See all Founders transcripts on Applepodcasts

Dad took me to buy a car. It was to be my first negotiation, an experience akin in his mind to losing one's virginity. He made a long list in preparation for this transaction, a catalog of features my first car had to have. Each characteristic of each candidate was given a value between 1 and 22. According to this list, the perfect vehicle for me was a used Honda Civic with less than 70, 000 miles.

We looked and looked and then amazingly he balked when we actually found it. I don't get you, I said. It checks every 1 of our boxes. You haven't learned a thing, he said. This car has all the what, but it is seriously deficient in the how.

What are you talking about? Did you see all that writing? The car was covered with names. Red letters on the driver's door that said Bobby, blue letters on the passenger door that said Barry, yellow letters on the hood that said Billy, this presumably being the name of the car itself. So what?

I said. We can have it repainted. You're missing the point, he said. A schmuck owned this car. That is an excerpt from the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is The Adventures of Herbie Cohen, World's Greatest Negotiator, and it was written by his youngest son, Rich Cohen.

So I found this book by accident. A few weeks ago on episode 255, I reread the fantastic book, The Fish That Ate the Whale, The Life and Times of America's Banana King, which serves as a biography of Samuel Zemuri. And It's 1 of my favorite books I've ever read for the podcast or otherwise. And so I decided, hey, let me go see if Rich Cohen has any other books that might be interesting to read for the podcast. And I found his latest book, which is the 1 I'm holding in my hand.

And the reason I bought it because it was so interesting is that he writes a biography of his dad. And as soon as I picked up and started reading the book it's very hard to put down and I knew immediately that I was gonna read this book for the podcast. It is 57 short stories spread over 225 pages where Rich introduces us to his world-famous dad who also has this giant personality that jumps right off the page. So I want to go right to the beginning of the book. This is you know the 1 of the most bizarre openings to any book that I've ever read and it's just Herbie.

It's a quote from Herbie Cohen talking to his son in conversation. He says, when I die, your mother will meet a man who will buy her gifts and flowers, who will do all the little things that I was never good at and who will ask her to marry. I tell you so you know now that this man is a schmuck. And as you can see from that, he's also hilarious. This is an overview of his career and why I think it's so interesting to study him.

In professional circles, he is Herb Cohen, an expert in the art of the deal and the author of You Can Negotiate Anything, A publishing phenomenon that came out of nowhere in 1980 to sell more than a million copies. He's a speaker, a guru of the corporate retreat, a consultant to governments and companies, the gun hired to work out the terms and close the deal. The wise man helicoptered in to settle the strike. He helped resolve the Major League Baseball umpire strike in 1979, as well as the New Orleans police strike the same year. He advised Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980 and 1981.

He advised Ronald Reagan during the summits with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and 1986. He was part of the American team at Geneva during the strategic arms reduction talks in the 1980s where he said he went, quote, eyeball to eyeball with the Russkies and learned what he calls the Soviet style. He helped settle the NFL player strike in 1987. He was a pioneer in the field of game theory and helped set up the FBI's behavioral science unit. And so through the entire book, Rich introduces us to Herbie, and he's telling us what he learned from all the things that his dad taught him throughout his life.

Not only through with his words, but his actions and in some cases the lessons he learned from seeing his father make mistakes. He has a great line towards the end of the book where he says, even our heroes falter. So I want to jump to the first story, which is about how is about how Herbie taught rich how to drive. So he says consider the way he taught me how to drive at the end of our last lesson. He told me to drive into Wrigley Field where the Chicago clubs were playing.

There was a long line for the left turn that led to the expressway. When we got near the front, my father said, the car in front of you is going to jump the green light and take that left before the oncoming traffic. I want you to get close to his bumper and follow him through. Explaining himself, he added, we don't want to miss the first inning. I started well and kept close to the lead car, but then made the mistake of looking into the faces of the oncoming drivers.

Their eyes were full of hate, their mouths twisted in fury. I froze in the middle of the intersection, snarling traffic and setting off a cacophony of honks and insults. When the cars were finally sorted, we drove on in silence. It was my father who spoke first, saying, it was my fault, I overestimated you. And so the first part of the book is rich going through all these childhood stories about what it was like growing up as a Jewish kid in Brooklyn for his father in the 1950s.

He's got a small group of friends. They call themselves the Warriors and their friends for an entire lifetime. Like there's stories later on in the book where they're either all retired in California or in South Florida, and they're in like their 80s, and they're still hanging out. And 1 of them, 1 of Herbie's lifelong friends was the radio show and TV host, Larry King. So he's in this book as like a little kid and so says this is really an overview of How his father taught?

His son and he does it through like aphorisms over time Herbie turned the tricks He learned in Brooklyn into a philosophy. It was a kind of Jewish Buddhism. He preaches engaged detachment, characterized as caring, but not that much. More than a business strategy, he considers this a way of life. Don't get fixated on a particular outcome, he would say.

Always be willing to walk away. Once you see your life as a game and the things you strive for as no more than pieces in that game, you'll become a much more effective player. Most of his parental advice is about maintaining perspective, which he does by dismissing whatever is currently bothering you as quote, a walnut in the batter of life, a blip on the radar screen of eternity. The man is besotted with aphorisms. He would say things like, we're all captives of the pictures in our heads.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. The key to walking on water is knowing where the stones are. Time heals all wounds right up to the moment it kills you. And so Herbie was gifted with language, he was really good at storytelling, and all of the stories that he would talk, whether it's about from his childhood or otherwise, they were embedded with like lessons and morals for his son. This is a story that happened when Herbie was 9 years old, and the Larry in the story is Larry King, his lifelong friend.

They started debating in the street, arguing. Larry said that crossing kids on their way to school was busy work. It was a joke. So Larry and Herbie had been made crossing guards by their school and so they're having this debate over whether they want to do it or not. And it says Herbie disagreed.

