The Point Radio: Pat Kiernan Pleases The Crowd

He’s not only a newscaster in movies like THE AVENGERS, but he plays one on TV in real life. CNBC’s Pat Kiernan’s new show CROWD RULES gives new businesses a kick in the bank account and he tells us how that all works. Plus more with Anne Heche on SAVE ME and an update on The CW’s Wonder Woman Pilot. Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

Hello, it's Mike Raub. Welcome to The Point, where all parts of pop culture come together. We've got more with Ann Hage on the upcoming NBC series, Save Me. And he plays one in real life and in movies like The Avengers. Newscaster Pat Kiernan now has a new job.

He's handing out money to small businesses, and we'll tell you how that works. Plus, the Wonder Woman pilot. Whatever happened to that? Let's get to The Point. This is The Point.

The Point radio. Get The Point radio. It's easy to say that newscaster Pat Kiernan, especially in the New York area, is the go-to guy, well, for newscasters. Anytime a show needs somebody to fill the part, like Law and Order SVU,

or even in a movie like Marvel's Avengers, well, there's Pat. And from Pat being in front of the microphone, well, it was a boyhood dream. It was a boyhood dream, and I got talked out of it a few times when I was in high school, and the guidance counselors would be, oh, you can't make any money in that business.

Why don't you become a lawyer or an accountant or something? But I enrolled in business school, got involved at the campus radio station, and eventually, though I completed the business degree, wound my way back into the radio and television news reporter. Early in Pat's broadcasting career, a chance meeting got him interested in business.

When I first arrived in New York, this would have been 1996. We were doing a series of reports in conjunction with Fortune magazine, and there was this company that wanted to come in and tell us about how it was going to change internet retailing. And they were so eager to come in.

We were just a little show, but this guy was like, no, I'm going to fly in. You tell me when to be there from Seattle, and I'm going to fly in and do this interview. And I was like, are you sure he understands it? It's like a 15-second sound in this story. But this guy got in a plane from Seattle.

His name was Jeff Bezos, and he was starting a little company called Amazon that was going to sell books online and compete with Barnes & Noble and Borders, and the rest is history. I asked Pat, going forward from that moment to now, what he really sees as the biggest change in online broadcasting?

The thing we've seen change dramatically, just in the time since that interview in 1996, is the way we consume information and how much we expect everything to be on demand. And obviously, your program's an example of that, that we get these things when we want them. We listen to them where we want to listen to them, and it's not on the terms of broadcasters like it used to be.

There's an expectation that if you miss the program when it airs initially, that you'll be able to find it again somewhere else, that you'll be able to record it on your DVR. And that's this transformational change. I mean, when I started in broadcasting, which I like to think of it in that long ago,

the only time you saw something is when the TV station decided to put it on. And now we have this on-demand world, and we're still only halfway there with the way things are happening on demand. But I think, you know, 10 years from now, it'll be fascinating to see if any program has a scheduled start time,

or if you just watch everything when you want to watch it. Right now, crowdfunding is hot with Kickstarter being involved in so many different projects, and that leads us to Pat's new show called Crowd Rules. This came from that idea, and we had to twist it a little bit

because it wasn't practical to have everybody walking into the studio with their checkbook. But what we did do is at the beginning of every episode, we tell the crowd of 100 that you've got a $50,000 prize to award, and we're going to do that with your votes.

So we bring three companies into the studio. Over the course of the hour, all three of them make their case as to why they deserve the $50,000 from the crowd. Just to turn up the heat on the companies a bit, we bring in a small business expert

who has traveled to each of the three company headquarters, seen the business. That person gives us their assessment just so that the crowd has a little more to go on than just taking the word to the companies.

But by the end of the hour, the crowd picks a favorite. Sometimes it's a close vote, sometimes it's a very one-sided vote, but they pick a favorite, and that's the company that gets the money that they can use then to expand their business, to increase their marketing,

bring on some staff, buy some inventory, whatever they want to do with the money, it's theirs. And $50,000 is a good chunk of money for a small business. At that startup stage, that's a transformational prize that can really put them over a big hurdle

and on their way to success. So how do they find companies to work with? We recruited nationally for contestants. We've got companies from Florida, California, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Washington State,

you name it. We've got companies from all over the country. For the initial round of the show, it's always tougher to recruit companies. We had no shortage of companies that submitted their names,

but it was a more active process because we had to explain what the show was. I can tell you that even just with the pre-show publicity here, we've already got plenty of companies rolling in for any future episodes we do.

But initially, it was an outreach process just letting people know what the show was and telling them how it might be helpful for them to be involved. Down the line, will the show be following up on the winners?

Yeah, very much part of the plan. I don't know whether that would be in the form of like a one-hour reunion show or whether we'd do two minutes on each episode reminding people what's going on with our first winner.

But I think that is something that the audience will be interested to see because you want to see whether they followed through on the things they said they were going to do. You can see more on Pat and his website, patspapers.com,

and more on crowdrules at cnbc.com and new episodes every Tuesday on CNBC. The point, radio. Let's jump into the very latest in pop culture. The never-before-seen third season

of Steven Seagal's Law Med has found a home. It'll be on reels and it'll be premiering in June. You can catch up on the previous seasons, beginning with the first one running on the network starting in June.

Season two will air in the fall and then the third season will premiere on the network next January. The future of Stephen King's Dark Tower on the big and the small screen still is a little bit uncertain.

