How the stories of innovative minds and indomitable spirits inspire us

In this episode of the Better Innovation episode, host Jeff Saviano joins author Rich Cohen to explore the power of resilience.

Related topics

To kick off 2024, we bring you a special Better Innovation episode featuring renowned author Rich Cohen. Join Jeff Saviano as he sits down with the acclaimed American non-fiction writer, whose works have been New York Times Best Sellers and amongst the Best American Essays.

In this episode, Jeff and Rich explore the influences on Rich’s captivating narratives and the timeless innovation lessons embedded in his works, which include The Fish that Ate the Whale, The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World's Greatest Negotiator, and When the Game was War.

This conversation will give you a glimpse into Rich’s creative mind and explore the power of resilience, cleverness, and the indomitable spirit of interesting people who have outsmarted their opponents. And, as a bonus . . . Jeff (a tennis fanatic) indulges in a discussion about Rich’s experience working with Maria Sharapova, delving into her remarkable ascent in the tennis ranks against all odds.

Key takeaways:

Scarcity can be a driving force for innovation, turning challenges into opportunities.
Altering the perception and accessibility of a product can revolutionize an industry.
A corporation ages like a person, in the evolution of its culture, risk-taking, and innovation over time.
The gamification of life and business can foster an innovative mindset that allows for creative breakthroughs.

Humor can be a valuable asset in navigating life's challenges.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Intro

Meet the people behind today’s leading innovations from the boardroom to the halls of government. Join Jeff Saviano a global innovation leader at EY. To hear from the trial blazers. reshaping our world. You're listening to better innovation.

Jeff Saviano

Hey Better Innovation, Its Jeff, I’m coming at you live from New York city today. We were blessed to have Rich Cohen with us in our studio. Rich is an author of many New York times bestselling books. I got to know Rich’s work from reading, I think one of the best book I have read in a long time called “ The fish that ate the whale” the life in times of America’s banana can just an incredible story of the banana industry from over a hundred years ago and the life of Samuel Zamari. Fascinating book, I got to know Rich’s work from reading that and led us to many others. Excited that Rich came into join us in this show today . He just his wrote 15^th book called ‘When the game was war NBA’s greatest season’ was published just a couple of months ago and it details the rivalry between NBA grace Magic Johnson, Lary Bird , Issaiah Thomas and Michael Jordan. We had such a wide range in conversation, and he was a contributing author to Maria Sharapova’s book, so for a long-time listener you know I’m a tennis nut hence we had a great time talking about tennis and his work with Maria Sharapova. I think you going to love this one. Hope you enjoy. Here we go, Rich Cohen.
Cohen welcome to the show.

Rich Cohen

Thanks for having me.

Saviano

We are recording live here today in New York City. And appreciate you coming in to do this. We've been doing lots of these interviews remotely. We started that in the pandemic, but there's nothing like doing this interview live. So thank you. Yeah, appreciate that. Our whole team, we've got our Better Innovation team here today.
We're all thrilled to have you on. We've had a Cohen Cohen book Bonanza. Okay? We've each been devouring many of your books. And, I asked our team to set this up today because I got to tell you, I couldn't get enough of the banana story. And that's not the real name of the book. And I honestly, I had to go look up the name of the book.

Cohen

Yeah.

Saviano

it's called The Fish That Ate the Whale The Life and Times of America's Banana King, because I've been calling it the Banana book ever since I read it. And there was about a month or so where I drove my family and my friends crazy. I couldn't stop telling stories of the banana king. And so it really is a captivating story. So that's what brought us here today. I thought our listeners would love to hear this incredible innovation story and the life lessons that you explored in the book.

Cohen

Yeah.

Saviano

And so that also then got us into what we were just talking about, the Cohen Cohen Stack, and it's been so great to be able to go through some of your other works as well.
So, we're going to cover the gambit today.

Cohen

Okay, that's great.

Saviano

Okay. So, if it's all right, let's start with the fish that ate the whale. What's the book about?

Cohen

Well, it's about a guy named Samuel Z Murray who lived in a on a wheat farm in Russia, and he was a kid and his father died and suddenly his family couldn't work this farm anymore. And he was sort of the oldest and he was sent to America - a classic immigrant story, sent basically with nothing to make enough money to bring the rest of the family across, just a few siblings. He was, its notable that he was a big person. He was like six foot five. Yeah, Russian Jew, basically. And he went through Ellis Island like a lot of other Jews, Italians, Irish, everybody else.

Saviano

He was a kid when he came. He was a young

Cohen

Teenager. Yeah. And he had a distant relative in Selma, Alabama, who ran a dry goods store, General store. This was like a business guys who started out as peddlers. When they got enough money to build a building, they put everything in a store and they had a dry goods store. Some of those became the great department stores. That's how they started. Lazard Forever was a dry goods store in New Orleans.

Saviano

Interesting.

Cohen

And a lot of the other ones. And he worked at one of these in Selma, Alabama, but he wasn't a direct relative of this guy. So, there was no thought that he was going to take over this business. So, he was looking for a way to make money. And one way always sort of framing the story. It was a love story in that he saw one day behind the store somebody selling bananas and he had never seen a banana before. There were really no bananas in the lower 48, what we call, because you couldn't get in from the tropics before they rotted. They were in the extreme part of a southern part of America in some places, but they didn't grow enough there to sell them. They don't travel well, they don't travel well. And he you know, if you grow from a grow up on a Russian wheat farm and you pick up a banana, you realize a banana is kind of a miracle. And this guy kind of fell in love with bananas.

Saviano

Exotic.

Cohen

Yeah, it was exotic. It's like the tropics. And nobody was selling these bananas. So, he saw a niche for himself, so he thought he would be the first person to bring bananas into Selma, Alabama and the market there. And he went down to Mobile, Alabama, where he knew that the fruit chips, which were from the Boston Fruit Company, the Boston Fruit Company, had become United Fruit by conglomerate him with all these other companies buying them.
And he knew that the ships came in, unloaded there, and he stood there all day and just watched their business. And he noticed after the ships came in, there were these big piles of bananas. And one of these bananas were, you know, one part was very green, one was just turning yellow, one was yellow. And the other one were like sort of freckled.
So, he went to the agent of the Boston Fruit Company and he said, What's the story? And he noticed that they took all the piles away, but the freckled ones stayed. And he said, What's, why are those bananas still here? He said, well, those bananas were the green ones are called are called greens. The yellow ones are called turnings.
And the ones that stay here are called rips. And he said, what's the right? And he said the definition of a ripe is if it has one freckle on it, it's a turning. If it is two or more freckles, it's a ripe. And he said, What do you do with them? He said, we throw them out because you can't get them to the market before they rot.
And he said, I'll buy. He had took all the money he had and he said, I'll buy all the ripes. And they basically gave him these bananas because they were going to throw them out for some small amount of money. He rented a car on the Illinois Central Railroad, and his idea was to bring it back to Selma, Alabama. And he realized, you know, on the train charts, it worked, because by the time they got there, he'd make it. But he realized the train charts didn't mean anything. The train would just stop. And sure enough, the bananas started to rot, which is what the guy said. You can't get into the supermarket in time. So, what he did was he wired ahead to all the little grocery stores along the line and said, come buy these ripe, I’ll give them very cheap, right off the train.
And later on, when The New York Times talked about him, they said he used railroad cars like they were pushcarts and that he was selling off of them. And he ultimately he went back, he sold brought the sold all the bananas before he got back to Alabama, went back, did it again, did it again, kept doing it. He became notorious in the banana business as the crazy Russian Jew who was selling rotten bananas.

Saviano

And he's young.

Cohen

He's not, 20 years old.

Saviano

No business experience. He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur. You think of startups today, You think of the entrepreneur. Sure, he is an entrepreneur. Where do you think that came from Cohen?

Cohen

I think it's the immigrant, You know, like he grew up in a time of scarcity, in a place of scarcity, and you hear it as a cliche, which is one man's trash is another man's treasure.
Yeah, but it was really the case with him, which is and if he was going to make enough money for his family and to be a free person to do what he wanted to do, he had to discover a market that was basically unexploited and unknown because there was no place for him. He was an edge. He had no education. He spoke with a very thick accent. He swore a lot. He was kind of rough. And they used to say he only had an accent when he swore, which was all the time. So basically, you know, he had a sort of noticed something that everybody else missed. And it gave him this incredible sense of how things work, what was being missed, hidden value.

Saviano

Problem solver and maybe that's what he carried over from immigrants and others in his family back in Russia, is that people I can just imagine in those times you're faced with problems every day just surviving. It's probably a litany of people in his family who were creative problem solvers.

Cohen

Yeah. And he couldn't go on the blazed path because there was he wasn't wanted on the blaze path.
So. Yeah. And what they did with the banana was brilliant, which is when he started with the banana, it was an exotic fruit, you know, like every now and then a Trader Joe's, they have these red bananas and they're expensive and you might buy one to see what it tastes like. He took what was an exotic fruit and he changed the business model.
So, it would become a very cheap fruit. So, it's sold at scale, which is what it remains. And to me, one of the most brilliant things he did, one of the brilliant things he did in addition to recognizing the market, getting the bananas, transportation, is marketing. So basically, he wanted to associate the banana with America. So, what he did was he had agents from, they have agents from the United Fruit Company later on meet all these immigrant ships coming in from Ellis Island and other ports, Galveston, Texas. And when people would come in and hand him bananas and say, welcome to America, and those people would always associate the banana with America.

Saviano

From their very first days in the country.

Cohen

Yeah. And it became the most popular fruit in America. And the joke is not one of those bananas is grown in America.
They were all grown in Central America.

Saviano

And every step along the way, the risks that he took, that's what struck me reading the book. Cohenes from that first story that you tell of buying, taking his entire savings that he has, and just imagine that nobody has charted that path before. He puts all of that money into that first stock of bananas and incredible risk, incredible risk, and later going to Honduras and going to Central America.

Cohen

He had this. He was a real gambler, in a way.

Saviano

Yeah.

Cohen

And he's like the guy that walks into the casino with $10 and ends up breaking the casino, you know, by just continually amassing this pile and pushing the whole pile back out into the center of the table. But at any one time, though, he could have lost that whole. But yeah, that's what struck me. You know, going back into the book and the stories of how many of those big bets that he actually placed in any one of them could have ruined him and ruined the company.

Cohen

But sometimes those bets, like later on in the story, he bought all this land in Honduras to grow his own bananas because the United Fruit Company, he was a competitor at first, the United Fruit Company, they basically owned Guatemala and he needed a place to grow bananas in the same way they had the same amount of rainfall.
And he went to Honduras. Honduras was a refuge for runaway prisoners from America because there was no extradition treaty. It was where the term Banana Republic comes from in, you know, Henry story. And he went down there and bought this jungle incredibly cheap, which was considered kind of junk land because always he built towns and stuff up on the hills, mostly because of the malaria and the mosquitoes and everything else with disease.
And the whole banana business was basically based on not paying tax because the bananas had to be moved so cheaply to make a profit and the government of Honduras fell. And the U.S., it's a whole long story, but they owed a large debt to the British banks and JP morgan was going to come in and take care of this debt and basically charge tax to pay off his debt at the port of entry to all these places.
And Zamora showed up at the old Executive Office Building to meet with the United States Secretary of State Philander Knox and explain that he couldn't, he was going to lose his whole business because the whole thing was based on not paying these kind of taxes and philander Knox said go talk to JP Morgan about it. And he said, Jp morgan's not my favorite uncle.
That was always a thing, you know. So, what he ultimately did was and it's so crazy now because he was going to lose his business, he's going to lose everything on the verge. And he'd already put everything in. He'd gone from the guy selling rotten bananas to guy buying green bananas to the guy growing bananas. And he borrowed a lot of money, including from the mafia, really.
And he had everything at stake. So instead of just sort of folding it up and trying to do something else, he got together a group of mercenary soldiers who hung out at the Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monte Leone. You can still go there, on Royal Street in New Orleans. I was just their last weekend, actually. And he went over with a group of guys.
He got him an old civil war boat, got a whole little mercenary army together. They went and they overthrew the government of Honduras. And he put the deposed president of Honduras back into power. And as the first order of business, the guy exempted Samuel Zamora from paying tax for 25 years. Yeah, and he used that Honduras as his base to grow this company that then became the main competition.

