Becoming Heroes and Overcoming Poverty - Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Published Mar 31, 2023, 10:00 AM

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This week on Relentless Hope, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, world-renowned American psychologist and professor, taught us what it means to become everyday heroes, how to lead with moral courage, and to find hope through prayer.

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Let us pray trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding, and all thy ways acknowledge Him, and he shall direct thy paths Proverbs three five and six. Thank you God for giving me life and strength. To day is a blessing because I get to live out the great plans you have for my life. I may not always understand what is happening around me, but I trust that you see the whole picture, and you will direct my life as you see fit. I rely on your wisdom, power and goodness in every decision that I make to day. Thank you for accepting me and making me sure of your love. Amen, thank you for joining us in prayer. Now for the Relentless Hope Podcast with Steve Gettina, where we bring you true stories and personal testimonies that will help you love your life, lead with purpose, and leave a legacy of helping others. Heroes help people in need. Their conscience helps them understand the difference between right and wrong. They stand up and speak out when they witness injustices. They protect the weak and vulnerable, and they treat everyone with respect, grace, love, acceptance, forgiveness, empathy, and compassion. To be a hero, you don't need extraordinary superpowers like Superman or Batman. You just have to show up to act with moral courage and to not allow the enemy and fear to cripple you. God knows that we can all be heroes, and he gave us one of the best examples we could ever hope to have, in Jesus. Jesus showed us what it looks like to have courage in the face of evil. He showed us how to take care of people in need, how to speak out and stand up to injustices, how to go against popular opinions, and how to do the right thing. God understands this isn't always easy, that fear can hold our tongues and keep our hands closed, which is why he wants us to rely on him for guidance and support. He reminds us that he always walks with us and that there is nothing to fear because He is with us. This week on Relentless Hope, I have the honor and privilege to welcome doctor Philip Zimbardo, world renowned American psychologist and professor. Doctor Zimbardo teaches us about becoming heroes, about taking heroic action, in our everyday lives and how we can live with moral courage. Doctor Zimbardo, who has spent more than fifty years teaching, researching, and writing in more than forty domains, shares personal stories from his life that shaped his understanding of heroism. We learn about his harrowing experience being quarantined for six months in a hospital when he was just five years old, and later how he organized one of the first teachings in the US to protest the Vietnam War. As doctor Zimbardo also teaches us leaders have a moral conscious and possess moral courage, which is the ability to stand up for what they believe in, to share their ideas, and to transform compassion and empathy, the highest personal virtues, into action that changes the world. We also get to learn about the Heroic Imagination Project, which doctor Zimbardo started in twenty fourteen, which inspires and teaches people how to become effective heroes and leaders, transforming passive bystanders into active heroes, transforming biases and prejudice into understanding and acceptance, and really helping people change from a narrow, fixed mindset to a dynamic growth mindset. Doctor Zimbardo also reveals to us how he hopes to be remembered for the good work that he's done as a teacher, as an original researcher, and as a writer, and we learn that of the sixty books and six hundred articles that he's published throughout his career, that he believes the most important work he's done is on heroism. As doctor Zimbardo explains, we live during a time when leadership and moral courage is being challenged, but it's also a call to action that Doctor Zimbardo urges each of us to respond to by becoming every day heroes, by speaking out and standing up to injustices, to protecting the vulnerable and weak, and helping those in need. We stand up to the enemy and to the faces of evil, and that's how we can help God change this world. Our takeaway for today that I want you to think about as you'll listen to this episode is knowing what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's right. In nineteen thirty eight, at the age of five, Philip Simbardo was quarantined and isolated from the public. And it was nineteen thirty eight thirty nine, and of course, penicillin and self of drugs had not yet been invented, so there was no medicine, no treatment at all for any of the ailments that we had. I was very, very sick with I could hardly breathe with devil ammonia and hooping cab, which meant it was difficult for me even to eat. I lost an enormous amount of weight, and of course you lay in bed and did nothing. In those days, they didn't even have the concept of exercising why you're in bed or stretching, so he never got out of it. On part one of this three part series, doctor Phillips Embardo, a world renowned psychologist and professor widely known for his Stanford prison experiment, explains growing up in the nineteen thirties. We learn what it was like growing up in the ghettos of New York, being quarantined as a young child, and how praying brought him hope. I was born in March twenty third, nineteen thirty three, and my first major life