It's a position with real power, he said. Herbie walked to the middle of 19th Avenue and held up his hand, bringing traffic to a stop. It is simple as this, Herbie said. He was proving what would become a lifelong principle. Most people are schmucks and will obey any type of authority, even if it's just a nine-year-old in an orange sash.

As he'd say later in lectures, power is based on perceptions. If you think you've got it, you've got it, even if you don't got it. Cars and trucks were soon backed up for blocks. And the way I would summarize the lesson that he's trying to teach his son is pretend to be in control and people will assume that you are. So that reminded me of this thing I read in Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson where Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, is talking about meeting Steve.

So Nolan's like, you know, maybe a decade older than Steve was and he hires like a 19 year old Steve Jobs to work at Atari And he said that there was something indefinable in an entrepreneur and he saw that characteristic in Steve Jobs even when Steve was really young and Nolan gave him advice that Steve used for his entire life. If you read any biography of Steve Jobs was obvious and Nolan said I taught him that if you act like you can do something then it will work. I told him pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are. And so another main lesson that Herbie repeats throughout the book and is constantly trying to teach not only his son but the people that he's hired to teach in his professional life is that life is a game and that other people are playing it too. So you have to focus on their interests and that's the way to truly move them.

So there's This hilarious story that Larry King would tell over and over again on his show that happened when they were in middle school They said that their friend died and he was just on vacation for a few weeks on the west coast But they said yeah, he's dead. I think his name was Moppo. Moppo is dead and then they raised money for his memorial And they went up keeping the money their middle school gives them an award and then the kid that was supposed to be dead shows up during the award ceremony. And so once they found out hey, you know, did you guys lie about this student of ours dying but then you raise money and you try to keep it, they were going to expel or suspend Larry and Herbie. And so this is where we see Herbie's gift with negotiation.

Herbie raises his hand and says, wait a minute, Dr. Armour, you're making a terrible mistake. What did you say? Asked Dr. Armour.

Larry told the rest of this story in books, on the radio, on television, and at every reunion and family function. Herbie looks across the desk, calm as can be, and says, Slow down, Dr. Armour. That's the principal, obviously. Let's talk this through.

Yes, we did a very bad thing and we admit it. But if you expel us, there will be a hearing before the Board of Education. That's automatic. At that hearing, they'll want to know why you took the word of 3 idiot kids that another kid was dead. All you did was call their house, get a disconnected message, and then mark the kid as deceased.

Yes, we'll be expelled, but you'll be fired. You'll never get another teaching job in New York." Dr. Armour sat back and groaned. Larry described his demeanor as totally whipped. Larry always spoke of this as Herbie's first negotiation.

Dr. Armour agreed not to expel us. And so this is the moral of the story according to Herbie. This experience let Herbie test a theory that he'd been working on since his crossing guard days. Life is a game and to win you must consider other people as players with as much at stake as yourself.

If you understand their motivation you can control the action and free yourself from every variety of jam. Focus less on yourself and more on others. Everyone has something at stake. If you address that predicament, you can move anyone, even a junior high principal, from no to yes. And so Herbie's point throughout the entire book is that negotiation is just natural to human beings and so if you want to be good and negotiation you have to understand human nature and so he uses that tactic of understanding humans and how they're liable to be persuaded over and over again throughout the entire book now they're in high school they go out to get some ice cream on a snowy day and they convince they some of cross these volunteers it's election night and Herbie convinces the volunteers for this political campaign that Larry King had done the most to support their candidate when in fact did nothing And so says it was 1 a.m.

On a on a Tuesday in November election day. The group had stumbled on a party of volunteers who had campaigned for Richard Lee who would serve 8 terms as mayor of New Haven before moving to the US Congress. Herbie and Larry worked the crowd. Hoo-ha, which is another 1 of their friends, was at the buffet table filling his pockets with donuts. Pulling Larry aside, Sandy said, do you know what Herbie's doing?

He's going around telling all these people that you've been the number 1 campaigner, that no 1 has worked as hard as you. Larry tried to even the score, so he went around talking up Herbie. The campaign manager stood up and thanked the workers. He looked across the crowd and asked, is Zeke out there? Zeke is what they called Larry King when he was a kid.

Is Zeke out there? All night I've been hearing about the great work that this young man Zeke has done for us. Stand up and introduce yourself Zeke. Larry stood up, waved, and then introduced Herbie saying, he's the real hero. Herbie gets up and starts talking, Larry said later.

He talks for maybe 15 minutes. He does the history of America. Paul Revere's night ride, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy and then said, I give you not just the next mayor of New Haven but the next president United States Richard Lee. Here is what Herbie learned in New Haven.

If you say something long enough and loud enough and with enough confidence, No 1 has worked harder for this campaign than Zeke, for example. People will believe you. And once they believe you, you can take as many donuts as you want. So that ties back to their friend Hoo-Ha, who they're all at this gathering for campaign volunteers at a campaign they did not volunteer for and yet they're still eating the doughnuts just as the same people, just as many doughnuts as the people that actually put the work in. So Herbie joins the army during the Korean War.

He's got all these different jobs and so 1 of the jobs that he had when he was in the army was that he helped investigate criminal activity within the army. And so a lesson that Herbie learned in the army that he taught his son is that life is a lot of things and certain is not 1 of them. And then I'll tell you my takeaway from why this is important to founders after this paragraph. He'd been transferred from the Border Patrol to courts and boards where he'd had the unit that investigated criminal activity on the base, file reports and suggest which cases to try and which to dismiss. It was work that gave him a rare insight into people, What made them tick, how they functioned under pressure, and how some remained stoic and strong while others wept and told on their friends.

It taught him how to spot mannerisms. Ticks that indicate a lie or a bluff. This is what Herbie said, those who can live with ambiguity and still function do the best he's telling this to a son those who can't stand uncertainty get their certainty but pay for it and so the north of myself when I got to this part was It made that sentence that he had where he says listen those who can live with ambiguity and still function do the best. That's important to me you and I because ambiguity is the constant companion of the entrepreneur. And so I like herbies advice here which is you have to learn to live with the ambiguity and still be able to function.

