Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Eric Maddox – The Ace of Spades - [Invest Like the Best, EP.15]

Episode Date: December 13, 2016

This week we explore a rare and underappreciated skill through the lens of an incredible story. My guest is Eric Maddox, whose name you probably don’t know but won’t soon forget. Just trust me that you need to listen to this entire episode, and listen carefully—because that is what the episode is ultimately all about: how to listen to others, with care and empathy, in the age of distraction. Sometimes it’s fun not to know what’s coming and be surprised, so I won’t say anymore. After the episode, you can learn more about Eric at Ericmaddox.com. On his wall, Eric has a framed Cuban cigar, he starts his story by explaining the significance of that cigar. Enjoy this episode, and try Eric’s method. It has worked wonders for me. Please enjoy!   For comprehensive show notes on this episode go to investorfieldguide.com/maddox/ For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfield guide.com. Patrick O'Shaunisee is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaunicee Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunice Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Oshoness the asset management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this

podcast. This week, we explore a rare and underappreciated skill through the lens of an incredible story. My guest is Eric Maddox, whose name you probably don't know but won't soon forget. Just trust me that you need to listen to this entire episode and listen carefully, because that is what the episode is ultimately all about, how to listen to others with care and empathy in the age of distraction. Sometimes it's fun not to know what's coming and be surprised, so I won't say anymore. After the episode, you can learn about Eric at Ericmatix.com. Now, on his wall, Eric has a framed Cuban cigar, and he starts his story by explaining the significance of that cigar. Enjoy this

episode and try Eric's method. It has worked wonders for me. Okay, Eric, thank you very much for joining me today. I think we're going to have a really interesting story to hear from you, but also a lot of interesting lessons about how to listen better, how to communicate better, and maybe the way that we could jump in is with a picture from your book that nobody can see, but I was really intrigued by, which is a framed picture of a cigar. Maybe you could tell people the origin of that cigar, and then we'll go from there. Sure. Thanks for having me, Patrick. So in my book, I put a picture of a cigar that came from the hole that we drug Saddam Hussein out of in 2003. The Delta team that I was with, they pulled him out of the hole.

And they got Saddam, which was the key catch. They got $750,000 cash that went to the Army. They got a Glock pistol that went to President Bush, and they had a box of Cuban cigars. And the Delta Force team gave me one of the Cuban cigars. So I've received a lot of medals and a lot of accolades for that, but the cigar from the Delta Force team probably means more than any other award I've received. So the cigar commemorates your role in quite an amazing story. And maybe we can go back to what you feel is an appropriate starting point.

It doesn't have to be the same as the book. But where this journey kicked off and how kind of your unique set of skills made you the right person to ultimately be the one that won that cigar. Sure. So a little bit of background. I was an Army staff sergeant. I'd been an infantry guy for three years, and then I became a Chinese Mandarin linguist. So the Army spent 17 months, Monterey, California, the Language Institute in the 90s teaching me Chinese Mandarin. Well, you also have to have an MOS. You have a job. And they said, hey, go do this eight weeks of interrogations. You'll never do an interrogation ever, ever. You'll be our linguist. I learned Chinese Mandarin, went and worked at the embassy in Beijing, and in, from 2001 to 2004, I was working as a Chinese Mandarin linguist in Los Angeles, California. Well, of course, we went to war in 2003, and I was told I'm never going. I'm Chinese Mandarin linguist, and pretty soon into the war, I get told I'm going to Baghdad.

Didn't know who it was, what group I was joining. I get there, and it's the group, the end of the, who are supposed to track down everyone on the deck of cards. So if you remember in 2003, it was Saddam, Asa Spades, and his regime members. And I'd never actually done an interrogation. I mean, they brought me in as an interrogator, and I'd never done an interrogation because I've been working as a Chinese Mandarin linguist, knew nothing about Iraq, really didn't know anything about Saddam.

So they sent me kind of out outside the area of Baghdad where all the action was. And they sent me to kind of a danger zone up there in Tukre, with the Delta Force team, who had indicated they wanted a guy who could go on raids with him. And because of my infantry background, the interrogators said, yeah, send him to Tukre. And by the way, there's nobody important in Tkrete. There's nobody on the deck of cards in Tukreet because it was so. such a small town that they'd checked every house. So I was kind of just feeling a hole of a place where no one else wanted to go. And it doesn't matter if I don't have any experience. And I used

to be an infantry guy. So it's a perfect fit. But I will have no impact on the war. That's kind of the setting. So going from there, obviously things turned out quite a bit differently. What were the early experiences actually with interrogation? So I start my interrogations when I get to the Delta force team into Crete. And they're not interrogators. I wasn't around. An interrogator. I've never done one. So I just used what the Army taught. And it just didn't work. I mean, it didn't work

at all. It was a zero-sum game. You used intimidation. You tried to give the idea that you had all the information on these prisoners. And the idea was that you want to remove all their hope. And when you remove all their hope, they just say, Uncle, here's everything I know.

