Meet Frank King

I am a Suicide Prevention Speaker and Comedian, was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years, a full-time speaker and comedian for 37. I’ve worked with Jeff Foxworthy, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Steve Harvey, Rosie, Ellen, The Beach Boys, Neil Sedaka, Randy Travis, and Lou Rawls. I’ve fought a lifetime battle with Depression and Chronic Suicidality, turning that long dark journey of the soul into 11 TEDx Talks, one SPEAK Event, and sharing my lifesaving insights on Mental Health with colleges, corporations and associations. I’ve survived 2 aortic valve replacements, a double bypass, a heart attack, 3 stents, losing to a puppet on the Original Star Search and lived to joke about all of it.

A comedian who speaks on depression and suicide. How does that work? 

Well, depression and suicide run in my family. It's called generational depression and suicide. My grandmother died by suicide. My mom found her. Nine years later, my great aunt died by suicide. My mom and I found her. I was four years old. I screamed for days. In 2010, after filing a Chapter Seven bankruptcy in April, I came very close to suicide. Close enough, I can tell you what the barrel of my gun tastes like. Spoiler alert. I did not pull the trigger. A friend of mine came up at a keynote recently. He goes, “Hey man, how come you didn't pull the trigger?”

I go, “Hey, man, could you try to sound slightly less disappointed?” So that's where the humor is in the topic. It's not jokes. It's just funny, personal anecdotes.  That's why. And I myself live with two mental illnesses, major depressive disorder and chronic suicidal ideation, major depressive disorder, relatively common. Chronic suicidal ideation, far more rare. It means for people in my tribe, the option of suicide's always on the menu as a solution for problems large and small. And when I say small, my car broke down a couple years ago. I had three thoughts unbidden. One, get it fixed, two buy new, and three, I could just kill myself.

That's chronic suicidal ideation. 

You have 11 Tedx Talks. How did you land all of those? 

Well, the only person who had five was the guy in England. He passed away. That's the most I've been able to find anybody else has gotten.  In 2014, I applied. It was a Tedx in British Columbia. And I got it on my first try, which is unusual. And then two TEDx events reached out to me after that said, do you have any more mental health ideas to talk about? And I did. So I did two more at their request. 

The next seven I applied for and got. And I've got a really big social media footprint on LinkedIn. And an event in India, in the state of Assam, reached out and said, we like your take on mental health. Would you be willing to do a TEDx force virtually? I said, absolutely. 

So I got invited to as well. So, it's just a matter of applying, it's a bit of a numbers game.  I got my first one on the first try, but the other ones took 20, 30, 40 applications before I got the audition and got asked to do it.

Connect with Frank!

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LinkedIn is the channel that you'll find me on. Just search for Lori Highby. You can simply click the follow button as I post daily information about marketing strategy tips, all podcast episodes and any upcoming events you might see me at. If you'd like to connect, make sure to send a note with your connection request that references Social Capital. I can't wait to hear from you.

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All right. Today's guest is Frank King.

Frank King is a suicide prevention speaker and comedian. He was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years, and a full-time speaker and comedian. He's worked with Jeff Foxworthy, Jerry Seinfeld, John Stewart, Steve Harvey, Rosie Ellen, the Beach Boys, the list goes on and on. He's fought a lifetime battle with depression and chronic suicidality.

I hope I said that right. Turning that long, dark journey of the soul into 11 Tedx Talks, one SPEAK event and sharing his life savings insights on mental health while with colleagues, corporations and associations. He survived two aortic valve replacements, a double bypass heart attack, three stents, losing a puppet on the original star search, and lived to joke all about it.

Well, Frank, welcome to the show.

[00:02:20] Lori Highby: Losing to a puppet. Okay. Yeah. Got it. That'd be rough.

[00:02:37] Lori Highby: All right. Okay. Well, so a comedian who speaks on depression and suicide. How does that work?

