What I learned from reading The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator by Rich Cohen.

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.

This car has all the what, but it is seriously deficient in the how.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Larry described his demeanor as totally whipped.

Larry always spoke of this as Herbie's first negotiation.

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.

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.

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.

All night I've been hearing about the great work that this young man Zeke has done for us.

Larry stood up, waved, and then introduced Herbie saying, he's the real hero.

Herbie gets up and starts talking, Larry said later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 just want to update where he's at in his career at this point in the story.

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 gone 300 days out of the year.

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.

All the needles touched red, but he just went on smoking, binging, running, fasting.

When trying to scare him straight, I asked, what will I do if you die?

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.

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.

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 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.

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#262 The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator