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Herbie Cohen

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2022-08-11

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2022-08-11

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1. “Let's be honest, that's no tragedy. The quarantine robbed us of time together, but spurred me to call him more often. One 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.”

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2. “Kirby'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.”

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3. “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, 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.”

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4. “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 one morning, went down there, and stayed down there until he had finished eight months in a hole. Forty 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.”

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5. “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 have 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 three. If someone sees your name three 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, some of them are not biographies. But I had two 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, two weeks, maybe four weeks, had recommended the same book. They're like, David, you need to read this book, How Brands Grow and the subtitle.”

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6. “Help me, divest yourself of preconceived notions and biases, ignorance even if feigned, will produce curiosity, humility, open mindedness, and the kind of innovative ideas that bring people together. So this is when Herbie's starting to get famous. This is right before he's going to write his book and then his famous going to 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 assigned he's like, hey, cover this, you know, the world's greatest negotiator, Herbie Cohen. And it's seeing this interaction, seeing this freelance writer follow his data 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”

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7. “Less, not more, in some cases dumb is smarter than smart and inarticulate 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.”

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8. “And so once his father went into business for himself, when he wasn't giving speeches for governments or at corporations, he was running his own seminar, Rich and then his other siblings 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 then he's got these counterintuitive ideas on negotiation that he would teach over and over again. By ceding 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.”

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9. “Sold out for months that we never get in. He insisted that we go anyway. He walked to the front desk and said, Herb Cohen, table for three. 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. Five 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.”

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10. “This idea that Nolan Bushnell had taught Steve Jobs at Herbie clearly discovered in his own life the fact that if you pretend to be completely in control, people assume that you are. So let's say that maybe the third time I've 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. 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 used to be Sam's a Murray's own house. And Sam Zurray is like a legend in New Orleans. And so that leads him to discovering who Samsa Murray is doing all that research and then writing one 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.”

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11. “He thought books 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 his 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 Victor 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 threaten 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 probably the third time I've mentioned to you so far in the book.”

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12. “What Rich had to deal with, like what his dad was doing when Rich was a kid. He became 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 they'd call him 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 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, he had like a holy reverence for the written word.”

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13. “How to fight, and then even when you 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 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 going to go over me for a layup, you're going to pay a price.”

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14. “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 Steven, the two older kids, less tough on Rich. He was tough on my brother too. When he heard Steven was being tormented by bullies at school, Herbie drove him to the ringleader's 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, this is hilarious. He talks about, makes them play ice hockey, because that'll make you tough.”

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15. “Then he starts tying up all the lessons that he learned into this book, the publication of that book. It's going to sell over a million copies. It's going to go 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...”

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16. “Family. Don't rat. Don't turn your brother into the cops. This kind of reminds me of my dad. It was another one 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 there in one second. I just want to update where he's at in his career at this point in the story. This is where he's like, forget this. I'm going into business for myself. Herbie quit his job. At this point, he's been transferred and 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.”

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17. “Trick the other opponent, make the other person feel that they're getting a good deal and 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 going to 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 two 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 herbia, it 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...”

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18. “Because really the way I feel, the way I think rather of the book I hold in my hand, it's just like the distilled knowledge of your father that you can read 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 by 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's told him, but his father, as we see, is kind of like loose with the facts and wants to be more drama in the story. It's more important for him that the story is interesting than that 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.”

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19. “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 four times in five 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 one of their three children that is actually born in the Midwest. He's going to grow up outside of Chicago. And his parents say, listen, we thought we were done. There's a reason there's this giant gap between you and your two older siblings. You were an accident, but we love you anyways. And so this entire time, he's just...”

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20. “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 spends nights at NYU law school and worked a variety of jobs during the day, eventually taking a full-time position at all state insurance. He started as a claims adjuster, a job that served as kind of a postgrad course in his lifelong study of negotiation. As, 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 two 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 two 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.”

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21. “It's 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.”

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22. “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, he's intentionally tries to make life more dramatic. Helen says it happened in the 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 one 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 Irby as soon as he sat down. Herbie's version...”

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23. “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 hardworking 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 bit oppressed because he feels like he hasn't achieved enough. And his drive, this internal drive to achieve, actually causes him because he winds up getting famous when Rich is still a young kid. So he winds up missing out on quite a bit of rich's childhood. And so it's at NYU where Herbie is going to meet Rich's future mom, Helen. And then they tell two different stories on how Herbie's version of events, like how I met your mother, is very different from the story that his mom was.”

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24. “For my father taking notes is key everywhere all the time because it lets you learn from the past, lets 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, lets 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 that you have around you. You can't build a team around a random strategy, he explained. Maybe in 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.”

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25. “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 his son. Those who can't stand uncertainty get their certainty but pay for it. And so the North myself when I got to this part was 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 Herbie's 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 two things that he's telling. He's retelling this story to his son later on. And the first one 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 just took notes.”

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26. “Eating the donuts just as the same people, just as many donuts 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 one 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 one 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 head 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 manuisms, ticks that indicate a lie.”

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27. “This is Herbie's first negotiation. Dr. Armor agreed not to expel us. And so this is the moral of the story according to Herbie. This experience led Herbie test the 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 at 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.”

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28. “Gift with negotiation. Herbie raises his hand and says, Wait a minute, Dr. Armor, you're making a terrible mistake. What did you say? asked Dr. Armor. 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. Armor, that's the principle, 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 three 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. doctor Armor sat back and groaned. Larry described his demeanor as totally whipped. Larry always spoke of”

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29. “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 as 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 you 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”

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30. “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.”

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31. “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 lessons and morals for his son. This was a story that happened when Herbie was nine years old.”

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32. “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”

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33. “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 Ruskies 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 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.”

    2022-08-11 · Founders · #262 Herbie Cohen (World's Greatest Negotiator) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “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 could 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 helicopered in to settle the strike. He helped resolve the Major League Baseball Umpire Strike in 1979, as well as the New Orleans Police”

    2022-08-11 · Founders · #262 Herbie Cohen (World's Greatest Negotiator) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source