And it does not work. And, you know, it's funny, I didn't think it'd work when I was in the interrogation course. I almost flunked. Matter of fact, I got recycled because I just didn't get it. I just remember sitting across the booth when I was going through interrogation training thinking I wouldn't break. This wouldn't work on me. And when I got to real life, real prison, it didn't work.

So after a couple of weeks of those failures, I realized I got to figure something out. And I got to just stop. slow down and really try to figure out what's making these prisoners tick and and what can I do to get them to open up and I finally put the army kind of intimidating techniques aside and said just try to listen to these guys and when I listen to their stories the more that I listened the more I realized, okay, I think we can communicate. And the more that I tried to address their needs, the more they started to kind of provide me information. And the more that I really, really dove into their world and their lives and their problems,

the more that they would actually lean on me and say, hey, I'm going to help you, Eric. I'm going to help you, you know, U.S. Army interrogator, because I think ultimately you're going to help me. and once that I could align our goals and ultimately their goal is one is freedom and two is protect their family so they want to be protected that they're not going to get caught helping the United States and once I could ensure them that I would do that within the prisoners turned to the point to where they were they were leading the hunt they were helping me giving me ideas I couldn't even think of on my own solutions to problems I would have never come up with understanding of the culture that I couldn't learn in just a few weeks because they were driving they

were pushing me to get farther into the insurgency and once I got earned the trust of my prisoners you know it started to dawn on me I said you know everyone says Saddam Hussein's not here but I think he is. The way these prisoners behave, the way this insurgency set up, the behavior of some of the leaders, I said, it doesn't,

their behavior does not make sense unless they're taking orders and guidance from this huge force, this huge presence that can only be him. And three months into my tour into Crete, I told my Delta Force commander, I said, I think Saddam's here. I think we can get him if we,

maybe if we follow this social network of insurgents that we'd learned of in those three months. And at that point, we really narrowed our hunt down to just to one man and his brothers. His name was Muhammad Ibrahim. And once we were able to focus on an individual who I believed could take us to Saddam and also get into the lives of these prisoners. You know, it was just living, you're living out of soap opera and you just, you're able to have an impact on it. And the prisoners really began to break fast.

And it was, it was, it was an amazing situation to where, you know, one morning an individual may want to kill you, may have even tried to attack your forces the night before. and the next day, you know, he's pushing and leading for the charge because you've influenced him to take up your side. So I want to go back a little bit because there's clearly a transformation that's happened, that happens early in this story. And I'd love to put maybe some numbers around it or some context around it where you have this system, this sort of this entrenched method of trying to break or achieve or learn useful information that just isn't working. So is there a way of quantifying, isn't working? Like, you know, if you're interrogating 100 people trying to get information, how many would this old entrenched technique work on?

Patrick, I never got a single prisoner to open up on the old technique. But across the board, since 9-11 until now, on average, of all the prisoners that have been interrogated by all the military, on average, 4% of prisoners break using the Army's old technique. So 4%. That's bad. That's bad. It's bad at anything. I can't imagine any technique where that would be even used since 2003 when I created this technique and then I went on to train it. I trained this technique throughout the military, throughout elements of the Delta Force and Navy Seals and 75th Rangers and other elements of the military of the groups that use it and the interrogators that use it, they break prisoners, which break means get a prisoner to provide

you information where they otherwise did not want to when you began the interrogation 65% of the time. Wow. I will also argue that it should be higher than that, but if I get four prisoners, I don't need them to break them all. If I get four prisoners from a house, I'm just looking for the one guy that's going to break first. But if I get one to break and I don't spend the time on the other, I get counted against in those three.

So it could be much higher. But yes, I think 4% compared to 65% it's a staggering difference. So this is where you know, you see an analog to this problem in so many places and relationships and businesses where there's something entrenched. Why do you think it took you and why was it you? Like what were the circumstances where you finally said, look, the emperor has no clothes here? There's something clearly wrong. How did it last that long?

Give me that question one more time. I got stuck on the emperor having no clothes. So hit me one more time. I teach listening and I think I failed to listen to your question. Sure. So a 4% success rate is terrible. Why did it last that long? Why did the Army's, the U.S. government's method of interrogation not evolve in the face of such a bad or such a low probability outcome?