threatening experience was when I was six years old in nineteen thirty eight thirty nine. The second one came when I was sixteen years old in high school, and the third one came and my first job at New York University when I was about thirty four years old. So let's start at the beginning. I grew up in the South Bronx, a ghetto in New York City at that time. In any ghetto in the world, it's toxic. The air's toxic, this asbestos, there's in those days manure in the streets, and people lived in close proximity. A consequence of that climate was many children developed all kinds of contagious diseases. I developed hooping cough, which was a contagious disease, along with double pneumonia, and I was ordered to go to a to be quarantine, to go to a hospital called Willard Parker Hospital with children with contagios diseases. In this hospital on the East River in Manhattan were hundreds of children with every known contagious disease, children as young as two, I guess up to I don't know, teenagers. And it was nineteen thirty eight thirty nine, and of course penicillin and salva drugs had not yet been invented, so there was no medicine, no treatment at all for any of the ailments that we had. I was very, very sick with I could hardly breathe with double pneumonia and hooping cab, which meant it was difficult for me even to eat. I lost an enormous amount of weight. And of course you lay in bed and did nothing. In those days, they didn't even have the concept of exercising while you're in bed or stretching, so he never got out of bed. And and what happened, of course, is children died at all the time. Curiously, it seemed as if children died during the night. From my perspective as a little five six year old. When I awoke, I tell the nurse whiz Billy, and she said, he went home. Mary. The nurse said, she went home. Why didn't they say goodbye? Well, they were in a hurry to leave, and they left their goodbyes with me. To tell you, well, it was a conspiracy of denial between the nurses and are the patients us, because we knew they were dead, but we couldn't admit that because then we'd have no hope. My hope came mostly from praying. I was, as I said, five and a half years old, and I began to pray every morning when I woke up, pray to Jesus Christ and make me strong and brave and healthy and be able to go home as soon as possible. And I also use this time I was there for six months. I used this time creatively. I learned to read and write from comic books. That's the only Because it was a contagious ward and our families were poor. The only thing we had, the only goods we had commodities were comic books. And that was the start. In nineteen thirty eight thirty nine of Superhero comic books, Captain Marble, I guess Superman, and I would ask the old boy in the next bed, what is this? These words, these symbols, wow, exclamation point wow. While in comic books there's a lot of wows. But I would I would relate to the sound, to the image, and I would write it down. So during the six months I was there, I began to read and write, So that was a positive thing. The other thing I did positively is I had a good imagination, and I would make up games that the kids in our unit vicinity would play, like our beds were really rafts and we're going down the Nile River, which I guess I had heard about in search of the Great White crocodile, and each of us would have to be looking for the crocodile. But also there's also dangers. And I would organize these games for my buddies and it was really exciting, a very exciting adventure. I made it into an exciting adventure and fortunately, and then but again, since kids seemed to die at night, I doubled my chances of success by praying to the devil at night, saying, please don't take me devil. Um, you know I'm a good boy. I'm not. I'm not a kind of bad kid that you you want down in hell. And then clearly what I had done was learned self hypnosis. I pulled a sheet over my head and next thing I knew, it was morning. So I learned self hypnosis, which I actually later used in my teaching and research and many personal medical experiences. I survived. I got home April nineteen thirty thirty nine, much the worse for wear, very skinny, very uh sickly still, and it took a long time for me to recover. One of the things I did to gain my physical strength is um. When I was like when I was eleven, I joined the boy Scouts and with a friend. We used to go hiking in New Jersey in te Neck Cresskill, tenafly every weekend, just my friend, I think dominic and I carrying big knapsacks and sleeping out. Uh, you know, walking a lot and sleeping out. And so I use that experience to help me develop physically, um, to get to get to be strong. Uh. The other thing was because I was sickly, I was always you know, never chosen for the stick ball games and stuff. And I learned what it meant to be a leader. I looked around to see what what did kids do who are a leader? Uh? And I and I decided my life was not to be a follower, followers or boring. Leaders make things happen like I did in the hospital. So leaders are creative, come up with good ideas. And I had other principles which I'll talk about in our next series where we talk about leadership. So I became a leader, meaning I was a captain of the team, president of my class. And then in nineteen oh I guess when I was a high school junior. I guess it was I don't remember now what year. That was. Nineteen forty seven, my family moved from the Bronx to North Hollywood at California because my father's family was all there. And I went into high school and it was the most beautiful, incredibly gorgeous high school with palm trees and everything. An amazing thing happened. I'm greeting everybody high I'm sure Zimbardo, and I was shunned, meaning