So later on he gets stationed in Berlin. The job he has there now is they have like this intramural basketball competition between all the soldiers on the base. And so Herbie can't really play, but he's a really good coach. And there's 2 things that he's telling, He's retelling the story to his son later on and the first 1 is take notes And he says when he took over the new team the first thing he did was just sit on the bench for a few games Didn't say a word But she took notes for my father taking notes is key everywhere all the time Because it lets you learn from the past Let you keep a record while letting the other side know that a record is being kept these are all This is him telling his son why you want to take notes it lets you learn from the past Let you keep a record while letting the other side know that a record is being kept. These are all this is him telling his son why you want to take notes.

It lets you learn from the past, let you keep a record while letting the other side know that a record is being kept, and on occasion lets you hang them with their own words. And then he talks to his son about the importance of adapting your strategy based on the talent you have around you. You can't build a team around a random strategy explained maybe a perfect world heaven or fantasy land but in the real world you have to devise your strategy for the talent you actually have don't bitch don't complain Just play the cards you've been dealt. And so after the war, he comes back. He enrolls into NYU, to New York University, and he's extremely ambitious and determined to pursue his goals and to make...

It's almost like his experience being in the army during the Korean War had him refocus on his professional ambitions and he's very hard-working and ambitious his entire life in fact we'll get to stories later on in the book where in older age he starts becoming a little depressed because he feels like he hasn't achieved enough and His drive this internal drive to achieve actually causes him because he was getting famous when rich is still a young kid so he was a missing out on quite a bit of like riches childhood and so it's at NYU where her be is going to meet riches future mom Helen And then they tell 2 different stories on how Herbie's version of events, like how I met your mother, is very different from the story that his mom would say. My parents told different stories about their first meeting, or maybe it was the same story told in different ways, filtered through different sensibilities." And so we'll see Herbie has a gift for storytelling and he intentionally tries to make life more dramatic. Helen says it happened in NYU cafeteria. She was eating lunch with friends before an afternoon class.

Herbie walked in, scanned the room, caught her eye, came over and sat down. He knew 1 of the girls that she was sitting with slightly. Looking first at this girl and then at Helen, he said, Has anyone seen Marty Eisenberg? I need to borrow his econ notes. This was a lie.

There was no Marty Eisenberg. Herbie made up the name. And he did not take econ. He wanted to meet Ellen. They started talking and were soon in deep conversation.

They were still talking after the room had cleared out and Ellen had missed her class. Ellen said later that she had fallen in love with Herbie as soon as he sat down. Herbie's version is more fantastic. Ellen was sensible, committed to the literal truth. To Herbie, there is truth and then there is truth.

Or as he says, you see things not as they are, but as you are. He believes in founding myths and fairy tales, in giving people a story, a poetic reality that supersedes the facts on the ground. Or Maybe it's just his love of bullshit. He says it rained the day he met Ellen. Then the rain stopped and the sky cleared and a rainbow appeared over Manhattan.

He followed it down 12th Street, through the doors and into the NYU cafeteria, where he first saw her. You understand what I'm telling you, he'd say. I found your mother at the end of a rainbow. So after graduating, he decides to stick around, go to law school at NYU, and then he's going to start working in the insurance industry, which is where he gets to practice his trade and negotiation before he goes out and starts his own business. He spent nights at NYU Law School and worked a variety of jobs during the day, eventually taking a full-time position at Allstate Insurance.

He started as a claims adjuster, a job that served as kind of a post-grad course in his lifelong study of negotiation. Asked, and then this is where we're going to see that he's very gifted in language, asked to define negotiation, he said, it's 2 kids arguing on the corner. It's a husband and wife fighting about where to have dinner. It's mom getting her kids to do homework. It's John Kennedy talking to Khrushchev and Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table and screaming, we will bury you.

Khrushchev, who all the while has 2 perfectly good shoes on his feet. I didn't know that. It's not something you learn, but something you've always known and have been doing all of your life. Herbie climbed like a rocket through the ranks at Allstate. He was put in charge of his own crew.

He was the man in the financing shed, the wizard behind the curtain, the closer in the bullpen. He said a key to his success was settling quickly rather than fighting overpaying a little instead of going to court and overpaying a lot. In other words, negotiation. Because his crew outperformed all the others, he was put in charge first of an office, then of a region. He was promoted 4 times in 5 years each promotion meaning a new office in a new town.

And so it's while they're moving around that rich is born rich is the only 1 of their 3 children that is actually born in the Midwest he's gonna grow up outside of Chicago. And his parents say so listen we thought we were done. There's a reason there's this giant gap between you and your 2 older siblings. You were an accident but we love you anyways. And so this entire time he's just teaching his son and I guess his 2 other kids his other son and his daughter about just all the stuff he's learning throughout his life because it really would the way I feel the way I think rather of the book I hold my hand it's just like the distilled knowledge of your father that you can read you know in a weekend so he says most people try to blend in herbie went the other way When they zig I zag he'd explain his art of the deal was never about tricking an opponent It was about making the other person feel respected getting a good deal while letting the other guy feel he'd done the same Win-win so in the book he says that term win-win Was actually invented by his father but I couldn't tell if it was a joke or not because that's what his father told him.

But his father, as we see, is kind of like loose with the facts and wants there to be like more drama in the story. It's more important for him that the story is interesting than the story is true. And it isn't because I want to be a good person he'd explain so he's going back to why you want to feel Like if you're making the best Way to make a deal is don't trick the other problem make the other person and feel that they're getting a good deal that you're Getting a good deal as well, and he's like listen. This isn't because I want to be a good person he'd explain it's because I want to be effective if the other guy walks away feeling bad about what happened the deal is going to fall apart And you're gonna end up with nothing and so not only is he teaching his kids the art of negotiation But he's got this like growing up on the streets of Brooklyn Kind of mentality where he also talks about the importance of loyalty, standing up to bullies. And so this is an example.

