Selects: How the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked

Summary

Summary of "Selects: How the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked" – Stuff You Should Know Podcast

Release Date: November 23, 2024

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Introduction to the Stanford Prison Experiment

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark delve deep into the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), exploring its execution, outcomes, and the ensuing controversies that have surrounded it for decades.

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Background and Setup of the Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in August 1971 at Stanford University, aimed to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power dynamics between guards and prisoners. Organized in the basement of Campbell Hall, 24 college students were randomly assigned to either the role of guards or prisoners. Each participant was compensated $15 per day (equivalent to approximately $93 today) with the experiment originally slated to last two weeks.

Notable Quote:

Chuck Bryant [06:16]: "Which would be about $93 today, funded by the U.S. office of Naval Research."

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Immediate Escalation and Emergence of Cruelty

Initially, both guards and prisoners treated the roles as mere role-playing exercises. However, tensions quickly escalated, leading to the emergence of genuine cruelty from some guards and severe emotional distress among prisoners. By the second day, a prisoner riot erupted, signaling the deteriorating environment within the simulated prison.

Notable Quotes:

Philip Zimbardo [06:45]: "You should just call this episode the Stanford Prison Experiment, AKA perhaps the hackiest experiment of all Time. And it's really not an experiment anyway."

Chuck Bryant [10:08]: "They were referred to only by their prison numbers. They would never say their names."

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Ethical Concerns and Intervention

As the situation spiraled out of control, Philip Zimbardo, the lead researcher, assumed the role of the prison superintendent, blurring the lines between researcher and participant. This dual role compromised the study's objectivity and exacerbated the abusive behavior of the guards. The turning point came when Zimbardo's girlfriend, Christine Maslock, visited the experiment and was appalled by the conditions, prompting her to urge him to terminate the study.

Notable Quotes:

Chuck Bryant [16:48]: "So he comes out, tells the world in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you...and put you as guard and prisoner...Evil is in everybody."

Philip Zimbardo [16:51]: "That was the second interpretation of the Stanford Prison experience."

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Methodological Flaws and Subsequent Critiques

The experiment has been heavily criticized for its methodological shortcomings. Key issues include the absence of a control group, the recruitment of participants through biased advertisements, and the researcher's active involvement in the experiment. These flaws cast doubt on the validity of the findings, suggesting that the observed behaviors were influenced more by the experimenters' expectations than by the situational dynamics.

Notable Quotes:

Chuck Bryant [40:51]: "He didn't have a control group. And one of his...chauffeurs was a warden."

Philip Zimbardo [42:17]: "If you run an experiment of any sort...it should have two sets of tomatoes."

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Reinterpretations and Modern Perspectives

Recent analyses, including critiques from independent researchers, argue that the SPE did not conclusively demonstrate that situational factors alone can lead to abusive behavior. Studies like the BBC Prison Study replicated the SPE with more rigorous controls and found that without researcher intervention, participants did not exhibit the same levels of cruelty. Additionally, revelations about Zimbardo coaching guards to behave aggressively further undermine the experiment's claims about inherent human tendencies toward evil.

Notable Quotes:

Philip Zimbardo [47:12]: "From what I understand, yes."

Chuck Bryant [44:06]: "That was a big deal, because the findings of the Stanford Prison experiment say if you take some people and say you're a guard, give them some power, and you will turn evil."

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Impact and Legacy of the Experiment

Despite its controversial nature, the Stanford Prison Experiment has left a lasting imprint on the fields of psychology and ethics. It has sparked ongoing debates about the ethics of human experimentation and the extent to which environment versus inherent personality traits influence behavior. The experiment has also influenced popular culture, with numerous adaptations and references, including a 2015 film starring Billy Crudup.

Notable Quotes:

Philip Zimbardo [46:35]: "The second set was that Zimbardo inserted himself and that it actually demonstrated what's called situationist theory."

Chuck Bryant [50:37]: "The movie, you know, the documentary is probably a little more accurate, but the movie wasn't bad."