Saviano
What an amazing part of the story to actually to not just to grow his company, but to survive. Yeah. For him to survive, to be able. He had to essentially overthrow a government in order to keep the company in business. Yeah. Amazing. I mean, thank you. The Secretary of State at bay throughout the process.

Cohen

Right. And in the end, the secretary of state was like, fine, we know all we care about is getting we their whole thing is they didn't want the British to come in and occupy Honduras.

Saviano

Yeah, that was it.

Cohen

So, they were trying to get the British their debt paid back and that was taken care of by the Marine as long as it was stable and it wasn't going to be British, they were fine with it.

Saviano

But there was still a risk at that time, but I came away from the book was that there was a risk that the Secretary of State or others in the State Department could have stepped in and it could have essentially made his company worthless.

Cohen

Yes, he had he was under that kind of risk all the time. But that was part of pushing the whole pile of winnings back into the center of the table, which is every time it was like go for broke, there was no margin for error.

Saviano

Well, what else could he have done? I don't think that was probably very at that point, very few options. He was heavily invested in Central America. He needed some place to grow the bananas. He had no other choice.

Cohen

Right. And you realize that it's kind of like character is destiny in that this is his character. And every time he got into a situation, he would sort of see the backwards way around it, you know? And that happened again and again and again. And that's why he keeps emerging and emerging and emerging is this and it's interesting, which is you watch what happened. I won't go into it because but it basically the only person who could hold that company together through the 20th century was this guy who is constantly doing things in an unorthodox way and basically cutting the Gordian knot over and over and over again, which is the government is going to record company in Honduras.
Maybe Honduras needs a new government. And that's not like a normal thing that a person can think. That's right. And especially a guy coming completely powerless and alone to America, built up this company and built up this network of people he worked with and then took, made these very audacious moves. And people admired him even in the top of our government that you wouldn't think would even notice.

Saviano

And he did it again when he rose to be the CEO of United Fruit and how he ended up, how he became the leader of that company as a result of his effort to rise to the top. I mean, that was that was a big part of it, too, I would imagine.

Cohen

Yeah. Well, first of all, people don't realize it, but at the time, United Fruit was one of the biggest companies, corporations in the world. You know, it had 100,000 employees. It was in all these countries around the world, and it had a huge fleet of ships. And at first, he was the competing company, Caimel Fruit, across the river in Guatemala, Honduras. And those two companies went to war and it got to be like an actual shooting war. They were attacking each other ships and they and it almost turned into a war between Honduras and Guatemala, where these banana companies are going to cause a war between these two countries.
And again, a different secularist state called them in, called these two Americans. And because it was the United Fruit Company, which was the chairman of the board, was the president of the First Bank of Boston, and it was all these kind of very establishment guys in Boston. And Sam Zemurray and his guys from New Orleans. And he said, You guys got to settle this non-violently.
And the solution worked out was First Bank of Boston bought out Zemurray with stock. They merged the companies and Zemurray became the largest shareholder of United Fruit. That's why he's the fish that ate the whale. But he agreed. I signed a non-compete clause. He wouldn't sign another company and agreed to retire, and he was fine with that. And he wasn't very old still, he was like around 50. Yeah. And he went back to New Orleans. He built this huge house that is now the president of Tulane University's house, and he kind of lived the philanthropic life. And then the Great Depression happened and his stock, which was worth like, you know, $50 a share. I don't know if these numbers became worth like less than a dollar a share.
And meanwhile, he thought that the United Fruit Company, which at this point was being run by guys, had gone to business school, not like the first generation United Fruit's, who sales guys like himself built the company. This is now third generation MBA. These guys from Ivy League schools, risk averse people who looked at just numbers and he thought that they were in a time of risk, time of real trying time. That's when you needed to, like, be risky or take chances. And he kept going to them and making suggestions as a stockholder. And they didn't want to hear from him. One of the reasons they bought it was so they never to hear from him again. And ultimately what he did was he went around to the other shareholders and said, these guys are going to destroy the company, lose all the money, give me your proxies. And he went up and he fired. He took over the company in a proxy war and he fired the entire board because one of the things that they said, they couldn't understand him. Yeah. And he said basically, F-you, yeah, you're all fired. Do you understand that? And then he very quickly turned that company back around by doing the things he had been suggesting.

Saviano

Because he knew the business, because he grew up, he grew up working, working from the lowest levels of the business.
And that's where that that the leaders of United Fruit at the time, as you said, they came from business school. They didn't come up in the business. They didn't really understand it today.

Cohen

No. And one of the things that really bothered him that they did is they had these managers in Central America and they were changing their orders in second guessing. I mean, he's like, you guys are sitting in a room in Boston. How do you know, this guy is in the field? And he said, look, you hire a guy you trust, and if you don't trust him, you fire him and hire somebody to do trust. And then you let him let that person do their job. One real simple thing he did that I always thought was like, to save money during the Depression. They were having ships move incredibly slowly from the plantations in Central America, the banana plantations up to the markets in America. And he figured out, look, you're losing more bananas by going slow. So many bananas are rotting on the way. It's actually you're much better off full steam ahead. You're you know, your caution is actually losing you more money than it's saving you.

Saviano

Yeah.

Cohen

You know, And so he did stuff like that. There was another great one where they got in a war, this is earlier with the United Fruit. They were both fighting over this one piece of land. Nobody could figure out who it owned. They were two different owners. And him and United Fruit were both arguing over how to buy this. And he just went and bought it from both owners. And United Fruit was sort of like, we don't know you're allowed to do that. We didn't think of doing that. Why would you pay somebody for? Because it saved them so much money and legal fees and ended the whole thing well. And they were on a path that it would have taken them months or even longer to figure out who was the true owner.
And he looked at what's the, what's the price of it, what's the value of that time lost? And he moved quickly. One of the things when his people give him these big long reports, he would rip off the first page of the report throughout the rest and say, now it's a perfect report. He just wanted very simple. He wanted the facts.
He wanted to know what was going on. He wanted to hire good people, let them do their job. And because of that, the people that worked for him, loved him because he was like a great leader, you know?

Saviano

Yeah, yeah. He solve problems. And I also appreciated in the book that that, you know, you told the story as it was he was not a saint. He was a flawed leader, not your typical protagonist. I think he was deeply flawed. What do you think drew you to him and to tell the story? You also should say you also went to Tulane University. It was that the first time that you heard of Zamora from walking the campus and you could see evidence of him all over the place.

Cohen

Right. Well, you realize that this guy, because New Orleans kind of became a different kind of city. New Orleans was a big industrial city, and it was the capital of the oil trade in America, banking. And that's why they have those big buildings in New Orleans has become kind of a tourist city and a much smaller city than it was.
And if New Orleans had become New York or Boston, then Sam Zemurray would be like J.D. Rockefeller. Everybody would know. Yeah, I knew him because the president, Tulane's house had been his house. And it's an amazing house. And I'd go there for functions and it was like, you're going back to a time machine. You know, every room in the house is made of a different kind of wood from a different country in Central America.
And they have the old steamship routes for the bananas went. And it just made him this very interesting, interesting figure to me and this very kind of powerful guy who had a completely different ethos than a lot of people today, which is he gave a lot of money away. He did a lot of charitable things, but was conditioned always on the fact that his name could never be mentioned and never be cited, because he said if you basically are causing, asking for your name to be put on something, you're not giving the money, you're buying something, you're buying notoriety. Right. So, at Tulane, nothing was named after him until after he died. But when I got there, they named everything after him and his daughter, Doris Stone. So, there was a Zemurray dorm. There was a stone center. So, you started to just wonder, who were these people that built this school? And it's interesting because Tulane became really the school it became because the Zemurray gave a lot of money to study tropical diseases, which were the problem in Central America.
And every summer before they figured out that mosquitoes caused it and Walter Reed screens and everything, there was a yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans. Like you could argue that jazz is connected to the yellow fever, you know, So, that's a whole other story.

Saviano

But looking back, his legacy is complex, isn't it? And on one hand, he was this visionary who shaped an entire industry, pushed the envelope, his methods, raised certain ethical questions. Can you talk about that dichotomy of, as you said, and he gave most of his fortune away?

Cohen

Well, I think that right now, looking at him and it's happened, I mean, people critical of my book say that I shouldn't that this guy was like a villain. It was a, he's a historical villain because he helped overthrow the government of Guatemala with the CIA.
He overthrew to the government of Honduras. He, you know, United Fruit ended up being so powerful, they owned 85% of the roads in Guatemala. They delivered the mail. You know, you know, one of the first things Fidel Castro did was sort of trash United Fruit because he saw them as the oppressor. But really, he was to me, you say he's flawed.
I don't think a human being's ever been alive who hasn't been flawed.

Saviano

Sure.

Cohen

Okay. And I think that the more people do, the more they accomplish, the more those flaws are evident. If he never did anything, you'd never know anything about him, you know? You know what I mean?

Saviano

He's unorthodox.

Cohen

He's unorthodox, and what's bad about him is connected to what's good about him. You don't get one without the other, you know? So, I think that it's the fact that he went fast. Did he make decisions quick that he didn't look at every angle? He thought that the thing to do was to move, keep moving.

Saviano

You made mistakes. But then he just he just moved on, right?

Cohen

There's, you know, whatever. And he did a lot of great a lot of great things, even in Honduras and stuff.
And you can ask people in Honduras about that. You know, sort of set up the school system.

Saviano

And he hired a lot of people, took care of communities. Yeah, sure. He gave a lot of money.

Cohen

He established the best schools, the agricultural school there, which was a free tuition school. If you were from Honduras or from one of the countries that grew bananas.
So, but the fact is that he you know, he was a real human being who has good and bad. And often the good and the bad are connected. And my problem with criticizing people of the past who were clearly not bad people really, but bad things happen is that you have to look at yourself and think that from position 50 years now, looking back, you have to think a lot of the things we do right now and that we think are good, you know, are going to look bad.
They're not even the things we think, that's bad. We shouldn't do that. Things we think are good are going to turn out to be bad. That's just the fact of not being God and not knowing, being omnipotent and not knowing everything and the whole history of the world is a history of, you know, unintended consequences.

Saviano

And he's and he is a survivor.
You could argue that if he didn't take those extreme steps at various points throughout the story, he would have lost the business, He would have lost whatever fortune. And he couldn't have he couldn't have done those things.