His 2 older siblings are, they take the bus to school. His older brother is like being rambunctious, misbehaving on the bus. And so his sister Tells on her brother and gets him in trouble But when they get home the brother is not in trouble the sister is for telling for not being loyal to the family And so this is what he said for her be a meant Sharon had failed to understand an essential part of an ancient code If you have a problem with your brother you deal with it inside the family don't rat don't turn your brother into the cops this kind of reminds me of my dad it was another 1 of those of his big lessons loyalty without that he said you have nothing And so there's a few more of these like funny stories from their childhood. I'll get to their 1 second. I just want to update where he's at in his career at this point in the story.

This is like forget this. I'm going into business for myself. Herbie quit his job at this point. He's been transferred. He'd working for a different company.

He's working for Sears. Sears had been lending him out to other companies where for a fee paid to the home office He'd analyze their operations negotiate their deals train their workers and train their workers It had only been a matter of time until he decided to cut out the middleman and do the work on his own Selling his services directly he would never again work in a single location or office but in towns and cities around the world so he's been spending his whole career negotiating. Instead of doing it for a company he does it for himself then he starts tying up all the lessons that he learned into this book, the publication of that book, it's gonna sell over a million copies, it's gonna go to like 19 printings or something like that, it still sells to this day. And as a result of that, he becomes super famous. And so his other kids, Sharon and the brother, They're already teenagers on their way to becoming adults.

And so Herbie is just traveling the world. I think he's doing like 3. I think he's gone 300 days out of the year. And so we'll get there in 1 second. This is a description of his father from from Rich's eyes when he was a kid.

He was a man of tremendous appetites for comedy, success, love, and food. He was 1 of those human yo-yos who could gain or drop 100 pounds in a few months. He would binge and then fast, consume and forsake, sin and repent, enjoy and suffer. I worried about his health constantly. All the needles touched red, but he just went on smoking, binging, running, fasting.

He read the newspaper while he drove. When trying to scare him straight, I asked, what will I do if you die? He did not answer as most fathers would. You would be fine, for example. But focused on the second clause saying, nothing can kill me, I will never die.

So he repeats that over and over again throughout the entire book after he has this dramatic open heart surgery. He's like, if that didn't kill me, nothing will. Nothing can kill me. I will never die. And so then talks about the difference between he was really tough on Sharon and Stephen, the 2 older kids, but less tough on Rich.

He was tough on my brother, too. When he heard Stephen was being tormented by bullies at school Herbie drove him to the ringleaders house and made him knock on the door and asked the kid to come outside and fight the presumption Being that bullies are cowards who only operate in packs. He was right about that. He and so this is hilarious he talks about makes them play ice hockey So because I'll make you tough and teach you how to fight and then even when he plays Even when he plays basketball, I just have this picture in my mind like a little kid Maybe like a 12 year old going up Trying to do a layup on his dad, he's just getting slammed to the ground. Listen to this, he says he insisted on Brooklyn rules when playing basketball in the driveway.

Which he explained this way, If you're gonna go over me for a layup, you're gonna pay a price. He wised up when my turn came, so he's talking about the difference and the fact that he was easier on him. He's also older. I noticed that like if you have, if there's like multiple, if you had multiple siblings usually the first kid gets it worse. They're like younger.

I think parents are younger, more aggressive, don't know what they're doing. By the third, By the time the third or fourth kid comes around, they're like, whatever, it's fine. He wised up when my turn came and just wasn't around that much, leaving him little time to mold me. Having experienced a first flush of big success, he'd become fixated on his career. He was given as many as 250 speeches a year when I was in middle school traveling from boardroom to boardroom from convention to convention and leading negotiations around the world He became the subject of magazine articles really becomes like this guru He's all over like all over all forms of media throughout like the 70s and 80s on the best selling list.

It's like you know these people still exist today. So you kind of get the idea of what rich had to deal with like what what his dad was doing when rich was a kid. He began the subject of magazine articles his speaking fee doubled and then doubled again over time without meaning or wanting to he gathered a group of disciples he became a kind of guru so people would get his phone number and the column all hours of the day and would just ask questions like life questions Not even really about negotiation like should I forgive my husband if he cheated on me like what should I do with my business? How should I live my life these kind of questions? And so this is what he means by he had like this his philosophy is kind of like Jewish Buddhism is The way his son would describe it at the core all his lessons were about the same thing empowerment he tried to wake up people to the power they had without knowing it you're never out of options he'd say there's always something to be done his philosophy had been informed by his reading of history his life in brooklyn and the impression made by certain works of art So he had like a holy reverence for the written word.

He thought books are the most important way. He's like, there's a reason that when God wanted to talk to us, he put it in a book. He would tell us, son, he didn't make a movie. When they say made impressions by certain works of art. He's talking about books.

His favorite passage came from Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, where the last human freedom is defined as the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances and to choose one's own way. Every hour, so this is a quote from the book that Herbie would repeat not only to his children But also to the people that he's teaching every day every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision a decision which Determined whether you would Or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self of your inner freedom Herbie believed it was all about confidence Behaving as if you belong so that's what probably the third time I've mentioned to you so far in the book this idea that Nolan Bushnell had taught Steve Jobs that Herbie clearly discovered his own life the fact that you should you if you pretend to be completely in control people assume that you are so let's say that maybe the third time I mentioned it that's in the book probably a dozen times in different stories and here's my favorite example in the book at this point. Rich is already in college.

So Rich went to school in New Orleans. So if you think about this, he went to Tulane. That led him, the fact that Rich went to Tulane, led him to discover, he's like, oh, the president of Tulane lives in this gigantic mansion. That's interesting. And then you realize, oh, that's Sam's.

They used to be Sam's of Murray's own house and Sam's Murray's like a legend in New Orleans. And so that leads him to discovering who Sam's Murray is doing all that research and then writing 1 of the best books on entrepreneurship that I've ever come across. It's really interesting how everything kind of like connects when I was in college in New Orleans Herbie wanted to have dinner at Commander's Palace, which is the best restaurant in town I told him the place was sold out for months that we'd never get in. He insisted that we go Anyway, he walked to the front desk and said Herb Cohen table for 3. Do you have a reservation?