not a single person talk to me, not a single person sat down next to me. When I went to the cafeteria and sat down, kids around we'd get up and walk away. And I just didn't understand. And this happened every day, day after day. And it was a contrast of being a popular kid in the Bronx and being you know, ignored, shunned in North Hollywood. And I developed psychosomatic asthma as a consequence, and I was really really sick, and since we were poor, we didn't have money from medication, and so ultimately my sickness was the excuse that my family could use for us to go back to the Bronx at the end of the year. I should say that the whole experience with my family was really not very good. My father didn't have get the job that was promised to him, and we were even poor in this wonderland of North Hollywood, California, than we had been in the Bronx. But we came back to the Bronx, and curiously, I went to James Unroe High School in the Bronx, and in three months I was elected most popular boy in the senior class, vice president of the Sea in your class. I got a girlfriend, and suddenly it was the same me, only you know, now, I was just in a different environment. And it turned out the reason kids were shunning me amazingly, they thought, because I was an Italian from New York, I must have mafia connections and therefore I was dangerous, and so they felt threatened and they were avoiding me so that I wouldn't, you know, sing, you know, put put the mark on them. Uh. And sadly, nobody told me that until I was I guess the end of the year, I was on them. I made the junior varsity baseball team, and I was asked some kid, another player, you know, why would people treating me so badly? He said, they're afraid of you. And I was so upset that nobody had mentioned that, because I said, you know, my family is Italian, but we're not mafia, you know, we're anti mafia. So that was the second terrible thing. And the last thing that happened was I got my first job at New York University in the Bronx, and I worked really hard. I was publishing. I published many many journal articles. I was doing lots of revigual research. And also also at the same time, it was not early nineteen sixties, I got involved in anti Vietnam war activities. I organized one of the first teachings in the whole country at New York University in the Bronx. A teaching was something that went from ten o'clock at night to eight o'clock in the morning. We brought soldiers, you know, rebellions, soldiers, Buddhist monks, other people talking about why we should be against the war, why the war is illegal in Amorral. And then finally NYU gave an honorary degree to Robert McNamara, whose Secretary of War, and he was the architect of that immoral, illegal war which he later admitted to, and I had I organized a walkout as soon as they mentioned his name. Hundreds of students, faculty and parents got up at the graduation simply walked out. Was very respectful, but it made the New York Times the next day. Instead of being that being positive, it worked against me with the administration NYU. I was supposed to come up for ten year with a raise in salary, and instead the chairman of the department said I needed time to mellow. I was too brash, and they didn't link it to the to the anti war activities, but it was clear that's what it was. So I was really really depressed, partly because I wasn't the status I needed the money that getting promoted to the next level would bring me. I had a child, Adam, who was young, who had a lot of problem medical problems which required a lot of money in those days, um um, and so I was really depressed about not getting promoted. What happened was suddenly I got invited to go to Europe to be part of the first European social psychology the Summer School, and I'm the youngest one there. Everybody else is the famous professor American and European, and my group did the best work, which was published. We did an experiment in one month in Leuvane, Belgium, and as soon as I got back, I get an offer from Stanford University to become a full professor in in the Sanford psyche department, which was the best in the world. So these were three experiences, all of which were initially devastating, but I was able to work through them and work around them to make me physically stronger, psychologically stronger, and essentially to promote my own sense of personal value, my own personal worth, and also my vision of me as a leader, which I will talk about in our next section. I want to tell a brief story about healthy, engaged community that we had in the South Bronx. In the ghetto of the South Bronx back in nineteen forty five, when I was ten years old. My favorite uncle was Uncle Norman. He was about six years older than me, and I idolized him for many reasons. He was handsome, he was strong, he was talented, and very very friendly. My uncle Norman fell in love with a woman who lived on our street a few block up. I know her name was Sylvia Scolarski. Now, when Norman wanted to get in touch with Sylvia, nobody had telephones in their apartment because it was too expensive and we were all poor. So what he would do is he would call Charlie's candy store. Charlie's candy store was across the street from where I lived. I lived in nine twenty Abean Saint John and Charlie's Canny, so I had the only phone booth on the bok. So Norman would call Charlie's candy store and say, could someone contact Sylvia and tell Sylvia that Norman is waiting to talk to her. Charlie knew that I was his cousin, so Charlie would get someone to ring my bell in my apartment, and I was on the fifth floor. I had a run down, and then I would walk up the block and ring Sylvia's bell doorbell because her mother didn't want her to be going out with an