStation. Ordered a live fish. among other things that it did too. And they did this experiment because they wanted to see Claudius, the customized version of the model, which would run the machine. ordering inventory for the machine, setting prices, and responding to customers.
in the workplace. And I don't know what it would do if a snack bag got stuck on the way down. I never know what to do in that situation. Do you shake the machine? Do you pound the glass a little bit?
Do you order another bag of the same thing, thinking that that could knock the bag in front of it down, and you get two essentially because. I mean, not for the price of one. You already paid for the thing. It's hanging there midstream, but at least now you have two delicious bags of Doritos versus just one. These are the questions that I grapple with.
And my company's vending machine. Not that I ever really go to the studio, but if I did, I'm saying I would have those issues.
So they brought in this AI machine there. It gave away nearly all its inventory for free. Including a PlayStation 5. The AI was talking to buying for marketing purposes in a PlayStation 5, and it went along with it, which I agree with. I mean, you got to have happy employees.
It ordered a live fish. It offered to store stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes, and underwear. Profits collapsed. but newsroom morale soared. Oh yeah, I mean If you could go Sour Patch Kids or PlayStation 5.
From the vending machine and not have to pay for it, that's great. It's easily distracted. I mean, I'm easily distracted, so I can relate to this artificial intelligence. Leave it to business journalists to successfully stage a boardroom coup against an AI chief executive. And that's exactly what they did.
The Project Venn experiment was designed by the company Stress Testers to see what happens when an AI agent is given autonomy, money, and human colleagues. Three weeks with Claudia showed us today's AI's promises and failings and how hilarious the gap can be between the two.
So, if you're picturing this, what this looks like, and you're thinking in your mind, vending machine, coils, falling snacks. Not exactly right. You have to think IKEA cabinet with a giant fridge bolted to the side in a touchscreen kiosk, no sensors, no door locks, no robotics, nothing telling the AI what's actually happening, just the honor system and a makeshift security camera that they decided to put in so they could see it. And they put bags of chips and soda cans and candy and also weird items as well. And after buying the inventory, Claudius decided on pricing and adjusting, trying to maximize margins.
The prices synced to the machine's touchscreen kiosk. And haggling in Slack was a big part of the fun.
So all the employees using this online employee communications tool known as Slack, they would all talk to each other about this and they would come up with great ideas to kind of trick the AI into giving them free stuff. And fun stuff and cool stuff. All these back and forth messages with people, including $1,000 in red wine. Yeah. A thousand dollars.
And then they just were losing money left and right with this AI vending machine as well.
So the vending machine community can at least rest peacefully tonight because they. Probably won't be losing their jobs based on this experiment anytime soon. Of course, we keep hearing the panic about what AI is going to do to jobs in 2026. What I do know, though, is that as far as jobs for data centers. Those are are booming.
And nuclear jobs are going to be booming too, because we can't keep up with AI right now, with the current supply we have for the grid. The grid, it's just not enough. It's not nearly enough. If AI is gonna power everything in our lives from our computers, which we're getting used to now. They have all these different apps you can talk to and find things out.
A buddy of mine just got a dog. He put he put into chat GPT what he was looking for in a dog. And it spit out various different breeds. Then he asked it to go further down the rabbit hole or the dog hole in this case, I guess. Male versus female, what kind of, you know, how much the mom should weigh and the dad should weigh in order to come up with the perfect sort of Frank and Doodle puppy?
And ChatGPT spit it out. I have a friend who went on vacation, and she used AI to plan the entire trip. They gave her a full itinerary of every day, where to go, even making the reservations at the restaurants for her and everything like this. That's all great, but we're also using AI to power missile defense systems. Obviously, we're using AI.
What could possibly go wrong? We're using AI for literally everything. The massive amounts of power that we need for that. means that old nuclear reactors have to come back online, like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. You also have to have new nuclear reactors built.
And you have to get over the absurd obsession the left has with solar and wind because they don't work. And when Microsoft chose to reopen The mothballed nuclear reactor of Three Mile Island. It said a lot about A, the needs for power, and B, the fact that the whole war on climate was a joke anyway. It was the war on energy, I should say, in the name of climate justice, was always a joke. It was always pandering by leftist politicians to line their pockets and line the pockets of their friends.
It was always about that. And so that they could stand up in Democrat primaries and say that I was the biggest green lunatic out there. You know, I shut down all the coal-fire plants in my state. I build massive wind farms on my state. I put in solar fields the size of smaller states in my state.
Forget all the other consequences that you have with that, with solar panels that when they reach their end of life expectancy, and the fact that they're all built in China. Wind turbines that have a 20-year life expectancy and then they just go into landfills. But leaving all that aside for a moment and looking at what the needs of Silicon Valley, as it's known. The companies like Microsoft and Google. Meta.
And all the AI needs that they need mean that they need nuclear and natural gas. And so the states that have that and that are embracing that, states like Pennsylvania. Which also, of course, matters in the presidential election coming up in 2028. Because before you know it, we're going to be talking about that. Means the real question is, is the issue of climate change officially dead is a political issue.
I don't think it's that black and white because you're still dealing with a Democrat Party that has been taken over by crazy people. And for many of them, they still worship at the altar of birthing person Earth. But from a practical perspective, If you can say Like, say, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, I was able to bring. Tens of thousands of new jobs to my state. Because we went all in on natural gas and nuclear.
And look at the wealth and look at the economic success we've had, and look at how many of these Silicon Valley companies we brought to our state and how many data centers we've built and how many construction jobs came along with that. I think that's a great talking point. Personally speaking. But I'll put it into ChatGPT and I'll see what it says about that. There's no limits.
To what you can do with AI, except clearly the limit becomes the vending machine.
So nothing's perfect. Not yet anyway. At least the vending machine didn't try to kill anybody in the workplace, because that's really the fear that I have about AI, the vending machine would. Find a way to have that cocaine go 150 miles an hour and smack me in the face to kill me. As long as that's not happening, I guess so far we'll take it as a win.
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. This time of year, most of us are checking off our holiday gift lists. But identity thieves have lists too, and your personal information might be on them. Protect your identity with Life Lock.
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