The Point Radio: Meet The Nets Biggest Stars Live

They are among YouTube’s biggest stars with over 23.5 million viewers. Meet Eva Gutowski, Andie Case & Meredith Foster who are joining together for a live 20 city tour called GIRLS NIGHT IN. They give all the details plus some tips on how they got started on the internet. Then Troy Dunn, a man who never gives up. After several successful TV shows and books, he’s back on the UP Network with a new show helping people find family members they have lost contact with. Wait until you hear how it all began for him.

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Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Rod. They're some of the biggest stars on YouTube with well over 20 million viewers. And now they're coming to a city near you

and we'll tell you just exactly what you can expect. Plus, meet Troy Dunn. He's the guy who finds people that are, well, pretty much unfindable. And he's still been doing it after two and a half decades. Let's get to The Point.

This is The Point. The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. They've got a combined audience of more than 23 million viewers. And chances are somebody in your life is a fan of people like

Eva Gutowski, Meredith Foster and Andy Case. All together with some friends, they're heading out on a 20-city tour for a thing called Girls Night In to bring their real-life experience to the stage and give fans a chance to see them in person.

Eva told me what fans can expect to see. So Girls Night In is a really interacting experience. It's a fan experience for us to get to know our viewers more people that love us and watch our videos, whether it's singing or comedy or beauty or fashion.

I just really wanted people to have an experience that they left feeling inspired by and feeling really happy and just, I don't know, more in tune with who we are as people instead of just hugging them and taking a picture, I felt like they deserve a little bit more than that.

So Girls Night In is really interactive. It's us on stage having fun. There's a lot of stuff involved like acting, singing, improv, games, and it's just going to be a nightmare. Our viewers can get to know us more.

So how do you get started being a YouTube superstar? For Meredith, it was just a boring afternoon with a video camera. Well, I started six years ago, and it was just a typical summer day. I turned on my camera and I showed my, well, I didn't have any viewers yet. I just showed people online what I bought with the $50 that I got from babysitting.

And all of a sudden, people just started commenting and it was a really fun way to engage with people and become friends with people via the internet. And it was kind of a first moment thing, and it is what I love to do and it's what I'm passionate about, and it just grew from there.

Andy's YouTube channel involves her music, and she's pretty successful at it. I was curious as to how early music became a part of her life. Well, I grew up in a pretty big family. So I think all of us, like a sibling, always tried to kind of go and do our own thing.

And when it came to music, that was just something that I always loved. And I loved listening to different music and stuff. And then me being in any time, I was going through school or something, and that was hard, but I was going on. Music was kind of like what I turned to,

and it was kind of like how I would cope with the different things. So, yeah, I just kind of kept singing and doing little talk shows and stuff off and on. And then I was fortunate enough to meet my bandmates that are in the videos with me. And started doing some local shows and playing together, and then we ended up kind of doing YouTube videos on a whim.

And I think it was just something that I always wanted to do. So, like, no matter what happened, I was trying to do it as much as I could and finding every possible way to get into music. So everything just kind of snowballed from there. So with this kind of success early on, where do you go from here?

For Meredith, it seemed like a pretty clear path. I think for me, before I started YouTube, I was going to school for broadcast journalism, and it's because I just wanted to inspire a lot of girls. I wanted to make my dreams to kind of be a talk show host like Ellen or Oprah or something. And that was kind of my future down the line when I was like 45 years old.

That's kind of where I wanted to go. But then I started doing YouTube, and suddenly I was this 18-year-old girl that had this huge audience just like Ellen or Oprah, but it was girls my age that I could inspire. So I'm super fortunate to be doing my dream job right now.

In the future, I just want to inspire more girls just what I'm doing now. Girls Night In coming to many cities all over the U.S. this month. To find out how close it'll be to where you are, go to fullscreenlive.com. Heart to Heart fans, are you ready for a reboot? That's just part of what's going on in the world of pop culture.

The Gambon film now needs a director, Rupert Wyatt, who was originally scheduled to direct the film for Fox. Had to drop out when production was changed till next March, which conflicted with another project he was involved with. Fox, who claims they were remaining committed to the film,

and it's star chanting Tatum. And I'll be looking for replacement for Wyatt in the very near future. If you're looking for sex in a city, Amazon Prime is the place to go. The streaming service has added all the episodes of the show, including all six seasons available for streaming for their users.

Pacific Coast Entertainment has announced they're developing and producing a TV series based on their science fiction film, Rogue Warrior Robot Fighter. The film is yet to be distributed in theaters or in on demand, but the series is still planned. And we'll see Tracy Birdsall reprising her role from that film in the TV series.

It's described as a cross between Star Wars and Mad Max, and eight episodes are planned with production to begin early in 2016. Next on a list of reboots is Heart to Heart, the 1979 to 1984 detective series, of course, is the one that starred Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers.

NBC is in the process of rebooting the series. This time it'll focus on a gay couple, and they're looking right now for scripts. The three Stooges are back in comics, and Mythology Productions has announced a new series of issues based on the Stooges,

with plans to launch that in comic stores sometime early in 2016. No word yet on who would be involved creatively. Most recently, there have been three Stooges material done by paper cuts written by Jim Salicrap, with art by Stan Goldberg. It looks like Pete Holmes may have found a home in a new HBO series,

and Judd Apatow is going to direct and produce it. It's called Crashing, and it involves a man who crashes on fellow comics couches after his wife leaves him. No word yet on when we'll see this, more than likely it'll turn up sometime early in the new year. The point, the point! Troy Dunn just hasn't given up.

He's got a best-selling novel, he's got a couple of TV shows, and to this day he continues to help families all over the world reunite with members that they've lost contact with. And now on a new show called Last Hope, Troy takes on the truly tough cases, the really unfindables.