Italian guy. And I would simply say, there's a phone call for Sylvia. I'm not sure who is from Sylvia then would walk down with me to Charlie's Candy store, make the phone call with Norman, and at the end would give me five cents. I would take the five cents and I would buy a two cents two cents special, which was a Seltza, but I could then add two cherries to make it a five cents special and this is the way that our neighborhood went. This was a special case. This is nineteen forty five, just after the war, where we had an engaged community. We knew each other, we carried for each other. And you don't get that now, partly because people are affluent. Everybody has not only your own phone, but cell phone, and people are not as socially connected as they should be, or as we were back in the good old days of nineteen forty five in the South Bronx Schedule where I grew up. On part two of this three part series, we learn about leadership from an American psychologist, doctor Philip Zombardo. He explains how leaders are socio centric. We hear what it was like leading during the Great Depression and how to use compassion and empathy to become a leader. When I was a child, I mentioned earlier, I was very sickly, having recovered from severe medical problems, and I was skinny and weak, and I realized that I had so I built myself up physically to be stronger. But then I noticed just enough to make make the stickball team. So I noticed that I had to build my athletic abilities, which I did by practicing endlessly hitting a ball against the wall and catching and running, which I did, and so that was the physical component. But then I noticed whenever there was a meeting of the stickball team or the local gang on East one hundred and fifty first Street in the South Bronx, there was always a few kids who were the leaders. I mean they they set the agenda. They told us what things that we should do, things that we could do, and then and everybody else mostly ended up agreeing. And at that time, I guess I was ten to twelve, I realized that the world is filled with a few leaders and many followers, and it just seemed much better to me to be a leader, because you set the agenda and you don't have to follow somebody else's agenda, which may not be to your liking or fit your skill set. So I noticed that leaders in the following things. They often were the first to speak up in a group meeting. They often had some creative ideas, things that other people hadn't thought about. They had a good sense of humor, they cracked jokes, they had some vision things we very concrete things where we could begin to do and clearly we could achieve. Uh in small steps the plan that they set out. Also, they often had um, a big big guy to bang them backed them up, meaning um when somebody disagreed that they had their end quote henchmen who could, who could stifle the opposition. And lastly, leaders tended to be physically taller than than average. So that's the only thing I had going for me. I was taller than average for my age always, so with those with that thing, I began to practice being the first to talk up, always having a creative idea, uh, breaking the ice with telling, telling jokes. Again, it helped smiling, smiling, embracing people with different ideas U and I very quickly became quote aid leader. I was always the president of the class, captain of the team, whether it was a track team at Brooklyn College, president of my fraternity at Brooklyn College. Later I was president of the Western Psychological Association twice and even president of the American Psychological Association. And to top it off, I was president of the Council of All Scientific Society Presidents, which is president of all the presidents. So it worked out um and um and I was. I was always a well liked leader, so it was I never led by might of forest. It was always with a smile, with always being gracious, always also being aware of what challenges were to my points of view, and trying to bridge the gap in various ways. UM and UM. My hero when I was a kid was FDR. FDR was Franklin del and A Rosevet was the president of the United States coming out of the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties. That's when I was born in nineteen thirty three. He was my hero because he was handicapped. He had he had polio, but he did the best he could to conceal it from the public because he didn't he didn't want sympathy. He wanted people to believe in his ideas, and he had brilliant ideas coming out of the Great Depression. He had something he called the New Deal. Howd he get people jobs and work? Howd he get um um artists involved, how to get various projects working and different parts of the country that had different different demands. And he was very personally effective. He started UM, I guess it was weekly or monthly fireside chats where he would talk to the people personally. So this is the first time the president used those days. The media of the radio, to make personal contact to say what he was doing, why he was doing, and how it could help America. And it was always putting America first in a positive way. So it seemed to me that what leaders do is they have a moral conscience and a moral courage to stand up for what they believe in. They share their ideas, they make it clear that they care about other people. Leaders are socio centric, not egocentric. It's always even in the language, it's always us, it's always we, it's never I, it's never me. And essentially what leaders do, what heroes do, is they transform compassion and empathy, which are the highest private virtues, into heroic action. It's action that changes the world. And so I started the Heroic Imagination Project ten years ago. It's