#262 Herbie Cohen (World's Greatest Negotiator)

What I learned from reading The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator by Rich Cohen. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [1:20] The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen (Founders #255) [2:42] You Can Negotiate Anything: How to Get What You Want by Herb Cohen. [3:57] Even our heroes falter. [6:01] 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. [7:20] He was proving what would become a lifelong principle: Most people are schmucks and will obey any type of authority. [7:34] Power is based on perception; if you think you got it, you got it, even if you don't got it. [7:54] Nolan Bushnell to a young Steve Jobs: “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.” from Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson. (Founders #214) [10:30] 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 motivations, 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 from no to yes. [14:01] Those who can live with ambiguity and still function do the best. [14:21] Ambiguity is the constant companion of the entrepreneur. [15:26] Don't bitch. Don't complain. Just play the cards that you've been dealt. [20:12] Most people try to blend in. Herbie went the other way. When they zig, I zag. [21:49] 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 family. Don't rat. Don't turn your brother in to the cops. It was another one of his big lessons. Loyalty. Without that you have nothing. [27:03] Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl [30:11] When it comes to negotiating you'd be better off acting like you know less, not more. [32:18] How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know by Byron Sharp [35:56] 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." And he'd made his decision about the book. In case of rejection, the only thing that would change was his opinion of the publishing house. [37:01] It took 18 no's to get to a yes. [37:37] Herbie sells his book by hand. This part is incredible. [40:36] 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. [43:50] 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. [47:34] You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son. —Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life by Michael Schumacher (Founders #242) That was the last time I saw him. His brave cheerfulness chokes me 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. Sixty years have not softened these memories, nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three 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. — Invention: A Life by James Dyson (Founders #205) [52:48] Even our heroes falter. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  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 one 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?

• 0:45David Senra?

  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 we're going to 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 Zemurray.

• 1:29David Senra?

  And it's one 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 one 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 going to 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, one of the most bizarre openings to any book that I've ever read, and it's just Herbie.

• 2:14David Senra?

  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,

• 2:56David Senra?

  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's 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 Ruskies," and learned what he calls "the Soviet style." He helped settle the NFL Player Strike in 1987.

• 3:36David Senra?

  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, 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.

• 4:19David Senra?

  When we got near the front, my father said, 'The car in front of you is gonna 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."

• 5:01David Senra?

  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 they're friends for an entire lifetime. Like, there are stories later 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 one of them, one 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, it 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.

• 5:45David Senra?

  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.

• 6:29David Senra?

  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 nine years old and 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.

• 7:14David Senra?

  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,

• 7:56David Senra?

  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, it 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 his, 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.

• 8:40David Senra?

  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 Mapo. Mapo 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, not only did you guys lie about this student of ours dying, but then you raised money and you tried to keep it, they were gonna expel or suspend Larry and Herbie. And so, this is where we see

• 9:24David Senra?

  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 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 wanna 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.

• 10:08David Senra?

  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

• 10:49David Senra?

  at stake. If you address that predicament, you can move anyone, even a junior high principal, from no to yes.

• 10:59David Senra?

  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 out to get some ice cream on a snowy day and they convince, they stumble across 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 he in fact did nothing. And so it says it was 1 a.m. 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 eight terms as mayor of New Haven before moving to the US Congress. Herbie and Larry

• 11:42David Senra?

  worked the crowd. Hoo-Ha, which is another one 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 one campaigner, that no one 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

• 12:25David Senra?

  America. Paul Revere's Knight 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 of the 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 one 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 Hou 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 donuts just as the same people, just as many donuts as the people that actually put the work in.

• 13:09David Senra?

  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 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

• 13:51David Senra?

  and strong while others wept and told on their friends. It taught him how to spot mannerisms, tics 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 his son. Those who can't stand uncertainty get their certainty but pay for it. And so the note I left 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 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.

• 14:34David Senra?

  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. 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. 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.

• 15:18David Senra?

  You can't build a team around a random strategy, he explained. Maybe in a perfect world, heaven or fantasy at the end. 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 that 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 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.

• 15:59David Senra?

  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 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.

• 16:43David Senra?

  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 Herbie as soon as he sat down. Herbie's version is more fantastic. Ellen was sensible, committed to the literal truth.

• 17:27David Senra?

