940. Andy & DJ CTI: Jimmy Kimmel Goes Nuclear Over ABC Cancelling Him, Kash Patel Doubles Down On Handling Of Epstein Files & Brigitte Macron To Present Evidence To Prove She’s A Woman

A small St. Louis funeral and a national moment collide

One of the oddest protections of a conversation about national politics is how easily it can begin with something intimate and local. In a kitchen-like cadence the hosts move from a wake on The Hill—a neighborhood in St. Louis that still feels like an American Italian enclave—into a sprawling debate about media power, celebrity accountability, and political violence. The funeral vignette functions as a moral anchor: the memory of an uncle who was "crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside" becomes a counterweight to the brass-and-bullhorn world of viral outrage.

Ritual, community and the power of small gestures

Walking a procession through town, the hosts notice construction crews pausing, hands over hearts, and one driver cutting through as if ignorance could trump custom. That everyday detail is treated not as mere local color but as evidence of a civic substrate that resists the nihilism of online outrage. The truth of community rituals—wakes, processions, waves of respect—emerges as a measure of social health and a reminder that human decency still gets practiced outside of feeds and timelines.

Comedy, cancel culture and the business of being famous

The conversation quickly tilts to the combustible intersection of celebrity, comedy, and corporate calculation. A late-night monologue about the murder of a conservative activist has rippled through broadcast newsrooms and boardrooms. The hosts trace the consequences: a celebrity under pressure, an alleged corporate buyer threatening to scuttle a multibillion-dollar deal, and whispers of federal regulators weighing in. The episode lays out two blunt premises: corporations will perform risk management, and cultural capital alone does not immunize anyone from market consequences.

When comedians become political actors

Late-night personalities are no longer just entertainers. They are brand ambassadors, political commentators, and bargaining chips in corporate mergers. The hosts argue that podcasting and streaming have exposed how brittle that fame can be when it becomes voluntary consumption rather than forced primetime presence. The real shock isn’t that the scrutiny exists; it’s that many performers have never had to face it in an environment where audiences choose what to watch.

Truth, propaganda, and the new AI battleground

Another thread in the conversation is the rising anxiety about synthetic content and institutional propaganda. The hosts bounce between skepticism of mainstream broadcast claims and alarm about how artificial intelligence could amplify disinformation. They describe an era when credible sources might themselves be co-opted by very effective AI tools, and when private companies, government partners, and media conglomerates are all implicated in shaping the public story.

The Epstein files, congressional theater, and the games of disclosure

When the topic shifts to the FBI and the Jeffrey Epstein files, the mood becomes forensic. Congressional hearings, selective redactions, and claims about national security supply the hosts with a familiar narrative: a state-sized chessboard where information is the currency and disclosure is negotiated rather than automatic. The hosts read testimony for the gaps as much as the answers, arguing that when officials say "we don't have everything," they may be signaling geopolitical leaks, foreign intelligence holds, or other constraints beyond routine transparency.

Culture-war infrastructure: funding, violence and public anger

The hosts move from institutional secrecy to more combustible terrain: who funds political disruption and what happens when ideology metastasizes into real-world violence. With references to protest logistics, philanthropic grants, and the flow of money through NGOs and foreign-aid channels, the conversation surfaces a recurring point: political disruption often requires resources, and who supplies those resources changes the political calculus. For these hosts the revelation is stark—tax dollars and institutional funding can circulate back in ways that destabilize communities and inflame public resentments.

The pendulum and its consequences

There is a frank admission about the moral awkwardness of a social pendulum that swings from one side to the other. The hosts recall a decade in which dissenting voices were censored or deplatformed, then note the present reversal: previously protected cultural elites are now vulnerable to consequences. The unsettling question becomes how a society rebuilds norms of consequence without handing power to a tyrant who would weaponize those consequences.

Oddities, humor and the creeping normalcy of AI fantasy

Between grave topics the hosts slip into lighter, absurdist asides—AI-designed superstadiums, celebrity interactions gone sideways, and late-night merch plugs. Those tonal shifts perform an important rhetorical function: they remind listeners that a media environment that traffics simultaneously in grief, outrage, satire, commerce, and conspiracy is not merely a set of siloed conversations but a single, messy public square.

• Human rituals anchor political life and reveal what ordinary decency looks like in practice.
• Corporate governance often decides the fate of public figures more than audiences do.
• Information control—by government, by intelligence services, or by corporations—reshapes what gets called truth.
• Funding streams matter: protests and political action have logistical backers worth interrogating.

The hosts do not tidy the contradictions. Instead, they stage them: empathy for individual suffering side-by-side with a relish at seeing previously untouchable elites face consequences; a defense of free speech but an insistence that speech has social costs. The resulting argument is not a policy prescription but a character judgment: societies that ignore the reverberations of public speech will sooner or later experience the blowback in very human terms. That fact—uncomfortable and unresolved—lingers past the last laugh and into a quiet moment of reflection about what we owe one another, in private rituals and public debate alike.