I talked to Troy about his ability to do this and asked him if it well was something he had a knack for early on. I don't know that I ever felt like I had a knack for it. I think it's just something that developed over time, but I fell into this on accident. This was never on my life plan or anything. I just grew up with a mom who is adopted, and I listened to her throughout my life,

talked about wanting to find her biological family, and that, by the way, never became a to-do list for me. I just thought it was interesting that my mom had people out there somewhere. But when I was about 22 or so, I met a guy who was adopted, and he'd found his family, and I said, could you help me help my mom?

And it took us about five and a half hours, and next thing I know, I've got a slip of paper in my hand, and I'm calling my mom, and I said, Mom, are you sitting down? And she said, Oh, Lord, what's wrong? I said, No, no, nothing's wrong, but I'm holding a piece of paper with your mother's phone number on it. And she was quiet for just a moment and then just began to weep.

And it was unlike a cry I've ever heard come out of my mom, and I knew at that moment, it was something life-changing to her to have that happen, and that was it. That was kind of what changed me or broke me, I guess. And I set up then to figure out, can we build an organization that helps people find missing family members? My mom couldn't be the only one.

That was 25 years ago. We've helped over 40,000 people. I no longer make a living at it. We sold our company way back in 2002 to Ancestry.com, and it's just my life's work now. We just help people because I can't figure out how to stop doing it.

So what do we see on this new show? So I have been doing these TV reunion-type shows for about 25 years, and it's always been generally the same sort of situation. I was getting a little burned out on TV only because I guess I don't have a lot of positive things to say about the industry, generally speaking, other than the platform helps me reach a lot of families and help a lot of people. But UpTV came along, who I hadn't heard of at the time, and I began to explore them and their mission statement and the types of things they did.

And I was so flabbergasted to learn that a channel actually existed that was so family-appropriate, because I have eight kids. My wife and I have been married 27 years, and there's not a lot on TV that we can watch in the room together. So I was thrilled to be a part of Up, and they put out a pretty big challenge to me, and I put one out to them. And mine was, if we're going to do this, I want to take on cases without any interference from the network. I don't want any editing.

I don't want any people telling me to fake anything or recreate anything. This has to be shot like a documentary in real. And they said, well, we want you to take on cases that you would have turned down in the past. We want unsolvables, and we want you to be raw and honest with your feelings. We're not going to let you be edited out either, because they know that I'm not comfortable being that emotional.

It's just I'm a dumb guy about that. So I agreed to be vulnerable. They agreed to let it be real, and that's how Last Hope came about. In the 25 years Troy's been doing this, technology's taken some pretty big leaps. And I was curious about whether or not the way things are today really makes his job that much easier.

You know, if you would have told me back in 1990 when we started doing this, and all we had was micro fish and, you know, fax machines, that someday we'd have access to trillions of records at a fingertip, I would have imagined life would have gotten easier for us. It's actually gotten harder, and it's gotten harder because now everybody is an instant people finder. Anybody can get it on Google and Facebook and Ancestry.com and do searches for people.

So they don't come to me for help unless everything else has failed. And so now there's no such thing as a quick and easy case for us. Everything is monumental and difficult, and that's frankly the reason the show is called Last Hope, is because it's the most common phrase we get in every email, because everyone has done everything else they can do. So we've never raised a bar this high.

We've never taken on cases like this. And to your question, the technology has only made my life more difficult, but I love a good challenge. Even with two and a half decades of experience and technology as well, is anybody out there really unfindable? Wow, that is a great question. I will probably upset people when I say that there are some that just can't be solved,

because the fact is, to your point, there must be something out there somewhere that should lead to them. It's just trying to find that something. And that's, you know, I try to remind my team constantly, like, look, you know, I realize we can't find him, but he's on this planet somewhere. Even if he's dead, he's on this planet somewhere.

So it is hard to close a case or mark it unsolved, but the fact is there are some that simply can't be solved. People are intentionally hiding. They've done a lot of work to be that person that you can't find, and sometimes they beat me. So among the cases he's been involved with, what were some of his favorites? Oh, my.

I could probably tell you a hundred of those, because I've had my heart touched many times by these people. But, you know, I would say there was this one case where a man and wife have been in a car accident, and their 11-year-old daughter was severely injured, and they needed a biological donor, and they were the adoptive parents of this little girl. So we got a frantic call from a nurse.

We called. We worked through the night. Middle of the night, found the birth matter, woke her up, told her what I was calling. She said, oh, my gosh, I've never told my husband. He's sleeping right next to me.

And I said, look, all you have to do is say out loud, I'm sorry you have the wrong number, then hang up on me. I'll never call you again. But before you do, you should know your little girl that you relinquish for adoption has been in a car accident, and she needs you. And she rolled over.

She told her husband. We flew her to the hospital. She met the woman that had raised her baby. They exchanged hugs and tears. They did the medical procedure.

They put her at the other end of the hospital until she recovered. Three days later, they flew her home. To this day, that little girl has no idea that while she slept, her mother flew in and saved her life. Wow. And it's those moments that make me realize that I don't know that I'm ever, ever, ever going to be able to stop doing this.

Last Hope with Troy Dunn. New episodes every Thursday, exclusively on The Up Network. That's it for the podcast, but we're never too far away. Pop Culture Upload is on a radio station in your area, we hope. And you can also follow us on Instagram and on Twitter under PC upload.

On Facebook, we're under The Point Radio, and you can also subscribe to the podcast here in the iTunes podcast directory, or catch it on websites like ComicMix.com and GetThePointRadio.com. See you back here in a few days. GetThePointRadio.com You