Meet Master of Every Medium - Ellis Henican

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.

Welcome to this special edition of Speaking with TJ Walker. Today. I've put together a fascinating panel of world class communicators. It's a little different from most shows. We've got six great guests for you today. We have a New York Times bestseller. We have a prominent stand up comedian. We have a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist. We have a prominent, prominent network news analyst, someone you've seen on Fox, HLN, CNN constantly for the last 20 years, a talk radio host who fills the airwaves constantly. And we have someone who is a great voice artist. You hear him on the Cartoon Network series C Lab. Now, since we don't have six different microphones, I've put this all in one person. I'm very happy to introduce our guest today, Ellis Hennigan. Ellis, thanks for joining us.

I have never been introduced like that, but I like it. Thank you very much.

And you are in fact all of those things.

I think that adds up to a short attention span and a man who needs to work. How about that?

But they all involve communication.

They're all a little bit different.

Many people in our audience are saying, wow, if I could do even one of those things, I would fulfill my dreams. How did you launch a career that took you in so many different wildly successful paths? And I should say it wasn't just one fluke of a book. You've written nearly a dozen books. A handful of them have become New York Times bestsellers. You've got, I think you've started a couple more books just since we started this interview. Making it in America worth Dying for coming out right away too. So how do you do it all?

Well, it certainly was not a careful career plan. I will tell you that. I'd love to be able to claim that I was reflecting deeply as a young man and somehow decided that this was where I wanted to end up. I guess you and I probably like each other in that way. We have found our way through the, the twists and turns and realities of the media marketplace and cobble these things together. I mean, my own story was when I got started as a young grown up, I worked in the newspaper business and that's what I wanted to do. I came from a family of lawyers. I'm the first male in three generations not to be a New Orleans lawyer. And I cast off.

Just curious. You're only a couple years older than I am. At what age did relatives stop suggesting to you? Well, there's still the LSAT prep.

You know, it's funny. My family did not pressure me in that way. They were actually very good about wanting their kids to do what they thought would be best. In the back of my mind, as I began my career as a journalist, I did always think, well, you know, if this newspaper thing doesn't work out, maybe I could go to law school. And then, I don't know. At some point, it just seemed like that that ship had sailed. But I started a newspaper business, and I loved it. It's a great, exciting place to be. And I started at little papers and then got onto bigger papers and went from being a reporter to a columnist and clawed my way to New York.

And you've been a columnist for Newsday now for quarter of a century, correct?

Yeah, yeah, long time. And that was really, I have to tell you, T.J. the extent of my ambition. I mean, it just seemed like, my God, if I could get a job on a good newspaper and have a chance to express my own opinions about stuff going on in the world, I mean, what could be better than that? And truly, I was almost surprised that people actually let me do that and paid me some money to do it. But as time went on, a couple of things happened. One is that the newspaper business began to decline. And so doing well in the newspaper business in the 2000s and beyond really, frankly, just didn't mean what it once did. And newspapers were less important in our society. They didn't dominate the media the way they once did. It really was the public conversation the same way. And while, you know, I still love newspapers and read a bunch of them every day, they seem like they actually.

Read it in a paper format.

Less and less, man. Less and less. I still like to, you know, page through ink on paper, but. But no, I'm like. I'm like most people. And good luck, by the way, finding someone under the age of 40 who reads a newspaper really in any way. I mean, it's in the businesses. I think it's running out of gas. I mean, I hate to say that, but it just feels like that's just not the way that people communicate anymore. There's still great work being done in newspapers, and I still got a lot of friends who've dedicated their lives to it. But I did come to sense that, you know what? This is not the format that's going to carry me to my grave. And at the same time, there was all this other media developing and opportunities would come up. You know, I'd get a call from a television producer or someone working on a radio show. Often, often based on a column I'd written, some piece I had in the paper. Hey, would you, would you come on and talk about that? And you know, I came from a big loud family where we argued at dinner table every night. It wasn't that different from cable news, honestly, all those lawyers in the family.

You had an advantage. My father was an engineer and it was very quiet. The dinner time was quiet and serene, which was peaceful, but didn't exactly hone my debate skills.

We were the opposite. Everybody was expected to have an opinion about everything. But so, you know, I started doing that stuff and, and I have to tell you, it reflected poorly on me, tj how much I enjoyed it. I remember back in school I had had a teacher who told us that television was for people with good hair and bad minds. And I guess radio was probably beneath contempt. But at the Columbia Journalism School in the early 80s, they were very print oriented, let me tell you that.

And for our audience who remember seeing you recently, you have a great head of hair. I'm quite jealous of your thick chalk of white hair.

I'll ride anything I have at this point, that's for sure.

Now you brought up the superficial aspect. I have to ask you, your longest tenure on network TV was at Fox.

That's right, yeah.

Roger Ailes famously, and I'm going to clean this up for our family oriented audience, he famously only hired women who, who were datable, we'll say, as on air analysts and hosts. The thing that doesn't get much talk about is, and he would only hire men as anchors who seemed like he'd want to go out and have a beer with them and go to a ballgame. What I have noticed, and it's delicate to say this, when he hired liberals, it seemed like the opposite was true. He actively went out of his way to hire non good looking people. You're the exception to that. I mean, I think you and Kirsten Powers were the exception when it came to the non conservatives being sort of non dweeby. So our audience would love to know anything you could share about your, your many years of communicating and being a regular and sometimes being a punching bag at Fox News.