a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, and I again the president as well, who's the founder of the Heroic Imagination Project. And what we do is we use so please visit www. Heroic Imagination dot org and you see what we do is we develop lessons based on social psychology and cognitive psychology to teach not only inspire young people, high school students, college students, and now business people, how to become effective heroes, how to become effective leaders. And our programs are, for example, how to transform passive bystanders into active heroes, how to transform bias and how to transform bias and prejudice into understanding acceptance abothers. How to change having a narrow fixed mindset into a dynamic rosbndset. So so we have these programs which we license for small fee and then we do training. I actually I and a small team and massive trainers go around the world. Our program is in a dozen countries as dispersed as uh Iran in Tehran, Iran in Bali, uh In um Um and um let's see um in Poland, in Sicily, in UH Budapest, in UH Prague and Bratoslavia and just uh many many places around the world. And essentially it's just using psychology to teach people how to be wise and effective leaders. Uh. It's these days it's difficult to be a leader because they're very extreme. Uh there's extreme opposition more than ever. Uh, there are challenges and everything has gotten very political. I mean it's now the right wing versus the left wing. UM. So there's opposition that a leader has to learn how to reconcile, how to integrate uh points of view of different points of view, and sometimes it's hard because some of those different points of views are our alien uh to some leaders beliefs uh. And clearly now political leaders around the world are having a big problem where former democracies that came out of the Second World War, where where the Allies defeated the axis of fascism uh uh and democracy ruled, democracy was embodied, freedom of the people, encouraging individual initiative. And now there's been a movement around the world toward right wing nationalism um against against, against integrating migrants into any country. And of course this is ridiculous in America because every single person in America is a migrant that comes as their family has migrated from some place in Europe, some places in South America, in the Middle East, and Asia. America is great because it has had been the melting pot uh of of all these different countries, people from different countries, and now it goes beyond the melting pot, that is we are. We are the the crossword puzzle, if you will, that put all these people together into to make a great America. So it's hard to be a leader, but We need strong effective leaders, not only political leaders. We need leader local, local community leaders. Uh. Every team needs a leader who can inspire others to Again, a leader inspires others to be their best, to do their best, to work hard, have the moral courage to do what is right and also to make clear distinction between so the moral consciences, make explicit what is right and what is wrong, and why your followers should help you, help you and do the right thing. We started to Shyness Clinic to help people who were shy who are inhibited, and we are almost one hundred percent effective because we know how to treat shyness. And that clinic is still continuing this day. In twenty eighteen in Palaauka University, and I wrote popular books Shyness and What It Is What to Do About It, which was very popular, so I think five hundred thousand copies. So this is the combination of getting an original idea, turning it into research, turning the research into treatment, and then sharing these ideas with the general public. On part three of this three part series on Relentless Hope, doctor Phillips Embardo talks about his studies and how good people turn evil, What to do about shyness and the time perspective theory. From worldwide psychology conferences to ted talks to authoring prominent books in psychology, he plans to leave a memorable and helpful legacy of education. I'm a teacher. I'm an educator. I'm a researcher. I'm a writer. Those are my three definitions. So evan educator for almost sixty years now. I taught at New York University, at Columbia University, at Stanford University, at Hernard University, many universities overseas in Europe. So I'm a teacher. I teach. I work very hard at being an effective, good teacher. I model what is best in teaching. I teach courses in how to be an effective teacher for graduate students in addition to my in class teaching, which I must say was legendary at Stanford University. I also took three years to develop a program called Discovering Psychology for high school students and really the general public. It is I did it twenty years ago, and I updated it and it's still available online through Annenberg CPB project. Discovering Psychology is the twenty six twenty six episodes each thirty minutes that I created and narrated covering all of psychology, and it's probably maybe one of my most enduring assets to the field of psychology. I secondly, I'm an original researcher. I've worked in forty more than forty different domains, so I'm a journalist. When I get an idea that's interesting, I follow it up with research. For me, the magic word is I wonder what would happen if, and then I do the research to answer that that question. So in my research, I've done dramatic research like the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is almost fifty years old and is still the subject of lots of controversy and sets examples of what truly dramatic research can be. Like. My most important area that my original research in the psychology of shyness, what makes people shy and what they