So that is a great question. And it's the big question. It's the real problem I have with getting my technique pushed through all the military. And the reason is my technique is based on compromise, communication, negotiation, cooperation. So it is very difficult in the middle of a battlefield to try to explain to your commander,

whose his men and women have been out there getting shot at, many getting killed, and they capture the, these bad guys, they bring them to me and I go, sir, after a day, he's our buddy. He's our helper. As a matter of fact, he's going to help us and we're going to let him go. It just, it's tough to get that to fly. And when I talk to groups, anybody who'll care to listen to me, I explain to him, courage is not looking down the face of the barrel without fear or running up the hill when the enemies obviously got the advantage and going to try to kill you. I see courage is is is is knowing

that it's right to do these things even if you have to help the enemy at the lower level the larger strategic mission is going to to gain even though you have to face your men and try to explain to them why the individuals who may have killed some of your some of their friends, their comrades the day before, you're letting them walk out the door. That's courage. And that's what I saw with the Delta Force commander I was with. He had to face those criticisms. Criticisms of trusting me and a Chinese manner and linguist who had never done an interrogation before on this wazoo story hunch that Saddam was in a town where they said he wasn't using a technique that had never existed before. I didn't get ridiculed. He did. And he stood up to it and

said, yeah, we're going to do it anyway. We were talking about sports before we started recording football, but in baseball, there's something very similar where statisticians will find a strategy that will no doubt add to the win total, but because it's so unconventional. oftentimes the managers of the teams take a long time to implement them and it sounds like what you had in the delta force commander was someone who ran interference and sort of allowed you the innovator of the technique to do it without having to worry about the backlash is that a fair is that a fair comparison it is so my commander ran interference we had some things that really benefited us there was a case officer from the agency there and to crete with the team when I first got there and agents agents you know they run informants and informants that are friendly individuals that are working to gather information for you kind of spying around that was the standard way that was the the traditional way of gathering information and it was really ineffective the information we were gathering didn't work well our agent

or case officer got shot. He got sent home. And to Crete was such a useless place where there were no high value targets and certainly nobody on the deck of cards. He didn't get replaced. So that was a benefit to us. So I had the, I was, I was a default for gathering information because it was deemed such a meaningless place that I was given the freedom and my commander was given.

to freedom that they said, you know, just don't get in trouble. Try not to get killed and just do whatever you want because to Crete doesn't matter. So that was a real benefit for us. Fascinating that being sort of off the, off the beaten path is such a key advantage, which is why I want to get back to this story. So part of what happened was you began, and part of your technique was you began to map out this, you know, several hundred person network where you're sort of stepping up, building out, clearing up the fog of war, so to speak, and building out an understanding of how this network might lead to a high-value target, Saddam, ultimately is who it was.

Can you walk me through the beginning stages of that? So when you're first interrogating people and you have this switch from the 4% method to the 64% method, how does one of those interrogations go? Maybe just kind of generically. How long do they take? How is it set up? How do you begin? Okay.

So let's start with an interrogation. put yourself, you've just captured an individual in a small town of Crete. You really don't have any information on them other than what another prisoner has told you that they do. So they're usually going to be part of an insurgent group. Maybe they emplace IEDs alongside of the road or they provide safe haven for senior insurgent members. But there is no evidence. They're not in a military. They don't have a smoking gun.

You bring them in. Obviously, you've probably done a raid in the middle of the night to capture them. So they're not happy to be there. They're scared and there's no trust between the two of you. So the initial thought is that you go in there with confidence and authority and say, I know everything about you. Standard stuff you see on TV. It's stupid.

Games up. I know everything about you. If you don't want to spend the rest of your life in prison, you'll cooperate. Well, what that does is it shuts them down. And so what I thought is I said, what would get me talking? And so what I always thought was, well, I don't have any evidence. And they want to know what evidence I have. And so what I do is I'll throw some evidence at them that is completely false, outlandish,

and something that they can prove they're not guilty of. And so I might look at them. So it's to Crete, Iraq, right? So I might say something like, so you're, and I'll look at my paperwork. So I'm looking at somebody else's evidence and go, so you're Osama bin Laden's driver, right? That's al-Qaeda. That's Afghanistan. That's nothing to do with Iraq.

And immediately in the mind of the prisoner, right then I've got them. Because that prisoner looks at, I can tell him, look at me. And it's not that they're thinking, uh-oh, he thinks I'm Osama bin Laden's driver. It's, oh, my gosh. I know I'm in the clear. He doesn't know what I actually do. He doesn't know I just set up bombs and Tikrit. All I have to do is prove that I'm not Osama bin Laden's driver.

And I see the adrenaline just go rushing through my prisoner and this excitement. So now he's like, I want to talk to you, Mr. Interior. You know, it takes a few minutes. But now I've got them excited because I really need them on the offense. Okay. I need them begging me to talk and explain themselves. That is the key to getting, get it, get the, get the ship out of the harbor. From that point, I opened the discussion just talking about how they're not.

Osama bin Laden's driver and I need them to prove to me all the facts of their life because most of these prisoners will tell you 95% of accurate information. They're just going to hide that 5% of their lives that was involved in the insurgency. Then I'll map out in my mind. It's a very difficult part. It's hard for me to teach this. I can identify the lies through just kind of blueprints of the data of their family and friends and hobbies and money. And I will go through just random different conversations in this one conversation, but I will get them crossed up in certain lies, identify those.

