Election Profit Makers · Jon Kimball & David Rees

Episode 347: From The Conference Room Of A Prestigious Southern University

September 23, 2025·50 min·4 clips

John is recording from a conference room at the University of Virginia, sparking confusion about his mysterious research mission.

The sound starts wrong. John is recording from a conference room in a library at the University of Virginia, and the room refuses to disappear into the background. Nobody tries to sell it as polished. The hosts make the bad acoustics part of the bit, somewhere between a road show and a morning zoo broadcast that accidentally ended up on a prestigious Southern campus. Then they move to the corporate sentence at hand. A line about respectful constructive dialogue gets treated the way it deserves: as language that sounds official until someone actually reads it. From there, the conversation gets into ABC affiliates and the surprise that two corporations control about a quarter of them, less than the hosts seem to expect. That number pulls the joke into the boring stuff underneath: Nexstar, a merger, ownership caps, and the need to keep the FCC happy. The funny part is how ordinary the pressure looks. It is not a grand threat. It is percentages, approvals, local ad markets, and a company trying to guess what power wants before power has to ask. The tone stays crooked. One host reaches for Ticketmaster or Live Nation as the obvious comparison, then the facts yank the riff back down. Jimmy Kimmel gets folded in next, with joking guesses about what he might say while Trump is said to be designating Antifa a terrorist organization. The episode never turns into a neat explainer about media pressure. It lets the confusion breathe. Sarcasm, dread, and half-finished logic do most of the work. The boxed-in road audio helps. It fits a conversation about institutions, permissions, and everyone squinting at the room. Then the show lands in familiar housekeeping: Patreon, stickers, Discord, ratings, listener questions, skyline requests, bird recordings, ads, and travel safety.

As heard by us

A scrambled, funny look at media power, politics, and public outrage.

Election Profit Makers runs with a scrambled live-broadcast energy: one host checks in from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, speaking from a conference room in the library, while the other keeps the conversation moving.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want politics, media, and nonsense served from a humid conference room.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Election Profit Makers