can do to overcome it. I was a pioneering research in that area. Starting way back in nineteen seventy two, I started this Stanford Shyness Research Project which we did all kinds of original research on shyness. We started to Shiness Clinic to help people who were shy, who are inhibited, and we are almost one hundred percent effective because we know how to treat shyness, and that clinic is still continuing this day. In twenty eighteen in Palauka University, and I wrote popular books Shyness and What It Is What to Do About It, which was very popular, so I think five hundred thousand copies. So this is the combination of getting an original idea, turning it into research, turning the research into treatment, and then sharing these ideas with the general public. And we still have a website which people visit shyness dot com. And a lot of my work was with doctor Lynn Henderson, and she's transformed the idea of shyness into social fitness, so her treatments called social fitness therapy. In the same way we all want to be physically fit, we all want to be socially fit, and we can do so by following the half that she outlines. The other thing I started is the whole domain of psychology of time perspective, how people divide their personal experiences into temporal categories of past, present, future. And I developed the an original scale, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory z TPI, which measures the degree to which people live in a positive and negative past, positive neg of future, positive negative present, and that scale is being used around the world. There are hundreds of researchers who now study this concept of time perspective in many different ways. And we have annual bi annual international conferences every two years, starting eight years ago in Coimbra, Portugal, and then or So, Poland then Copenhagen, Denmark, and this last month we were in nons France, and in two more years our next a fifth bi annual conference will be in a Cologne, Germany. The current research I'm doing is I call it man disconnected or man interrupted, and I'm focusing why young boys and men are getting addicted to video games and online pornography. I've done the ritual research in that area, written, as I said, several books about this concept, and now the addiction to video games and pornography is now clinically valid depiction of addiction, and in my book I described the phenomena. I was the first to clearly identify both of those and then we have we propose a number of solutions. So the Prison's study as a dramatic kind of research shyness area time perspective and addiction to pornography and video game And lastly, probably my most important contribution I think is in the area of heroism. So ten years ago I started this Heroic Imagination Project in San Francisco. We're a nonprofit foundation UM that not only inspires but trains ordinary people how to become everyday heroes. Everyday heroes of people stand up, speak out, and take wise and effective action in challenging situations in their lives. UH. They opposed the evil of inaction meaning passivity in the face of doing nothing when people should be doing something, and also the evil of action like bullying and other hostile social actions. And so I formed this foundation. We have an active we've had an active board of directors. We have again our website, Heroic Imagination dot org shares information that we have learned with the general public. UM our lessons are combine basic social psychology and congress psychology in in really unique ways. So our lessons are used, as I said, in high school, colleges and now in businesses. UH. And what makes the lessons special is they're all organized around provocative videos UM. And we give the teachers or the business business center UM a presenter's guide with all the videos with all the background research uh and then we lead them through had to deliver this these materials in very efficient and effective and interesting, as I said, provocative ways um uh. And so we license our lessons for relatively minimal fee um um. And then but in order to use the lessons, high or one of our master trainers has to go to the school, to the business, the center and train people how to how to be effective heroic imagination leaders. Our program now is in more than a dozen countries around the world, most of which I have gone to do the training, and I visit. I go back and visit regularly. So s most ambitious program is in Budapest, Hungary, and now we're in more than a thousand high school st all of Hungary. So I usually go there every year or every other year. And we're all over Poland and Mossa crackoff in other places. We're in the ghetto in Sicily, in Palermo, and we're working with African migrant youth, not only teaching them or lessons, but getting them to be the trainers of Italian high school kids the same age, only now because they are the teacher, they get new respect and it's been transformative for many of these young African boys and girls. So so the legacy means what are you remembered for? So it's it's will be mostly for all that research. As I said, also, I'm I'm a writer. I published sixty books and more than six hundred articles. I published introductory textbooks like Psychology and Life. I did many many editions which has been used literally around the world Core Concepts, which is an upgraded, updated version of Psychology in Life. My most important book, from my point of view, is A Looser Effect Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, and it summarizes what I learned not only from the prison study, but the work I did with defending an American prison guard in Abu Grade Prison, also my research on Jenne Sides in Rwanda and UM and again in Nazi Germany. UM. But