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Welcome to the daily Stilik podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stilik's a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talked to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discussed the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.
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This is how to respond to everything. Life presents us with countless situations. Some big, some little, some expected, some quite pointedly the opposite. Some dignified, some lonely, some fortunate, some unfortunate.
How do we respond to them? Could these moments require anything in the way of a uniform response? As it happens? Yes.
Still, it's believed that no matter what was thrown at us, we could always respond with hard work, with honesty and helping others best. I can't. This was Marcus Aurelius's duty as emperor, just as it was, Mussonius's duty as an exile on a chain gang digging ditches. It was Seneca's role as he recuperated from illness as he worked in the royal court as he scrambled to write in his last days.
Doesn't matter who we are, where we are, what sudden reversal or bounty that fate has bestowed on us. Doesn't matter if we're in the middle of a pandemic or a runaway bull market, but the moments demand of us is work, honesty, and compassion. Good character and acts for the common good, as Marcus said, take solace in that. Doesn't matter what you're facing.
You're not lost or out of lost. You know exactly what to do. And that's a chapter that's adapted actually from the obstacles away, which you can pick up a weatherbound edition now in the daily Stokes store or signed copies in the daily Stokes store or anywhere. Books are sold if you haven't read it yet over a million people all over the world half.
I hope you check it out. The obstacle is the way the timeless art of turning trials into triumph. My first book on stoicism and I appreciate everyone that supported it over the years. I can't believe it was 10 years ago now, but it was at least 10 years ago.
Now I was in Octavia books in New Orleans when I lived there. I was just finished in trust in my mind. It may have been actually at the first book event I ever did for one of my books. I did a talk at Octavia books for Trust Me in Line and I saw this book.
It was called Fish that ate the whale by Rich Cohen. It's about this guy that Samuel Zemuri, the founder of United Fruit, one of the richest men in New Orleans, one of the most powerful controversial entrepreneurs of the 20th century, actually had that big wedding cake house and autumn in place in New Orleans. But it was a whole story I never heard of. And I loved it.
I wrote a little bit about it in the obstacles way. But more than that book, I just fell in love with the writing of the author. And I since when you find an author, you just love and you read all their stuff. I think I have read almost everything Rich Cohen has ever written in my red tough Jews, which he wrote after his book, Monsters About the 85 Chicago Bears, his book about the Chicago Cubs, his book Peewee's about youth hockey.
I had him on the podcast a couple about a year ago or so also incredible. His book, which he's ghost written for Jerry Wine Drop when I stopped talking, you'll know, and dead. Just seriously, one of the great writers, one of the most prolific writers of our time, and someone I actually interviewed because I wanted to know a little bit more about Zemuri, and I thought there as the number one or number two best negotiating book of all time, the other being Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, which is also incredible. Anyways, I was so excited that Rich finally wrote a book about his dad, absurd, larger than life character and this new book is called The Adventures of Herbie Cohen, The World's Greatest Negotiator.
It was just released last week. You know, Rich Cohen knows how to tell the stories of characters. That's what all his books are about. They're about characters.
And I just love Rich Cohen's writing. I was so excited to talk to him. I feel like I owe a debt to him, not just because I loved and I've used examples from his books in my books, but because he was so generous and kind to me when I was just a known writer writing The Obstacles away. So I'm excited to bring you Rich Cohen once again.
He's written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Harpers, among many other publications. He's been included in the best American essays and the best American travel writing. I recommended a bunch of his books, all linked to them in the show notes. I would start with a Fish that ate the whale.
I would read Tough Jews next. I think I might read Peewee's after that. You really can't go wrong with any of the books, but his new one, The Adventures of Herbie Cohen, about his father, fantastic, lots of great stories in there. And it's just a sweet book and we really get into it in this conversation.
I think you're going to like it. You can go to Rich Cohen's website, authorrichcoen.com. You can follow him on Twitter at Rich Cohen 2003 and you can follow him on Instagram at author.richcoen. Great, great interview.
Enjoy. So I love the new book. I was thinking about it because I loved Peewee's a bunch too. There's a line you have in the hockey book where you were saying that you're talking to your son's hockey coach and he was like, is your son having fun?
And you were complaining about playing time or something like this. And he said, you know, is your son having fun? And he said, yes. And then he said, then what do you care?
Reading about your father, I was curious what you thought he would think if a sports coach had ever said that to you when you were a kid or said that about you when you were a kid. My father truly didn't care about sports, about you sports. I think it's a generational thing. They never saw it as a serious thing.
You know, to them like working, I used to ask my father like how he completely missed the Beatles and Elvis Presley. And he said, I was too busy working. I had a job. I had a family and they saw, I mean, sports were fun, but it was, that's a huge change.
It's happened in the last 20 or 30 years. It's suddenly these things like sports teams seem important and like what happens seems important. So he would not have cared. And I might have cared about other stuff, college or school, but he didn't even show, he didn't even come to my games.
He did, he came to one baseball game and two hockey games and only probably because my mom made him. Yeah, so if it's not sports, what would he have thought of the idea of the, it's whether you're having fun that counts, not who wins. Well, he did not believe that whether you're having fun thing at all, I should say that. So I used to complain to him that I wasn't happy.
And he would say, you're not happy. Good. Happy people have never accomplished anything in the world. It's dissatisfaction that breeds progress.