Well, the visiting team is how I like to describe it, which I believe.

Is where we met in the green room, either at CNN, MSNBC or Fox News 20 years ago.

I spent 13 years as a, you know, on contract at Fox and I still appear on their shows and have a fairly happy relationship over there. But it was a, you know, the role was a specific role. And there are challenges. And this is, I think this is right in your ballpark. TJ There are, there are special challenges appearing in front of an audience that is not inclined to agree with you. Right. You get a certain advantage if the audience, even before you open your mouth, wants to cheer what you're likely to say. But it's a different challenge when they're ready not to like you. And I think, you know, I'm a little more liberal politically probably than the average Fox viewer. And so it seemed to me that if I was going to succeed in that venue, I had to be likeable. Like for instance, if I just got into a debate with an angry conservative on Fox. We were both yelling at each other. The audience would hear that as the other person was strong and I was being obnoxious. Somehow or another, it seemed to me that I needed to use the tools of charm or humor or likability or somehow twist things around so that the audience would at least be willing to listen to me. Now, I didn't have any illusions. I don't expect to be saving souls in a five minute television segment, but I mean, I would like it if people would at least give a thought to what I was trying to say. And it seems to me the cost of entry if you're standing in front of or being on television in front of an audience that is not inclined to agree with you, is first you got to make them like you or they're never going to listen to you.

And humor is certainly a part of that. Tell us a little more about the difference in how you prepare for a five minute spot on Fox versus CNN where people see you frequently, headline news or MSNBC where you've appeared.

Well, I mean, I don't know that the prep is that different. One of the most crucial things, and I would say this to someone who was just sort of thinking about doing stuff. In those worlds, you've got to understand what the format is. And each of these places is different. You know, it's different what someone needs to do to as, you know, to prepare a half hour key note, address versus what you're going to be able to do if you're, you know, arguing with a skinny blonde woman for five minutes. They're just, you need different stuff. And on a television appearance, the mistake is to go on and try and sound like Mr. Smarty Pants. It's not a format that works well with citing lots of statistics and making very complex arguments. You know, the audience is not paying that much Attention, the speed is too quick. There's a lot of going on. So you really, in a short TV segment, have the chance to make one or two or, God, at most, three relatively small, straightforward points. So what I try to do before I go in those things, I mean, I need to make sure that I know the basic facts of the story of the issue that we're discussing. But, you know, I keep up with that stuff all day long. I mean, that's pretty much all I do. So I don't necessarily have to go do an explicit research project if I'm going to be debating Donald Trump this week. But I try to have in my. I had two or three things that I want to say and maybe even if I'm lucky, a humorous or a kind of clever way to say it or something that feels fresh to me. It feels like something I just haven't heard a hundred times already. So they're getting something special out of me. And so I have that in the back of my head. And, you know, sometimes I get to use it and sometimes I don't. I'm not running the conversation always. And so I, I don't like to be one of those person who just goes on and gives a speech. It seems to me those segments are better if you interact and debate and discuss and kind of kind of dance around a little bit.

And so you mentioned Donald Trump, debating him. You've been on Fox News Channel hundreds, if not thousands of times. How do you win a debate? If you are opposing someone you feel very strongly, just lies, just makes up stuff. How do you win a debate like that? Gosh.

I mean, there's a lot of techniques, and you don't always. I mean, you know, sometimes. And Trump's a great example of that. I mean, he has his own odd, effective ways of kind of bullying his way through those things. I mean, it seems to me that a couple of things you gotta always do. One is avoid getting mad once you get mad or lose your cool you've lost. And particularly in front of an audience that's, you know, not already agreeing with you. I think you've got to find a way to make your points. Don't just try to answer them or correct them or, you know, you got to figure out what it is you want to say, how you want to frame the issue, what you think the strongest argument is, and articulate that in a way that's compelling. I think that the trap in that kind of particular, that kind of confrontational, lot of what cable news is today, I mean, you know, they believe they get energy and keep the interest up by having people who disagree with each other. I mean, what's that joke, the worst two words in television or. Good point, good point. The conversation is over, right? Or I agree, it's like, no, no, no, no, that doesn't really, that's not really what we're looking for. But, but yet, I mean, I think you got to understand what you want to say. Keep your co. And you know, you can, you can give a little dig at the other person or you can, you can be a little, you know, dismissive or contradictory of something they're saying. When they say something that's just out and flat out wrong or a lie, you don't necessarily want to just let it pass without comment. But I will tell you that if you end up in a, in a shouting match of yes, it is, no, it's not, yes it is, no, it's not. It's just not a very effective way to communicate in that setup.

And you mentioned you like to use humor. Certainly all the times I've seen you, I have a very strong image of you having a smile on your face. Now you've taken it a step further. Unlike a lot of people who are afraid to venture out into areas where they might make a fool of themselves or might fall flat on their face, you have gone onto the stand up comedy stage. I've seen you before and Jerry Seinfeld isn't nervous. But I have to say, you put.