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Conclusion and Reflections

Chuck and Josh conclude the episode by emphasizing the importance of critical analysis in psychological studies. They caution against accepting widely held beliefs without scrutinizing the underlying research methodologies. The episode serves as a reminder of the complexities involved in human behavior studies and the ethical responsibilities of researchers.

Notable Quote:

Philip Zimbardo [50:33]: "Were you Philip Zimbardo, we expect to hear from your lawyer."

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This comprehensive exploration of the Stanford Prison Experiment sheds light not only on the events of 1971 but also on the evolving understanding of human behavior and the ethical considerations paramount in psychological research.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, come on in.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks so much. See you soon.

[Josh Clark]

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[Jerry]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hi, everybody. Chuck here. Hope you're having a great day. Hope you're having a great weekend. I'm thinking about you. You, each one of you individually. I'm thinking about you. I know where you live. I'm standing right behind you, actually. I'm just kidding. But I hope you're doing well. This one goes back to July 5, 2018. It's a good one. I think I picked this one because I had just recently seen the movie on the Stanford Prison Experiment. The movie is okay. It's not great. It's not bad. It's fine. The podcast episode was pretty good from what I remember, though. But you should do both. If you've seen the movie, listen to the show. If you listen to the show, then give the movie a shot. It's got Billy Crudup. He's always awesome. And it's called how the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked, where friend becomes foe, foe becomes friend. What'll happen in the end? Listen in to find out. Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. So why don't you pull up a chair, kick back, and tell us about your problems, because this is psychology stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

We should just call this episode the Stanford Prison Experiment, AKA perhaps the hackiest experiment of all Time. And it's really not an experiment anyway.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I got kind of ticked off while I was researching this.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, you should, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because I used to think it was cool. Like, oh, man, what a cool experiment.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, everybody's evil at its Core.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Then I researched it and I was like, this is a bunch of bs, all of it. This is one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That is so funny because I, while I was researching this, I was like, I'm gonna have to keep it together. Maybe at the end I can really go off or whatever.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's go off at the beginning.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That's great, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I watched the movie today too.

[Philip Zimbardo]

The 2015 one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

How was it? How was Billy Crudup? Because I loved him in Almost Famous.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I'm a fan. He was good. But like, I don't know, the movie A was pretty sensationalized as far as the violence. Like they showed a lot of straight up physical violence in the movie which supposedly didn't occur.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like beating them with billy clubs and hog tying them and like real violence.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Hollywood actually these days. I should say Atlanta.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yollywood is what they call it.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Oh, there you go. Perfect. That's perfect. That sounds like a Norman Reedus creation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, might have been.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Shout out to Norman Reedus.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then what was I saying? Oh, I don't feel like it came down hard enough on this Yahoo. What was the guy's name?

[Philip Zimbardo]

Zimbardo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Zimbardo. For just crafting a really poor. Doing a very poor job at crafting a supposedly scientific experiment.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No, he was like the driving force behind that movie getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get a movie made in America.

[Chuck Bryant]

He seems to be a pretty shameless self promoter.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Decades. Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

It's not a good quality in a social psychologist.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So we're going to see. I guess we let the cat out of the bag. But we shall see that the Stanford Prison experiment, one of the most famous experiments in the annals of psychology, is not an experiment at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Its findings are wide open to interpretation. And it was conducted by a showman, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a red flag when you don't publish your findings in a medical journal. You publish them in New York. Was it New York Magazine?

[Philip Zimbardo]

New York Times Magazine, Hodgman's rag.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, great rag, but that's not the place to go publish scientific findings.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No, peer reviewed journals are.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And they circumvented that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But for very good reasons.

[Philip Zimbardo]

All right, so let's. Let's talk about the outline. So let's go back to the beginning, Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Back to the year of my birth. 1971.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

And Stanford at Stanford University.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which is what? Palo Alto.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. Go fighting. Sequoias what is there? They have like a big old sequoia on their logo. I think it's like a. And then they have a. A sequoia with its fists up. Or is that a leprechaun? Oh, that's Notre Dame I'm thinking of.

[Chuck Bryant]

I do feel like it has something.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Chuck's looking it up. Everybody. So let me stall.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is a tree. The Stanford Tree.