Cohen

Absolutely. That's what I mean by if you had done anything, you wouldn't know about his flaws. Right. So basically, you know, he was in it. He didn't create the banana business. He entered a bad business that existed. Most of the really bad things people attached to the banana business are attached to United Fruit, which he didn't start and he didn't own. You know, he inherited when he took over the company and the banana business operated back then in a certain way, which is it had to control a lot of land because the weather was so hard to predict that if you could lose your entire crop, if a hurricane hit one region, so you had to end up having to own a lot of different land in a lot of different regions, which made them seem too powerful, but other otherwise the company was in big trouble. And then ultimately there was a banana disease which ultimately wiped out the banana that he traded in the big mic and the banana disease caused him to buy a lot of land and then hold that land even when they weren't using it to grow on because the thought was they were going to cure this disease and this and they don't want their competitors to get the land.

Saviano
He didn't have the single point of failure. It was they think about, you know, what companies are going through today and know he created a resilient company. He had to have a back door.

Cohen

Right.

Saviano

And so by owning that land and you could look at various points of the story, he took some steps to be sure you could even this is, of course, a show about innovation and you think about him as a he's a natural innovator. And you've explained a couple of the stories already where he sees a problem and you can just envision him looping through various alternatives to that problem. Right. And some of those alternatives were unorthodox. The one that jumped out to me is that he was one of the first or maybe the first to bring refrigeration to these to these trips.

Cohen

Yeah, right. Well, they had, you know, like he took advantage of the new technology. Yeah. So suddenly when Boston Fruit started, there was no refrigeration. You're depending on luck of the winds, you know? And when the company started, it's because they got a great wind out of Jamaica and they brought these bananas up to Boston, which normally didn't make it.
And they made a lot of money. So, he did stuff like the refrigeration and also finding a banana to replace the one I mentioned, which was the big mike, which was a banana. It sounds like a stupid little thing, but it turned out to be revolutionary, which is the big mike was is very hardy banana and it was kind of supposed to be a very delicious banana. That's the banana Curious George was eating and he was enjoying banana, so to say, and but it was also super hardy, so they would just throw huge bunches of it under the decks of ships. But the banana that we have now is called the Cavendish, and it's not nearly as hardy. So, he invented the banana box. It sounds like a stupid thing.
You know, also the sticker on the banana, which first they thought was so stupid because how do you brand a banana? Banana is like branding, but it made it.

Saviano

He figured out how to do it. Yeah.

Cohen

And one of the stories I that later on, one of his big competitors was Dole, and Dole was in Hawaii. And Dole said, We're thinking of growing, getting into growing some bananas in Hawaii. What do you think of that? And he said, That's a great idea. I'm thinking of growing some pineapples in Honduras. What do you think of that?

Saviano

That's great. That's great. There's another aspect of the book that I loved, it really propelled him to be such a legend was this drive to succeed that throughout his journey that he had this unwavering passion to be successful.
And there was one quote from the book we loved. He said, quote, “The greatness of the Zemurray lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation. Bad things happened to him as bad things happened to everyone. But unlike so many, he was never tempted by failure. He never felt powerless or trapped.”, end quote.
I loved how you explained that in the book, because I think it really says a lot that you look at modern business today or for all of us in our lives. Bad stuff happens all over the place. He had a natural way of getting out of a jam.

Cohen

Yeah, I think I understood this. I recognize this quality in him because my father was named Herb Cohen, wrote a book called You Can Negotiate Anything when I was a kid.
Sold like 2 million copies. And he had certain things he always taught me. And one was one of the things he always had his powers based on perception. If you think you got it, you got it. Even if you don't got it, you know, and basically that and when there was ever a problem with my father, his reaction was always, all right, what are we going to do?
Yeah, never like, why did this happen or why.

Saviano

Don't awfulize it.

Cohen

Don't feel sorry for yourself or could we have done something else right? What are we. What are we going to do? What's your plan like? There's always a plan. There's always a way. As long as you're alive, there's a way. And when I saw Zemurray, you know, I saw.
I just recognize that's how he operated, which is. Yeah, there's always something to do. You always have power, you know, You only, you know, is as long as you realize it, you have it. And I think that he was a very competitive person and it was a game to him to some extent. And he wanted to, he felt that many times you could see coming out that he didn't like being treated like he was a worthless person.
You know, not being educated, not being a native English speaker, you know? Right. And so, a lot of times when it became in any way personal to him, it was and people sort of gave him the hi hat, I would say. Yeah. And he saw a lot of people with a lot of education doing a lot of stupid things.
And he trusted his own kind of common sense. And you're right, some of it was because he'd been in Honduras. He plowed those fields himself. He planted those bananas. He lived there.

Saviano

You think that's the greatest lesson from the story, Cohen, that that, you know, his ability to look at a problem, don't let it consume him. But to cycle through the options and figure out what he thinks the best approach is. If it doesn't work, then don't labor over it. Try something else.

Cohen

Yeah. And basically, he's a big information is power like he wanted to know, you know what was on the ground he wanted to go see for himself. He never would trust trusted what was written. He never trusted a report. He would be a guy that would prefer human intelligence over electronic intelligence or report.

Saviano

You made me think of the Henry Ford, the power of walking the assembly lines and getting to know the workers and personally being invested in the business. He wasn't sitting in some lofty position. He was, he was with his people all the time.

Cohen

Right. And he wanted to be he had fun doing that. I mean, it's clear that he had fun building that company. He was very at home in Honduras as home as he was in New Orleans.

Saviano

Yeah. And he did come away feeling like he enjoyed he enjoyed the complexity of the problem solving, the complexity of the position that he had building, building a company, placing those bets. He seemed like he enjoyed all of that, didn't he?

Cohen

Yeah, I think he was super smart. One of the weird things he come because, like I said, he wasn't educated. What he liked to do in his spare time was math and play piano. So clearly, he had a like there was a very analytical Looking at problems that was just part of how his brain worked.
Yeah. And he also had the kind of competitive aspect and a little bit of a daredevil, you know.

Saviano

Sure.

Cohen

So, he never allowed the fact that, you know, as you get as you get older and as you accumulate more stuff, you become more cautious and more risk averse. And he realized that that was a danger to him, that wasn't really protecting him. What was going to protect him was going forward, not just trying to, you know, And that's what he saw in the United Fruit Company, which is a company that had become timid.

Saviano

There's one more quote just to that point. Cohen and our team was also drawn to this quote in the book about the rise and fall of a corporation as a living, breathing thing.
And you say in the book, quote, “A corporation age is like a person. As the years go by and the founders die off, making way for the bureaucrats may be the second or third generations, the ecstatic risk taking just for the hell of its spirit that built the company gives way to a comfortable middle age where the firm had been forward looking and creative. It becomes self-conscious in the way of a man pestering itself with dozens of questions before it can act.” End quote. And I just love that. Maybe talk a bit about what you meant by that. This comparison of a company aging as a person would.

Cohen

Well, you know, just accepting the idea, a mitt Romney idea that a corporation is a person. Yeah. Okay. You can look at it like a person. You know, as you get older, you get more risk averse, you get more cautious, you get more careful, you're more aware of the fact that you can die, you can get hurt, you can lose a lot of money. It's repercussions for your actions, right? When you're a kid, you're too stupid to understand the kind of risks you're taking.

Saviano

And sometimes the stakes aren't as either, right?

Cohen

And the stakes are as high. You know? Like, this is another thing my father used to say. When you're a kid, you fall. You fall out the window. That means you're on the first floor. You dust yourself up, you go back inside. Yeah. When you're like on the 50th floor and you fall out the window, you just a stain on the ground.

Saviano

That's a problem, you know?

Cohen

So, yeah, but basically it's the risk to be near the it's the risk to be near the window that made you the fortune in the first place. And it's just a natural thing that happens with companies where, as the company goes along, there's different kind of people work in it. There's one kind of entrepreneurial generation. They're the people that build the company, they take the risks and they hire the professionals who have a much more risk management attitude, and they don't take the same risks, which makes the business more safe. They can predict what's going to happen in the future. They can plan, but it also makes them vulnerable to the next generation of Sam Zemurray who are going to show up and they could push them very quickly out of business.

Saviano

You do see that a lot. You see a lot with founders of a startup. At some point, they're not the right people to lead the company. Yeah, right. Who's the right person to lead this company at that particular stage? Yeah, it was interesting, even as you tell the story about he, he rose to the top of the proxy fight ultimately to lead United Fruit. He was the right person to you. Probably the only person who could get out of that jam. Yeah right. He was he was the right person at that time. But if you look across the history of companies and the lifecycle of a company that the needs change don't they.

Cohen

Yeah. The needs change but sometimes they get, you know, a little too comfortable and they become,

Saviano

Risk averse.

Cohen

Yeah. Risk averse. And they are then ripe for you know, you go very quickly from the leader of the market know to suddenly not happy with being 50%. Yeah. To gone.

Saviano

I love the phrase of the Teflon CEO with a CEO who has his handlers around him or her who wrap the CEO and bubble wrap. They won't let them get close to problems. They'll protect the leader. And it seems like that's a recipe for disaster, Zemurray would have never let that happen.

Cohen

No, but it's like it is a natural lifecycle. It's like old trees fall down, new trees rise up. Yeah. And you know, Zemurray very much had this idea that that was just his personality, which is he was kind of reckless and it was kind of I think he had a high. So, here's another thing from my father. Keep going back to him. Yeah. He said basically to be successful, you have to be able to live with ambiguity. Right? If you don't want to live with ambiguity, you don't have to. But that's going to cost you. You're going to pay for the luxury of not living with ambiguity. Big established corporations have trouble living with ambiguity. They want to know what's going to happen next year. Zemurray often didn't know what was going to happen next year, and he didn't care about ambiguity. He had no problem living with ambiguity. So, there was no we look at it, you know, from the end back and it looks like what he did was right. But like you said, at any one of those times, his company could have just disappeared.

Saviano

Well, maybe he had. It's interesting because maybe he had no problem living with ambiguity. But he's also obviously very smart. And you mentioned he plays piano and he was a mathematician. He enjoyed math problems that I also get the sense that, okay, maybe he was living with ambiguity, but he was calculating the risks of all of those actions that he was taking. And he was these were calculated to say, well.

Cohen

They're calculated, but he like. So when he borrowed money from the mob in New Orleans Mafia, really the mafia because he couldn't borrow any more money from banks because he borrowed all the money he could from all the banks he could. And he did it because he recognized that the land in Honduras was really undervalued and he could buy a lot of land very cheaply and in ten years he wouldn't be able to. So, now was the time he took a huge risk. It was calculated, huge. On the other side of it was what he built was becoming one of the most powerful people in the world. But on this side of it was like actual physical peril to himself, you know, if he didn't pay that money back. Yeah. So, I do think and I just don't think that that's a risk that a normal person with a normal sense of, “I don't want to go to sleep every night terrified what's going to happen tomorrow.”

Saviano

You know. But he also knew what the upside could be. yeah. Yeah.

Cohen

High risk, high reward. Yeah.

Saviano

And he needed that. It was like a drug.

Cohen

Yeah. It's almost like you hear about these guys who are rock climbers. It turns out they have, like, low level of adrenaline or something. They have to get they have to bigger risk to reach the same level of sort of dopamine or something.
Right. It was like that was like he almost had to play big stakes in order to feel like he was doing something. Yeah.

Saviano

Otherwise, why bother?

Cohen

Yeah. Otherwise it's not interesting to him.

Saviano

Let's. I could talk about Zemurray forever. It's such a fascinating. I'm so glad that you found it from your days of Tulane. And you told me because I don't think lot of people would have known about him. It was a different time, and he was one of the most successful business leaders in the world. Very unorthodox, but had anybody ever told that story before you?

Cohen

Well, the way I came to the story is I had a teacher at Tulane who is kind of obsessed with Zemurray. He knew the story. I mean, he didn't know the complete story.
He knew sketchy version of the story. And he started his class, which was kind of about Southern literature, talking about this guy, even though there's no book about him, he just one he just thought it was, you're a Tulane.