You know, so as he's gotten older, he's 89, he's mellowed a little bit on that. But mostly he saw unhappiness as a great engine of history and we should embrace our unhappiness instead of trying to be happy all the time and being happy all the time was kind of a trap. Was it hard to grow up with that, like sort of ethos running through the house or do you think it informed who you are? I think when I was a kid, it was, I had a great child and a lot of fun.
And I think because I ignored him and I thought I was ignoring him. But of course it was seeping at some deep level that's come out as an adult. So it was fine as a child, but it's made my adult life definitely harder. You know, I feel like driven by an engine he put into me while I was asleep.
Yes, you sort of subconsciously pick up on like what a person should be doing, what a person is allowed to let themselves get away with. And like what's acceptable because that voice in your head of like, would my parents approve of this? Yes or no, sort of looms there. Right.
Like I'll give you an example. Yesterday I saw a driver on the road and I saw like a really cool, like a rocket car, like out of a cartoon, like red two-seater. And I said, wow, that's a cool car. And then I heard my dad's voice go bullshit car.
That's bullshit. Cause you can't have a two-seater. You got a family you idiot. How can you have a two-seat car?
It's always the money immediately killed my fun. Internally, I had the back and forth tennis match and he wasn't even there. Yeah, I think about all the things like, you know, I bet that's a cost of fortune to take care of. I bet it gets horrible gas mileage.
I bet that person actually isn't successful. They're just living way beyond their means. Just like that is something I think about a lot. I think about this sort of internal monologue, sort of the throwaway judgments that your parents write about things, how those seep into your consciousness.
And like it's not that they were wrong. It's that sometimes they were wrong. Sometimes they should just kept their mouth shut. But then other times they were right within the context that they lived or their economic circumstances.
And it's really hard as an adult to go like, yes, that is an appropriate attitude for someone who makes X to have. But if you make five X, you can throw it away on an inefficient part of you. It's hard to update those scripts in your head. Like one thing, like I grew up in Chicago and we, you know, some families had a swimming pool.
He was very against the swimming pool and he would do the math about how eight months a year the pool is covered because it's two degrees out. Then it's going to rain another fight. So the way he'd figure the math, you can use the swimming pool three days, three days of what you might up with. You know, and I think what happens with your parents is sometimes they say stuff when you're a kid and they might not even be serious or they might be not even thinking about it.
And it becomes hugely important to you. And I always take a great example of this is in the movie, you know, Talladega Nights, when he's a kid, his father says, you're not first, you're last and he bases his whole life around it. When he brings it back, he goes, I didn't say that. If I did, I was drunk.
That doesn't even make any sense. And that's like sometimes, you know, you take this stuff so seriously and it's not, it's an adult feeling with a kid. So yes, you got to be careful. Have you read the novel or watched the movie, The Apprenticeship of Denny Cravets?
Oh, of course. It's sort of your dad's generation. And you know, he has the grandpa's like, you're not a man if you don't own any land. Right.
And it's sort of like he ends up, what he ends up doing to get the land, to get his grandfather's approval is something his grandfather doesn't do. Like, you know, the penultimate moment of the, of the movie is he's accomplished all the things that he thinks that that generation needs to be proud of him. And then his grandfather doesn't approve because of what he had to do. And that to me is a warning against internalizing those scripts without the, without balancing them out.
I guess. Well, I'll give you an example of that, which is one thing my father said. He always heard from his great uncle was land, same dudgy crave. Yeah.
And he quoted a thing he said, women may leave, banks may fail, but good land lasts forever. And my father took this into some extent and he was big into buying real estate. I mean, and did very well in the few occasions that he did. And I recently was researching where that came from that saying, and it was an ad.
It was an ad for like a long island housing development, but it was like on a big printed sign. And it's funny because my father's whole thing is about questioning authority. And one of the things he has a lot of suspicion of is our big signs because they seem like they were printed there by God, but it was just a couple of guys in a room, smoking cigarettes, writing it out. You know, so, but basically this thing came down as family lore.
And I think it was an ad by the long island expressway, like in the 30s. Yeah. And it's weird how if you just take one piece of advice, you build your whole life around it. You become this almost cartoon figure.
I remember, is that worked at American Apparel for many years and jobs sort of similar to like the sort of sweet most story that you tell about one of these like hyper successful entrepreneurs, but profoundly flawed individuals. It was so clear to me, he was sort of almost in this kind of Gatsby esque or Dutt's, Denny Kravitz way, where he was like, he wanted to do this thing to impress these people. But it became such a like almost cartoonish pursuit of this thing that thinking that like, Hey, when I arrive here, I'll feel good, I'll feel happy, I'll be respected. And you never actually get it.
It's you're like Gatsby after the light. You never get there. It's what it's it's it's always recedes as you reach it. Now, I'll give you I've experienced my whole life, but I'm a massive Cubs fan.
You know, I wrote a book about the Chicago Cubs and they won the World Series in 2016 and I wasn't happy. I mean, I was glad they won the World Series, but it didn't fulfill me in the way I had expected. And I heard somebody want to say the reason you searched for this thing and you reach it and it doesn't make you happy, it's because it's not really what you're looking for. You know, it's a substitute for what you're looking for.
