Welcome to Wheels Off, a show about the messy reality of the creative life. I'm Rhett Miller.

That's when it got wheels off. We started up and we ain't going to stop us. I like you.

I could like it or not. That's where they got wheels off. In the world of terrestrial radio, we have a couple of subsets.

We have this sort of nationally kind of syndicated computer programmed pop stations where you know what you're going to hear.

We have political talk radio where, for the most part, you know what you're going to hear.

And we have a handful of outliers.

One of these is the station out of Dallas, Texas that I listen to pretty much every day. I listen on my phone via an app called Sports Day that's hosted, I think, by the Dallas Morning News newspapers, also an institution that has taken a hit in the modern era.

But this terrestrial radio becomes this sort of international thing via this app,

and I listen to it wherever I am in the world. I started listening when I did live in Dallas,

Texas. For this station, is based in Dallas and has existed for now 25 years. They started within about a year of my band

old 97's starting and pretty quickly they became the biggest talk radio station in Dallas.

They are on paper a sports radio station, but there are a lot more than that. They're probably

what would be called nowadays a lifestyle talk radio station. A lot of it does center around

sports. A lot of it centers around Dallas sports. Even though I moved away years and years ago,

a quarter century ago, I still followed Dallas sports teams and root for those teams.

So that makes it easier for me to listen to the ticket because I want to know what the Dallas

stars are doing. There is one host on that

station in the morning, the morning show, which is their highest rated show on this highest rated

station. There is one host who doesn't even like sports, as far as I can tell.

He is what they call in the parlance of that industry a yuck monkey.

I feel like this sort of belittles his contribution to the show and the station.

His job is to create characters.

...