No. We're completely booked. Herbie threw up his hands, turned to my mother, and said, I guess Ella was wrong. Ella? Said the maitre d, confused.

Ella Brennan, a friend of mine. She said I should just come on over and that you would seat us. 5 minutes later, we were at a table in the corner. Who is Ella Brennan, I asked. She owns this place, said Herbie.

Do you really know her? Of course he doesn't, said my mother. There was a story about her in the in-flight magazine. And so once his father went into business for herself when he wasn't giving speeches for governments or at corporations, he was running his own seminar rich and then his other siblings also had to help set up the seminar. They would see his seminar over and over again so they would absorb the lessons over time and it said no matter the audience his message was the same stay detached don't become fixated on a particular outcome care but not that much if you approach a negotiation as it were a game you'll have more fun and be more successful if you approach life as if it were a negotiation you'll care less achieve more and live longer and he's got these counterintuitive ideas on negotiation that he would teach over and over again by seeding power you gain power he would explain.

What are the most powerful words in a negotiation? Are they I'm an expert I know better No, they're who huh? And what when it comes to negotiating you'd be better off acting like you know less not more in Some cases dumb is smarter than smart and in articulate is better than articulate You want to train yourself to say, I don't know, you lost me, could you repeat that? The most powerful words in business are, I don't understand, help me. Divest yourself of preconceived notions and biases ignorance even if feigned will produce curiosity humility open-minded ness and the kind of innovative ideas that bring people together so this is when Herbie starting to get famous This is right before he's gonna write his book and then his fame is gonna explode.

And what I thought was very interesting is like the impact that the decisions of the father have on the outcome and the life of the son, because There is a reporter who gets a sign like hey cover this in the world's greatest negotiator Herbie Cohen. And it's seeing this interaction seeing this freelance writer follow his dad around where Rich is like man that's what I want to do I want to be a freelance writer. A reporter called the office in early 1980. He had been assigned to profile Herbie for Playboy magazine. The writer was a smart, young Ivy Leaguer named Andrew Tobias.

He spent a week following Herbie around. Watching Tobias work is what made me want to be a writer and not just any kind of writer but a freelance writer that had the ring of freedom. Here's another piece of advice to his son this is something that you and I've talked about over and over again that repetition is persuasive you see it over and over again in these books. Herbie speaks of the rule of 3. If someone sees your name 3 times, they feel as if you're everywhere.

So you must be famous. And if people think you're famous, then you are famous. So that reminded me, so this is really interesting. It's really hard To get me to read any books that are not biographies these days even though I get a ton of book recommendations and most and some of them are not biographies But I had 2 really smart people both listen to the podcast both don't know each other and they both Recently in the last like I don't know 2 weeks maybe 4 weeks had recommended the same book they're like David you need to read this book how brands grow and the subtitle I think is what marketers don't know and the main as far as I understand I read the book yet but what I've been told is the main message of that book is repetition and how people's constant exposure to like a brand or a company over and over again can actually influence their purchase decisions. At least that's what I've been told.

I got to read the book for myself. But I thought that was interesting. Someone sees your name 3 times they feel as if you're everywhere so you must be famous and if people think you're famous you are famous. So this is the point in the book where he decides to write his own book, and this is just fantastic. This might be my favorite part of the book.

Herbie's big on lecturing his kids and grandkids about study habits, perseverance, and establishing a routine. He told us to go about our work in a methodical and even boring way, to conduct ourselves in the practice exam or scrimmage as if it were the real test or game. That way, when we got there, we'd feel as if we'd already been there a dozen times before. Don't do anything differently, he'd say. Make the extraordinary ordinary.

That's the key. But that is not at all how he behaved when he wrote his book. He didn't go about it as if as he'd gone about his earlier work on seminars and speeches, casually sitting at the kitchen table a few hours at a time. He did not make the extraordinary ordinary. He made the extraordinary super extraordinary.

He set up a cramped office in the basement, said goodbye 1 morning, went down there, and stayed down there until he had finished. 8 months in a hole. 40 pots of coffee a day, that cannot possibly be true, but a lot of pots of coffee a day. Nothing to eat but lettuce and bread filling dozens of yellow legal pads with his neat cursive composing the book just as it was meant to be read from open to close. Starting with the first sentence, your real world is a giant negotiating table and like it or not, you're a participant.

Can you imagine a more painful way to write a book? In a single marathon session in a basement. Then he lists all these other famous writers and what they used to help write. Kerouac used Benzedrine. Hemingway drank Anisette.

Hunter S. Thompson dropped LSD. For Herb Cohen, there was nothing but lettuce, bread, and black coffee. And so he finishes this book in this eight-month session where that's all he's going to work on and he decides hey, this is before it's published by the way, they decided to take this like super long road trip. And the reason being is that he wants his kids trapped in the car so he can read the book aloud to them.

Needing to mark the occasion, Herbie told Alan to pull the children out of school. He was taking us on a drive. He planned to read the entire book out loud in the course of the drive. That was the trip's real purpose. Ellen drove so Herbie could read us his book.

Maybe that sounds boring, but hearing him read those pages out loud was exciting. It was hard to believe I knew someone who'd actually written a book. Herbie read a hundred pages as we crossed Kansas. I absorbed every word. And so the note I left myself on this page is think about the impact this is having on Rich, his son.

It changed the entire trajectory of Rich's life. You fast forward maybe 40 years after this is happening or so and now Rich has written 10, 12, 8 different books. So while they're on the road trip eventually he gets to the End of the book and really what is taking place here is to me is the power of belief Herbie smiled he had finished reading his book and that's what he was thinking about he believed it was good Possibly very good and It was this belief which never wavered that would give him the confidence to persist despite the rejections that were coming. Quoting Harry Truman, he'd say, I make a decision once. That is the first time I heard that quote from Harry Truman and that is fantastic advice.