And then I will begin to come back on those lies to where now I'll make a deal with. with him and I'll say, listen, if you haven't told me a single lie, I'm I'll let you walk out of here. Is that a deal? I mean, if you tell me you're innocent and you hadn't lied to me and let you walk out. But if you've lied to me just once, then you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison. I mean, is that a deal? And they're like, I haven't lied to you. And they're thinking in their mind.

He's no way. He's acting like he didn't, he didn't know anything. He hasn't caught me. There's no way he's mapped these out. Thought I was a driver. Yeah. He thought it was a son of bin Laden's driver. And I start revealing the lies.

And at that point, they're like, oh, shoot, I just made a deal. And then I look at them and I don't get on to them, right? You can't get mad at them. And I go, listen, it's okay. But we're going to, now, now you, now here's the deal. I'm going to help you. I'm going to get you through this. I'm going to protect you.

I'm going to protect your family. But you're going to take me to the elements of the insurgency that are a threat to you or your family or that you just don't like. I'll never go after a brother or a friend or a family member in the insurgency that you tell me not to go after. Just give me the people you don't like. Right. So, so I give them that opportunity to take me to individuals and I tell them, you give me three people above you in the, in the, insurgency and I'm going to let you walk. I'm going to let you go home. It's kind of my little saying. You give me three and I'll let you go free. And then I will even create for them

enough evidence to where they know, wait a second. If they take me to person A, B, and C, their biggest fear is that the community is going to find out, oh my gosh, this guy took us to person A, B, and C, so put a threat on their family. So what I actually do, so I told you I have 65% success rate. So what I'll do with that 35% that doesn't cooperate with me, I'll start spreading rumors or evidence throughout the prison that it was those 35, any one of those individuals who could have known person A, B, or C, that they gave me the information. And it let the community believe that. And it really solves a couple of problems for me. It protects my cooperative prisoners

and the uncooperative prisoners. Now they've got a real problem at home. Because now the community turns against them. Sure. One of the, I guess I'll call it a tactic that interested me in the book was this idea that when you were asking these questions, so you kind of put the false accusation up front,

but then you start asking these questions, but you don't do it in a linear or chronological way, that you have a skill for sort of, as you say, mapping, mapping an overall picture or story, and you actually jump around quite a lot. So you jump, but you have to maintain continuity. So, for instance, I get a lot of information by their means of transportation, right? I know that sounds weird, but so I want to know all the vehicles they've owned since the day we capture them back till, you know, whatever, 14 or 16 or whenever they start driving. So if I just say, okay, what vehicles do you currently own now? This car and this truck, okay? Well, how long have you

own this car? Well, prior to owning that car, what car do you have? I'm doing a reverse chronological gathering. Well, if three trucks ago, five years ago, they bought the truck from their sister's husband's brother who now got them in the insurgency and my prisoner wants to avoid the existence of his sister's brother a husband's brother then he'll just omit the existence of that truck so i can't go directly linear reverse chronological order because the prisoners go okay here we go one more truck and just skip the existence of it so i have to skip around but you can't look skippy you can't look as though you're skipping right or they're like i don't know he's doing but it's goofy so i have to create some level of continuity from friends to vehicles to money to family and it's a it's a technique i i call continuity

questioning and once you can do that then you can move around and not go linear and the the individual you're speaking with will never know that you're doing it takes a little bit of training but really it just takes awareness and practice so you've got this this method which is really interesting and seems to draw on a lot of findings in psychology and persuasion, which I find fascinating. How does it then start from the initial findings, starting to build that network? What's the next stage of the story? So you start having some success. You start mapping out who you need to go after next.

Maybe tell kind of the next leg of the story before we get towards the end game. I mean, once we started mapping out, the insurgent, and we realized it all fell. the entire insurgency was being run by this former bodyguard of Saddam, his name was Muhammad Ibrahim. Muhammad Ibrahim was one of 32 inner circle bodyguards that Saddam had, and all of Saddam's bodyguards were from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit of Saddam Hussein out to Crete. Well, all the other 32, the majority of them, they weren't doing anything. They weren't involved.

And it was very peculiar that this one insurgent was, one former bodyguard. was running this insurgency. And so when I started focusing on Muhammad Ibrahim, it was also really odd that Muhammad Ibrahim was a fun-loving guy, right? He was a whiskey drinking domino playing bodyguard and all the other body. Most of the bodyguards were intimidating.