You're looking for some kind of truth or something, which you can never get the way that you pursue it. You know, when I remember I read that he craved because of Chinese like, you got to read this novel. It's all about like the it's all about the hustler, like how you should be like, he read the novel and didn't even understand that it was not just satire, but that it was it was criticism, right? Like Gatsby is the hero of the great Gatsby, but also the cautionary tale, right?
And we sort of hold up these figures as like, look at what they did. And we kind of we don't go like, yeah, but was it worth it? Right. But everybody makes that mistake with movies because style is so much more powerful than substance, you know?
So every gangster movie, which is posed as a cautionary tale, makes everybody want to live like a gangster. I mean, everybody who reads a great Gatsby thinks I want to have a lot of different colored shirts and cool cars and drink mint juleps and live out in a big, you know, when of course that's totally empty life and he's built it on a completely false premise. You know, but that's never the lesson you get. You always get the lesson of awesome.
That's how I want to live. Yeah, you forget that he ends up dead in his swimming pool and nobody comes to his funeral. I mean, think about think about Goodfellas. I mean, Goodfellas, you want to live like those guys and Goodfellas are the worst guys in the world and they all wind up brutally murdered or hanging from me books.
But the thing that sticks with you is you want to be one of those guys hanging out, you know, in the nightclub, sitting at the Copa Cabana and that overpowers everything else. That's what my father always warned about that. So he learned that lesson you feel like? Well, I feel like he grew up as far as the gangsters go.
I mean, he lived in a neighborhood at the time where they were and he sort of had a more of a realistic view of it and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. But I think, you know, one of the things my father did that was good and bad for me is he sort of say what everything he would always say with bullshit all the time. He never believed the hype about anything to the point where it made it hard to actually enjoy some things because you're like, this is bullshit. This is bullshit.
And one of his expressions was always when you strip away the phony tinsel underneath that, you find the real tinsel, meaning underneath the fake stuff is more fake stuff. So it's all a recipe for continually traveling and never quite arriving. Yes. Yeah, that's really interesting.
Yeah. One of my favorite passages in meditations from Marcus Rios, he's like looking at this feast and he's like, well, what is all this stuff? He's like, the wine is sort of rotten grapes and he's like, this is a dead pig. This is a dead bird.
You know, it's sort of like that when you strip away the tinsel, you see what's really there, but even that isn't maybe all that it seems. Yeah. And you could, you're always searching for the, to finally find the real thing. You know, one thing that you know, when I would come home from trips, my father, he would always look at my pictures and I would always take pictures of, you know, Monument Valley in, you know, at West and with no people and he'd be like, where the hell are the people?
Let me tell you're not going to care about this picture. In 10 years about this picture, Monument Valley, it's going to be the friends faces that you want to see. And I think that that's really true, that your only hope is sort of to build it on relationships. Well, yeah, flashing forward, obviously your father was very successful, but I remember reading, you mentioned this in some of your other books, those sort of breakfasts that he would have at Nate Niles with Larry King and all these people.
That seemed like a kind of wealth that not that many people ever actually accumulate. Right. But, but my father, the thing is my father grew up in Larry King, his name is Larry's Iger. They grew up in Brooklyn and they were little kids together and a bunch of other guys who were in this sort of club gang called the Warriors.
And he had all these lessons about how you should live and how an adult should be. And he wrote, You Can You Go Shade Anything, which was a big bestseller, but it was really it was a kind of a self-help book. And when I discovered it was like, and I'm sorry, Dan, but people who write self-help books in my experience are the people most in need of self-help. There's sort of course talking to themselves in the dark.
So when he got around Larry and those guys, he was instantly like a 12 year old kid again. And he forgot all that stuff and he just was kind of totally living in the moment. And as his kid, it was always a little disorienting. You know, once he took me to a baseball game and we got to go to the field during batting practice, mid-season game.
And my father saw Frank Robinson, a player he loved and he was a kid and he just took off like a kid to go talk to Frank Robinson. And Rick Sutcliffe, who'd been a pitcher for the Cubs and during batting practice, came up to me, saw it happen. He said, Did your dad just ditch you? Because he saw a famous person?
Yeah, someone who as someone who writes self-help books, you if you didn't need the advice, you probably would understand it at some sort of intuitive level that would make you incapable of rendering the advice. Right. So you're almost always are writing to yourself. You can it's like, like, Billy Bean was a better baseball player.
He probably would have been a worse manager. Right. Right. It's that by being a Michael Lewis talks about this, but by being just not good enough, you're forced to see it and understand it and articulate it in a way that people who are just actually good at it are not even conceptually aware of.
So I think that's probably part of the story. I mean, that's one of the things that fascinates me, like who made good coaches and sports, good players or bad players. Sometimes there's a good player who's a good coach, but it's unusual. Usually like my father started, he was in the army and he worked as a basketball coach for, you know, basically pro players have been drafted and he played basketball, but he was a pretty mediocre to bad basketball player.
And that caused him to sort of sit back and analyze and break down the game, which made him a very good coach. And I remember that Ted Williams, like the greatest baseball player of all time, one of them was the manager of the, I think the Washington, whatever they were before the Washington Capitol, the Washington Senators. Yeah. Yeah.
And he would be in hitting slumps and he would say, well, just hit the ball. Yeah. You know, Wayne Gretzky, the same thing, just score. You know, so like it was very hard for them to teach what came to them very, very naturally.