  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

• 18:12David Senra?

  he's going to start working in the insurance industry, which is where he gets to practice his trade in 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. "Ask," and then this is where we're going to see that he's very gifted in language. "Ask 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 crew chef and crew chef banging his shoe on the table and screaming, 'We will bury you.'" "Crew chef, who all the while has two perfectly good shoes on his feet."

• 18:57David Senra?

  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 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.

• 19:42David Senra?

  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, so 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 teaching his son, and I guess his two other kids, his other son and his daughter, about just all the stuff he's learning throughout his life. 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, 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."

• 20:27David Senra?

  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 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 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's 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

• 21:12David Senra?

  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 Herbie, 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 family. Don't rat. Don't turn your brother into the cops." This kind of reminds me of my dad.

• 21:54David Senra?

  "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 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 where he's like, forget this. I'm going into business for myself. Herbie quit his job. At this point, he'd been transferred. He'd been 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.

• 22:37David Senra?

  So he's been spending his whole career negotiating. He runs up, 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 is 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 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, I think he's gone 300 days out of the year. And so we'll get there in one second. This is a description of his father from Rich's eyes when he was a kid. "He was a man of tremendous appetites for comedy, success, love and food.

• 23:18David Senra?

  He was one of those human yoyos 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.

• 24:02David Senra?

  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, but 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 insists, 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

• 24:46David Senra?

  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 in 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 the worst. 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.

• 25:29David Senra?

  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, he becomes like this guru. He's all over, like, all over all forms of media, throughout like the 70s and 80s, on the bestselling 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 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

• 26:12David Senra?

  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, you know, books the most important way. Like, he's like, there's a reason that when God wanted to talk to us, he put it in a book.

• 26:57David Senra?

  He would tell his son, he didn't make a movie. When they say he 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 threaten to rob you of your very self, of your inner freedom. Herbie believed it was all about confidence, behaving as if you belonged.

• 27:41David Senra?

  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 in his own life, the fact that if you pretend to be completely in control, people will assume that you are. So let's say that might be 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. 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, that used to be Sam Zomri's own house. And Sam Zomri is like a legend in New Orleans. And so that leads him to discovering who Sam Zomri is, doing all that research,

• 28:26David Senra?

  and then writing, you know, 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 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 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 maître 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.

• 29:10David Senra?

  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 himself, 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.

• 29:55David Senra?

  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 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 are, I don't understand. Help me. Divest yourself of preconceived notions and biases.

• 30:37David Senra?

  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 fame is 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 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.

• 31:22David Senra?

  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 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 and most, and some of them are not biographies.

• 32:07David Senra?

  But I had two really smart people, both listened 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, I think, is What Marketers Don't Know. And the main, as far as I understand, I haven't 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 gotta read the book for myself. But I thought that was interesting. Someone sees your name three times, they feel as if you're everywhere, so you must be famous. And if, 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.

• 32:52David Senra?

  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.

• 33:36David Senra?

  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." Can you imagine a more painful way to write a book? In a single marathon session in a basement.

• 34:19David Senra?

  Then he lists all these other famous writers and what they used to help write. Kerouac used Benzodrine. Hemingway drank Anacet. Hunter S. Thompson dropped LSD. For Herb Cohen, there was nothing but lettuce, bread, and black coffee. And so he finishes his book in this eight-month session where that's all he's gonna work on. And he decides, hey, this is before it's published, by the way, they decide to take this like, super-long road trip. And the reason being is like, 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.

• 35:02David Senra?

  Alan 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 forty years after this is happening or so, and now Rich has written ten, twelve, eight different books.

• 35:42David Senra?

  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.

• 36:25David Senra?

  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, send the book. Wait, wait, wait, rejected. Weight on Herbie, and it must have, he did not show it. He never stopped believing he would find a publisher. "It only takes one," 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 that he said that. It took 18 noes to get to a yes. And so, the publishing house that said yes was a tiny publishing house.

• 37:10David Senra?

  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 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.

• 37:53David Senra?

  So he made he'd go to each new he'd 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 one 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, this is hilarious. 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."

• 38:33David Senra?

  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, then a regional bestseller, then 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.

• 39:15David Senra?

  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, they're, you know, 25, or they're 32, or they're 45. I would do this for when I was like, listened to hip hop growing up, like, oh, when this album came out, you know, Jay-Z was 32, for example, or whatever. And so you always try to think of 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 pre-history of somebody before they become the person you know.

• 39:58David Senra?