On a good show, let me tell you.

And how did you, how did you even get the nerve past the age of 21 to take up stand up comedy? Well, you're, I, I do think of that as really, at some levels, the hardest form of public speaking.

Absolutely right. Absolutely.

Is the expectations are so much higher.

So what, you know, absolute hardest thing you're told you're totally, totally right about. Much harder than one on one with O'Reilly. Whatever you think the toughest thing is in the news biz for a couple of reasons, right? One is the audience is drinking and they're not shy about saying you suck. They will tell you if they don't like you. Also, I mean, kind of the business of comedy today. Think about who's in the audience at a comedy club. You know, mostly it's, you know, young drunk adults on the date, I mean, on tourists, I guess that's really pretty much the audience. And so, you know, they're not necessarily looking for the most erudite humor. I mean, you know, but fart fart joke might go over better than a Nancy Pelosi joke.

Who. That can be the response.

But I want one. One. I'll tell you one lesson I've learned. And again, this is, this I think is up your alley. Like, if you're doing stand up comedy and you're halfway funny, people think you're terrible. If you are giving, if you're the luncheon speaker and you're halfway funny, people think you're hilarious. I think the expectations are different. The bar is different, the audience is listening in a different way.

Boy, expectations are much lower. In most speeches at conventions, conferences, business meetings, people expect you to deliver a horrible, awful, boring data dump. So if you get one laugh, you are by far the best speaker they've seen all day, perhaps all week.

Absolutely.

Stand up comedy. If I don't get a laugh every 10 seconds, I'm angry at you.

You're absolutely right. I will say this. I found it in. I don't think of myself really as a professional stand up. I mean, I've bounced around in it. I really haven't done it lately and I, I need to get back to do it. But it taught me a lot. It taught me how to listen. A big part of stand up, as you know, is interactive. So you can't just, even if you have your set beautifully memorized, you're not a good stand up. If you just get up and deliver it like a robot, you've got to interact with the people there. So it teaches thinking on your feet, it teaches dealing with tough audiences. It teaches kind of bobbing and weaving and rolling with it. And those are all skills that are certainly useful in a TV pundit role or talk radio or even stand up in front of a room and give a speech role.

You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. Our special guest is Ellis Hennigan, the wildly prolific multimedia communications guy. You've seen him on Fox News for years now. You see him on cnn. You, you may have read any one of his dozen books, including several New York Times best sellers. His latest books, Making it in America and Worth Dying For. Now, Ellis, your background was as a writer first, and you have solid journalistic credentials. You're a graduate of the School of Journalism at Columbia University, which most people think is the preeminent journalism school in America, if not the world. You worked in newspapers for years. You've got a longer track record at a major newspaper than anyone else I can think of. You've won a Pulitzer for some of your reporting at Newsday. And then you branched into writing books. And you didn't just say, let me write one or two. You put together a very significant body of work, and they're all different, whether they're about Darrell Waltrip and sports stars or prominent soldiers who've come back for major wars. But they do all combine strong storytelling elements. How did you get into the whole book writing, and how is that different from writing a column?

It's a lot different, other than being longer. Right. It runs a lot longer than a column does. Again, it was not a great plan. But I'll tell you what happened when my hometown football team, the New Orleans Saints, won the Super Bowl, I guess half a dozen years ago now, I had a friend who was connected to the team and hooked me up with the coach, who was a guy named Sean Payton, and he thought he might want to write a book just as they were about to win the Super Bowl. So he and I had a little visit, and I told him, I'm going to come from New Orleans. And, you know, I didn't know that much about football, but he didn't know that much about New Orleans, so it seemed like we might be a good team. And so I wrote that book with him, and the book did well. And, you know, it was a story. Wasn't really a football book. I mean, it was a story about a beleaguered team and a beleaguered city. You know, New Orleans after Katrina, sort of inspiring each other to greatness. And it was a. It was fun. I liked doing it. I liked him. But the book did well. Penguin published it and sold a bunch of copies of it. And so that just, you know, opened up opportunities. People only think that you can do what you have already done. Right. I wasn't a better writer.

You've shown that's wrong throughout your career.

That's right. I mean, people want you to. When you do something once and it works, they want you to. They want you to do it again. But it's different from. It's very different from anything else I do for a couple of reasons. One is that every one of those book projects has been me teamed up with someone else. Right. Someone who has something amazing, has lived some wild and fascinating and crazy life, and is often someone that the public's interested in. They're mostly not obscure people. They're people who are well known to some extent. And so really, what. I'm. I'm in a storyteller role there. This is not like me or you going on television and just spouting off our Opinions about something going on in the world. This really is me working with someone and crafting stories, not really about what I think about one of these topics. This is me helping someone, you know, pull that story out and tell it in a way that's compelling. And, and so it's a, it's a much more of a, I don't know, an interactive process. It's a cooperative thing. It's. And it's not as much about my ego, really. I mean, you know, I don't always necessarily, you know, even agree with every single attitude or view that's, that's expressed, but that's not my role. My role there is to be an effective and compelling storyteller and to make people interesting.

Now, I haven't read all of your books. I have read every word.

I'm not sure I've read all of them.