So it's the struggle and the figuring on how to overcome the struggle that certain people who are great coaches are able to then relate to players. I just heard this stat that shocked me, given that I hear from the sales staff, my publisher quite a bit. The status sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin work and self selling relationship building closing deals, which means they're not selling, right? And that's where today's sponsor comes in, Pipe Drive.
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Do it to be up and running in minutes. Yeah. I mean, you think about Michael Jordan, incredible basketball player. Also incredible businessman, right?
Creates one of the most valuable shoe companies in the world. Really bad NBA team owner. When those two skills should combine perfectly to make you very good at it. But I think probably if you think about what makes a good NBA front office, it's personnel, it's working with other people.
It's not just identifying talent, but nurturing talent, getting the most out of not that talented people, which is probably what Michael Jordan was worst at as a player. He, Kobe Bryant, other athletes where you have this thing where you're just like, why aren't you as good as I am? And it's almost this inability to comprehend why people just don't go into Michael Jordan gear or Kobe gear or want it as almost as unhealthily as Kobe or Jordan does. And then that makes it really impossible to just work with a flawed or an mediocre person, but as part of a larger organization.
Right. And you look at the bulls. Yeah, Jerry Kraus who Jordan obviously dismissed and didn't like and was short and fat and all that and was a brilliant basketball guy. And Jordan would go to him.
You could go make a list every year that Kraus made a draft that Jordan went with a different traffic and said, I want you to draft this person as if it was up to him. And if you look at the team that he would have drafted, they're terrible. Because he was just trying to draft Michael Jordan over and over again, whereas the team needed all these different role players. They already had Michael Jordan, you know, there wasn't going to be another Michael Jordan.
So they needed John Paxson and all these guys that, you know, that Jordan would not have signed necessarily. Yeah. Have you read the, have you read the Capon's class? Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. So you don't have the bulls without Michael Jordan, but Michael Jordan on the Bulls by himself is not that great. I know he's kind of the exception because they did win rings after he drove people away.
But that's more of the testament to Phil Jackson and also the exception to the rule where pretty good athlete, great coach. Yeah. No, I think that it's, it's super interesting. Like one of the, I'm a Bulls fan and one of the Rubs on Kraus is always, well, he didn't draft Michael Jordan.
Jordan was there when he got there, but it's like anybody could draft Michael Jordan. All you had to do was be a basketball fan in the early eighties to know that Michael Jordan was the best player in the world or, you know, very, very, very good. It's the guy who can draft. I don't know, Scotty Pippin, you know, from a little tiny college, you know, or Charles Oakley from a little tiny college, that's, that's what the sort of great basketball guy does.
He finds kind of hidden value. He likes Sam Zemuri, actually. Yes. Yes.
Uh, the sort of character, the misfits that end up being the perfect piece in the, in the puzzle. Yeah. They're overlooked because people just can't see them. You have to really understand what you're seeing.
Like, you know, so you're seeing this incredible player that's at this school that's off the radar. So, so going back to your dad, what would your dad think? Because have all your books been with F.S.G.? No.
Almost all of them? Yeah. What would you think about that? I would be curious about how he thinks about how he thought about your career, because, you know, negotiating contracts, working with agent.
How does he think about how you do what you do? Because you're at the high, you're not very high level of what you do. How does he think about that? I know he's always suspicious.
He always said that the worst career you could pick if you want to like have a family and make money is ballet dancer. And number two is writer. So he was always kind of very skeptical and, and always wanted me to go to law school. This was a thing.
I was, I wanted to play in the NHL when I was a kid. He assigned me a favorite hockey player, which was Ken Dryden, who's a goalie for the Canadians, because Ken Dryden had gone to law school and thereby, you know, always had something to fall back on. And even when my first book, which was Tough Juice, came out and was successful, I remember we were walking through Riverside Park and I said, what do you think I'll be doing in 10 years? I was 30.
And he said, 10 years will be 40. He'll just be getting out of law school. So I think he looks at the whole thing and, you know, he wrote these two books and he wrote a very successful book, but he wasn't really a writer in that. Like he doesn't go sit down and write every day.
He's a speaker, a teacher, and a storyteller who at some point took a bunch of stories together and wrote a book in the most ludicrous and sane way possible, which I saw when I was 12 or 11. And when he went down to our basement, which was an unfinished basement that flooded every time it rained with yellow legal pads and calligraphy pens and by hand, wrote this entire book over six months and didn't eat. I think he lost 40 pounds in the process and making it very hard from the right another book because he's like, I don't want to go through that torture again. You know, he made it.
So I think that his advice to me has always been, you know, hurry up and go back to law school. That's funny. Yeah, I think with my parents, it wasn't until their friends started to be aware of my books that they got it. Do you know what I mean?
It's like, like, because like there's the, oh, we're proud of you. It's great. But then it's not until it's like something impressive they can talk about to other people that they stop being so insecure about it, which is partly, I think, what, like, why do they want kids to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever? One, they know it's safe too.
They know it's a profession that they get is like a profession that successful people have. But I think it's always like, I think the most illustrative thing I saw during the varsity blues scandal, you know, where they brought their kids into college. Some hedge fund manager was he's like, look, I just can't have my son go to ASU. Right.
