Since Leaving The Ticket, The Dumb Zone Guys Are Looking to Find Their Groove

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 episode, 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 officially announced their days at the station were over just four days beforehand via YouTube. 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 decades, 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 earliest 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 producing a podcast series, according to the conglomerate, was close enough to the pair hosting their own radio show for a competing 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 continued 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 published 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 workers across the country affected by noncompete clauses that many economists believe unfairly restrict workers’ options,” the Post article stated. Two days later, the case between 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 people. 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 audio/video production equipment including monitors, microphones, lights and cameras. The jokes, laughs, energetic chemistry between McDowell and Kemp and even a keyboard 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 podcast 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 every 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 extremely entertaining and if I’m with them, then we can figure it out.”

It seems that if The Dumb Zone is to eventually find its groove, it will be because of Jones. Jones was McDowell and Kemp’s producer at The Ticket. He, too, left the station not long after his radio buddies did and joined the podcast crew just after the Cumulus lawsuit was settled. His on-air personality, 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 concerns 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 ramifications. 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 immediately. 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 subscribers. 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 February 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 Bruenig’s, and Matthew Bruenig, Elizabeth’s husband, was one of the attorneys who represented the podcast in their court proceedings. 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 airwaves 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 audio 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 enjoying what they’re doing right now.

Had a couple of things gone a bit differently, though, it’s likely these three guys would still be on The Hang Zone. McDowell said that at the local, station level, his and Kemp’s hopes for extracurricular activities to be allowed under a new contract were more or less agreed upon. It was only the corporate suits in the upper echelons of Cumulus Media that put a stop to that, not anyone at the Ticket specifically.

Eight months removed from their last radio show, and five months past the lawsuit, McDowell, Kemp and Jones aren’t shy about how they feel about their former employer.

“I had made my whole identity out of being at The Ticket. It was everything I knew, from high school listening to college interning,” Kemp said before later adding that he still exchanges texts daily with someone from The Ticket.

While agreeing with Kemp that his friends from the past are still his friends, Jones equated the situation to a breakup of sorts. He thinks The Ticket is “trying to erase anything that Dan and Jake did and pretend that they don’t exist. ... So it’s like watching your ex delete you from their life and ask for all their things back and you wished it had been handled a little better.”

And speaking of their old friends at The Ticket, a few of them have received high-profile promotions in the wake of The Hang Zone turning into The Dumb Zone. David Mino and Sean Bass took over the 1–3 p.m. time slot that McDowell and Kemp once manned. Others at the station have assumed new roles as a result as well.

“You don't have to write this down, but I do sometimes think about it,” Kemp said with an impish grin growing more evident. “I sent these guys [former Ticket co-workers] an email the other day about how Dan and I leave, right? Blake leaves a couple months later. Blake’s doing better. Multiple people have now been promoted to host, multiple people are promoted to producer, multiple people are promoted from part-time to [Ticket] Ticker positions. I don't want to say ‘hero’ but if you look around, there are a lot of people who are doing way better because we decided to say ‘Fuck off.’’

McDowell was a bit more diplomatic, adding quickly, “I feel like we politely told the company ‘I do not agree with what you are offering,” before Kemp interjected with, “Who are you trying to be, Aaron Burr?”

Even though McDowell, Kemp and Jones, unlike Stella, have yet to get their groove back, none of the three seem worried about it. The answer isn’t relevant, because for them, The Dumb Zone has to succeed, and has to eventually find its groove. There is no Plan B.

“From my perspective, that would allow me to chase my dream of being a girl’s high school basketball play-by-play man,” Jones said. “However, I just don't see a scenario where Dan and Jake fail.”

McDowell, on the other hand, has given a possible Plan B at least some thought.

“Only Fans,” he said. “Jake is hot.”