I have read every word of your book on Dwight Gooden, for example, even though I'm not a baseball fan. And fascinating stories. How long does it take you to work with someone, interview, just get in their world before you can pull a great book out of them?

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a little different from, from case to case. But I, you know, I'm doing, I'm doing more than one a year. I mean, maybe not. Maybe close to two a year. So I guess I'm working maybe on average about six months. And it's about, you know, I just, we just sit down and talk. You know, I run tape. We. I, you know, I have some notion at the beginning of what the story is. You know, Dwight, it was just, you know, baseball guy with baseball pitcher, maybe the greatest pitcher of his generation, completely unprepared for the famed success that he had. And he throws it away in drug addiction and other life issues. And so it's kind of a, you know, moving and tragic story. And he'd never really been told, right? I mean, Dwight had never really fully opened up about it. And, you know, he was willing to do that. And, you know, he came over and sat on my couch and we talked a lot and then we wrote it and, you know, worked back, traded forth and, you know, he would, you know, it was one chap that would spark another idea. And, you know, in the end, I think we had a pretty, you know, I mean, shockingly open. I mean, my God, the guy opened up about everything.

He revealed all. I mean, He definitely didn't whitewash himself and try to make himself look perfect for like a saint.

The opposite.

Now some of our audience Members are thinking, wow, it sounds like this guy, this guy has the secret formula to writing successful books and New York Times sellers. I think I'll call them and have him co write my book. It's not that simple, is it? I mean, someone in our modern culture really has to have a degree of fame in order to move books, don't they?

Well, as you know, when you talk to people in the book industry, the word they use more than any other is platform. What's the platform here? How are we going to, how are we going to get people to know about this book? There's a millions of books come out every year and some of them are good, but readers have to know that they're there. Somehow or another you've got to get it onto the shelf in the bookstore or prominently on Amazon. But even more than that, the audience needs to know to want it. Right. They've got to have some kind of way to actually kind of realize it's there to buy it. And so what has become increasingly important is the ability to get on television, the ability to create PR and find some kind of way that you get public attention for your book that makes stand out among the many, many other books that someone might buy. And you're asking someone to do a fair amount. I mean a book, a hardcover book is it lists for 25 or $26 and you probably pay 18 or 19 for it. So you're asking the reader to, to make a pretty good sized commitment there.

And it's not an insignificant financial commitment. It's not just a little Kindle book for 99 cents. You're doing so called real books with major publishers, with real paper hardback.

Yeah. Although I don't turn up my nose at the other thing. I mean, I think we're probably all heading in that direction, aren't we? You know my attitude, honestly tj, I've seen a lot of this technology change and I don't, I mean I'm not really for one or another. I just, you know, I love the idea that people are reading and people are listening and you know, they're all, every one of these formats, every one of these platforms has good and bad things about the fact that someone is listening to you and me talk right now. Right. There's a, you can get inside someone's head in a way when you listen to their voice in a way that's difficult on paper. So this has advantages. But then there's other things that are great. A book, you know, you can get into such depth and Nuance. And you have so much room that you know you can never do a podcast of that length. So I just, to me that each one is interesting, and I just, I just want to, I just want to be involved in all of them if I can.

You mentioned that you can get in people's heads with podcasts, certainly radio. You and I have spoken before, and I think you have told me that that radio is really the medium you enjoy the most. Tell us about your, your involvement with. Because you've had numerous shows over the year, you're a frequent guest host at the premier talk station in America, wabc. You've, you've co hosted, guest hosted on every major network. You've substituted for Alan Combs. Tell us about your, your love affair with talk radio, but also what you see as the limitations of it.

Well, it's fun. I mean, that's the first piece of it, right? There's so little, it's like me and you talking today. There's very little between us and the audience, right? There's not 100 producers. There's not a bunch of screaming graphics. It's just really, you know, a human being, one person talking into the ear of another person. And so there is a purity and a humanity and a simplicity to it that is just really, really, to me, exciting. If you're good on the radio, it's because of you. If you're terrible on the radio, it's because of you. And so there are very few other instances in the media where one individual really is driving the train quite in the same way. As a business, it sucks. I mean, it has so many limitations. I mean, people like to look at pictures, I think, is one of its limitations. The AM radio dial, which is where most of the, the talk is as a technology vastly surpassed by many other ways to communicate. The audience is ancient. I mean, the average radio listener is really old today, particularly in AM as an advertising vehicle. It's not as potent as it once was. I mean, so all of this also, it's been captured by the sort of most extreme and intolerant poetry parts of the right wing in America. Which isn't to say there aren't good radio shows out there, including some good conservative shows. But it's, you know, it's.

Who are your favorites? Certainly Rush Limbaugh has been the gold standard of talk radio since 1988. But who, who do you think is just the best broadcaster, even if you think they're full of baloney? And who do you respect the most in talk radio as A prominent daily talk show host.

Well, I mean, yes, Rush does as good a show as anyone in many ways invented the format that others follow. And so, yeah, you can't talk about that business without, you know, even if you disagree with all kind of stuff, his outlook as a performer, the guy is the gold standard. I like people who have humor and humanity. You mentioned Alan Combs. I think he does a, he does a terrific show. John Gibson, who does a conservative show on Fox that's a, you know, much smaller show, I think is a great show. I think he was born talk radio performer. I wish more people haven't heard his.