Saviano

And he knew it from the lure of New Orleans.

Cohen

Yeah. Yes. Right. And he had then gone and he lived through some of it because he died in the seventies.
This was a guy who was very old when I was there. So, he lived through some of it. And he said, you're in New Orleans. And when you come to school like this, lot of you come from places like I came from Chicago, New York, L.A. You have no sense of that. You're in a place, right? And let me tell you about one of the people that built this place.
Yeah. And he told us this story. You know, one class was different and not in incredible detail.

Saviano

Good storyteller?

Cohen

Good storyteller. And it always stuck with me, that story. And I've always been fascinated by New Orleans and

Saviano

Which is about telling stories.

Cohen

Yeah. And at some point I went back and started, you know, researching. Yeah. Which you could just start by doing by reading old newspapers, read the Times-Picayune or whatever, you know. Yeah, The New Orleans Times, which doesn't exist anymore. And then started researching. And then there were still some people around who worked with him. Yeah. So here's an interesting thing. You know, Michael Yeah. His father was one of Zemurray lawyers. really? And Nick Nicholas Lemann, who was ran the Columbia Journalism School and, you know, wrote all these great books, great writer, worked The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann. His father was the other one of Zemurray’s lawyers. Lawyer So actually, I got to I spoke to Nick Lemmon's father, who is still now very old guy in a very tall building in New Orleans, telling stories. And they were dealing with Zemurray at the end of his career. Yeah, in the seventies, you know, when he was an old man.

Saviano

And you wrote it, if you were to write it now, probably would have been more difficult. You wrote a time where you had access to. Yeah, some people who were still with them. You probably just caught it, didn't you?

Cohen

Yeah. I met one of the guys who kind of because he had these guys were kind of roughnecks. Yeah. Who would be down there like cowboys. I call them Banana Cowboys. And I asked him about Zemurray anyway.
the old man. I love the old man. He taught me how to dynamite fish.

Saviano

Did you get to anybody in the State Department? Did you find anybody in the U.S. government? No, but I found records. I mean, there's records. There's records of all this stuff in the government. You know, that's it's really wild. It's like and he was very, very involved with the CIA.
And that's a whole other story, which is, yeah, he kind of created the model that the CIA used of how to overthrow governments because he did it with like just a few people, like and he did it by one of the things that they it's this is one of the things he's hated for, which is they basically took over the radio station and they created like a war of the worlds type situation where the president of Honduras later really this president, Guatemala, they did this to, heard all these broadcasts about this huge invasion.
And there was just like a few guys that surrendered because he thought they were being invaded. It was just all these it was kind of like asymmetrical warfare in the banana wars.

Saviano

So, he left his mark in many of the way he left his mark and in how the government was dealing with probably other Central American countries.

Cohen

Oh, definitely how the government dealt with.
You know, so if you look at who worked at United Fruit, it's basically the people who worked for the CIA. So, on this work, working for the United Fruit were the Dulles brothers, Dean Acheson. So interesting, all these guys. And they're what I always kid my sister about is their lawyers were Sullivan and Cromwell, where my sister is now partner.

Saviano

That's funny. We could talk about Zemurray forever. I want to make sure we get to some of your other books as well. Cohen and we were looking at the stack and all the books that you wrote. This was your 15th. So, you just you just wrote a book about the NBA, which we're going to talk about.
And that was your 15th book, is that right?

Cohen

Honestly, it seems I don't really count. To me, it's like I think of it as one giant book, and all these books are chapters in the Giant book, so could be filling up some books I don't think of as so much, you know,

Saviano

Like they're not independent books. A different thing.
Yeah, they're not independent, right?

Cohen

I wrote a kid's book for my son. Yeah, different thing.

Saviano

But this we look across the books, there is this concept of the underdog and rising up to defeat stronger opponents. It's it was evident in when the game was War. You mentioned Adventures of Herbie Cohen, Last Pirate of New York and of course, we just talked about the fish that ate the whale. Why do you think stories of the underdog persevering resonate with you so much? Is it about is about your dad?

Cohen

I think it's about my dad, but it's also I like I like people that are clever. I like great stories. Yeah. And I like people that are clever that figure out a way to win when they shouldn't win. And you call that an underdog or whatever. That's what Zemurray did. Yeah, it's like I like The Odyssey better than the Iliad because I like that Odysseus is clever, you know, And he did clever things.

Saviano

So, the underdog that maybe gets lucky or catches Goliath on a bad day, that's not as interesting to you. What's interesting to you is when they outsmart their opponent.

Cohen

What's interesting to me, because you mentioned Goliath, That's David, David and Goliath. You know, here's what I always thought was so interesting that that story, which is the first time David, he goes, brings food to his brothers and Goliath is in the valley, cursing everybody and saying, send a man down here to fight with me. And everyone's terrified and won't fight him.
And in the Bible, they say that the first word is spoken dialog defines that character. That's very right. You know, David's first line is in the Bible. How much would somebody get for killing him?

Saviano

Clever.

Cohen

I mean, it shows he was a national hero and all this stuff, but he was planning. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, he was the brother who wasn't going to get anything because he was had all these other brothers. He wasn't sent to battle. He was tending the sheep. Yeah, but he knew that there was a way to take a big risk which was to fight Goliath. Right. But on the other side of that, he becomes the king of Israel, you know?

Saviano

So clever.

Cohen

Clever, you know, And it's always about being clever. So, I think that, you know, so first of all, they're great stories.

Saviano

They're stories where I feel like I understand the people and their stories that I feel like something about something unlocks their character for me. Like I understand him. So let's extend that and I have to say so I was introduced to your work from the story of Samuel Zemurray. But then I feel like so many of your books were talking to me.
I'm from Boston, and I was in college here in New York during the 8788 NBA season. We're going to get to that. I'm a diehard Celtics fan and so I still think about that Game seven when they lost it to Isaiah of the 8788 series and the Eastern Conference finals. But I'm also a tennis nut, so I want to talk about Maria Sharapova. You worked with her to write her biography. How did you come together to work with Maria?

Cohen

I wrote a book about Jerry Weintraub, who's a movie producer. Yeah. And I never really ghostwritten a book with anybody. But Jerry Weintraub was so much like my father. He's from the Bronx. He's around the same age. He's a guy.
He managed Elvis Presley. I met the colonel, manager of Jeffrey Drew's is promoter. Okay. Took him on tour, became very friendly with Colonel Tom Parker. He managed Frank Sinatra and then he became a movie producer. He produced Oh God. And right. 11, 12 and 13. If you ever saw the movie The Firm. He's in it. Yeah. Sonny Capp's, who's like sort of the guy down in the Caribbean who's the client, he's got to go, right? Yeah. And, and anyway, he was he died a few years ago. So, one of the big losses in my life he's a great guy. He told great stories, and I wrote this book with him, and he's a clever guy. All his things are about solving problems in unorthodox ways. Yeah, and Maria read that book. So, when Maria Sharapova had to write a book, they asked her who she wanted to work with on it. And she mentioned me. And then my agent at the time just said, Would you want to do this? And I went, I met her and we hit it off.

Saviano

Well, that's how it started, because she had read the piece.

Cohen

She had read the book. Yeah. Which was, you know, she lives in California, was a big story hit California. It's called When I Stop Talking, You'll know I'm dead. I was like, this That's Jerry is always talking. And the first time talking about, like, first line of spoken dialog. Yeah, the first time the first thing I really heard Jerry say, it made me fall in love with them was I was with them the first morning I met him and he was ordering an egg white omelet and he's like, I want three eggs and cheese. And the guy says, Well, wait a second, one second. Listen to what I'm saying.
Listen, let me say this because, like, I don't want so much cheese, I feel like I'm eating a whole pile of cheese, you know, just enough cheese to hold it together.

Saviano

That's perfect. Yeah, perfect like that. But what else do how else can you explain it? Right? Explains it all.

Cohen

Yeah. So and then, you know, I was really interested in it because I hit it off of there.

Saviano

But what I was what was it about hitting it off with the fact that she was drawn to the book? But what else about Maria?

Cohen

She's very charming. She has this great career and she did this incredibly hard thing, which is what she wanted the book to be about, which is coming from Russia. She was still playing at the time. Yeah, she was still playing at the time. You know, coming from Russia with nothing, you know. And what I was interested in, I'd written a lot about sports at that point. I'd written already written a book about the 1985 Chicago Bears called Monsters. And I had done a lot of sports writing for Sports Illustrated, Harper's, and I just written a lot about sports. And now I wrote a book about,

Saviano

you're drawn to the athlete.

Cohen

Well, what I was drawn to with her was I've interviewed a lot of athletes and everything, but you never feel like you're getting the real truth.

Saviano

Why?

Cohen

Because they don't say anything stupid. Because they're presenting an image like anybody else. You know, every now and then you run into somebody who tells them. But the idea of getting a world class athlete like Maria, one of the greatest athletes of her time. Yeah. And she's going to tell you what she was really thinking when she lost and had to go over and shake some of his hand at the net.

Saviano

And she dealt with a lot of adversity and talk about the right the doping issue. And she had to sit out a suspension. I mean, she dealt with it.

Cohen

And I was with her when that happened. But the funny thing is I didn't connect to her personally. I mean, connected to like a friend. The person I connected to personally was her father, you know, because at this point, I'm already older and I'm a sports parent, too.

Saviano

And he's also a hero in this story as well. If it wasn't for the dad coming here. Right, $700 in his pocket She was nine, do I have that right.

Cohen

She was younger than nine and she was like somewhere like seven issues like seven.

Saviano

She's like seven years old. Yeah. And somebody saw something in her that she could. It was Navratilova.
I think Kivalina Cove.

Cohen

Was it Kivalina Coastal. But she before that she'd gone to this. wasn't Yeah. It was never to a level which is, she'd gone to this clinic that was the first thing that happened and I'm not good with all the names that I remember all the names well. And she was just it was like a clinic to spread tennis in Russia. Yeah. And she just. She'd already been playing because her father played. Yuri played. But Yuri was old. I mean, he was like in his thirties.

Saviano

But she must have been like six years old, Right?

Cohen

But she picked up the racket and just started hitting the ball very hard for a kid her age know. And she brought her to this clinic where I, I think anyway I won't remember the second.
And they took her aside and said she's really good. And he said, What can I do? And she said, I think it was Navratilova said, If you can get her to America, get her to America. And somebody told her that. And then he did some research and he found out the name and all.

Saviano

And it was right around the time when the academies were becoming a thing.
Right. It was the early, in also made me think of Cohen made me think, if you know the Yannick Noah story, how the French Open champion Yannick Noah was, it was found by Arthur Ashe. He was in it was in Africa playing little kid, and Arthur Ashe was there on a humanitarian trip and saw something, saw and gave him a racket and helped to explain what happened like a similar story. So, she gets a so she comes to the States with her dad, her mom couldn't come because of visa issues. Right? Right. So, her mom stays back for a couple of years. And so Yuri's here. She was too young to go to the academy and we talked about the academy. Nick Ball Terry, who was right, just passed away a few years ago. Famed tennis coach. He's probably coached more number one in the world than anybody, both male and female. And he was one of the first to launch these academies and bring them to Florida. But she had to be nine years old, Right, to join the academy.