Many times they'd taken advantage of their authority and maybe upset some of the people within the city. Well, Muhammad Ibrahim hadn't, yet he carried this massive amount of power and it dawned on me it's like wait a second there was nobody in the deck of cards nobody else in saddam's regime was into creed and all the bodyguards that would have had enemies he didn't want to have anything to do with but he picked the one guy with no enemies to be his the one guy that knew his location and i think it was because saddam understood listen we're going after the queen of diamonds and the four clubs and if they're around into crete

we could go after them and stumble on saddam so saddam pushes all them away well he also understood hey these these bodyguards who maybe caused uh enemies their own personal enemies if saddam was using them for contact, then the citizens could say, hey, go after this bodyguard because they didn't like him. Muhammad Ibrahim had no enemies. So he was untouchable. And he was not on the deck of cards. And it's the only person that Saddam kind of really allowed to remain and to Crete. And once we realized, once I was like, whoa, this is exactly what he's doing. This is how we knew. All right, We're on, we're on to Saddam Hussein. And from that point, we really focused on the bodyguard.

And then we finally learned that he had a driver. And we were told the driver of the bodyguard, Muhammad Ibrahim, knows everything. And then we come to find out this driver, right? He's sitting at home. And he's a nobody, but the driver of my bodyguard, that's running the insurgency that I think can take us to Saddam. His cousin, coincidentally, is the head of security for the governor of Tecrete. And the governor of Tecrete is this puppet that the United States military has put in because all Sunnis hate us. And we had to have somebody run the Sunni triangle, the heart, which is

in Tecrete. So all the local Sunnis wanted to kill this governor. And he had a head of security that kept him alive. And the only reason that he was alive was because of this head of security. and that head of security's cousin happened to be the driver of Muhammad Ibrahim of of Muhammad Ibrahim so now things got very political and and my Delta Force commander said Eric you you can't go after the cousin of the head of security the governor of the crete the governor of the Crete's the United States government's best friend his head of security kept him alive we don't mess with that head of security's cousin and at that point I told my commander I said I got to have the driver

And again, you want to know what courage is, is when you are going to go arrest the cousin of the head of security of the governor of Crete, who's nowhere, anywhere on the deck of cards. He's not even wanted by anyone. And you know you're going to cause all sorts of a political storm in Washington, D.C., but you go ahead and do it. And my commander did. We arrested him, and I began my interrogation of the driver of Muhammad Abraham, and within probably five, five, six years. six hours of the interrogation, the driver Muhammad Ibrahim says, listen, Muhammad Ibrahim, he's administratively ahead of this insurgency, but he's taking all orders from Saddam. And that was the first time that we really knew we were going after Saddam.

Wow, really incredible. So what was the timeline from that point forward? How long did it take between that realization and the old? ultimate capture. So that interrogation was on December 1st, 2003, and we would capture Saddam on December 13th. We went on probably a dozen raids between December 1st and December 9th. And really, we couldn't find the bodyguard, we couldn't find Muhammad Ibrahim, and we thought we were out of targets.

And my tour was up. My six months were up. I was being sent home, and there was no way I could stay because, remember, there was nobody important in to Crete. So they said, hey, your tour's up, and my commander, my Delta Force commander's like,

do you have any, there are no more targets. And I told him, but well I have one more and it came from a we want I wanted him to raid this pond and the pond was significant because when we first got when I one of the first prisoners I ever interrogated in Tikrit was Saddam's chef and he said how much Saddam liked this fish and we'd captured the bodyguard Muhammad Ibrahim's son and the son said you know that my dad they built this fish pond and that just didn't make any sense why you'd build a fish pond in the middle of a war except Saddam ate this fish all the time twice a day and if he couldn't go to the fish market why then that would be why you would make a fish pond next to the river to

stock it so on my way out of the city back to Baghdad I'm you know into my tour the team rated this fish pond and we we captured two guys that built a shack next to this pond and we really thought that we had got Muhammad Ibrahim and maybe Saddam and it turns out it was just two fishermen. And at that point it's like Eric, you know, games over. We've caused a political mess by arresting the relative of the head of security, the governor of Crete and all this stuff. So you got to go back to Baghdad and go home. When I get to Baghdad, they had these two fishermen. And I said, you know, let me just talk to them, see what the heck's going on. And from my interrogations of those two fishermen, I got one of the fishermen to break. And he admitted,

he said, hey, Muhammad Ibrahim comes by here every three days or so and gets fish out of the pond. And they take it away. And I finally got one of the first. And I finally got one of the first. And I was a of the fishermen to break and they said listen Muhammad Ibrahim I think he went to this house in Baghdad and it was great I was I was in Baghdad so I got the Delta team in Baghdad to do one more raid on the the morning of December 13th 2003 and they did the raid in Baghdad hoping to find Muhammad Ibrahim and they didn't get him and they brought back the prisoners and I started interrogate the prisoners. I realized one of the prisoners was the deputy of Muhammad Ibrahim, and the deputy finally breaks

and tells me that one of the other prisoners is Muhammad Ibrahim. They actually had him. They got him. They just didn't know it. And my flight's leaving it early, early. This is literally your last day. Last day. Last minutes.