[Philip Zimbardo]

I don't know what the mascot is, but there's definitely a tree associated.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I looked it up. The Stanford tree.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Oh, okay, cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the first question is, why is it a tree?

[Philip Zimbardo]

Uh huh. Well, what's the answer?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where it is in California, but that doesn't answer the real question, which is why would you have a tree?

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. Philip Zimbardo sitting there like, quit stalling. Get to the. Get to the heckling.

[Chuck Bryant]

He's still around.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, he is.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, all right, we're at Stanford, it's 1971.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. We're actually in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford University, I think like Campbell hall or something like that. And I think August of 1971, there were 24 young men, almost all of them. I think one of them was Asian American. And they are doing something pretty bizarre in this basement in August of 1971. They've been divided into two groups, guards and prisoners.

[Chuck Bryant]

Supposedly average kids.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. And they are acting out this basically role playing game of guards versus prisoners.

[Chuck Bryant]

For 15 bucks a day in a.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Simulated prison in the basement of this hall at Stanford University.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which would be about $93 today, funded by the U.S. office of Naval Research.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Is that right? So it'd be 93 bucks a day, and it was originally going to be two weeks. So I'm sure some of these guys were like, heck yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, I kind of forgot what it was like to be a college student. That'd be, you know what, between 12 and 1,400 bucks starting off your summer.

[Philip Zimbardo]

It'd be about $1,302 if my quick math is correct.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good scratch for a 21 year old.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. Two weeks on summer break.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. So you were divided into two lots like you said. They asked people supposedly what you want it to be, unless this was purely a movie creation. And I did try and look up and try and find out the differences.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they supposedly asked him and most everyone said, or in fact everyone said prisoner. And one of the reactions from who ended up being the Bad guard, the guy said. They asked him why and he's like, because nobody likes guards.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

He's like, why would anyone want to be a guard? Because they thought, we'll just be prisoners because they just will lay around and smoke cigarettes.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So we'll kind of unpack what that suggests later on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Okay, so you've got these guys and they're down here for this experiment. And so coming at it from the way this is the popular interpretation of what happened at the Stanford prison experiment. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Philip Zimbardo]

You've got 12 guards and 12 prisoners.

[Chuck Bryant]

The prisoners had been arrested, by the.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Way, by the real Palo Alto police.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. They weren't told when, but the real cops came by, arrested each one of them for, you know, a variety of.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Crimes, booked them at the Palo Alto police station, and then transported them to the jail. The fake jail at Stanford.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they did a legit job. They put up signs, they had these rooms decked out like jail cells. They had a hole. They did a really believable job of making this seem like a prison environment, at least.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So you've got these prisoners who've been delivered, you've got these guards who are waiting there for them. And as far as Zimbardo has ever said, these guards were told you have to protect the prison and everything else is up to you. The only rule is there's no physical punishment. We're just here to observe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like, here's your uniforms, here's your sunglasses.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. And then the prisoners were booked in with wearing smocks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No shoes, no underwear.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Naked under the smocks, chained at the ankles.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And then they wore like those stocking cap durags.

[Chuck Bryant]

They had a panty on their head to simulate.

[Philip Zimbardo]

To simulate. They're having their head shaved.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And you know, this is the early 70s, so most of them had these big afros and long hair and stuff under these panties.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So this is like, at first everything's pretty normal. The guards don't quite know what to do. They're a little timid. The prisoners apparently relished this immediately and started like finding where the guards boundaries were and they started to band together. And there was actually, I think on day two, the turnover from day one to two, there was a prisoner riot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, they, like you said, they were sort of laughing at first and I think we didn't mention too. And this will end up being very, very problematic. And the first sign that he didn't do a good job. Zimbardo actually acted as the superintendent of the prison, involved himself in his own experiment and had one of. He had some graduate assistants that were assisting in the program. They acted as a parole board. And one of them was the warden that was.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. An undergrad actually named.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, were they undergrad assistants?

[Philip Zimbardo]

Well, the warden, Jaffe. His last name was Jaffe. He was an undergrad at the time. And actually he had come up with the experiment on his own.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, he was the guy, huh?