Cohen

Well, the crazy thing is they should go to the United States and they go to Miami because they know that that's somewhere near where the academy is. Yeah. And they don't really but that's what they know. Florida, right? He doesn't know anything about how big it appears. And they show up and they meet a guy on the plane who's coming from Moscow or wherever they're coming from, too. And they talk to him and they just show up and they don't know.
They just show up. Middle of the night.

Saviano

Very little money.

Cohen

Very little money. He's got him and his daughter doesn't speak any English. And the Russian guys see him and say, what are you doing? And he said, well, you can stay at our where you can stay with us for the night. Then you got to figure somewhere else. And they drive him. They give him somewhere to stay. This is like really depending on the kindness of strangers. And the next day she goes out and they are just walk around, like walk along Collins Avenue till they see a tennis court. It's like a hotel tennis court. And he starts hitting with her, which immediately draws a crowd because she's a little kid who's hammering the ball.
Yeah. And somebody tells, meet somebody tells them what they want to do and they give him a ride and they bring her up to the academy and he tries out and he says, you're too young now. She has to wait two years. But ultimately, he finds her like coaches and he starts working at a country club as a groundskeeper, making enough money to pay for her lessons until she's old enough to go to the academy, at which point she they pay her fare. They pay, you know, she gets a scholarship to the academy. She's paid to stay there and she becomes, you know, one of the people that attracts everybody else to the academy.

Saviano

That's clever, right? You talk about you being drawn to clever people. And she showed later in her career, she's a businesswoman. She launched her Sugarpova business. And you talk about on the court how she solves problems on the court. But what Yuri did. And so, to get ready for today I was watching last night the 2004 Wimbledon final, which I say it's getting ready for today, but I watch tennis clips on YouTube all the time anyway. So, it could have been any other night. And I watched the extended version of when she played Serena, and I hadn't seen it in a few years, but so this is 04. She comes into Wimbledon, seeded 30th or ranked like 32nd in the world or 34th in the world. And Serena was the two-time champion. Right. And she finds herself in the finals against her. And what really struck me and thinking about and after reading the book years ago, but then thinking about what she must have been facing at the time. But she had no fear and watching that. And she beat her in straight sets. But that's what I'm so fascinated just watching this again last night is that she was fearless in going up against this legend. And she was a significant underdog, wasn't she?

Cohen
Right. Well, she was similar to Zemurray in that she didn't like sort of being given the high hat in a way she didn't like.

Saviano

Neither did her father, I would imagine.

Cohen

And she had no fear because the stakes were so high. But think about it, since she was a little kid, the stakes had been so high. Yeah. I mean, when she tries out for the academy. Yeah, It's like if you don't make this tryout, right, you're. We're going back to Russia.

Saviano

But so many athletes and there are so many tennis players that can't win their first Grand Slam final. Right. They can't win the first in some. It took many, many time. Kim Clijsters and they took a lot of times because the moment is just now, Ons Jabeur is some wonder whether she'll ever win a major because it's a big moment. Well, she's had a life of big moment.

Cohen

Yes. Well, there's a whole mental obviously, it's like really is a mental thing. And you see not just in tennis, but in all these sports. Yeah. And it's happening in sports. You know, it's happening to people in business and everywhere else where you get to the big moment and you just don't sees it because of fear or whatever, whatever you want to call it, choking, whatever.
Right. But I think that from the very beginning it was like Zemurray, it was do or die from the time she was a little kid. And when she saw, you know, Serena Williams, who she'd seen as a kid. Yeah. Her attitude was, she's not better than me. She's not better than me. Now, people would argue whatever, whatever. But that's what attitude that made her great. Yeah. And I would say that she was better than her then. And Maria instilled this real anger in Serena, which is a whole other story. Yeah. And what people don't realize, but Maria Sharapova, when they would talk about her playing Serena, I think, is Maria served in a super unorthodox way.
They kept trying to change it because it was wrong. And at one point they tried to get her to play left even. Okay. So, she had a big serve.

Saviano

They were always worried about her shoulder.

Cohen

And she destroyed her shoulder, you know, And that's the difference with her. That's the little difference that made it very hard for her to win against Serena.

Saviano

probably had the best serve.

Cohen

Right. She was missing a huge weapon. Now, what's amazing about Maria is that she's like one of these great athletes. I would you can name them like Michael Jordan did the same thing, like she lost something and she reinvented herself as a player a bit so she could still win while losing something.
It's like, I think, a good lesson for life, which, yeah, when you get older you lose a lot and you can make up for it.

Saviano

Well, and we'll talk about the but your most recent book about the NBA. But I always thought of Larry Bird like that Larry Bird famously every offseason would develop a new shot right?

Cohen

Right and right And so she lost her serve.
I mean, she still had a professional serve, but she didn't have this big serve that her game sort of played off of. Yeah. And rather than, you know, she never talked about.

Saviano

She never really played doubles. So she never was really the and a lot of the top tennis players would some of them would play doubles just so they could become better volleys.

Cohen

She never really did that but she did have to develop in other ways. Right. I mean. Yes. And she did. And she it was really unfortunate what happened to her right at the end with the doping thing or whatever, because

Saviano

It's inadvertent.

Cohen

So, it's like I'm friends with her. I like her. It seemed just that it didn't seem right. And it basically took the end of her career away from her. Yeah, because I think she was set up right then for like, you know, a late like, we love the great athletes, like Ted Williams, your Boston guy, you know, hitting whatever he hit 330 or whatever.

Saviano

336 Yeah.

Cohen

When he was 40 years old or over all he was Yeah.
You know, and Michael Jordan, the last coming in the Madison Square Garden. Right. I think she was set up for one of those kind of and Serena herself for.

Saviano

She also owned it. I always appreciated that she owned it that that it seemed to be and most people believed that it was inadvertent. It was even some language, as I recall, about when they announced the decision I think they acknowledged that it didn't seem purposeful.
It seemed like it really helped your performance. No, it didn't. But it was still, but it was still it was a banned.

Cohen

But it was newly banned. That was the thing that violated it by like she failed the tests like I don't 20 days after the ban. Yeah. So, she was in violation of the law for 20 days.

Saviano

But she still owned it. She still owned it. It was her responsibility was her team's responsibility. I think a lot of I think she I think that that she was received well for that.

Cohen

And I also think that that's part of the same qualities we're talking about, which is like to be great at anything. You have to have like a short memory which is dwelling on it feeling sorry for herself is never going to help her win right? She had it sort of she fought it as hard as she could, you know, at a reduced, you know, and then she forgot about it. Yeah, because what are you going to do? What good's dwelling on it can do?

Saviano

And it also made me think about it was that when you look at some other athletes or, you know, we talk about Zemurray, talk about people who are successful, if you have a silver spoon, it's if you've been giving given it to you, which is why I think what it's stick with another tennis player Jessica Pegula. What she's doing now is amazing. She's the daughter of the owner of the Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Sabers. She doesn't need the money, but she's figured, she's risen to the top five tennis player in the world. Like, that's pretty rare.

Cohen

That's something else driving her. There's this there's something else to be driven that to that extent you have to be slightly mentally ill in a good way. You know, you have to be you're not content.

Saviano

There's got to be something else. I think you said it well. There's got to be something, some other motivating factor.

Cohen

Well, another thing that my father went too much in as a kid, and I said, he said, What's wrong? I said, I'm not happy. And he said, Good, happy people never accomplish anything.

Saviano

Think he really meant that?

Cohen

Kind of, yeah, dissatisfaction breeds progress. That was one of the things he always said, you know, So I do think that like the really content people, the really people, you can envy them, but they're not necessarily going to be the people. They're going to win Wimbledon.

Saviano

So, what was really cool about when she won Wimbledon and just to see it again, I don't remember this part of it, but and now it's come and they all jump in the stands and they have to go.
Yeah, they have to sort of go through the spectators to get to her dad. And the joy, I'm sure you've seen it now 100 times, the joy on his face. And now looking back at it and knowing the story, it's different from maybe some other parents because of what he personally had to go through to help get her there.
Like he he's as much of a protagonist in the story as she is. Yeah. Isn't he?

Cohen

Yeah. And he's the one I identify with. And he would, yeah. Basically give me advice to improve my kid's hockey game. And I'm like, my kid's never going to be very good in hockey because I'm never going to do what he's saying.
That's totally crazy.

Saviano

But you knew it. But you knew that it was coming from a place that if you followed it, it probably would have worked. Yeah. And I also do that the disadvantage somebody like my kid has is he's competing with this guy's kid. Yeah. And this guy is going to push his kid in a way that I'm uncomfortable doing, you know, And that.
Did he do that did he put did he push her? At what point? I mean, when she's six and seven, she's probably going to get pushed. But at some point it be college.

Cohen

At this point that I was talking to, my kid was six or seven, you know, and. Yeah. And you know, he upended his whole family's life, quit his job.
He had a good job. Yeah.

Saviano

He left his wife.

Cohen

Left his wife. You know, he had to basically go to customs and beg. Yeah. For this dream, you know, that he had. Yeah. And, and so it's just something that I just wouldn't be comfortable doing. And you know, that the people who your kid's going to compete with out in the world are people who they're competing with the kids of people like that, like that or like Zemurray.

Saviano

Well, and in the one thing so, I'm 57. I've been playing since I've been 15 my whole life. I've had notes in most of the time that now it's because everything's digital. It's on my phone of like stuff that I'm working on in my game. And what's crazy is that some of them are still working on it from like 30 years ago. Right? But what I take away, what I love about what Sharapova and I still and I was laughing watching it last night is like almost after every point she goes back to the curtain and she stands with her back facing the court for what, like 3 seconds? I love that. You know, there's like three. And she collects herself and just that now they've got a clock. So probably to do it a little bit quicker now. But she just collects herself for a moment and then she figures out what she's going to do and then she just goes and she executes.

Cohen

Yeah. No, there's.

Saviano

I don't think many people do.

Cohen

No, but it's really true that it's like that's with all the kind of meditating and stuff they do now, clearing.
Like I had a breakthrough as a kid playing baseball. When I realized that I wasn't really watching the ball, You know what I mean?

Saviano

You're like, if you got impact.

Cohen

When you're hitting as you're hitting the ball, if you yeah, if you sort of stare at the ball, you know, you're you don't even your body does the rest. It's your hand-eye coordination. It's when you start thinking you don't even look. You realize, what was I looking at. I spent it's my son saying.

Saviano

The muscle memory when the muscle memory kicks in.

Cohen

Also, like when you swung and miss at that pitch, what were you looking at? You'll think, I was looking at the pitcher. Yeah. Which is Forget the pitcher, man.
It's just the ball. Yeah. So, I think that's you know, what she's doing is she's, that's why meditation is such a big practice.

Saviano

But they a coach. Okay but, but take that example of a baseball player and you mean right back in the dugout and the coach gives you or you walk to first base and get another coach at first base telling you what to do.
And what I love about tennis is that now the tours sort of toying with letting people coach. What I love about tennis is that you're on your own, right? You're totally on your own. And so, what she was doing is figuring out, again, maybe like Zemurray, she's clever. In order to beat Serena in straight sets, you got to be more than just tenacious.
You've got to have a strategy. You've got to have a plan, and she wants you to execute on it. But that little moment to sort of refine it and figure out what she's going to do, I think that's, I think that's important.

Cohen

Yeah. And it's I think it's just clearing your head so you can focus again, clearing your head the ball.
Yeah, but you could think about it, not the ball as the moment. Yeah. You know anybody who's played golf knows that your thought pattern is the biggest enemy you have playing golf. Like. Thinking and set.

Saviano

Thinking is not always the case.