Leaving in just a couple hours, and I finally got to talk to my bodyguard. And I started to interrogating. and, you know, I know he was listening, but he wouldn't break. And they said, hey, you're leaving the country, man. Your flights, what are you still doing? And I told the bodyguard, I said, man, I'm going to leave. And no one knows what you can do. No one knows who you're going to, that you can take us to Saddam.

So when you change your mind and you're going to take us, I see you really need to go crazy in your cell. You need to bang on the wall so they'll come talk to you. because no one's going to come talk to you. They're just going to let you rot in this prison. And so I leave, and I'm driving to the flight line. And one of the other interrogators tells me, he said, hey, they're worried about your prisoner.

They think he's going crazy. He's beating the hell out of the walls of his cell. And I knew at that point he had broke. And Muhammad even when he was going to give up Saddam. So I jumped out of the truck and ran back. and pulled Muhammad Ibrahim out and right there he said let's go I'll take you he said where he said he was at the house of a farmer named Keis named Jassim drew the sketch drew the map and I thought wow I'm staying man I'm here and they came back to get me and I said this guy just broke he's taking

us to Saddam and they said man go get on the truck your flight's leaving and I said you know I understand. This is Saddam. And they said, really, where is he? I said, he's in Tikrit. They said, staff sergeant, go get on the damn truck. So I begged him. I said, just call Bam Bam, it was my Delta Force commander. Said calling into Crete, tell him we got Muhammad Ibrahim. He broke. He's going to take you guys to Saddam. So I got on, I left. I left the country. Got on the plane and I left. But they called Bam Bam. And, uh, the Delta Force team in to Crete came down on a helicopter, picked up Muhammad Ibrahim, brought him back to the house,

into Crete, our house, planned the raid, and that night they raided the farmhouse of this case, Namak Jaseen, and they could not find Saddam. They looked for an hour, and finally they went to Muhammad Ibrahim, the bodyguard, pulling out of the Humvee, cut off his handcuffs and pulled off his hood, said, where is he? And the bodyguard, the guy Saddam trusted not to give up his location, took him around to the back of the house and started digging at the dirt, the sand, and he was digging up a rope. And when the team realized it, they spread out and they started

digging up the rope and it was connected to a lid. And they lifted up the lid. And there he was, Saddam. So that's how the United States capture the aces spades. It's an unbelievable story which now I want to use to get into why it all worked, why you were able to do it and what aspects of your system and also your mindset, which I would characterize as contrarian, which I like, that people out there can can adopt, replicate, use in their own lives. And one of the things that really struck me when you were talking earlier was the reason for the entrenchment of the old 4% system, which was this person just tried to kill us, there's no way we're going to go in and be friendly. And that was a big part of

empathy. That was a big part of your success, as I understand it. What is that like? Is that true empathy on your part? Is it manufactured to look like empathy? Because that strikes me as something that would be very difficult to be authentic about in the circumstances that you were with the people that you were interrogating. So empathy, empathy's tough, right? And it's not that it's hard to care. It's just hard for a lot of people to dump that much emotion and yourself into a conversation, which basically is a relationship constantly. So, you know, to gain empathy, people think, well, it means to care. And it's like, well, it's more complicated than that.

I mean, the first thing about empathy, before you're going to do that, you've got to be able to listen. And to be able to listen, you have to remove the distractors. There's so many distractors, and you can list them off. I mean, there are distractions of being tired. There are distractions of not understanding my accent. There are distractions. You know, there's just immediate distractions, right?

If I have a lisp or if I have an angry look on my face, it's a distraction. Or you can have larger distractions of, you know, my child has an illness. Any conversation you're in, you're dealing with these distractions. but then you come up with even greater distractions like biases towards the individual you're talking to. So U.S. soldiers have biased against the enemy because they try to kill them, right? And then even worse distractions would be objectives of a conversation. So when two individuals are trying to have a conversation, I mean, all a conversation is the only purpose of a conversation. Maybe it's a little bit entertaining.

But all you're really trying to do, you're trying to gather information or you're trying to influence. that's all a verbal conversation really is and and sometimes you gather information to influence but if part of your objective is to gather information then you have specific pieces of information you want to gather well just thinking about those are distractors right and then you have to be able to put those distractions behind you and then lack of familiarity on a topic so if if If I'm talking to a software specialist, just the words they use is going to throw me off. So there's a distraction there. And then probably the biggest distraction that all of us have in conversation is what you're going to say next.

That is the one that's always on the front of the mind. It's just these great. So what you have to do is you have to remove those distractions in order to listen. And then if you really want to be empathetic, all empathy is he's putting yourself in the shoes of the individual you're talking to. So the best way to look at empathy is do you know those things of which I just listed as your personal distractions, do you know what those are for the person that you're talking to? That's what empathy is.