[Philip Zimbardo]

And then Zimbardo was like, this is a really good idea. Let's do this for real.

[Chuck Bryant]

Imagine the press. So, yeah, like you said, it escalated pretty quickly. After kind of laughing at first, these guards got into their roles, to say the least, and really kind of started being jerks in quick order. And after, the prisoners were like, hey, this is kind of funny. Like, you're being. You're not being very cool.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they were, you know, kind of smacked down and, you know, made to do things like push ups and jumping jacks and they would withhold food and eventually they would, like, take their beds away from them and stuff. Like, it just got worse and worse. And there was, I think, like you said, on day two, an uprising. They got together, threw the cots off their beds and threw the bed frames against the door and wouldn't let them in.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So there was a prisoner riot. Yeah, that's pretty significant. Right. And what's equally significant is that the guards by the second day started to show signs of, like, real cruelty toward the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. They started engaging in basically acts of torture, like waking them up randomly in the middle of the night, making them get up, like you said, push ups, which is interpreted as physical punishment because, again, you couldn't hit them with the rubber hose, you couldn't hit them with the baton, you couldn't punch them. But if you make somebody do a bunch of push ups, that's physical punishment, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And it was within the bounds, apparently.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. They were referred to only by their prison numbers. They would never say their names. They were made to memorize everyone else's prison number. And, like, they would line them up and tell them to repeat their numbers for like an hour if they didn't do it fast enough. And then in reverse order, they would get punishment. They would do the kind of the classic moves of holding one responsible for the punishment of others.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, that's a big one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, if you didn't make your bed good enough, then no one could go to sleep. Stuff like that.

[Philip Zimbardo]

The guards also Innovated carrots here or there too. They actually made one cell, like a good cell. Like, they put a bed in it with, like, bedding. If you were in that cell, you were eligible for, like, good meals, like, better than what the other prisoners had. And there were room for three inmates in there at a time. And so it instilled this sense of competition and skullduggery, I guess, backstabbery among the prisoners to curry favor with the guards, like, by informing on the other ones so that you could get a chance to be in, like, the nice cell.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think even before that, like, when they went to stage the uprising, I don't think there were three rooms of three, and I think six of them. Two of the rooms participated and one of the rooms did not. And because not all the guys, you know, not all the prisoners, like, rebelled as much, some of them just kind of went along with it.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Interestingly, some of the guards did not descend into cruelty.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Philip Zimbardo]

They actually, some of them did, like, favors went out of their way to be nice to the prisoners. But the grabster who wrote this article points out very significantly, they didn't stand up to the cruel guards or officially object to their behavior.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Philip Zimbardo]

They went along with it, but then.

[Chuck Bryant]

They thought they had to in their.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Own right, in their own way, they did what they could to retain their humanity. So there are two huge points, and one of them, there's one among the guards and one among the prisoners. And the one among the prisoners comes 36 hours after the beginning of the experiment. And this prisoner, his name, it would later be revealed, was Douglas Korpi. He had an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown. 36 hours after this experiment starts, one of the prisoners becomes so emotionally involved in this simulated prison at the cruelty, the simulated, supposedly cruelty of the guards, that he had a nervous breakdown. Well, and had to be. Yeah, had to be removed from the experiment. And this is like, this is Zimbardo's. This is the official line for the Stanford Prison Experiment.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, so he has the plane along.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. And has been for decades.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He also said that one of them broke out in a psychosomatic rash. There was all manner of various levels of psychological breakdowns happening on the other side.

[Philip Zimbardo]

The big star among the guards was a guy named John Wayne, who you referenced earlier.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman. And he was the one who. He was the ringleader. He's the one that came out as the most brutal guard of them all. And all the other guards kind of fell in line behind him and took their cues from him.

[Jerry]

So this whole thing's going on.

[Philip Zimbardo]

This is crazy town, this place. In six days, Six days, this thing descends into chaos.

