14 March 7 - 13, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Above Their Station Since leaving The Ticket, The Dumb Zone guys are looking to find their groove. BY KELLY DEARMORE A podcast called The Dumb Zone made its debut on July 24, 2023. While the podcast was indeed new, its hosts, Dan McDowell and Jake Kemp, were familiar personalities to pretty much anyone who listened to that inaugural episode. Until just before that introductory epi- sode, the pair had been popular voices heard on The Hang Zone, a long-running show on 1310 The Ticket, the dominant sports-talk station in Dallas. And the guys had only offi- cially announced their days at the station were over just four days beforehand via You- Tube. Contract negotiations had not gone the way McDowell and Kemp hoped, thanks mainly to the corporate bosses considering the host’s requests to occasionally record their own video streams or podcasts outside of company time to be a non-starter. In short, that first Dumb Zone episode was the start of a new era for the nationally recognized, award-winning radio station that made stars out of its hosts for three de- cades, but also for the new podcast hosts that dove into unfamiliar waters head first. This new era went from surprising to controversial pretty quickly. One of the ear- liest obstacles The Dumb Zone faced came in the form of a lawsuit when The Ticket’s ownership, Cumulus Media, sued the pair for violating the noncompete clauses in their contracts in August. Immediately pro- ducing a podcast series, according to the conglomerate, was close enough to the pair hosting their own radio show for a compet- ing station. Over the next several weeks, McDowell and Kemp faced the possibility of needing to wait until after the start of 2024 to resume their new venture, one for which thousands of paying Patreon subscribers had already signed up. But as The Dumb Zone guys con- tinued to speak in court and over the phone with their lawyers, the case began attracting attention from places outside of their usual audience. On Sept. 25, The Washington Post pub- lished an article discussing the possibility that The Dumb Zone’s case was about more than a couple of guys recording a podcast in a garage apartment. “At stake is not just the future of the co- hosts’ musings about the Dallas Cowboys schedule and Disney casting controversies, but also the status of millions of other work- ers across the country affected by noncom- pete clauses that many economists believe unfairly restrict workers’ options,” the Post article stated. Two days later, the case be- tween Cumulus Media and The Dumb Zone was settled. The podcast would continue uninterrupted. On Super Bowl Sunday in February, the apartment above Dan McDowell’s garage at his Southlake home was packed with peo- ple. Super Bowl parties are the norm across the country on the annually momentous day, but this wasn’t that kind of party. It was a Dumb Zone Super Bowl stream. As crowded as the walls of what has been dubbed “The Dragon Den” are with posters, pictures and shelves of books and knick- knacks from sports and pop culture, the room is equally bursting with all sorts of au- dio/video production equipment including monitors, microphones, lights and cameras. The jokes, laughs, energetic chemistry be- tween McDowell and Kemp and even a key- board player, kept the hours-long stream moving along with what looked like ease. To at least this viewer, it seemed as though The Dumb Zone had, after many months, finally found its groove as its own, new show. But maybe it hadn’t, not quite yet. “I think we’re better than when we started, but I wouldn’t say we’re in a groove,” McDowell said one recent morning in the Dragon Den just before a new episode would be filmed for YouTube and recorded for audio and distributed to the major pod- cast depots such as Spotify and Apple, and on their own Patreon page. “I think we’re trying to figure out what we are in the long run. Are we a radio show that’s now in this [podcast] world? Are we going to video ev- ery day?... That’s just me. I don’t feel like we’re in a groove. My head is constantly spinning, trying to figure out this or that, what to do next.” Kemp, although not committing to whether he feels the show has found a nice groove just yet, indicates he’s not concerned about ever finding it. “I feel like the three of us together, we’re a really good show,” he said, nodding toward McDowell and Blake Jones, the podcast’s producer, across the room. “So, however the show ends up being distributed or paid for or not paid for, there’s a lot of business stuff that we have to figure out, but these are my two best friends and I think they’re both ex- tremely entertaining and if I’m with them, then we can figure it out.” It seems that if The Dumb Zone is to even- tually find its groove, it will be because of Jones. Jones was McDowell and Kemp’s producer at The Ticket. He, too, left the sta- tion not long after his radio buddies did and joined the podcast crew just after the Cumu- lus lawsuit was settled. His on-air personal- ity, mixed with his technical skill and ability to book a range of guests, was something the earliest Dumb Zone episodes lacked. Jones is likely a big part of why episodes now sound much more familiar to longtime Ticket listeners compared to the ones with only McDowell and Kemp. when their days were packed as much or more with legal con- cerns as they were with recording duties. “The biggest thing for me was being able to add Blake,” Kemp said. “Once we became a three-person show, that meant a lot to me because I feel like that changed the dynamic to what we had initially dreamed up. But yeah, court sucks. It sucks especially since at the time I had a 4-year-old and a 6-month- old and I was just dealing with a lot and there were just people hitting you with all these different topics and legal ramifica- tions. I just wanted to do the show, and when we got to the point where we could do just the show and then have Blake with us, that was all I ever wanted.” Having Jones join the crew was an easy call for Kemp and McDowell, but it wasn’t quite the same slam dunk for Jones himself. “I wouldn’t say it was a no-brainer,” Jones said. “When they left [The Ticket], they were wandering out into the unknown, and I think I had a pretty good idea of the ramifications if they started a podcast im- mediately. And who knows? If they lost the case, then they were done for six months and not working. I didn’t want to step into that, and I didn’t know how much support they would get, but within a couple of days of starting the podcast, they had 3,000 sub- scribers. That’s when I was like, ‘Wow, they might have something.’ So, it wasn’t easy, but like Jake said, all I’ve wanted to do is a show with Dan and Jake.” Take away the affiliation with 1310 and the biggest difference these days between The Hang Zone and The Dumb Zone is that the podcast can be as similar or dissimilar to the radio show as the crew wants it to be — and no one is sitting in an office across the hall from the studio to tell them what it can’t be. A major example of this new era showed when noted journalist and Arlington native Elizabeth Bruenig was the guest on a Febru- ary episode. An acclaimed journalist discussing her career and recent work covering the death penalty in the U.S. might seem an odd fit for a show that features as many comical sex and drug references as The Dumb Zone. But McDowell is a longtime admirer of Bru- enig’s, and Matthew Bruenig, Elizabeth’s husband, was one of the attorneys who rep- resented the podcast in their court proceed- ings. What resulted was an engaging, provocative 30-minute discussion on the death penalty and the writer’s views on how certain states carry it out. Such a scenario would’ve never played out on Ticket air- waves of course, but in the Dragon Den, it felt like the perfect fit. The Dumb Zone’s personalities are gelling, and with the help of technical wizard Rob Chickering, the videos look sharp and the au- dio recordings sound crisp. Running their own business and being their own bosses has presented some unexpected challenges, but that hasn’t kept any of the three from enjoy- ing what they’re doing right now. ▼ Culture Screenshot from YouTube Dan McDowell (top left), Jake Kemp (top right) and Blake Jones (bottom left, with a recent podcast guest) record a recent episode of The Dumb Zone. >> p16