Cohen

The process thinking can be the problem. Yeah. And the more skills the sport is like that, the more that there's time to think, the more of a problem it is. So yeah, if you're playing hockey, for example, which I played, you're not thinking in that way. Yeah, I mean, you're thinking in the game, but you're not thinking about like, what am I going to do? You hope that you did last time? How could you do what I can't remember. That was such a good swing. What did I do? And then you can't do it. You're just doing it.

Saviano

And so for her, of all of the adversity that she faced and the adversary adversity of her dad, that that they faced bigger issues than hitting the forehand down the line. And maybe that's why when the moment was big from a tennis perspective or again later in the year at the tour finals, when she was down to Serena again and she came back, she was way down on the third set.
I fairly remember. Right. She was down for love in the third set. Serena, they say now was hurt. She was injured, but she was way down and she just let caution fly to the wind. And she came back and she beat her because maybe because the obstacles that she's faced in life were bigger than a tennis match.

Cohen

Yeah, well, because, like, it was always high stakes. Her life.

Saviano

It's always high stakes. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about your latest, your latest book and congratulations. The very recent release, When the Game Was War, The NBA's Greatest Season, our team, our Better Innovation team devoured that. And I've got a copy here. My dad is the biggest Celtics fan, so excited to give him this for Christmas this year.
It was a painful memory for me because that year the Celtics did not win the championship. Let's talk about the book. What's the book about?

Cohen

Well, I thought I argue that that was the greatest season. And the reason why.

Saviano

For who?

Cohen

Of basketball

Saviano

For Detroit fans for some time but of just because or for Laker fans you could say that well you can always say if it's your team.

Cohen

The greatest season is always the one where they won the championship.

Saviano

Yeah. How would you how you defining what is a great season?

Cohen

I define it in this case and it's a conceit to sort of tell the stories about these great people. Everybody's going to have their own greatest season. I realize that. And also, I was 17 years old or 90, whatever I was, and I also realized, like I was so into basketball.

Saviano

Then as a watching you in Chicago, you said as you grew up. Yeah.

Cohen

That you know of course that's like Lorne Michaels Sarat live right said well what's your favorite cast? Because whatever was the cast when you were in high school, that was the greatest. Yeah, that's right but I would argue that, you know, I was in high school when it was Bill Murray, John Belushi and Gilda Radner, but I still think that was probably the greatest cast.
So, there is an objective measure. What I liked about 87, 88 is there were four great dynasties. So, and they were all in different stages in their life, different stages of rise and fall. I thought of this as Game of Thrones on the hardcourt. You didn't really know who the hero ultimately was going to be. Yeah.

Saviano

So you had the NBA was different than to the NBA was tougher than it was today.

Cohen

That's the war part.

Saviano

Especially for those pistons.

Cohen

And the part of the legacy of that season is it became less tough because of the Pistons. But yeah, we can't have a team like this winning so basically. Right, right.

Saviano

So that resonates with me.

Cohen

Yes. So, you know, you had all four of these teams, you could argue was the greatest team of all time. People wouldn't at one point, not that season. People might not say it about the Pistons, but maybe they should. Okay. So people would say,

Saviano

Why do you say that?

Cohen

Well, I'll tell you. So, the first team is the Celtics. Yeah, right. And we all a lot of people say the 85 Celtics, I guess are the great 85, 86, the greatest of all time with Bill Walton healthy and everything.

Saviano

Yeah a lot of bird McHale right

Cohen

Yeah a lot of people that's one of the teams they wrote about but now they're getting a little older. They had the horrible thing happen

Saviano

Reggie Lewis.

Cohen

No. Len Bias, you know, who was supposed to be and Reggie Lewis later. Yes. And, and they're on the downside and the Lakers are sort of at their peak.
But if you look at it, they're sort of on the downside to in some ways

Saviano

Magic and Larry's first year was, what, 70, 70, 79. So they've been in the league now for almost ten years. Right.

Cohen

And it's Kareem is still playing, but he's almost going to retire.

Saviano

Yeah.

Cohen

Okay. So, then the Bulls, who are kind of just they're nascent, they're coming into their own. But I would argue that they're going to become the greatest team of all time as a Chicago fan. They win six of eight. They have that incredible season where they win all those games and they basically sweep the postseason. Yeah. So, and then the Pistons, a lot of if you that season I write about they basically were robbed okay because they had game six-one in the finals against the Lakers and with basically time expired they called a foul against Bill Laimbeer who had, was a guy who committed a lot of fouls.
So, the refs were watching him. So, there was a kind of poetic there may have been a payback for something else. Karmic justice, they called it on Kareem, and Kareem won that game from the free throw line. That's right. If they didn't call that foul, which they called the fan and felt didn't happen, the Pistons win that season.
And then we have to believe, all things being equal, they win the next two, which they did. Then there a three-peat team. Okay. Yeah.

Saviano

And then they're thought of differently.

Cohen

They're thought of differently. That the reason why they really were able to beat teams like the Lakers and the Celtics was because the great innovation of that team wasn't just the violence, it was the depth. They had basically two starting teams. Their second team would have been one of the best teams in the NBA. You could argue that their second team was better than their first team and they had nine genuine NBA players on one team coming off the bench. They had Dennis Rodman, Hall of Famer, John Salley near Hall of Famer Vinnie Johnson, near Hall of Famer and Buddha Edwards, a great player.

Saviano

But they're not remembered for that. They're remembered for their I know that's remembered as the bad boys as to be embraced. And that's how they played. Yeah, but that's what if you asked Larry Bird about what was so tough about them, he would say it was their death, because basically Bird couldn't take couldn't the rest he needed.
Because as soon as you went out of the game, the second team came in, run up the score. So, Bird with a bad back at the later stages of his career was forced to play many more minutes than he was comfortable playing. Same with McHale

Saviano

And McHale was. Yeah, he was. And Parrish couldn't play a lot of minutes either.

Cohen

So it was that depth in that second. Yeah. Now I would argue, and this might upset you as a Boston fan, but one of the things that interested me about that team, that season was it also showed in miniature how history operates. So, I was a history major in college. So, I feel like, well, jeez, if you want to understand why the United States was the way it was, which was you know, when I was a kid, which was very focused on the army, very nervous about war, you know, you have to understand the Soviet Union.
You can't understand the Soviet, you understand why the Soviet Union was the way they were. You have to understand Nazi Germany. That's why the way they were. The way they were. Yeah.

Saviano

I felt like put it into historical right perspective.

Cohen

What I mean is, like, each one of these players is not reacting. They're not alone. They're not making these decisions on their own. They're reacting to their environment. Yeah. And they're reacting usually to a specific foe. And then you realize in the NBA, except when there's rule changes, you know, it develops the same way. So, I feel like the the Celtics were a very rough team, a physical team and a team with the biggest frontline in the NBA and arguably the biggest best front line in the history of the NBA with three Hall of Famers, a bird being the small guy Parrish and McHale. And they became that way because they had to get by the 76s who were very tough team. And the Pistons object in those years was not to win the NBA finals. It was to beat the Celtics. They had to beat the Celtics, and the Celtics were in their way and to beat the Celtics, they had to become nastier than the Celtics.

Saviano

And they had to do it in Boston, right?

Cohen

It had to be done down to the team. Kevin McHale is the guy that clotheslines. Curt Rambis. Yeah, that's how they that's a very Pistons move you know so.

Saviano

And the Danny Ainge Tre Rollins incident.

Cohen

So, it was like this those were tough years the Pistons realized or their GM realized was that Jack McCloskey was a genius. GM realized that they had to sort of get big to beat the biggest bully on the block basically how they saw it. Yeah, and that's why they played the way that they played. And even that way it took them a long time. And then the Bulls had to go about it their own way. So the reason one of the guys I interviewed for the book was The Center, the Great Center for the Bulls.
This is what scares me about my age yeah, the guy that they traded Oakley for.

Saviano

With the goggles.

Cohen

No, that's. That's Horace Grant. I'll be here in a second. That's what I'm thinking. Anyway, I interviewed him for the book, and he said San Francisco.

Saviano

Cartwright?

Cohen

Yeah. Bill Cartwright. Jeez, the old man. Because he was a graybeard. That's right. Yeah. He said that they should pay the Pistons tribute because they only became great because of the Pistons, you know, because they had to become great. And for fan, it wasn't like one playoffs. Like it now often is like if like you're watching a great tournament. Yeah, or even one season it was like a six or seven year quest to overcome a dragon.

Saviano

Yeah and they made each other better It's the Celtics Lakers were the same right.

Cohen

And that's why it's the greatest season because that was my point originally.

Saviano

That's why you chose the season, right?

Cohen

Because those teams pushed each other and that's what made them greater than they probably would have been. So like when I was a kid, when I was just get out of college, the greatest boxer was Mike Tyson. He seemed like nobody in the history of boxing could stand up to Mike Tyson. Yeah, but you never really knew because he never had a great fighter fighting against him. Yeah. And you look at what made Muhammad Ali so great. It was Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes. You know, it was. It was Sonny Liston. Yeah. The fact that he had these people to fight.
Yeah. That made him better. Made him learn new ways, made him be clever. Yeah. I mean, the Muhammad Ali's another guy who was clever. Yeah, because he had to figure out how to beat Joe Frazier, who was or Larry Holmes, I mean, who was a stronger person and a younger person. And he had to use his strength against him.

Saviano

And his speed and uses.

Cohen

Yeah, use and use the rope a dope. All these things he invented just for this guy to figure out how to. And that's what I also loved about the season. My father was a basketball coach and he always said, you know, really, it's like life's about rhythm and timing and a good team can beat a great team if they control the rhythm and the timing.
Yeah. So, if the team plays fast, make him play slow. Yeah. You know, so that's what this that's what the pistons that's another thing.

Saviano

Yeah. It's the game theory isn't it. Because for every action there's a reaction and it's always felt like back to tennis, what we had, what was so amazing as a thing with Federer, Djokovic and with a little bit with Andy Murray.
But Nadal really the big three is how much they pushed each other. Right. And they wouldn't have been is great. But many people believe they wouldn't have been as great if it wasn't for the others. That's what you're saying here as well, that the Pistons would not have been as good as they were. Right. But for the strength of the Celtics.

Cohen

Well, it's adversity that makes you grow. Yeah. And its adversity that makes you strong.

Saviano

It's adversity. And it's also I think it's that, you know, each of those foes were a little bit different. So it forced them to adapt their games in different ways.

Cohen

And it's interesting the Pistons so the Pistons got strong to basically beat up the Celtics.
Yeah. So, the Bulls at first were trying to beat up the Pistons, which they could never do because the Bulls were a finesse team. Yeah. And what the Pistons did was they realized this, they got into the Bulls heads and they always made the Bulls lose their temper and leave their game behind. It'd be like if suddenly Muhammad Ali decided to just have it slug it out with Larry Holmes.

Saviano

They made them play their game right.

Cohen

And it took Phil Jackson, who the year I write about Phil Jackson, was an assistant coach to take over for Doug Collins. He'd been a great player but was just as emotionally invested as the Bulls themselves.

Saviano

So, you chose that year because you thought you think that year in particular because you have. And these three teams were a different of their greatness, as we talked about. Right? The Celtics were getting older and each team was at a different point.

Cohen

Imagine that you throw four balls up in the air and they're all great. Yeah, you might pick one year and one balls up in either balls and this is the year where they're all lined up.
Yeah, some are on their way down, right. Some are on their way up. But they're all, they're all pretty competitive with each other and they're all focused on each other.

Saviano

We don't have that now. Do?