Quoting Harry Truman he'd say I make a decision once and he's made the decision about the book. In case of rejection the only thing that would change was his opinion of the publishing house. I make a decision once. If the stress of that experience sent the book, wait, wait, wait, rejected, weighed on Herbie, and it must have, he did not show it. He never stopped believing he would find a publisher it only takes 1 he'd say then when the book hits all those rejections will just make for a better story that's fantastic that's actually fantastic He said that it took 18 nose to get to a yes.

And so the publishing house that said yes was a tiny publishing house. All they could really do is say, hey, I'm going to publish a book. I'll print a few hundred copies, but they didn't have a lot of resources for marketing. And so this is how Herbie sold his book and it is absolutely fantastic. He did it by hand.

So it says, Herbie considered himself a master at moving product. Life is 97% marketing, he'd say. You're better off with a mediocre product and a great salesman than with a masterpiece and an idiot to sell it Herbie broke the book by hand He'd load up boxes of the book into his station wagon and he would set off by himself Every American city had its own media in the 1980s. Its own television morning shows, its own evening news, its own newspapers. So he made a, he'd go to each new, he going to each new city, make a list of all the different media companies in the city and then sit by the phone and cold call every single 1 of them.

He would get on the phone and start making calls to producers, editors, writers. In this way, he got himself interviewed on radio and TV, written up in newspapers, featured in magazines. He went into every bookstore he could find, moved his book to the front, the top of the display, then signed every copy. He did this without being asked. Beginning each inscription with, congratulations, merely by picking up this book, you have demonstrated your intelligence Thousands of copies had sold then tens of thousands then tens of tens of thousands It went into a second third fourth fifth sixth 19th printing It was a local bestseller than a regional bestseller than a national bestseller So this is where he gets super famous sells over a million copies They're living in Chicago not because they want to live in Chicago because he traveled, you know, Most of the year he wanted a city that was like in the center of the country because sometimes he has to fly the east coast West coast but they were New Yorkers through and through and so they would get depressed like his mom would get depressed because she missed Brooklyn and so they would go back and visit And Rich's observations about his dad is really fascinating to me, like when I got to this part, because it's interesting to think about, like, he's seeing my father as he was before he was my father.

And so I try to do a variation of this when I'm reading these books. You'll hear me say hey, you know at this point in the story The person that we're talking about there, you know, 25 are there 32 or there 45? I would do this for it when I was like listen to hip-hop growing up like oh when this album came out you know Jay-Z was 32 for example whatever and so you always try to think like what was I doing at that age or maybe that's my age now and like I just think it's very interesting the prehistory of somebody before they become the person you know and in a celebrity or like a famous successful like entrepreneur obviously we're gonna see them you know 10 15 usually 20 years after they've been at it right that's usually when we discover who they are because they've they've been practicing in private for so long and so on a read this experience that he's having on 1 of these trips back to Benhurst in Brooklyn and then how it made me think of something else. So it says Herbie was a different person in Bensonhurst.

Profane and free. He rolled down his window as soon as we crossed 60th Street. If he was driving he'd push back the seat and steer with 1 hand. He nodded at people as they went by. Now and then, someone shouted his name.

He would shout back. In Bensonhurst, we were seeing my father as he'd been before he was our father, as he was still deep down when we weren't looking. And so it's fascinating to think now that we have the technology where in the future, our kids or people in the family members, people, loved ones are going to be able to say, hey, what was it like? Like, what was my dad like when he was like 25 or whatever age? I saw this TikTok that was fascinating and it's this guy saying, hey man, like even if you don't post it, you should make videos, you should take videos of yourself for your kids.

And he was 30 years old. And so he's like, listen, he shows us the video. He's like, this is a picture of my dad when he was 30. And this is at a surprise birthday party. That's my mom standing next to him.

He goes, my dad died a few years ago. Today is my 30th birthday. And how I wish, you know, he's talking about how I think he misses his dad and how devastating it could be. But he's like, I just wish, instead of just having this picture of him like walking through the door being surprised like I wish I could have like video like what he was like at my age I'd love to see my dad and his friends hanging out at his birthday party on his 30th birthday and him being there with my mom before they had kids and who they were essentially like I want to see my father as he was before he was my father which is exactly what Rich is talking about in this book. I just think that's great advice.

And so up until this point of the book, it's really about Herbie's life as viewed through the eyes of his son and then we get to the point where Herbie's own dad dies and This is gonna come up later on I mean, it's very surprising way and I didn't realize this the first time I read this section and so Herbie's father is hospitalized. They find a bunch of Like a mass in his stomach and he's got stomach cancer and the next morning They're scheduled to operate and there's only Herbie and his dad in his dad's hospital room. And so you got to remember this part for later. Herbie sat alone with his father the night before the operation. Morris put a hand on top of Herbie's and asked his son to judge his life.

Have I been a good father? Have I been a good man? Yes, pop, you've done great and Herbie really meant that he did think that his father was a good father and a good man. Morris died in his sleep early the next morning before the doctors could operate. Herbie believes Morris died because he wanted to.

He knew what the next few years would be like and he didn't want that. Herbie told me. So then the years pass by. Now Rich is a senior in college trying to figure out he's about to graduate trying to figure out what he wants to do After he graduates this is he's already fallen. He's like I want to be a writer and this is where you know It's very important No 1 else can live your life But you and where he goes against the advice, in my opinion wisely, goes against the advice that his father gives him.

I was a senior in college. When Herbie asked what I planned to do after graduation, I told him I hoped to get a job at a newspaper or magazine. I want to be a writer, dad. If you really want to be a writer, he said, you should go to law school. That way, if it doesn't work out, you'll have something to fall back on and this is 1 of my favorite sentences in the entire book I told him I did not want something to fall back on Because people who have something to fall back on usually end up falling back on it.