Haven'T heard his show. Certainly remember him as a host on air host at Fox tv, in fact, msnbc. He used to be there. He used to be on a show with him all the time, but haven't heard his radio show.

Good guy does a really interesting show. Like I say, it's, I mean, it's, it's, you know, part of the Fox lineup on the radio. It's, it's, I mean, you got to go looking for it. But it's a, it's a terrific show. I mean, listen, I mean, I have to, you have to admire with the, the vast amount of good stuff that NPR does every single day of the week. I mean, there are people over there, just the size of it, the scope of it, it's just so, so giant. I think Stephanie Miller is someone kind of among the left posts that I think has humor and isn't preachy. I don't like being yelled at. I mean, I don't want somebody who's just, you know, hammering and banging me over the head. To me, if I'm gonna listen to somebody, particularly for three hours, I want some, I want some intelligent banter and I want to learn some things and I want to have some fun. And so the hosts, whether, you know, left, right, dumb, brainy, you know, to me, that's what's, that's what's interesting. That's what, that's what would make me want to, you know, turn off the music station and turn on the talk station.

If you want to hear more from Ellis on a regular basis, I'd urge you go to his website, hennigan.com. we'll link to that in the show notes. That's three W's. H E N I C A N.com youm can also say hello to him and thank him for being on this show. On Twitter, it's Heneken again. H E N I C A N and you can reach out to him there. You can also find out about his upcoming appearances. He often mentions when he'll be on Headline News or WABC or Stand up or when his latest book is coming out. So that's a great way to stay in touch with one of the premier master communicators leaders in the world, in my view. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker, the show that's all about world class leaders and analyzing how they communicate, what they do, what they do that's different, how they prepare and how they get their message out. If you haven't yet subscribed to this show, please do so. If you have subscribed, then please leave a review for the show until tell others as well. Ellis, you mentioned O'Reilly a moment ago. He's been number one on the ratings heap for a long time on cable tv. He's certainly not the only conservative. He's not the most conservative.

What does he do?

Well, that perhaps casual viewers might not detect? How has he been able to do this for so long?

Oh, that's a great question and I've got lots of thoughts about that. One is he knows his audience. He has a very good sense about what the people who watch his show and the people who might watch his show, what they're interested in. And you know, some of it is a political outlook. Some of it is just more of what I would call an attitude, just a kind of way of looking at the world, a tone. And I think he has a very good sense of that one. Another is that he is, he's not down the line, predictable, 100% conservative.

He's like an 85%.

Yeah, I would have said 90, but 85 is a pretty good guess, right? Once in a while I'll surprise you. And to me that makes him far more interesting than his competitors who absolutely, day in and day out, you can utterly predict what they're going to say on any single issue.

It just, it just cough, cough, Sean Hannity.

It's just insane. It inserts a little interest in it. You know, you wonder and it's fun once in a while when the guy says something, you know, that you expect and I want to hear him, I want to hear him explain and argue. The other thing about O'Reilly, and this is something, frankly, I think I've benefited from with him over the years. I don't know how many times I've done his show, but a lot Bill is willing to have a guest on and even a one on one exchange with someone who is a strong guest who we disagree with. You will notice how rare that is in the cable television world. Either they'll just have some idiot on articulating a position they disagree with, or they'll set it up in a way that the person really can't get much in, they'll have six other guests or they'll, they'll find some way to frame the issue in a way that makes it very difficult. But O'Reilly really, really has the self confidence and maybe that's part of what he's got because he's not, you know, particularly good looking. He's not particularly charming, although maybe.

And he's not funny the way Rush was, at least at one point.

And the show is produced in a very straightforward, I mean, I think it's professionally produced, but there's something just very compelling about it. And I give him credit that opening the talking points at the beginning of the show is one of the best monologues in news television. And he's again, you know, he will go. And I've, I've had the pleasure of doing it quite a number of times, you know, just literally in his face, back and forth, arguing passionately some point with someone he disagrees with and someone, I mean, I don't mean to say this in a self flattering way, but I mean someone who's capable of conducting an argument. And it's been some of the, my best experiences on television. I mean, when I come off I might get 200, you know, hostile emails from some of his, some of his audience, but I don't care about that.

Why is it so hard for other networks to come up with something similar? Our audience is very familiar with Roger Ailes and who's recently left, but I do consider him a true mastermind and media genius. Part of it, it doesn't get talked about as much is just he picks a host, he gives them time to build an audience and he stands by them. Bill, again, I'm not, in fairness, a fan fan of Bill O'Reilly, but my understanding is that when he started the first couple of years, the ratings were awful and it was several years before it gained any traction and I guess maybe five years before he became number one. Bill O'Reilly's had his own, shall we say, legal employment problems and Ailes stuck with him at msnbc. It seems like if a host looks the wrong way or loses two viewers, they're fired. I mean, the never ending parade of new formats, new hosts, the revolving door there. It just seems like the audience can't build a relationship with them. And to me, that's part of the beauty of Fox is if you like the morning show, it's the same people 20 years later. If you like Sean Hannity in 8, 9 o' clock hour for 20 years, you get him. What would you do if you were all of a sudden given MSNBC and you had to come up with a true competitor at a news level and a political ideological level to Fox?