Right. Like, it was like, he didn't want to, because that was a shibbole is like, I have a dumb kid, right? Like, like, I have, I can pay, but my kid didn't get anywhere on his own. Right.
And like, I think for a lot of parents, it's like, what doesn't sound like a record scratch when they tell other parents overcoff? Right. Well, first of all, it's the same thing with the youth hockey, who's on the top team. You, I always thought parents were living to their kids and they wanted kids to be better players than they had been and to make the right turn instead of the wrong term.
But it really was about status now. Like, you, you, right, you feel like a higher place in the world if your kid's on a better team. And that's really true for college. The joke is my father always said, I know it could have been a joke.
You can never really tell that he wanted us to go to Yale. One of us to go to Yale. And none of us, I mean, especially me, I was like, didn't do well in school. I was very mediocre student.
I was a dumb kid, kind of. And at one point, much later, he said to me, you know, if you'd worked harder and really applied yourself, you could have gone to Yale. And I said, if you did better, you could have gone to Yale. I said, no, if you did better, I could have gone to Yale.
Because that's my takeaway from like, of varsity blues and everything. You feel like everybody's paying some backdoor in. But there's a really funny thing where I went to new church, high school outside of Chicago and they're putting together an alumni directory. I went to Tulane, good school.
Yeah. And my sister went to Tulane. I got my first book there. Very fun school to be.
So especially if you're from Chicago, where it's so cool. And the alumni people called my father and they said, we're just putting together a directory where did your son Richard go to school? And my dad said, Yale. And they said, well, we have down that he went to Tulane.
He goes, well, you got it down wrong went to Yale. And they said, we have Tulane. He's like, then why if you're so sure are you even calling me? They said, well, we're just checking as well.
You're being corrected. He went to Yale. So in the new trajectory, it says that I went to Yale. So at least he got that.
What was the whole thing? Did your dad get in a whole fight with the administrators at Tulane? Yes. Yeah.
Well, not the administrators. It was this kind of crazy thing, which is I took a creative writing class with this guy and I don't have any experience with really writing programs. And he was like a guru on the Tulane campus and he was like, yeah, wait to get in his class. And and he did this thing, which I'd never seen where you read, you have you read a story, you go around a circle and he would just rip you to shreds, try to completely humiliate you.
And he had these kind of totees who then join in and amplify whatever he said. And it was just this horrible thing. And it happened to me. It happened to everybody except a few kids who were his favorites.
And I'm like, I want to fight back, but I can't fight back over my own story. Cause I was like a winer and a crybaby and not doing that. So there was a girl that I was friends with outside. She was a business major.
She wrote a really good story. He destroyed it. She ran out of there crying. I felt like I should say something to him.
And he said his goal in the class was to leave blood on the floor. And then I responded in a really stupid way, which was he had to write a modern poem and I wrote a poem with all these funky line breaks that just said, fuck you, you fuck, fuck you and read it. And that was like persona non-brought after that. He just wouldn't even read my stuff and he gave me a B.
So I couldn't complain, but he wasn't going to read what I wrote. And it really upset me and I went home over Christmas break. And I was telling everybody about it. I told my friends, told my mom, told my dad, he didn't care.
Nobody cared. And finally he said, if I sit down and listen to you for five minutes, you just tell the story and then we just shut up about him, sick and care about it. So I sat down and in the courts telling him I saw him, I saw him become enraged at this teacher. And the thing about my father is he would get off, especially if he was between gigs or had nothing to do.
He looked at all this stuff as kind of a game and he saw himself as out there fighting for justice, freelance in the world. And he suddenly in his head saw this teacher, somebody that was destroying the creative impulse in people. So he became involved in writing back and forth and fighting with this teacher and then fighting with the whole English department and then traveling down there. Meanwhile, I had graduated from college and gone off and was living my life.
And I didn't even know this was going on. And he was still battling this and it was insane. And then he had kind of a heart issue and went to go into the hospital and I had all these letters and I said to him, you got to stop the two lane thing now. It's crazy.
And he said, I will not stop. This is like he's on his deathbed and he said, and your brother has been briefed. And if I should fall in the battle, your brother will continue on and continue waging it. So when it all ended, he got some stupid little concession, like they put the file in the letter guy's file and he had all these demands.
And I said, you see, it's not like five years doing this. And what'd you get? You got nothing. You got nothing.
You lost. And he said, wrong, I won. And I said, how do you think he won? He said, because the next time that teachers about to destroy a kid in their head will have a thought, maybe this one's got a greater crazy father to.
So that's how he saw it. He was laying down a marker. How did that make you feel? Did you like, because that kind of connects to the P.
We, a softy parent thing, like the parent that is crazy enough to fight for their kid, it's also probably completely mortifying and then also probably a little inspiring. But then also maybe there's this element where you find yourself like getting sucked into pointless vowels yourself. Right. Well, I didn't feel it was like the hockey parent thing because it wasn't about me.
Yeah. In that I was out of school. And his one demand was that all the kids retroactively be given A's except me because he wanted to seem like it was about me. I keep my B.
Everybody else gets hit. So I felt like it was crazy. You know, and this is kind of what he was like in that he would get, you know, my, like I said, people who write self-help books are most in need of self-help. So one of my father's big things is the key to success is to care, but not that much to remain detached, to look at this situation, which you're so worried about and say, it's merely a blip on the radar screen of eternity.