That's exactly how I feel. Jeff Bezos said the same thing. Plan B, Jeff has this great quote, he said, Plan B should be to make Plan A work. And So a few years later, all the kids are spread out all across the country. They have their own families, their own lives.

Herbie is still at it, constantly eating like crap, not take care of himself, pushing it to the limit, working all the time and thinking, you know, nothing can kill me. And he winds up passing out and having me rush to the hospital that's we discovered he has to have a quadruple bypass open heart surgery and so all the kids come in all over the country to be with them and they're saying OK we're we're assembling a team like the best team that we can get The surgery is going to be in a couple days. And so Rich goes to the hotel. He's like, I'm going to go home. I'm going to go to the hotel.

Gets some sleep for a few hours. Gets called a few hours later. You need to rush back here. And turns out he couldn't even wait 2 days. He starts going into like, I guess it's considered a heart attack.

His valve failed. I don't know if that's considered a heart attack or not. And they have a hard time in the surgery. Looks like he might die on the table. He eventually gets out, but I'm gonna read to you.

This is Rich's reaction to seeing his dad after Herbie almost dies during open heart surgery. "'They wheeled him past on the way to the ICU. He looked lifeless, inanimate, cold, and blue. My weird detachment, " so what he's talking about there is the fact that he could not understand. This happens later when his mom dies, too, where the doctors are explaining, like, the gravity of the situation to you and I went through this too because my mom died of breast cancer and it was like multiple like 2 years of just hell constantly going the hospital dealing with doctors and what's weird if you've been in any kind of experience like that you think you'd like be distraught the entire time and it just like comes in waves where like you feel almost like you're going through the motions like you there is no emote like you have no emotions at this point you're just trying to listen to what the doctor saying or like just Trying to get to the next step and then it just a wave it just knocks you out and like the most insane Emotional experience at least that I've ever had and this is exactly what happening is happening to rich at this point Cuz up until this point, okay, what do we have to do?

Okay, we're he's in the hospital. He's stable now We're gonna get the team of doctors Thursday morning. We're gonna take care of this. He's gonna be okay He's gonna be okay. Same thing when his wife died or excuse me.

His mom dies keep saying, you know, it's okay She'll be out. She'll be on next week. She about next week It's almost like this weird denial this like self-preservation denial that that occurs over and over again so he had been experienced that up until this point so he's gonna be fine he sees like he goes back right before this happens because his sister was in the room when they had to rush him and they'd like cut open his shirt and so she's holding his dad's like tattered shirt when they like cut and rip it off him, right? And so it says they wheeled him past, he was inanimate cold and blue. My weird detachment evaporated in an instant.

I fell through the floor and back into reality. I nearly burned on re-entry. Bile rose in my throat. I reeled, turned, ran down the hall, down the stairs, through the lobby, and into the light of morning, where I found a bush and puked into it and then he goes into the fact that takes his dad about a week to get ice out of ICU there's some more detail in the book but apparently after like surgery like this is very common to have like a peak and valley in the patient's emotional state like they sometimes get extremely depressed and so this is really interesting this is really why we really think about like why I wanted to read this book There's this quote in Francis Ford Coppola's biography that I read for Founders episode 242 and it says you can and this is something I've noticed over and over again when you're reading biography. You can always understand the son by the story of his father.

The story of the father is embedded in the son and that works across generations because so far we've seen that idea as the son writing about the father but the father had his own father. So check this out. The week that followed surgery was tough. Sometimes he was elated to be alive, sometimes terrified, not merely by how close he'd come, but how this near-death experience made life seem arbitrary and meaningless. I sat by his bed for hours.

You have to be more careful, I said. What would we do without you? I expected him to laugh when I said this, but he wept instead. I had never seen him cry like that. He said He could not stop thinking about how short he had fallen from the goals.

He had once set for himself. I Scoffed at this then told him what he had told his own father in the hospital You've done great No, I haven't he said All I've ever done is what I think my father would have done. And then this is what Rich said, but maybe that's all anyone has ever done. And that to me Just reading that gives me chills because it makes sense why like especially a kid the impact of like loss of a father would happen Would have on them right but the people I think at least I didn't understand and so I started reading a lot of biographies And in living other people's lives through their eyes is You're gonna feel that way when you're an old man or old woman yourself And so like I think about the the second James Dyson biography That I read it's uh, it's podcast number 205 and he talks about this He talks about this in his first biography as his first excuse me his first autobiography But at that point, you know, I think he's in, he might be like 40 years old. When he writes the second, maybe he's like 45, when he writes the second, he's a 70 year old man who's lived an unbelievable, like experienced an unbelievable amount of life in those 70 or 75 years.

And in that book, he is writing about the fact that his dad dies. I think James was like 9 when his dad dies. And his dad is dying from cancer. He's dying from cancer as a young man. He's got like 3 young kids.

And he talks about the last time he ever saw him that they lived in a small town and he had to leave to go get treatment in I think London in this case and he's going for he's going to the train station and he describes this experience now looking back 60 years after the fact I'm gonna try to read it and not get choked up because again when you're reading these books it's not like you're reading passively like you you are like you put yourself it's natural to put yourself in this story and think like what would I do in that situation I think that's also why it's like you can learn so much it's like it's like you're attaching this this vivid emotion to like a lesson that you're being taught by somebody in many cases that have been years dead. But James said, that was the last time I saw him. His brave cheerfulness chokes me up every time I recall the scene. It is impossible to imagine my father's emotions as he waved goodbye knowing that he might be on his way to London to die. 60 years have not softened these memories nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his 3 children growing up.

I felt the devastating loss of my dad, his love, his humor, and the things he taught me. I feared for a future without him. And to think how impactful that relationship is. You have Herbie, seconds away from death. He almost died.

And his thought, as a grown man with kids out of college, I think he's a grandfather at this point, and he's still thinking about his own father. I think these are important things. I'm not trying to be morbid or morose by any means. I think you'll make decisions differently if you realize that you and I are probably no different than James Dyson. That 60 years from now, when you're 75 years old, you're still gonna be thinking of these things.