Do you understand what their immediate non-biased distractions are? Do you understand their situation at home? Do you understand the bias they have towards you? do you understand their objectives in this conversation? Do you understand what they're trying to think of? I mean, when you really, if you can answer all of those questions, you're coming from a perspective of that individual. So that's on standard listening,

average person listens to 25% of what they hear, 25%. Well, if you remove those distractions, you can push it up to 50%. If you gain empathy, which is then to know, learn, and understand and put those things which are your distractions, which make up their empathy into the context of what the person's saying. You can push from 50 to 60 to 70.

You can even get into the 90s. And once you get into the 90s of conversation, you truly are listening to what you hear. And the power of that allows you then to correctly choose your responses to influence. So if you can get into the 80s and 90s of listening, you have overwhelming power to influence anyone that you talk to. So the question, the question should be, you should always think about it. this is you're trying to improve your listening. Why is listening hard? Like we all can agree it's a hard thing, right? Why is it 25%? Let's say it's 30. Let's say it's 20. But let's say it's 25. On average, why is that? So it comes down to this, the body, the way we're made up.

Your brain's this massive computer and you can hear five times as much information as the human mouth can speak. So imagine the talker in a conversation is moving at one speed and the listeners moving five times that fast. So the talker's going real slow and the listeners just zigz flying by. Well, in order to listen, what we do, what we tend to do is we just go kind of zigzag back and forth to our slow walker. we're zapping around and all that 80% is a distraction so so all those distractions that I mentioned

that's where we're feeling filling up that capacity for these slow talking humans this this the talker so what destroying the distraction does is it sort of tethers you to the person that's speaking so you're now going around them and you're not leaving them you're you're you're you're you're you're centered around them. Well, then once you kick in the understanding of empathy, it literally gets you inside the car, right? So the slow moving car, instead of being tethered around it,

which is better than nothing, what we typically do, you're literally inside the person, you're inside the soul, and you're using a very high percentage of this computer, which is your ability to listen, when understanding the slow talker. So if you can accomplish that,

it really will change the way you see the world. It'll change the way you interact with people. And the beautiful thing about listening is it makes you more attractive, right? So it makes a great listener is an attractive person. I don't mean sexually attractive. People are drawn to a good listener. So once you learn to listen,

and not only can you influence that people are drawn towards you. And so when people say, Eric, how quickly can you get a prisoner to break? Well, 12 minutes, 15, 4, that's embodied you do.

I'm like, they know when I'm listening. They, they, they know. And if you, if you can't remove distractions, then you can't gain empathy.

And if you can't, you're not even in the right, you're not, we're not even, we're not even playing the same game. I once heard it, an interesting definition of charisma, which is that charisma is the combination of power and empathy, which is kind of interesting.

And there's so much in what you just said that I'm going to need to listen to it myself a few times to really make sure I digest all those lessons. But it sounds like another aspect of putting your, one definition you used, I think, was empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes. Now, part of that is the destruction of your own ego. and you mentioned how we are constantly distracted, either gathering information or trying to influence, trying to achieve something.

So it's very self-centered, right? We're trying to get something what's in it for us, which seems to be like the largest distraction to being a good listener. I'm curious, and this is totally out of left field, but it definitely jives. Have you ever or do people that, you know, other people that think like you do

about listening, practice meditation? I don't formally practice meditation. I would say I probably meditate. I probably meditating 80% of the time I'm driving a car. I'll look up and I could be in a different state of the union. I don't know where I am, right? I'm always in my mind. And so maybe I don't formally meditate.

I pray, but form of it. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe. A focus, like a removing of the kind of constant, like you mentioned, the fast zigzag, just mind going a million miles an hour. Seems like that mindset is something that you've cultivated. And I'm curious, like is your, obviously you're listening as intently and as close to 100% as you can in the capacity as an interrogator.

But just in, is this just become the way that you are? Are you, does this get turned off ever? Are you constantly listening at, or trying to listen at this level? So it's pretty bad, my listen. I would say, yes, I take it to a heightened level almost all the time, which is wonderful, right? Like, that's what I want to achieve. It can be exhausting.

But really, once you really engage, so it takes me a while to gain that empathy, but it's like riding a wave, you know, once I gain the empathy of somebody, then the energy comes from inside me to be like so interested in the person because I was able to get on top of the wave, which is learning who they are, that then it's not exhausting at all. it's easy and it's fun and it's definitely the way to live life i mean i challenge people all the time i'm like listen i'm sure your life's great i wish you had one day where you could understand the power of truly listening with empathy i think you would like it better right it's trying to talk someone into starting a workout program or or you know finding god or I don't say that small. It's just these things that you have in your life that are wonderful things. It's like, listen, yeah, at first they're tough and they're challenging.