then it also ends with positive notions, what is it, what is it we can do to prevent good people turning evil? How can we get ordinary people to be inspired to be heroes? And out of that last chapter of that book, I came to think about the Heroic Magination project. In addition to writing all those books, I'm also I've also been frequent orreta on the TED dot com conference. I've given several lectures that have gone viral, seen by millions of people. Probably the most dramatic one was the Psychology of Evil. But then also I did a four minute version on the Descent of Guys and the Rise of Gals. That's the first time I had an idea about boys getting addicted to video gangs, and even though it was limited to four minutes. So I've given the shortest TED took four minutes, and the Psychology of Evils like twenty one minutes, one of the longest ever. Both of them went viral and was still seen by millions of people. So my legacy, I'd like to be remembered for the good work I've done as a good teacher, as a good researcher, as a good writer, sharing psychology, giving it away to the general public informs that they can use it. I want to be seen as an honest, generous, humble man, a self made man. I emerged from poverty, the son of a second generation uneducated Sicilian parents who migrated to the United States in you know it was grandparents migrated to the the United States in turn of the century and became educated through public education. I never spent one dime on all of my education from kindergart I didn't go to from first grade through graduate school. And I want to be seen as reliable, as talented, as generous, as he said, humble, uncompromising and so of course, And really what's important is being a good family man, good husband to my wife Christina, good father to my children Adam Zimbardo, Tanya and Zara Zimbardo, and my grandchildren Little Philip Pandazmbardo and little Bunny Victoria Lee Zimbardo. And last or not least, to be seen as a good employer of the people who work as my assistants, currently Kayla Langley and before her Coore Kine and before her Nikita Duncan Coolong. So good father, good husband and ideally good boss. And with that, I hope I do have some legacy and indoor yow. God knows that we will face evil. He knows that the enemy will try to tempt us to fill our hearts with fear so we turn away from God and from love. And God knows that we will face moral dilemmaus or we might have to go against the crowd. Fortunately, God gifted us with so many tools to help us in the battle between good and evil, and he knows that inside each of us is a hero. He gifted us with a mighty conscience that shows up and shows us right and wrong. He gave us his word so that we may turn to it for strength, inspiration, and hope. He gave us the scriptures that show us examples of true heroes, Jesus being the ultimate hero. And He's given us his son Jesus so that we may have a path to God, so that we may have a relationship with God, so that we may know God walks with us in every moment, especially the ones when we are called to act as heroes. This week on Relentless Hope, doctor Phillips Embardo, world renowned American psychologist and professor, taught us what it means to become an everyday hero. He taught us how to lead with moral courage and to find hope through prayer. Doctor's Embardo, whose career spends more than fifty years and is known for original research in a variety of subjects, shared powerful stories from his child childhood to his first job teaching, which shaped his views on heroism. We hear about doctor Zimbardo's first teaching job at New York University and his involvement in anti Vietnam War activities, including organizing one of the first ever teachings in the country and a peaceful walk out during a graduation ceremony when Robert McNamara was given an honorary degree. We learned that heroic leaders lead with moral courage and they have a moral conscience, which is the ability to stand up for what they believe in. We also learned that heroic leaders share their ideas, they make it clear that they care about people, and they make a clear distinction between what is right and what is wrong. As doctor Zimbardo explained, heroic leaders also inspire others to be their best, to do their best, to work hard, and to have moral courage to Doctor Zimbardo taught us that heroes take wise and effective action in challenging situations. They oppose the evil of inaction in the face of doing nothing when people should be doing something. Heroes oppose the evil of action to like bullying or taking other hostile social actions. Heroes don't entertain those types of behaviors. We also learned from doctor Zimbardo that of the more than sixty books and six hundred articles and more than forty different domains that he has researched, written, and published. He believes his most important contribution to the world is in the area of heroism, including launching the Heroic Imagination Project, which inspires and trains ordinary people to become everyday heroes. God never said that being a hero or acting with moral courage would be easy, but he promises us that we're never alone, that in the face of evil, that when we bear witness to situations that we know are wrong, God is beside us, loving, supporting, and lending us the courage that we need so that we will act according to His will. Doing the right thing isn't always easy. In fact, sometimes it's a real hard, but just remember that doing the right thing is always right. And if you know someone that needs a little bit of hope, the right thing to do is to share this podcast with them so that you too can be an everyday hero. So give this podcast a share if you enjoyed Doctor Phillips Embardo this week on Relentless Hope