I try to figure out, it's like I try to make decisions across time. It's not just how I feel right now. It's like even my own dad, he's been like smoking 2 packs of cigarettes for like 30 years. He's not in good health and we don't live in the same city and it's like I'm constantly going on my way even when I don't want to. And to be clear like sometimes it's like oh, I'm taking my time with work or you know It's kind of pain the ass to travel It's like it doesn't matter you are going to regret it if you do not spend you have no idea This could every time I see him and I don't even know if I Don't know.

I haven't told him this. I don't know if I will. I just assume that, I have to assume that this might be the last time I ever see him. And I think the fact that I've been doing this a lot, and I messed this up, I did not make, I made this mistake with my mom. I thought I had more time than we did, which is so stupid.

But I think reading these books is helping me make a better decision in this regard, is basically what I'm trying to tell you. And so after he recovers from this near-death experience, he changes. And this is where Rich just has a fantastic line where he says even our heroes falter And this is where his dad fails up to live to his own rules. He has like a midlife crisis He's gonna wind up having an affair with a younger woman And so it says He seemed edgy when he was with us, even a little angry. What's wrong with you, I asked.

What are you talking about? You've been mean lately, I said. You're crazy. And so they're at dinner, and his brother Stephen is with them. I'll tell you what's wrong with him, said Stephen.

He's realizing that he won't be around forever, and that he's not going to reach a lot of the goals he set for himself and he's much closer to the end than to the beginning. He meant this to be funny but he wound up cutting way too close to the bone. Is that true? I asked my father. It's bullshit, said Herbie, more to himself than to us.

This is the context for what followed, the part of Herbie's life that remains a puzzle for me. It violated the rules that he'd set for us over the years. And so his father is famous and rich and well known and he starts having an affair with a much younger woman. The woman is only 10 years older than his youngest son. She was 10 years older than me, around 40 years old.

She was dating my father's friend Sid. The Age difference struck me as odd. Sid was old enough to be her father. And so he meets her because Larry King at this point is in LA and their whole crew, like the warrior crew, like when they were kids, they're still friends. So they'll travel all over the country, hanging out with each other.

And so at this point, his father, Herbie, is making a ton of trips for no reason just to hang out with Larry and enjoy California, I guess. Larry had married his ninth wife. That's incredible. Then at her insistence, moved his CNN show to Los Angeles. Herbie began going out there to see Larry.

He invited my mother, but she refused to go. Penny, which is the woman, this is gonna be that young woman that he's gonna have an affair with, Penny, who had broke up with Sid, pulled Herbie aside during 1 of those visits. She said she knew about his work as a negotiator and she needed help There were at some point the relationship became physical I don't know the details and I don't want to know and this is the crazy part. She starts penny starts extorting Herbie she wanted money gifts and to be taken on vacation when Herbie refused she threatened to tell his wife and the children everything. After he depleted his savings to placate her, she called my mother and told her anyways.

And then this is Rich's reaction, which might be surprising. I was disappointed by her be but sympathetic to his brush with death, his fear of oblivion, the darkness ahead, his desire to live his hunger for more life, which to him must have meant novelty new experience even danger had pushed him to folly. There was tremendous fallout from the affair and so that's the page where he says even our heroes falter so they wind up trying working it out they wind up staying together and so a few years later there's another tragedy this is his mother's unexpected death I never worried about Helen's health in comparison to Herbie she seemed rock solid and bulletproof which is why I thought nothing of it when Herbie called me to say that my mother had checked into a hospital with stomach pains. Herbie said the diagnosis was ischemia. What's that I asked?

I don't know he said. Do a Google. I looked it up when we got off the phone. My father got something wrong I told my wife. He says that she has ischemia.

But according to this, if she has ischemia, she's going to die My wife later said that each time we spoke on the phone so over I'm skipping over some parts here But every time there's an update it gets like worse and worse and worse and then it's like ICU and like realizing he kept saying oh, no, she'll be fine. She's coming back out. My wife said later on that each time we spoke on the phone, my news was worse, but I didn't seem to realize it. You prepare yourself for the big moment, then you don't even notice when it arrives. I thought I was passing time while my mother was being treated.

It was only later that I realized I was watching my mother die. 1 minute she was fine. The next minute she was gone. She failed so fast And so this is very close to the end of the book. And so I wrote to myself, I was like, this is his mother's death.

This is when the book switches from a biography of his father to how Rich is forced to deal with the death of his parents. But I was wrong about that. Herbie's still alive. People have died all around him, but he keeps going, instructing the young in the Jedi art. He's not quite as fast as he used to be, but what he's lost in speed is made up for in perspective.

He keeps meeting people who said his books have been part of their lives. They felt as though he'd been with them when they bought their first car, closed their first deal, tried to reason with their kids. A new kind of freedom has come with age. He can say what he wants without feeling bad. He can do what he wants without asking permission or calculating the extended effects.

Longevity, survival, these have been added to his list of accomplishments. How he's continued to participate in the world even as everything in it has changed. When COVID swept through New York in 2020, he accepted it with equanimity. You'll be fine, he said. I'm the 1 who will probably die and let's be honest, that's no tragedy.

The quarantine robbed us of time together but spurred me to call him more often. 1 day I finally just came out and asked, what is the meaning of life dad? The meaning of life he said laughing. Don't you know? The meaning of life is that there is no meaning of life.

None that we can know. That's not your business anyway. Your business is to be a decent person, raise nice kids and keep going as long as you can. The meaning of life is more life. And that is where I'll leave it.

It was an absolutely fantastic book to read. Really fun, really well written. If you wanna buy the book, use the link to send the show notes to your podcast player or available at funderspodcast.com and you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you don't get this book, make sure you have Rich Cohen's other book, The Fish That Ate the Whale. I think it's a book I could easily recommend.

It should be in every entrepreneur's library. He's a really gifted writer. That is 262 books down, 1, 000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.