Cohen

No. It's very hard to do now because free agency and people, conglomerate entities, it's like we have a post. It's like the age of Consolidated.

Saviano

And a little bit of luck too of how yeah, how these teams came together and the timing of it all.

Cohen

And also because you could have hidden gems. Yeah, that now because of video and everything else look they the general manager Jerry Krause to the Bulls found Scottie Pippen who was on no one's radar. Yeah, playing at a small school. Nobody realized how great he was. Yeah, that wouldn't happen now because of the video.

Saviano

Well, Red Auerbach was famous for that, too.

Cohen

One of my realize that every one of these great teams was built usually around a single draft. Yeah, I'd say, like, behind every great team is a draft. It looks like a crime.

Saviano

That’s how Parrish came in that it worked because it worked for him in Boston, but it didn't work for him. Other, right?

Cohen

Well, he found the right spot for him and he traded for him. And in one draft he had Bird. Yeah, he had Bird, but he was missing the pieces around and in one draft he got Parrish and McHale through trading in one draft, and the Bulls had the same thing, which is they got Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant. That was their team in one draft. And there's like, I'm from Chicago and would always rip on Jerry Krauss. He wasn't loved by everybody. Yeah, but all he did was deliver all those great teams. And Jerry Krause said, yeah, sure he had. Michael Jordan was there when he got there. Who could be who couldn't build a winner around Michael Jordan? Well, they had one for six years. Drafting Michael Jordan is easy. Everybody knew Michael Jordan. He was going to be two or three. Yeah, everybody knew how great Michael Jordan was. Maybe he was better than they thought he was going to be, but they knew he was going to be one of the best players in the league. It's getting the other players. Yeah, getting Charles Oakley from a small school and then knowing as great as Oakley was, that's not what the Bulls needed. They needed a center.

Saviano

But don't you feel like to. Cohenard, I was thinking about this, too, with those with those particular teams that it seems like now there's so much emphasis on just getting the two or the three and getting those two or three stars to come together.
And it's almost like some teams can be dismissive of players four through eight. But these teams in the 87, 88, as you talked about with the Pistons, like they were really deep.

Cohen

The Celtics were really well the Red Auerbach who you mentioned. Yeah, invented the sixth man. Yeah. Which is we're going to take one of our best players.
Yeah. And we're going to hold him.

Saviano

That's what McHale was at the beginning and before that. HAVLICEK Yeah.

Cohen

we're going to hold him out of the game, right? And that's about rhythm and timing. Yeah. Which is now you have guys playing for 8 minutes or whatever it is, and they're kind of tired and they've switched into a different gear.
Yeah. And now here comes somebody that's incredibly fresh and is one of the best players. And how do we adjust to this? Yeah, you know so, and you know, some of it just has to do with the economics in the way I think that there's been a whole thing that's happened. We've mentioned Malcolm Gladwell or like really with Moneyball and this idea of statistics,

Saviano

Too much data,

Cohen

Too much data because or the wrong data, which is kind of what Moneyball said

Saviano

Can you imagine Red Auerbach sitting, sitting with statisticians and data?
I can say, yeah, he was he was he was leading and managing from his gut, from which

Cohen

You know, very basic thing we're talking about, because my book before I wrote a book about my son's youth hockey team and youth hockey, and you'd watch how they which kids would get on the upper teams, how they would choose. Yeah, it's very similar to how they choose in the NFL.
Okay. Which is if you look at the NFL combine Yeah and a Pee-Wee's hockey tryout it's not that different in what would break down these certain skills. Yeah that are like I'm a painter so what's his read like what's his blue like you know they break him down into these primary skills that hockey is inside edge, his outside edge, shot you know how big is it how fast and

Saviano

And you think that's too much emphasis on

Cohen

The NFL they do it what's his vertical leap what's his long jump. Yeah what's how much what's his 40 what's his 40. Yeah. How far can we throw. Yeah. Okay. So basically, when you create a, a measure, a measuring stick. Yeah. I think this says something like this in the, in the Bible, you end up basically that measuring stick becomes how everything is judged. And if it's the statistic can't be measured, it's as if it doesn't exist. And I would watch these kids get picked for these teams and I would know these kids. And I go, that kid's graded all these things. Yeah, except the kid doesn't like hockey.

Saviano

One minor problem.

Cohen

His father's making him play hockey. And because he doesn't like hockey, he plays like garbage. He can do all these things if you look at him, but he doesn't like or that kid doesn't like to get hit.

Saviano

If you use those statistics, you never would have drafted Larry Bird either.

Cohen

Joe Montana would have been a fifth or a sixth round draft pick.

Saviano

And Tom Brady was a right, right, right.

Cohen

So ever look at Brock Purdy right now and he was the last pick in the draft.

Saviano

Yeah there's an intangible that there's intangible

Cohen

Is how the guy actually plays the game.
So, I said if you want to know, like, who's going to be a great youth hockey player, go to a tournament and look at the fifth game over the one long weekend when the team is losing by three goals and see who's still playing. Yeah, when everybody else quit. Yeah. So, I speak with this with some passion because I'm a big Bears fan and I remember when the Bears drafted Mitch Trubisky and I was, I hadn't really been following it right then.
I said to some offensive explain Mitch Trubisky to me why we trade up to get this quarterback Yeah and they said well he's 65 Yeah and he can throw the miss 100 yards and he runs a four for 40. Yeah. And I said what's his downside Because he hasn't played a lot of football. Whereas, before when I was a kid the quarterback was Jim McMahon who was six feet tall, wasn't in great shape, would show up, hung over.

Saviano

Drank a lot of beer.

Cohen

Drank a lot of beer, but they picked him because in the Holiday Bowl, when he was at BYU, he came back like 30 points down. He came back and won the holiday. Yeah. And George Harris, who was one of these guys like Red Auerbach? Yeah, that guy wins.

Saviano

So go back to one of the themes and we'll close out this this great discussion Cohen. You one of the themes we talked about today of how you're drawn to clever people, if you look at these, as much as it pains me to say that maybe there was something clever about the Pistons, where at the time I didn't think they were I thought they were a bunch of thugs because I was a Celtics fan. Right. I thought there were a lot of sharp elbows in the pain. That's what Rick Mahorn did and that's what these players did. They're all you look at each of the teams you know certainly how smart of a player Larry was and how smart maybe even more importantly, how smart they played together. Right. The important importance of Bird, McHale and Parrish, how smart they were and how, you know, how smart in a different way the Pistons were. I just wonder again, like another example, you are drawn to people doing clever things, aren't you?

Cohen

Yeah. I mean, I like the stories about people who sort of see what I really like is.

Saviano

Zemurray would have been a great basketball coach.

Cohen

Yeah, maybe a great basketball player if he was very close. He's. That's right. What I, what I, what I like is, I like books that make you see the world a new way. Something that you think you know and you see it as if for the first time, you know and people like that, so they're looking at the same picture, a picture you've looked at a million times to the point where you're glazed over, you're not paying attention.
And they suddenly say, you know, there's a back door into this place. Yeah. Like they might have 100 guards in the front, but no one's guarding the back. Yeah. You know, and that's what all these people sort of have in common. And you know that the great one of the greatest stories ever about Red Arrow back and this is a great example of exactly what we're talking about is he wanted Bill Russell.
You would probably know the story. He one of his great sayings was, you can't teach height. I can teach you to pass, but I can't teach you to be tall. Right. You know, Bill Russell was a guy who was dominant in San Francisco. He was very tall and he wanted him and he knew he didn't have the draft pick to get him. And I think it was like the Rochester Royals had the draft pick. Yeah. And he's like, What are the Rochester Royals need? They're about to lose their stadium. They don't need Bill Russell. They need to save their stadium. Yeah. So, what he would he traded them for their draft pick was I think a free month of the Ice Capades.

Saviano

I have hear that story.

Cohen

Yeah. Yeah. Right. But that's no one's thinking that. Nobody's thinking though. So this is another. I wrote this when I was. I used to love to play the game Risk. yeah. You know, so I wrote this. I Have a column in the Wall Street Journal. It's in once a month, and I wrote a story about the game risk because they realized when Ukraine was happening, every time I tried to imagine what was happening in the world, they pictured the risk board, you know, because they played so much risk when I was a kid, you know, And I was playing once with my father and we had made a treaty and he was about to break the treaty and annihilate me. And I really didn't want this to happen. And I said, What can I give you? You know, that will cause you not to do this? Yeah, and he looked around and he said, I want your Snickers bar. I had a Snickers bar. And I'm like, But that's not part of the game.

Saviano

But that's currency. But that's currency.

Cohen

Yeah. He's like, lesson one. Everything's part of the game.

Saviano

Okay. what a life lesson. that's great. You are. And it's. And I want to thank you on behalf of our readers for tackling these great stories. And we have a way that we close out each of our Better Innovation episodes. Three quick questions. Okay. You ready for it? Yep. All right. What's a book that has greatly impacted you as well?

Cohen

I was thinking about this and I think the Rob Chernow book about Ron Chernow book about the Warburg family, the banking family. Yeah. Because what was interesting about them was because we were talking about how companies age. Yeah, the Warbirds were aware of this and they were aware that the problem with the Cohen guy is he's going to have a Cohen guy's kid. Yeah. And a Cohen guy's kid is going to lose the money because the Cohen guy is going to assume the money is always going to be there because it always has been. Yeah. So, the war would do is they had they would take their kids and they would send them out to work anonymously somewhere else, not in their company in a different industry when nobody knew who they were. Yeah. So, they developed some edge. And the other thing is they had distant relatives and they would look for Warbirds who were distant cousins in the province who might have that thing the founders had. Yeah. Now this is strong for me because my grandfather, I wrote a book called Sweet and Low. My grandfather invented the sugar packet and invented Sweet Low and he the first generation, he was a pioneer kind of guy like the Zemurray invented, you know? Yeah. And I feel like, you know, in the right sort of world, they would have looked at my older brother and he could have run that company. And, you know, it's like they weren't born. They were so much like primogeniture, like it goes down the line. But it's the Warbirds the reason why that family lasted as a financial company is because they had a wide they threw a wide net for talent.

Saviano

Yeah. so interesting. I can't wait to read that. Okay, excellent. Here we go. Second question, What piece of advice would you give to a younger version of yourself?

Cohen

Well, I'm going to quote my father again. Okay. And this is a piece of advice that I've heard, but I've had trouble living up to. And I think it's the key to everything, which is this. He always said the key to life is to care, but not that much.
So, he always thought you should approach life and business like it's a game, you know, and if you play it like it's a game, which is what Zemurray did, you know, then you'll play it loose and one you'll experience a lot less stress. Yeah. And two, you'll actually be more successful.

Saviano

You're not getting too high for the highs or low for the lows either. You're sort of protecting your you're protecting yourself. So, if you have if you have a setback, it's not catastrophic, right? It's you.

Cohen

Yeah. It's a game.

Saviano

It's a game. Yeah.

Cohen

And you know, you think of like you don't want to be driving around squeezing the steering wheel so tight you can't feel your fingers well, and it's also you don't take it so seriously too. Yeah right. How some have some. I mean, that like being funny was always a big part of my growing up. So humor is a good answer to everything. Yeah.

Saviano

And as you talk about athletes and as you could see again, back to the 2004 Wimbledon final with Serena, she was swinging loose. And you've seen so many athletes that that will tighten up.