[Chuck Bryant]

Supposed to be two weeks.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yes. There was rumors that there was going to be breakout, and so they moved the experiment. There were that guy, Douglas Korpi, who had a nervous breakdown, ended up getting put into the hole, this broom closet for, I think, overnight, and was finally released because the researchers actually stepped in and said, you should probably let them out. It was just utter chaos. And then eventually, Philip Zimbardo's girlfriend at the time, a woman named Christine Maslock.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, his wife to be.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Oh, she married him, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, still married.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So she came and just dropped in to see how things were going and was so outraged at what she saw that she was like you so far beyond the line. You have to stop this now. Like, this has descended into chaos. You can't do this. These people are treating these prisoners horribly. Like, how are you letting this go on? And he went, I'm okay, fine. And so the next day, he canceled the experiment again after six days. And it was scheduled to go on for two weeks. And so he comes out, tells the world in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you. If I took you, Josh, and I took you, Chuck, and put you as guard and prisoner in even a simulated prison and put a smock on Josh and took his underwear off and put a stocking on his head and gave Chuck a baton and some glasses. Chuck would beat Josh up and Josh would probably have his spirit broken and have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is in everybody.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Crumbling at the first sign of adversity is in everybody. We're all just pathetic weaklings. Stanford prison experiment. And he ran off and said, I'm famous.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, that's a great setup. So we'll take a break here and come back and talk a little bit about the. More about the experiment and the realities of it right after this. Hey, order up.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Jerry]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah.

[Jerry]

And now the big part. This isn't just a Kentucky story. AT&T is on track to cover more than 30 million locations with fiber by the end of 2025. So those opportunities Oldham county got connected to, well, ATT is bringing them to millions of people across America and that's.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Good news for Everybody connecting everything at&t.

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Jerry]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Philip Zimbardo]

That was, I felt, was expected and wanted from me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And I put on this fake Southern accent. And if you like, ask friends and family today, they would laugh at this because I'm really not this guy at all.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because he really comes off as a bit of a villain in this movie, for sure.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Well, he perpetrated real cruelty on other people, and we'll get to that later.

[Chuck Bryant]

He said he feels bad about it.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Too, and he should, because the other people actually did suffer under this guy's leadership as the ringleader of the mean guards. Like, they wore pink on Wednesday. It was terrible everywhere. Right. So he really should feel bad, and apparently he does. I saw that all over the place, too, that he feels bad for it. But the point is that he has said this didn't happen organically. Like, I felt encouraged to play this role.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That's a big deal, because the findings of the Stanford Prison experiment say if you take some people and say you're.

[Chuck Bryant]

A guard, give them some power, and you will turn evil, they will turn.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Evil within a day. A day. They said about this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was just, like you said, doing my job, what they were paying me 15 bucks a day for. Let's put that one to the side.

[Chuck Bryant]

Put a pin in that.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Let's go visit with Douglas Korpi, who was the prisoner who, in 36 short hours of this simulated prison experiment, lost his marbles and had a nervous breakdown and had to go home. Right. One of the other two pillars of the findings, that people are either evil or easily crumble in the face of adversity. From the Stanford prison experiment. And again, this is how this thing's been taught for like 50 years. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So Korpi comes out and says, I was faking that and I put on a big act so I could get out of there because it sucked and I didn't want to be there anymore, so I faked like I was. And he, like, one of his quotes was, I don't have it here. But he basically said like, any trained clinician would have been able to see right through this. Like, when I hear the tapes years later, it's like, I'm not an actor. I wasn't like, apparently the John Wayne guy at least had been in like.

[Philip Zimbardo]

High school plays and college too, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he was like, I was not an actor. And it was so clear to me, looking back at these tapes that I was faking it.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Faking a nervous breakdown.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, faking a nervous breakdown to get out of there.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So the reason why he said later that he did fake this nervous breakdown is because he took the job because he thought he'd just be laying around, like you said, smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And he would get to study for the gre. He was about to enter grad school.

[Chuck Bryant]

I didn't see that.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Well, they said, no, you can't have your books.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, they didn't give him anything.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And this guy was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. This is day one. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I need those books. I'm taking the gre, basically leaving here after two weeks and going to take the test. Like, I've got to spend this two weeks studying. They're like, you can't have your books. So he quickly saw that the only way out was to fake this nervous breakdown.