Boy, I got to tell you, I'm not sure I have any great insight on that. I think it's running television network is really hard. And I mean, you just made a good case, I think, for the idea of coming up with a lineup and sticking with it for a long time. But, you know, there are instances where people stick with stuff too long. It's just, it's terrible. You just got to get rid of it. So I don't, I don't know. I mean, I think I, you got to say, Ailes from a. As a broadcasting executive has accomplished something tremendous. But, you know, there's a lot of other good shows and I don't, I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure. Should MSNBC be more ideological? Should it be more or should be less ideological? Should it be more entertainment driven? I don't know. Seriously, I wish I had some great answer to that. I do recognize, knowing some of the people whose job it is to try and make those decisions, you might think it's easy. It ain't easy easy.

Oh, I don't think it's easy.

Seriously, it's very hard. You'll do something and your ratings will fall and your advertisers will start abandoning you. I mean, it's really. I'm barely able to get through a segment. I don't know if I could run a network now.

Speaking of hard, it's pretty hard for people to see any individual with more than one hat. I know that in my own career, people see me as the media trainer. Quite often they don't want to hire me as a public speaker because they think, well, that guy is a trainer. You have a reputation as a newspaper columnist, a serious journalist, and yet somehow you've been a hit out in Hollywood for years now with a Cartoon Network. You are the voice of Stormy in C Lab. How did that all come about?

It almost didn't, actually. It's funny, when that gig came up, there were two TV producers that I worked on a show on the USA Network with. Matt Thompson and Adam Reed are the names. Young just kind of Smart ass kids, overgrown college kids basically, who got that gig at the Cartoon Network to make that show. And we'd work together and they had all the other voices were, you know, serious voice actors and well known people. Eric Estrada, do you remember him? An actor from the TV show Chips and another guy, oh, yes, who's a Broadway vet. But they had this one character, this kind of good looking nitwit basically named Stormy. When my sister heard that, she said, oh, yes, typecasting. But he was, you know, well bred and nice looking. But anytime anything bad happened, pretty much Stormy did it. And when we, when we began discussing it, I mean, I had a conversation with my agent about it. You'll appreciate this, having worked in that world a little bit. He was like, listen, I don't know, we're trying to make you out to be a serious television pundit and a respectable journalist. Do we really want you to be a cartoon voice? And I was like, yeah, I don't know. It'll be fun. Let's just do it. Let's just do it. I got to tell you, I have not had a meeting about some career issue with a serious editor or broadcasting executive. One of the first things they don't ask me is, tell me about Stormy. How'd you get that gig? That's so cool. I think it's the one thing they don't want to hear about. The thousands of newspaper columns I've written. They want to know about cartoon voicing. This is fun. I mean, I don't, you know, it's not something I've devoted my career to or taken that seriously. But I'll tell you this, it opened me up to some audiences that don't watch cable news. You know, I'll get these, I'll get these emails you talk about O'Reilly. I get these emails that'll be like, I'm a sophomore from a large Midwestern university. I feel like it's a letter to Penthouse or something. I'm a sophomore from a Midwestern university and holy crap, he said, Stormy's on O'Reilly and it sounds just like him.

They don't know. They can just tell. They can tell from the voice. You're not changing your, your voice.

Not that, not that much. Or some. I mean, some of the real fans know who the voice actors are and follow that stuff and oh my God, they know the plot and the twists in that show. People will ask me these obscure questions about character development and some plot. I have no idea what the hell they're talking about now.

Are you, Are you like Jerry Springer in that you don't even watch the show or you do watch.

In fact, those guys, C Lab has now wrapped. We got six seasons and DVDs and all that. But those guys are now doing a show that is doing very well and I think it's paying them a lot more money than C Lab did, called Archer. That's on the FX network and is a very popular, I would say, higher class animated show than C Lab was. Although C Lab is hilarious, I gotta tell you.

And walk us through this process, because you go live on O'Reilly or tape to live, you say it once. That's it for a network cartoon series. I'm imagining you in this little booth and redoing each line 27 different ways. But tell us about the process of recording that. Sure.

You know, the first show, the very first time we did it, they got us all together in a large studio in New York over on the west side of Manhattan, and all the voice actors were there and about, I guess about half a dozen of us, and we all had our little easels in our scripts and it was a disaster. And everyone was stepping in everyone's lines and no one would be quiet long enough. And we had to. We had to wait for Eric Estrada to call everybody baby. I mean, it was just a mess. And so after that, we did it differently. We would go into, you're right, a little, tiny little booth in A studio on 45th Street, Manhattan, called Soundhound. And it was an amazing microphone and audio system. I mean, you could literally hear your heartbeat in that booth. And it was maybe I would say twice the size or three times the size of a phone booth, but not large. And I. My guy would have whatever lines he had in that episode, and, you know, some episodes he was in every episode. And he had a lot of lines in some episodes and not as many others. And I would do each of those lines until they liked it. And so if the line was, oh my God, we're going to hit an iceberg, I would say it the way I thought it should be said. And then they would say, can you say that a little slower? Or can you have a little laugh in the middle of it? Or oh my God, we're going to hit an iceberg. So, you know, I would do it multiple.