I go, Hey, man, could you try to sound slightly less disappointed? So that's where the humor is in the topic. It's not jokes. It's just funny, personal anecdotes. That's why. And I myself live with two mental illnesses, major depressive disorder and chronic suicidal ideation, major depressive disorder, relatively common. Chronic suicidal ideation, far more rare. It means for people in my tribe, the option of suicide's always on the menu as a solution for problems large and small. And when I say small, my car broke down a couple years ago. I had three thoughts unbidden. One, get it fixed, two buy new, and three, I could just kill myself.

That's chronic suicidal ideation.

[00:04:05] Frank King: It was part of a plea bargain, actually. No. Jay Leno was a permanent guest host at the time, and he was filling in for Johnny Carson. And Johnny Carson was famously mercurial. He would tell the staff late on a Friday afternoon, Hey, you know what, I'm gonna take next week off, which meant Jay had four nights, four monologues, 18 jokes per night to come up with, essentially over the weekend. So he started hiring road comics such as myself to write jokes, you know, in a pinch. And so I would pump in 1, 2, 3 dozen jokes over the weekend.

And then when he got the job for real, he let most of the contract labor go, but he kept some of us on until he left for CNBC.

[00:04:51] Frank King: Yes. Yes. It meant that it meant that I beat all the other writers who were in, you know, in an NBC because we were all working from the same newspaper stories back then.

And so it meant my joke was better than anything that the writers in in house came up with.

[00:05:17] Frank King: Well, the only person who had five was the guy in England. He passed away. That's the most I've been able to find anybody else has gotten. In 2014, I applied. It was a Tedx in British Columbia. And I got it on my first try, which is unusual. And then two TEDx events reached out to me after that said, do you have any more mental health ideas to talk about?

And I did. So I did two more at their request. The next seven I applied for and got. I've got a really big social media footprint on LinkedIn, and an event in India, in the state of Assam, reached out and said, we like your take on mental health. Would you be willing to do a TEDx force virtually? I said, absolutely.

So I, that one I got invited to as well. So, it's just a matter of applying, it's a bit of a numbers game. I got my first one on the first try, but I mean, the other ones took 20, 30, 40 applications before I got the audition and got asked to do it.

[00:06:20] Frank King: Yeah, and I coach it. People pay me to help them get a TEDx because, you know, it's difficult. Creativity seems to be the key. Two of the talks that I did, they liked the title and subtitle I came up with enough that I didn't even have to audition.

[00:06:35] Frank King: Yeah. My favorite and the only one I've ever gotten stand standing ovation for was called Mental Health on the Orgasm: treat your depression, Single-Handedly. And they were, they were crazy about that.

All right. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm sure some of our listeners are gonna be curious about the TEDx path a little bit further. But I'm gonna change it up and ask some different questions here. So you said you've got quite an extensive network on LinkedIn. How do you stay in front of and best nurture that network in that community?

And people on radio will tell you only 3% of the folks in their cars at that moment are gonna need tires that day, but the other 97% are gonna need 'em sometime. And that's why you hear the same commercial over and over and over and and over again, so that they want to be top of mind when your tire blows.

So on LinkedIn, through the marketing company, I create the content, but they post a one to three minute video on Mondays and another one on Wednesdays, and then text posts Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. And the posts are all educational, no selling. On LinkedIn, my profile is make money speaking. I believe you should just do one thing or just pitch one thing on LinkedIn.

And some outbound. When I started my newsletter, I thought I'd get a couple dozen people the first day. I looked at it about an hour and a half after it posted, and I had 797 people.

[00:08:45] Frank King: And that was the middle of April. I now have forty one hundred and forty seven.

[00:08:50] Frank King: So, I created a little less than a minute video to thank subscribers.

So the BA sends out a, if you subscribe, you get a little video from me. It sounds like this. Hey, listen, thanks for signing up for my newsletter. You know, I figured on the first day I'd probably get a couple three dozen subscribers and I tuned in after about an hour and a half and they were 700 ninety-seven, and I about pooped my pants.

So I'm guessing they don't get a lot of videos on LinkedIn where the guy screams I pooped my pants.

[00:09:17] Frank King: One of the benefits of being a comedian.