Cohen

Think about one of the greatest stories in NFL history, which is the Joe Montana and the Super Bowl. Yeah, Cincinnati. You know that story. Yeah. When he gets into the huddle and everyone's so nervous, they have to go 98 yards and 2 minutes. And he says they're all waiting to see what he's going to say. And he says, Did you guys see who's sitting over there? It's John Candy. I don't know Uncle Buck. And I heard one of those guys say, my God, we knew we were going to win the Super Bowl right then because the guy didn't care. They didn't care.

Saviano

Yeah. You got to be loose. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We are an innovation podcast. Last question. What areas or industries? What do you think is ripe for ripe for innovation in in the next 3 to 5 years? And I want to maybe change this a bit too, and ask you can answer it this way too. What's the book that hasn't been written, that you think is that at one point you said there's a Zemurray story has to be told. Is there another story like that that you think I mean, when I'm writing, when I write a book, first I'll say this and I'll tell you what I think should be innovative clues. Yeah. Okay.

Cohen

When I write a book, I don't usually start with a big idea and then find somebody that can illustrate it. Like, I feel like that's how some people write books, like. I want to write about. Some people think like I want to write about the new metrics in sports and let me find a general manager who's using them. Yeah, I usually find a story that's interesting and gets interesting to you. Something interesting to me. Yeah, but my whole thing is based on the fact that there's nothing very special about me, and if it's interesting to me, it's going to be interesting to a lot of other people because I'm just like a lot of other people. I have the same interest. Every man, right? And basically, I get into that person's life and then the lessons emerge from my being like sort of involved with their life. So, Zemurray I didn't go in there knowing like, what lessons could be taken from his life. It just came naturally from engaging with his life.

Saviano

And do you enjoy that part of writing, getting deep, deep into the research?

Cohen

I enjoy biographies, people's stories and historical things that seem like oddities. My first job was I was a messenger at the New Yorker, and I started writing Talk of the Town stories, which wasn't something messengers were really supposed to do. And yeah, all the big things were covered. Yeah. So, I had to find the weird oddball story and get an eye for them. That seems like it's about something small, but it turns out it's about something big. So, I've always kind of kept that sense of what's this little thing no one's noticing? Yeah, that actually illuminates the whole big picture.

Saviano

Have you heard the story behind, you know, Annie Lamont's book, Bird by Bird? You know, Bird by Bird. I love the stories of she wrote a book about writing, about every writer will face writer's block and how do you write and she named a bird by bird because her younger brother, when she was a kid, was crying one night. I don't know. He like, why were you like 13, 14? And he had a paper due the next day about birds and he hadn't started yet. And he was in a panic like, my God, what am I going to do? I got to submit a paper tomorrow. And the father sat there and listened and said, Son, you just need to go bird by bird.

Cohen

That's.

Saviano

I love that, I tell that story whenever I meet somebody who has trouble getting started. And I wonder if you ever face that.

Cohen

Well, it’s funny, I said I have this Wall Street Journal column, and that's when I it's called Back when. And it's about stuff that kind of it didn't start like this way. It was like very amorphous. But it's turned into me trying to write a basic memoir of my childhood in Glencoe, Illinois, in the 1970s and eighties. Yeah, one little incident at a time. So, the one I just finished, it's going to be in this weekends about woodshop, you know. Yeah. And they don't really have woodshop in junior high woodshop. You mean like high school.
Yeah. With the circular saw the jigsaw the Dave. Yeah but a great thing about woodshop is it was the same thing bird by bird which is you knew your steps, you break it down or how big your problem is. If you break it down into small steps, you do it. You make drawing.

Saviano

That can be paralyzed. It can be so difficult for some people can be paralyzed by that.

Cohen

But you just start with one step. Yeah. You know, and one good thing for writing, if you're having trouble or whatever somebody told me early on is don't think about writing a story. Yeah, just write a letter to me. Yeah. And tell me what's happening. And one of the great things we sort of there's a famous story about Tom Wolfe, his big breakthrough story where he couldn't figure out how to do it, and he was, like, past his deadline.
Yeah, And he had blown huge opportunity. This is his story. Who knows how true it is or how much mythmaking it is. But the editor who was Clay Felker, famous editor, said, okay, we're going to give it to somebody because we already have the photographs taken. We have the pages in the magazine, just type up your notes. And he typed up his notes of why I went to California and I saw this and I met this guy and I saw this and this guy said, Yeah. And they called back and said, all right, we're setting it up or just running these notes. And that that's his writing style. interesting. That's how Tom Wolfe writes. It's like.

Saviano

There's a lesson there for everybody.
Yeah. that's so great. Yeah. You havenot answer to the first question. yeah, I have.

Cohen

I have four kids and they're scattered ages. What need what is ripe for innovation is college. Sure. And, and the application process and what you're paying for. You get to read a few more books with those four kids. Go to college.
Well, how much? How much? How many of the things we do in general built up over time for sensible reasons. But now they just waste everybody's time and they don't do anything. And it's kind of like makes you cynical about the whole society. Like I'm doing this for no reason, right? So, an example is like we all take our shoes off at the airport.
I mean, that made sense I guess at the time, but it doesn't really make sense right now. I don't think they have these different machines. You know, it's not a security issue, but technology is advanced, right? We're still doing it. Yeah. And everybody thinks, you know, this is a waste of time that doing no one feels like that's making them safer.
But we're all doing it. And it makes you cynical about everything. Yeah. And college right now, there's the application process. Who gets in, who doesn't get in? Yeah. The different ways to game the applications. How much money is spent on special services that get you in these colleges that maybe you don't even want to go to?

Saviano

Well, just pandering to these kids, right? How many hot tubs do you need to have at the school? Because you get to sell it to these kids that they have to want to go, Right.

Cohen

Well, the best is one of these schools, and I'm not going to name it now because I'm trying to save because I don't remember is I've been told there's one of these big colleges out here in the country that has a lazy river flowing through campus, know the river?

Saviano

You're in an inner tube and you sort of I can just picture college kids with a beer floating down the river,

Cohen

Drifting to their class.

Saviano

Yeah yeah, there's a need for it. So, your point is, Cohen, there's a need for innovation in higher ed. Yeah, and the application process and what you're actually getting.

Cohen

Because I think everybody agrees that if you were honest about it, you know, you're paying for your kid to have an experience. Not really. So you think back to the system where it was City College. Yeah. Or my father went to NYU when it was like a commuter school. Yeah. And very different than paid. Very paid no money, actually, because he'd gone to the military. So, he's on the GI Bill. Yeah. And he lived at home and he commuted in by the subway every day. He met my mom, my mother there. And there's no way you're going to convince me the education he got there was less than the education my kids are getting right now, you know? You know, So I think that that's ripe for innovation.
Yeah. It just as parents, this is the system. Yeah. So, if there was another system, you know somebody's going to figure it out. And I always think like this thing seems like a bubble. So much money and so much time. Yeah, so much time is spent.

Saviano

And you need and, you know, and you need the clever people. I got two of my. I've got three kids. Two of them went to Ellen in North Carolina and I got close to the dean of the law school who's this really innovative guy. And there's I don't know, there's like 312 accredited law schools in this country. Maybe It's high or low. I can't remember. But there's a lot and there's been very little innovation. He figured and law school is three years I I'm a lawyer and I went like everybody else went to three years of law school and he figured out you don't need three years of it you can do it. And he figured out a way to get people the first one to do it, to get kids through school in two years. Yeah. And I think they're as good lawyers and you get to play with semesters and have trimesters and maybe they have to go a little bit more in the but figured out a way to do it.
And so, what do you do you save a third of the cost and you give it so now you can get a law school degree for I don't know, for like 75% of what I mean You wonder a lot. Like pretty cool.

Cohen

You see it with the youth hockey where all these kids want to be on travel teams because everybody's on a travel right and it means something. Now, I was a kid, I was on a travel team simply because not enough kids played hockey. And when we travel, we traveled right across the country. Yeah, we traveled to the other side of Chicago where there was a rink. Yeah, that was travel as opposed to house league where you played all your games in the rink right by your house? And now it's like every kid plays hockey. Yeah. There's no reason to go more than ten miles. Yeah. And you're spending three, 4 hours. Yeah. To have this. What's the experience?

Saviano

Well, there are these norms. There are these norms in higher ed that that he challenged this norm, that law school had to be three years. There's a lot of norms in higher ed that somebody will have to challenge because they may not make sense anymore.

Cohen

And basically, two things I figured out were one is if somebody's nervous about something or wants something they don't have, you can make money on that, right there. So, somebody's nervous about where their kids are going to go to school, the risk averse, so they'll pay you money so they don't have to feel nervous. You can take their nervousness. Yeah. And charge them to have. They're nervous. Yeah. These are all these college counselors you're paying. You're paying them, you know. And the other thing, the big innovation I saw in my own life is if you can figure out how to charge for something that people have always basically considered free, whether it was or not, you become Cohen. So, like water, you know, you just figure out what the next right thing is, you know? Yeah. So, all the whole college counselor industry. Yeah. Is we're going to handle the worrying for you. But you feel like if you don't do it, you do a disservice to your kid.

Saviano

And some of it too, is that, that especially for your first kid going through it, it's pretty complicated. It's complicated in that the stakes are high, that maybe it's some of it's psychological. You'll be considered a bad parent if your kid doesn't get into the right school. So, you pay a grand to get somebody to coach you to increase the odds that your kid's going to get into a good right. It’s your insurance policy.

Cohen

Well, one more thing is like so my father with my sister was very involved in her life, overinvolved like a helicopter parent, you know, trying to shape her and form her. Now, I'm much younger. By the time I came around, he realized no matter what he did, she did what she was going to deal with, a big giant waste of time. He didn't do anything. He just left me alone. Yeah. What I said to him, like,

Saviano

Thank your sister, for that. Yeah. Yeah.

Cohen

Well, he used to say kids are like pancakes. You should be allowed to throw out the first batch.

Saviano

That's great. that's great. So, you know.

Cohen

Yeah. Anyway, that's caring, but not that much. He had to learn it by or by a whole fit of over caring. Yeah. You realize that what you? Know a lot of things, Especially with kids. It's like the best you can do for them is just sort of clear the way for them, You know, Can't make. You can't tell them what they're going to do. Can't, you know.

Saviano

I was going to say, I can't wait for your next book, but I don't have to because I have to admit I am new to your work. From reading about Sam Zemmuray and I'm excited to dive into the stack. All right, that's great. Where should I go next?
We've had some chance to spend some time together today. What should read first?

Cohen

Probably the book about my father. That's the distillation of all this stuff. Yeah. Are you most proud of that? Probably, yeah. It's called the Personal Herb Cohen. Well, he's. He's was a basketball coach. Yeah. You know, And then he became worked on the START talks.
He worked for the State Department and sounds so interesting. And he, you know, did all this stuff, but it was like whether or not he was negotiating, his whole thing was like, you know, you get people to go negotiate for things they didn't think they could negotiate for, like a washing machine at Sears, you know, about sticker price.
Right? Right.

Saviano

Everything's negotiable.

Cohen

Everything's negotiable. And he was one of the pioneers of that whole thing. But it was all connected to his idea of, you know, how you should live your life. Yeah. Which was to care, but not that much.

Saviano

I can't wait. I can't wait to read that. I will. That's the next one. That's the next one I'm going to read.
Thank you. Thank you for being so giving with your time. Thank you for your writing and on behalf of your audience. Appreciate it. And you'll come back in, to our studio someday.

Cohen

Anytime.

Presenters

Jeffrey Saviano

EY Global Emerging Technology Strategy & Governance Leader

Podcast

Season 7, Episode 3

Duration

1h 46m 48s

In this series

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.