Originally conceived as a series of movies that would be bridged by some television, now that's been changed to more than likely a single movie. However, there's talk that a private investor has stepped forward to make that original plan happen.

All it takes is an agreement from the folks who will control the property. That right now, of course, is Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. The only thing for certain is that Russell Crowe is still attached to star in the project,

however it ends up. The sad news is pilot season has come and gone and the CW network has done nothing to progress the Wonder Woman pilot that was talked about called Amazon. There were hopes that it could get on the schedule

in time for the fall to be paired, of course, with the successful Arrow series. But the good news is they've reassigned a new writer to the project and that the CW president told reporters that the project is a top priority at the network

and the hopes are to get things moving in time so possibly to make Amazon a mid-season replacement on the network in early 2014. The past few days have been pretty significant for online streaming and the television networks

with ABC announcing their online streaming that has already begun in some markets and will roll out for the entire country by the time the fall season premieres in a few months. And big news from TBS and TNT,

they plan to offer live 24-7 streaming, also starting this summer as well on each channel's website with plenty of pre-advertising about that and we'll be able to tell you more as it gets closer to that. In the meantime, just plan on keeping that iPad

close in hand. CBS ended the season as still the number one network and made that clear when they announced their plans for the fall. No real big changes there except the move for Hawaii 5-0

from Monday to Friday nights and some new shows on the way that include the one we talked about before with Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Geller and of course Josh Holloway's series

called Intelligence with him getting a super-ized computer microchip in his brain to fight crime. And finally of course the Anna Faris comedy mom about a newly sober mother trying to make her way

in the world as well. Of course everybody's talking about the Shield trailers, the one that ran during Once Upon a Time a few days back and then the extended one that's been online over the past couple of days.

Now the big discussion is who exactly that superhero is that you see in the trailer. Well apparently it is not Luke Cage, at least according to sources close to Joss Whedon. It is a Marvel character and more than likely

that'll be something that'll be kicked up in discussions over the next few weeks and revealed down the line. One of the great things about rumors on the internet is stuff just doesn't seem to go away

and one of the more persistent one is the fact that there may be a sequel to the Dread movie despite a pretty dismal showing. In theaters a few months back, it's a rumor that keeps coming back up and back up

and even Carl Urban said in a recent interview that it's not completely off the agenda, so there's still hope. Good point. Your pop culture channel.

NBC is sending a message of sorts to viewers over the summer with a new series called Save Me starring Ann Heche as a woman who gets messages from God and tries in her own way to well interpret them in life. I ask Ann if overall does the show itself have a message?

To know that we can feel good and make people feel good and that we can find hope in our day. It doesn't, God is something that I have confronted, questioned, dealt with, looked at, experienced, rejected, and embraced my whole life.

I've had a give and take with this God identity and I think everybody has. I think everybody talks to God sometimes. I think everybody tries to figure God out. I think we all would love to have a helping hand.

I think we would all like to trust that we're being taken care of, that life means something. And this was a story about a woman who's dealing with that every single moment of her life

and wanting the best for everybody and wanting to use that experience of God to help people. So I hope that people feel like God's out there, helping them out. They're, you know, that we're here for each other

because that's all we've got. So if God, if you can find God in a friend, if you can find God in a smile of a stranger, it's here, you know, it's here. We're here to help each other out

and I hope people feel that from the show. Even if it's to make people laugh, you know. Who's to say that laughter isn't God? So how does she go about preparing for this role? Let's see, what should I do?

Oh, well, in the pilot, you know, Beth has kind of a slob when we first meet her, you know, before Beth gets filled with God, she's kind of a slob and a drunk and everything. So in the pilot for the first time,

she decides to get herself together and go out and start running. And I remember thinking, I wonder how, I wonder how God feels in your body, you know. What would it feel like

if all of a sudden God started walking around in your body? So I went into Hancock Park, which is where I live in Los Angeles, and I went to a gorgeous street that looks like the street where we were gonna shoot

that kind of looks like Cincinnati. And I remember putting on earphones and I looked all around and was really hoping that nobody was watching me. And I started acting,

I started feeling what it would feel like. Like, what would it feel like all of a sudden I was just filled with God. And so I started running down the street and I was jumping and doing jumping jacks

and shaking my leg and doing all of this goofy stuff. And I looked over and there was like two dogs and two people with their heads so much like, what is in that girl? What is that about?

And I realized that I had figured it out, that this character needs to be filled, filled in her body all the time. And so my work kind of was that I prepped for, started there.

Just what does it feel like to feel that good? What would it feel like if I felt, if I knew that I was gonna be okay? Which is really what I feel like God is to that. An answer that everything's gonna be okay for her,

that she's going to make it, she's gonna live, she's gonna reconnect with her daughter, she's gonna reconnect with her husband, her friends, everything's gonna be okay. And so that's the feeling that I have

when I'm working on her. See, Ann and new episodes have saved me every Thursday on NBC and of course see more at NBC.com. The point. The point.

The point. The point. The point. That does it for the podcast. Back in a couple of days, you know the Defiance

has been renewed for another successful season on Sci-Fi. And we go behind the set to talk to the cast about what's coming up for the rest of this season and what lies ahead for the game and the TV show as well. In the meantime, the podcast is heard on great websites

like ComicMix.com and MichaelDavisWorld.com and you can always find us in the iTunes podcast directory as well. Now for more great pop culture, you can listen free anytime you want to it.

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