You're right.

Sometimes the first time they'd be happy and sometimes had to do 10 times. But they were sometimes in New York, although they lived in Atlanta. So sometimes literally they were on a phone line, but they were in my headphones. I don't know how they do that, but somehow.

So you're getting direction from the producers or the directors from other cities?

Absolutely. And they then take all that voice, audio, content, which gets sent to them as a, I don't know, somehow electronically, you would know more about the mechanics of it than I do. And then they stitch it together on a Mac, put it on top of the pictures, which I never saw. I never see the animation as I'm doing the voice. So I just, I have a script that's just like a regular, you know, TV script or a movie script. And, you know, I would take a little yellow highlighter and highlight Stormy's line. So I would just. And we would just go through them in order like that.

And would you do a whole season's worth in three 12 hour days or.

How did that work? We did them one episode at a time and I think they were writing them one episode, episode at a time. So when they would have another one written and they were happy with it, they would get us all together and we would, you know, sometimes I would run into the other. To the other actors. A couple of them were in la, so I never really saw them. But you know, they would, they would just make appointments and, you know, for several hours of each of us coming in. But no, we just, we just did one episode at a time.

And when you're at a cocktail party and you know the chic, trendy Soho, what impresses people the most? Is it a Pulitzer Prize? Is it being on network tv? Is it stormy? Is it all the books? What is it?

I mean, I don't, I. I don't know. I don't know that any of it does. I mean, I'm just, you know, I mean, listen, I just feel it is.

Hard to impress that.

I just, I just feel like I'm lucky to be work, you know, I.

Mean, lucky to be working.

I mean, listen, you're the same way. You're around a lot of people who are richer and more famous and have probably easier lives. I don't know. I mean, I consider myself very blessed, right. I get to do things I enjoy. I get to insert myself into all these interesting worlds that are outside of my own experience. And I can most of the time make a living at it. Once in a while I'll make a great list. I mean, once in a while I'll feel like I'm being vastly overpaid.

But that's nothing wrong with. Nothing wrong with that.

No, I aspire to it. Every single day. But, you know, I mean, on balance, T.J. i feel like I have more fun and better morale and a cooler life than, you know, all my relatives who are lawyers. On the other hand, you know what, in some ways, you know, when they get into their, you know, later years, they probably have, you know, I'm still out hustling around and they're probably, you know, hitting senior status in a law firm somewhere. So I don't know who gets the last laugh. You tell me.

But the hustle keeps you thin and lean and looking for new opportunities and learning, too. Our audience is learning a lot today with Ellis Hennigan. You can learn about him on a regular basis by going to henneken.com it's linked to in the show Notes. You can also follow him on Twitter at heneken. You can read any one of his. Seems like dozens of books, but we're right about a dozen books. Let's talk about your latest book. What is it about and how did you get involved with this project?

Well, the last thing that's in the stores now is called Making it in America. It came out a couple of months ago, I guess, and I teamed up with a guy named John Bassett iii. And John Bassett, people may recognize that name. He is a titan of the American furniture industry. Bassett Furniture and his company, which is now Vaughn Bassett Furniture, they make bedroom sets, wood bed furniture and around third generation guy in that company, which was which was at one point the largest manufacturer in America of that kind of stuff around 2000, 2002. In those years, TJ the furniture industry went through something that a lot of American industries manufacturers sadly have, which is that they began closing the factories down their American factories and mostly in places like North Carolina, Virginia, and moving to low wage, cheaper places like mostly China, but China and then Vietnam and India, India and Indonesia and some other places in that part of the world where the factories could crank out furniture a whole lot cheaper than the Americans were. And literally it decimated the furniture manufacturing business. Now, you know, the retailers were still here, the designers were still here, the PR people were still here. But the actual furniture, even from great names in American furniture, virtually all of it made overseas. And Bassett, who was this, as I say, a third generation Virginia furniture guy, said, I'm not closing my factory. He said, these people working in this factory in Galax, Virginia, he said, they turned my family into multimillionaires and I'm not going to turn my back on them. And so he said, we're going to figure out how to beat this thing. And so instead of, instead of throwing out all these hard working mountains, people throwing them out of work, he sat down and started talking to them. So what are we going to do? How are we going to compete with the Chinese? What are we going to do that's going to make us better? That's going to keep this company going, that's going to keep your jobs and frankly going to keep me in business. And it's one of the great stories in American business. And he has succeeded. He's been at it now for almost 15 years since all the others left. He led his industry in an anti dumping suit against China who was engaged in all kind of illegal trade practices. They won the suit and got big, big money damages. And he's really, really a hero. So the book Making it in America, it's really the story of how he did that. His life story is really as though people may see soon is on the road to being an HBO miniseries. Tom Hanks production company Play Tone has bought it and is turning it into a, to his life story into a.

Oh boy, Tom Hanks is involved. I'm starting to smell success.

Be a great John Bassett too, I'll tell you. Saving the town and standing up to the, to the evil Chinese competitors.