And he was great at talking me down when I was upset about something, but he himself would have these incidents where it would trigger some value he had or some code would be violated and he would lose all sense of perspective. And it became, you know, entertaining, crazy, but also, you know, you could see why he was sort of telling himself that he shouldn't care that much because the human instinct is to overcare. And that's why the hockey thing is when it's your own kids, you become, become completely nuts. But with my father, like I said, he didn't care about you sports.
He just didn't. But generally he cared a lot. And that was probably why he has to write the advice, care, but not that. Well, he has a whole thing where he's great at representing other people in negotiations.
One of the best ever, one of the very famous for it. And he was like on the start talks, he negotiated with the Russians over arms. He worked for Carter and for Reagan. He did hostage negotiations.
And this whole thing was because it wasn't his life he was dealing with. And this whole thing, like he would say, you know, there was a guy that he was negotiating for and the guy had lost all this money or he had lost it for him. And he said, but the truth is I cared, but not that much. Wasn't my money.
It didn't really care. So because of that, he was able to get the guy's money back because he was very free and loose and willing to walk away. So all this is about being able to recognize when basically you shouldn't be negotiating for yourself. Because it does seem like the two-lane thing.
And then when he gets what is every author's nightmare, you get sued for plagiarism, especially if you didn't actually do it, it seems like there were a handful of instances where when it actually involved him or his stuff, he got sucked away in it and he was good enough. He would win, but they were pure victories to say the least. Well, I remember going to jury duty and they asked me if I had any experience with the legal system. And I said, yeah, my father is lawsuits because it was one after five years.
And they said how to work out. I said, well, he won. But it was one of those deals where the trial becomes the punishment. You know, we spent more money on lawyers winning than he probably made on the book and gave away.
But see, the thing is for him, he knew that the stories in his book were things that came out of his life. I knew there was no plagiarism because those stories, like the first story of the book is about me. I lived it. You know, it was ridiculous.
They're family stories. And but and his publisher basically said to him, you just got to settle when a book hits this big, people bring these frivolous lawsuits because you'll just pay them off. And the cheapest thing is a few thousand dollars, pay them off. But he thought by paying them off, he would be admitting that he did something he didn't do.
And it became, but again, he carried way too much. I thought he made the wrong decision. I think just move on, you know, just forget it, move on. I think in the book, his lawyers says, just pay the parking ticket and go back to your car.
Yeah, that is, I think really good advice across like the snow, talk about how there's taxes in life, right? Not the taxes you pay the government. It's just like everything. There's taxes to everything.
There's a tax to being famous. There's a tax to traveling. There's a tax to being a guy. There's a tax to being a woman.
There's a tax to being gay. All the things that you end up being in life, there's a tax, right? And you got to pay the taxes and move on, pay the ticket and move on. If you get indignant and you take it personally, like you go, this isn't dating me as a human being.
I will not go along with it. That is the, uh, sometimes you win, but a lot you usually end up losing even when you win. Well, I lost like five years. Yeah.
You know, I mean, you got to say, so, but I think part of the problem was that when they, when they, when this happened, it was big news because the book was such a big head. And of course, when he won, it wasn't news because that's not an interesting story anymore. You know, but yeah, I mean, based on his experience, I believe you just move on because it's a trap. That's what I think all in the way traps, everything's a trap.
And the thing is not to get hung up in one of these traps, but to keep moving ahead, you know, I come to see like the whole world is like a series of hooks. You're trying not to get caught on. And that was a big, big hook that he got caught on. See, that's my favorite story in the fish that ate the whale is Zemuri and is, he has the small company that he's fighting off against United Fruit and they're trying to buy this land at the border and, uh, you know, the United Fruit with all the lawyers and, and all the money is like, well, let's see who owns this, you know, there's, who owns the land is it?
This country is it this country is it this person, this person, you know, that they go back and forth, they're fighting over it. And Zemuri just goes and he buys it from both people. That's its attack, right? Pay the parking ticket and go back to your car.
He's like, I don't care. It's a gory and not man. It's pull out your knife and cut it in half. And usually my father's like that actually.
And he's very good about seeing things that you don't see. So one stupid example was I was applying for a job. It's a summer job. I needed a recommendation.
I was in college and I went to my Spanish teacher and I asked him to write a recommendation and he said, okay, and my father said, well, what does the recommendation say? And I said, there's no way I could know because it's this whole sealed envelope right to the blah, blah, blah. He goes, are you crazy? You can't send a letter out like information is the most important thing you have.
This whole thing is you need time, information and power. Tick. That's his rule for negotiation. Like one of the most important things and you don't know this.
I can't find it. How am I going to find out? He said, tell them that you're applying for an internship at power negotiations. That was his business and have them send the recommendation.
I just had even thought of that. And I did. And the recommendation was, I'll just say the first line of it was though, Mr. Cohen is not the smartest person in class.
It's not a good recommendation. Right. It's a, it's the sort of pragmatist approach, not not being so precious about it and understanding that it's when you make assumptions, oh, this is fine. It's good.
That's what's the famous thing you said to you get till it kills you. What was that? You had a great line in the book. Oh, time will get all wounds right up until one kills you.
Yeah. Yeah. Just yeah. It's like, Oh, whatever, I don't care.
Whatever. That's great until it gets you. Right. You know, well, but, you know, it's like, I have a French and college.