[00:09:28] Frank King: I'd get laid more often. Yeah, because I was dating a woman outta state who became my wife. And as a friend of mine said when I was in college at UNC Chapel Hill. 10,000 women. He said, Frank, look, she's in Arizona. She's never gonna know. Nobody misses a slice off a cut loaf. I think you should be using your available resources. And so I would probably go and, and spend a lot more time with the with the female of the species.

What else? I probably would've started comedy sooner, although it timed it pretty well. I started April Fool's Day in eighty-four, and that was right about the beginning of the comedy club boom. And about a year, maybe 18 months later, decided to go pro, and told my girlfriend, now my wife of thirty-seven years, I'm going on the road to be a comic. Do you wanna come along for the ride? Figuring, she'd go, oh, hell no. And she goes, yeah. So we gave up our apartment and our jobs and packed everything into storage I couldn't fit into my tiny little Dodge Colt, and we took off. And we were on the road together for 2,629 nights in a row, nonstop.

[00:10:38] Frank King: Seven. Seven years and change? Yeah, so, but I think I would've started sooner. I was gonna start actually when I graduated high school. And my mom said, no, you're going to college first. I don't care what you do when you get done. You can be a goat herder for all I care, but you're gonna be a goat herder with a college degree. So I went to UNC, got a couple of college degrees, and then moved to San Diego, the insurance company that had hired me. And just by chance, there's a comedy story, branches a world famous one up on Sunset in LA in San Diego. And I did my first open mic night. Halfway through my little five minutes, I heard a voice inside my head that said, you're home. So I probably would've started comedy a little earlier and I would definitely not have married my first wife. She was a wonderful woman, but we had absolutely nothing in common. But you know what they say? Opposites attract. She was pregnant. I wasn't. So yeah. I knew going down the aisle was a mistake. I just thought, oh, I'll try. You don't try marriage. You try Grape Nuts for a couple of weeks. So, yeah, I think those are the things. I'd get laid more often, I would not have married my first wife and I would've started a comedy sooner.

[00:11:54] Frank King: Well, here's my question for you. At this moment, are you now regretting that you booked a comic to come on?

[00:12:11] Frank King: Oh yeah. How come you don't do video? How come you don't do video as well as audio?

So, when I actually first decided, roll back the time machine a little bit here. But I was like, I need some sort of thought leadership channel. So I was blogging, but I wasn't really good about being consistent with it, 'cause I was trying to make it too perfect.

And then, okay, let's do video. But video takes a lot of work. You gotta look good. It's gotta be the right lighting. And then a friend asked me to be a guest on his podcast and I was like, ah, I don't wanna do that. And I finally did it. I'm like, oh, this is great. It's just a conversation. Go with the flow. Super easy: record, make some edits, publish, good to go. So I found that podcasting was the channel for me.

So hard work is not really a thing. But I discovered that the editing and booking, it's time-consuming. And I thought, how about this? How about I just guest on a bunch of people's podcasts and be a really good guest?

[00:13:33] Frank King: Yeah, because you'll post it and then send me the link and I'll post it on my social media so I get a double hit with the SEO, it helps the SEO. So I, I try to guess a couple times a week in my topic area.

[00:13:47] Frank King: Yes. In terms of suicide prevention, eight out of 10 people who are suicidal or ambivalent. Nine out of 10 give hints in the last week leading up to an attempt, which means most people wanna be saved, most people can be saved. And oftentimes you can do it by doing something as simple as we're doing right here. And that is simply starting a conversation. Start the conversation on suicide.

Frank, if anyone is interested in getting in contact with you, what is the best way that they can reach you?

[00:14:37] Lori Highby: We will include all of that information in our show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Frank.

[00:14:45] Lori Highby: Alright, this wraps up our episode of Social Capital. Huge thank you to Frank for taking the time to connect with us.

If you have a burning marketing or relationship question, just reach out. I'd love to answer it on the show. And as mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn. Connect with Frank, connect with me. We're both looking forward to hearing from you. I hope you enjoyed today's show and I want you to go out there and get noticed.

[00:15:08] Lori Highby: Oh, go for it.

[00:15:10] Lori Highby: Sure.