And so I'm curious how, how do you do that? Because I like the idea of nice American made furniture and works from, you know, I grew up in North Carolina. The idea of them getting paid, on the other hand, my wife is Chinese and she wants the best bargain. She wants to go to Ikea and get that stuff that looks great but was manufactured in China. And I can get it really inexpensively so there's more money left for our daughter in our home.

How did he do it? That's the challenge. I mean, he says one thing is that American business just gave up too quickly. He says in fact we have a lot of advantages. One thing is that there's not an ocean between us and our clients, our customers. So we can be more nimble, we can make the furniture more quickly, we can get it into people's hands fast. And you know what? American workers are pretty good. If you get them motivated and focused and they'll figure out ways to do things at a lower price and we get the right machinery in there, maybe we really can out compete those people. And I think the lesson that we learned from Von Bassett Furniture is that no, it's not easy. And yeah, they may have some advantages, but Americans still have a lot of things on their side in that stuff. And plus, you know what? When you buy something made in this country, it has huge benefits to us. That dollar spent echoes around some town. It employs somebody. It pays the diner waitress and keeps the school teacher working. And that money gets spent and comes back around and helps us all. You know, I don't know if we want to be a nation that doesn't make anything. And I certainly like inspiring stories of people who figured out a way to survive.

So it sounds like that's a great example of factory workers who found a way to survive. But I'm interested in your strategies for young people who want to survive in the field of journalism and media. At some point in your career, you went from thinking of yourself as a newspaper guy to a guy who tells stories in any media, wherever. Most people don't have that asset. Since I've known you, the first thing out of your mouth is usually yes when someone asks, not well, tell me how many downloads you have in your podcast, tj before I consent to being interviewed. Your attitude is yes, But I want to know, what advice do you have? If you had a 21 year old niece or nephew come to you and say, wow, she sounds like you have just a fascinating career, I want to be you, or I want to at least want to have a career in the media and as a communicator and with some branch of journalism, what would your advice be to that person?

You put your finger on a good start, which is to be open to stuff and easy and fun to work with and have people want to be around you and feel like you're offering something. This is a business, as you know, that's filled with unhappy, complaining people. And if you're the first one raising your hand, that's definitely a really good, really good place to start. I mean, I have a few other thoughts. One is that writing is still very important, even for people who don't think of themselves as writers. You know, the young woman wants to be a TV anchor, or, you know, it's still the ability to communicate with written words is still where so much of it starts. I know anytime you start any interview, you take little notes or you come up with an idea or you have to present it, it really is where not only the communicating starts, but often where the thinking starts. I don't often know what opinion I have about something until I try to write something down. So, I mean, I would certainly focus early on writing. Another is don't be a snob. You know, don't think you have to only work for The New York Times or CBS News or msnbc. You know, the way you get going in this is to get going. That's how you get better. That's how you make the relationships that will help you down the road. Those people working with you on that little website today, in five years they're going to be in big hiring positions in other places. So creating those relationships is also hugely important.

And what medium are you most excited about these days? Certainly pop stars like Justin Bieber have come and sprung out of places like YouTube. There are Twitter stars, Instagram stars. Podcasting seems to be exploding right now with everyone from Hillary Clinton to former speechwriters for Obama starting podcast. And a lot of these media are very inexpensive. Of course there's good old fashioned blogging if you want to build your writing skills. What do you think a young person, let's say it's someone in their junior year of college and they've got free time and they've got internship time. Where would you recommend they spend their time between working for their school newspaper versus one of your colleagues at cnn? Brian Seltzer just started his own blog and just became a complete newshound for the television industry. And that attracted such an audience in that niche. He's got his own show on cnn.

He was a student at Towson State, I think in Maryland. Just who knew, really didn't know anything about tv, just started doing it. You got to give him credit. First of all, I resist the notion that there's some secret bullet in this platform or that platform. I mean, I wouldn't say, well, forget YouTube, but go to Twitter. I don't think that's easy. So the answer is to be open to all of those things. But if I had more general advice, I think I would say do stuff that puts you in contact with others, particularly others who are better than you are. Sitting in your room and writing by yourself needs to be part of it. But boy, that can be discouraging. And I think doing the internship, volunteering on the website, having someone, someone who's editing you, having someone who's reading whatever it is you're writing or presenting or editing or talking and setting standards for you and making you redo it and getting better at it, to me, that really is the root. Find people who are doing what you want to be doing and make yourself indispensable for them. And early in the game, you have to do it for cheap or little or maybe even free. But it's though these are still, despite all this technology, tj, these are still businesses of relationships, people like working with people they know and like. And you want to make yourself one of those people. You want to make yourself the one who's happy to do it, who can turn it around fast, who doesn't create a lot of, you know, in a real pain in the butt. And yeah, these are still it's funny we think of these as solitary industries, all this telecommuting and all that, but those personal relationships are, I think, what drive the careers.

ALICE hennigan, sage advice do things that put you in contact and working with other people, which is why I'm happy to be talking and in a sense, working with Ellis Hennigan. Today. The website is hennigan.com his books are too numerous to list, but we're going to list them in the show notes. I'm TJ Walker. Ellis, thanks for being our guest today.

TJ this is great. Thank you so much for having me. It was fun. Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker where the communication skills and practices.

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