  And then a celebrity or like a famous, successful like entrepreneur, obviously, we're going to 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 I want to read this experience that he's having on one of these trips back to Bentonhurst 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 one hand. He nodded at people as they went by. Now and then, someone shouted his name. He would shout back.

• 40:38David Senra?

  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 videos, like, this is a picture of my dad when he was 30, and this is at a surprise birthday party.

• 41:23David Senra?

  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 he misses his dad and like, 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 and 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.

• 42:06David Senra?

  And then we get to the point where Herbie's own dad dies. And this is going to come up later on, in a 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 you've 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."

• 42:51David Senra?

  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.

• 43:02David Senra?

  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 all in, he's like, "I want to be a writer." And this is where, you know, it's very important, no one 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.

• 43:47David Senra?

  That way, if it doesn't work out, you'll have something to fall back on." And this is one 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 taking 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 to be rushed to the hospital.

• 44:33David Senra?

  That's where he discovered he has to have, I think, quadruple bypass open-heart surgery. And so all the kids come in all over the country to be with him. And they're saying, "Okay, we're assembling a team, like the best team that we can get. The surgery's gonna be in a couple of days." And so Rich goes to the hotel. He's like, "I'm gonna go to the hotel, get 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 two 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.

• 45:19David Senra?

  "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 two years of just hell, constantly going to 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're, there is no emo, like you have no emotions at this point. You're just trying to listen to what the doctor's saying or like just trying to get to the next step. And then it just, in just a wave, it just knocks you out.

• 46:04David Senra?

  And like the most insane emotional experience, at least that I've ever had. And this is exactly what is happening to Rich at this point. Because up until this point, he's like, okay, what do we have to do? Okay, he's in the hospital. He's stable now. We're going to get the team of doctors Thursday morning. We're going to take care of this. He's going to be okay. He's going to be okay. Same thing when his wife died, or excuse me, his mom dies. Keeps saying, you know, it's okay. She'll be out next week. She'll be out next week. It's almost like this weird denial, this like self-preservation denial that occurs over and over again. So he had been experiencing that up until this point. He's like, oh, he's going to 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 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.

• 46:49David Senra?

  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 reentry. 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 it takes his dad about a week to get out of ICU. There's some more detail in the book, but apparently after like surgery like this, it's very common to have like a peak and valley in the patient's emotional state. Like they sometimes can get extremely depressed. And so this is really interesting. And this is really why, if you really think about it, like why I wanted to read this book.

• 47:31David Senra?

  There's this quote in Francis Ford Coppola's biography that I read for Founders, episode 242. And it says, 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.

• 48:14David Senra?

  "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."

• 48:59David Senra?

  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 happen to them, right? But what 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 second James Dyson biography that I read, it's podcast number 205, and he talks about this. He talks about this in his first biography, 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, or maybe he's like 45, when he writes the second, he's

• 49:39David Senra?

  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 nine when his dad dies, and his dad is dying from cancer. He's dying from cancer as a young man. He's got like, three 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.

• 50:19David Senra?

  Because, again, when you're reading these books, it's not like you're reading passively, like you are, like you put yourself, it's natural to put yourself in the 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 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. Sixty years have not softened these memories, nor the sadness that he missed enjoying his three children growing up.

• 51:02David Senra?

  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 to say. 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, you know, when you're 75 years old, you're still gonna be thinking of these things.

• 51:45David Senra?

  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 two 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 a pain in 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

• 52:28David Senra?

  with my mom. I thought I had more time than we did, which is so stupid. But I think reading these books helps, 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.

• 53:11David Senra?

  "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 gonna reach a lot of the goals he set for himself, and that 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.

• 53:54David Senra?

  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, hang 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, you know, 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

• 54:39David Senra?

  affair with, Penny, who had broke up with Sid, pulled Herbie aside during one of those visits. She said she knew about his work as a negotiator and she needed help. 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 Herbie, but sympathetic too.

• 55:24David Senra?

  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.

• 56:09David Senra?

  "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, 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.

• 56:54David Senra?

  One minute she was fine, the next minute she was gone. She failed so fast.

• 57:01David Senra?

  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 desk. 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.

• 57:44David Senra?

  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 one 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. 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?

• 58:26David Senra?

  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 want to buy the book, use the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, or available at founderspodcast.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.

• 59:09David Senra?

  That is 262 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.