You say those are those are their rules, not mine. You know, it's like that was his like, that's two lanes rules, not my rule. You know, so as far as the recommendations go. So it's sort of like, also, there's always, I always think there's more than one way that's going to cat.
See, the one great thing about my dad is many great things about him as a father. One great thing is he always told me was looking at stuff like a strategist. And no matter what the problem was, there was a solution. There was always something to do.
And that's his whole thing, which is he always wanted people to realize they had power, even if they thought they were powerless, that the whole his thing from his first book was power is based upon perception. If you think you got it, you got it, even if you don't got it. So it was like empowering the weak in situations. So there's always freedom and there's always something to do and there's always a move to be made.
And he felt when bad things happen, people immediately give in to despair and quit. And in fact, that's not the end. That's the beginning. That's when you start to operate.
And the way you should operate is not at a desperation, but fun. It's fun. Look at it as a game. Play it like a game.
And if you see it as a game, you'll have fun. You'll live longer. It's very big enemy of stress. And actually you'll be more successful because you'll play loose.
That makes sense. Yeah. No, no, I imagine that gives a kid a pretty powerful sense of your own agency. Right.
First off that, like when you come to your parents, it's not a dead end. Like, oh, I told mom and dad and now they're mad at me, right? Which is, I think I'll a lot of kids. You know, certainly that was my, like if I got an argument with a teacher, I was something I brought that to my parents.
It was like, I'm not going to do that because it's just going to add more stress on me. Like it's just, this is just going to get me yelled at or criticized or I'm going to be told how this is my fault. I've got to imagine that for a kid to hear like, oh, well, this is interesting. Let's see what we can do with this corner you've backed yourself into.
Like, let me see what you're working with and let's see where we can't get you closer to where you want to go. That seems like it would be not just inspiring, but in a sense, like bring you closer together because you see your parents as the solutions to your problem as opposed to another one of your problems. Right. And one of the things that taught me was like question authority.
You know, like just because somebody's in this position over the new, it doesn't mean that they know. And one of the things he always said when his favorite quotes is don't put your trust in princes. And this probably had to do with the fact that, you know, where he grew up, his parents and he grew up during World War II as a kid. And he saw the whole world fall apart and all these leaders in charge, but they let this horrible thing happen.
So basically he had this idea that you, it's the position and the person, like if he would meet, he would meet my teachers, I remember. And if it was a teacher that was knew what they were doing was a good, would not be involved. And if the teacher decided it's wrong, okay. And I would get punished.
But if he would, you know, something happened that he thought was, you know, in just or wrong or screwed up, it was an opportunity for him to sort of have fun and test some of his negotiating skills. But what it taught me was if I'd go to him, he was always on my side, always had my back, you know, and it gave you a sense of you got to question everything and make your own decisions and reach your own view of things and not accept what's just shoveled down to you. Yeah, I wrote down. You had a good line in the book that he said some of the most powerful words a person can say is I don't understand.
Help me. Yeah. Well, you always said like in a negotiation, everybody wants to appear super smart, like they know better. And he said the most powerful words in negotiation are, I don't know.
Can you, you know, because you got people actually working for you, he said, and helping you. And he said, you know, sometimes dumb is better than smart and in articulate is better than articulate for negotiation. And he always used as an example. His first negotiation here, he said was in the Bible when Abraham negotiates with God, not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
And he has a whole thing about Abraham, but that's a power differential. God, Abraham, and he, Abraham uses his weakness to sort of appeal to God's strength to help him. You know, so you could actually in some cases use your weakness or perceived weakness as a strength. Yeah, there's a line from Epictetus.
He says it's impossible to learn that, which you think you already know. Yeah. And I think about that all the time, it's like where either because you're egotistical and you just go around acting like you're perfect, you know, you miss all the things that you could learn. But then also when you know you don't know something, but you're too insecure to be like, sorry, what was that?
Or like, sorry, I didn't understand or like, you know, like when someone's like, Oh, have you ever seen that movie? And you're like, yeah, of course. You know, and then that and then you hope you can pick it up. And then you're like, I have no idea what this person's talking about.
But now I can't admit that, you know, I didn't see the Godfather or whatever it is, right? And now you feel like if you're not comfortable being like, I don't understand, I don't get it. Yeah. Can you explain that to me?
You you end up often getting yourself in worse trouble than whatever the embarrassment of like saying, I don't understand is we're appearing weak is. Yeah. Well, he would go around and give these lectures all over the country. And when I was a kid, it was a kid who appeared to go with him to help him set up and travel him and I write him right on a blackboard three words.
Who question mark, huh? HUH question mark? Why question mark? He said, those are the three most important words in the negotiation.
You know, when you put them together, who, huh? Basically, he says it takes it all the way back down to zero. And they're like, let's start over and explain this. Is that all?
So people try to bull you over with facts and information and their intelligence and their superiority and it makes them come down to what you're pretending is your level and explain it to you. And one of his things that he really taught me, which I've tried to live by is if you're if you're dealing with another person and you're trying to get something to deal, you actually want to bring them in and come up with the solution together. Because if you come up with the solution together, see, that's what you don't see in politics anymore. If you create the solution together, then both sides have a stake in making it a success.