They don't sound. But once you begin them, it's like, I see the world differently. And I'm like, yeah, but the world sees you differently. You're a more attractive person. One of the things you said earlier was one big distraction is trying to achieve something specific or get like almost like a confirmation bias. Like you're after something and you're listening for stuff that confirms that goal. And it sounds like a big part of this method of listening is listening without a goal

and without any expectation and like an open mindset that will end up probably leading you to far more interesting places than if you were just trying to get one place in particular. Yeah. It's the most frustrating because I give a lot of talks about tracking down Saddam and then I get a lot of leading questions. And it's amazing what people assume is my political position on, you know, if you're the 44-year-old, eight-time war veteran, 20-year military career, white male from the state of Oklahoma. It's quite a picture. You can put me into a pretty small box. And it's the opposite of who I am.

I mean, I consider myself open, culturally, open-minded. And so it's frustrating when I have conversations with people who just go, well, it's this and this and this and this, right? And it's like, why are we doing here? This is such a waste of time. There's a question I ask everybody, and I'm curious if Bam Bam figures into this, the Delta Force commander figures into this, but here I am leading you again, which I shouldn't do. But I always ask people, what is the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for you?

Wow, that's a great question. I probably wish you would have given me that question before, so I had a time to think about it. I don't know. Let's start from the beginning. You know, I was born in 1972. I was adopted. And the girl who gave me up for adoption got pregnant some, let's say, right before her freshman year of college, I was born in May of 1972.

And they went through the ridicule of being pregnant without having an abortion. And I get to live my life. They had the courage and smarts to give me up. And I was lucky enough to then be adopted by my parents, who are my parents, and I have this family, and I got to live this life. So, you know, if we want to start right from day one, I'm forever grateful to that lady for not having an abortion. Pretty amazing. What are the things that you feel now out of the military?

are most important for you to do every day. And what I'm getting at is systems of living habits that you've cultivated that bring you joy or pleasure or that you feel make you a better person or a more successful one. Again, it goes back to the joy and the comfort that people that I talk to get when they see me look at them, listen to them stop what I'm doing

engage them I mean people think it's a little bit weird they think I stare and I tell them I'm like I have to I can't I got to get I have some immediate distractions right whether it's traffic or

whatever and I just I just think that the interaction with all the fast things that we have in our phones and I love my smartphone and the fast life. We're here in New York City and all that great stuff. But just to stop and engage with someone, especially children, right?

The kids love it so much when if anyone, the adult, stops and just listens to what they have to say. And so, you know, I buy what I'm selling. It resonates with me so much. I've got a three-year-old and who's now really interactive and has discovered the question why, which is a whole whole. new world and a young daughter. And, you know, I do my best, but I get distracted too, right, with the smartphones and work and a million things going on. And you see that joy in their faces. And it's so pure and essential when you just pay attention. And it seems like if we are

starved for anything these days, it's pure attention and listening. And so from there, I just kind of, in closing, be curious. What else you suggest people do beyond, is there a resource? Is there an influential book or talk or, you know, methodology? Any sort of follow-up that people can do to cultivate this talent, which seems to be so lacking? I haven't found the book that I love the most. I mean, I really just read articles online. I love, there's some Harvard business reviews that talk about,

listening and the best ones, I think, from like 1957. But it was an issue then. We haven't changed. Our bodies haven't changed. Our ears and our mouths. So that's where I do my reading. But what I would suggest is, you know, when you go into a conversation, whether it's a negotiation or whether it's a meeting, you know, take that list of distractors.

And I would just tell your listeners, they want my listening. outline, not selling it's for free. I'm not going to hunt you down or send you spam. But if you shoot me an email, my email is real simple. It's Eric at Eric Maddox.com. I have a basic listening outline and it's those distractors. And then you just reverse those distractors to gain the empathy. So you look at this before you go into a big meeting and a conversation, say, think about these things. Remember to remove these distractors and do you know what these are? for the group or the person that you're talking to, just the awareness of it.

If you'll do that for 30 days before you go into major conversations, meetings or negotiations, and then when you get done with those conversations, come out and go, hey, did I remove it? Did I get? Dan, did I identify these elements, which make up the empathy of another person? Did you do those?

Well, watch your, yourself in 30 days. Watch your ability to understand conversations and read people and influence people and watch the attractiveness. So, I mean, it's just practice like anything. It's just awareness and practice. Well, I highly encourage people to check out that list. I've seen it. It's really helpful. It is a classic example of something that is simple but not easy. You know, having already started to try to do this myself, it definitely takes a bit of mind set adjustment, but it does seem to work. And I think that probably more so than any tactic or talent that we've discussed on with other

guests thus far, this is one that seems applicable literally everywhere all the time. So with that, I want to say, again, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know is a crazy, busy travel schedule for you to do this with me. This has been enlightening and really a blast and obviously an incredible story. So thank you. Thank you, Patrick. Hey, everyone. Patrick here again.

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