And if you basically get everything you want out of negotiation and demolish the other side, you have humiliated the other side and they have no reason for the agreement to be successful. They have a stake in it failing and it will fail. You know, so a lot of his things is you get involved in these negotiations and they're long and they're drawn out and you don't want you want to speed to the end. You know, the example is like offering the asking price on a house.
And by doing that, you sort of screw up the whole process and cause a deal to fall apart. For example, if you offer the asking price on a house, which I found out, because you think you're going to just short circuit everything. Just done. Just done.
We'll take it. The first thing that those people think is not, Oh, great. We sold our house for the asset prices. Oh, no, we didn't ask for enough money.
And they start looking for a way out of the deal so they can put it back on the market and make what they think is a lot more money. And ultimately, they might never get that price again. You might not get your house and you both lost it. So you got to act like they're forcing you to come up, you know, to get to that price.
So by the end, they feel like I've gotten every bit of value out of this house I can and I've stretched a little further than I wanted. And now they want it to work. And that's like the win-win negotiation. Yeah, it's you think that being a good negotiation, I think people assume being a good negotiator is like aggressive, firm, unbending, etc.
But really what you're just talking about there is empathy, like not just what does the other person want, but what does the other person feel? And how do I make them feel like they're getting what they want? Even if actually I'm offering them less money in this, like, they think they want 500, you're actually helping them get what they want to feel by offering them 495 in a way that you're not by offering them 500. They would rather give $500.
Right. Or he would say offer them like 400 or whatever. You wind up at 450, let's say they're happier with 450 than they would be with 500, which sounds crazy, but it's true. And it's there's a reason why people go through these steps and he used to, you know, he always went back to literature and there's a play by Arthur Miller called the price and he used to always paraphrase it.
I don't know the exact quote, but it was basically to understand the price. You have to understand the player, which means that $500,000 might mean something to you, something else, what the person might want, might not even be money, might be something else. So you got to sort of empathize, you say radical empathy, put yourself in that person's shoes, understand where they're coming from, and then you'll understand the price. And one of the really cool things he did in his life is he helped, he worked with this guy, Walt Cyrene, to help set up the behavioral sciences unit at the FBI, where they would basically make profiles.
He did it like, it became famous for serial killers, but his thing was about hostage negotiation, you know, about you understand what's really going on inside the person so you can understand what they need to end this. You know, and that to understand that. And I always thought he was kind of a thwarted novelist and playwright. You're dad.
Yeah. Because what he liked to do is look at people, read their situation, try to understand them. And if you could understand them, he could deal with them. Yeah.
I think about like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is probably the most high stakes negotiation in human history. And one of the things that always struck me was Kennedy sort of sitting around this conference table and all these hardliners are like, you got to do this, you're going to look weak. And he has this realization that the same thing is happening to Khrushchev. Right.
And that they're both stuck, right? And obviously Khrushchev is wrong and obviously Khrushchev has made a mistake, but Khrushchev is now traps for having made said mistake. And Kennedy's thing isn't it's not about winning. It's not about who's stronger.
It's really how do I think about what this guy needs to win. So he doesn't blow up the world. Right. And even if you could get Khrushchev to give in without yielding it, without giving anything back, without giving him something to tell his people, then you might solve the problem momentarily, but you'll just have another con it'll just have another conflict later.
The most sort of famous example being World War I, the terms of which were so punitive that they basically caused World War II. You know, you gave you allowed one side to save no face. You humiliated them. Basically, you can't really humiliate people and expect a good long-term result.
That's basically the same thing. So if your dad was sitting in these negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, what do you think he would do? Well, I think he would understand what you just said about Khrushchev, which is Putin's got himself, Putin made a bunch of mistakes. He misread the situation completely and he's already lost.
So no matter what happens, he's already lost and he's already greatly weakened. So now you have to give him a way to save face and be able to claim victory if your goal is to end this. You know, if your goal is to utterly defeat Russia and bring him down, that's something else, but see, that will just cause another problem. You know, so I always thought the move in NATO so far east was a mistake when I was a kid.
I was a European history major, but now that is the situation now. I mean, that's where we live. So, you know, that's the starting point. But I would think that he would be focused on trying to understand Putin's needs right now.
He's a devil or whatever, but he's got needs and he needs a way out and he's stuck. You know, and the fact that he gave the speech today and he didn't make any new demands or anything shows you that he's sort of stuck and looking for a way out. That's what I'm speaking for my father, but that's what I would think. And we got to give him a way out.
We got to like leave a door open for him because we don't want a nuclear war, you know? Yeah, yeah, there's a thing I forget which Roman strategist was saying this, but basically it's like, not only will I give the enemy a way out, I'll pave the road. Right. You know, like, because you never want, you never want to be faced with someone who's back as against the wall.
Right. And so I think that's like, let's say you're even you're, let's say you have this employee who just is the worst, right? You fire that person, you're humiliating them. How do you get that person to quit?
Not like by burning them out, but how do you get that person to say like, you know what? I think I'd be better off somewhere else, right? How do you get, how do you get them away to leave? So they feel like it's what they like and they're happy with it and they don't feel humiliated because not only is it, do they not deserve to be humiliated because almost nobody does, but that humiliation is going to cost you more than it is them.
Right. Well, like look at Russia, even if somehow we could totally shut them down and it would just be another one of these in a few years. I mean, you want to pick his country in the world. What are you going to do?