[Chuck Bryant]

And Billy Crudup went in there and said, why is everyone saying, whoa, whoa, whoa? Only I can say whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. So we've kind of poo pooed the two major findings from this study already.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So that's a huge deal. Right. Because again, the idea is that if you put people, any random people, remember, these are just average, like middle class white kids, which is another problem. Right. If you put any. Well, 1971, that means everybody. That's the whole world. Right. If you put anybody in the world in this situation, they're going to either turn evil or lose their marbles. So those are the two findings. That's what everybody took it as at first. It later came out, no, this guy was acting, this guy was faking. So what Else do we have then? Well, we have this idea that Zimbardo insinuated himself as part of the experiment and that actually created the findings from the Stanford Prison Experiment.

[Chuck Bryant]

So should we put a pin in that? You want to talk about that now?

[Philip Zimbardo]

No, no, I want to go where you want to go.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, let's put a pin in that then and talk about a little bit more about what went on that week. They had everything from visitation. Like, you could write a letter to your family or girlfriend or whoever you wanted to come visit you to ask for visitation rights. And the family came in, and they did. They came in and visited for an hour. And there were, in some cases, parents were like, I don't know about this. This is like, this seems like a really weird thing. And Zimbardo would be like, oh, no, it's totally fine.

[Philip Zimbardo]

I'm a psychologist.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they want to be here. Ask them and the kids. They did say that they wanted to stay.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which is important.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Okay, so what else is important?

[Chuck Bryant]

No one in the visiting hour, I don't think were like, get me out of here. They're all like, no, this is all part of the act, essentially.

[Philip Zimbardo]

All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

They had parole hearings inside the course of a week. Somehow they said that if they could be released, if they would forfeit the money. And this is after I don't know how many of the six days. But they could not get paid and be paroled if they went in front of the parole board. They went in front of the parole board. Some of them did. And most of the prisoners said that they would give up their money. In fact. And the parole members, like I said, they were the graduate assistants. They even had one former prisoner, this guy that was a 15 year San Quentin. Yeah. Inmate. 15 or 17 year inmate on the board that. I guess Zimbardo, I want to call him Zamboni.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So he actually was a friend of Jaffe's, the guy who originally actually conceived of this experiment as an undergrad. So he brought him in on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So he was on the parole board, and he was kind of one of the ones, at least in the film version, that was kind of saying, like, no, this is like how it is. Like, you should keep it going.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I don't know how much of that was dramatized.

[Philip Zimbardo]

I don't either. That's one of the problems with this is, you know, so much of the documentation has been not released over the years, and when it does get released, it contradicts the official line, and it's Very tough to separate truth from fiction, especially when you introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing just to. Just to drive those nails in the coffin, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

In reality, in fact, there's been a lot of. In the year since, a lot of complaints that a lot of these kids were screaming, I want to go home. I want to go home. And for his part, Zimbardo said in the contract, it says, I want to exit the experiment is the official line to say. And they could have gone home. And he was like, but you hear, no one ever said, I want to exit the experiment. They would say, I want my mommy or I'm going crazy, or my God, please stop this. Please stop this. But they never said those exact words.

[Philip Zimbardo]

The safe phrase.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the safe phrase. But it turns out that's bunk too, right?

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, it turns out that if you look at the contract that they had, that he's referencing that, say, the rules and everything and the agreement, there's no safe word to be mentioned. Certainly doesn't say, if you say, I want to quit the experiment, you get released from the experiment.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he's just flat out lying about that, then?

[Philip Zimbardo]

From what I understand, yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

And what article was this that you sent?

[Philip Zimbardo]

There's a really good takedown in Medium called the Lifespan of a Lie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's a good one.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And it's based on. That title, is based on, I think, a documentary by a documentary or book by a French filmmaker who titled his version the Birth of a Lie. And it's basically about how the Stanford Prison Experiment was just. Basically, it was bunk from the get go, which we'll kind of pick that apart in a little bit. And that just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over again, basically 50 years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just stayed like an infection.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. Some other things that happened to make it realistic. They brought in a lawyer when parents asked for one and played along like it was real. They brought in a chaplain who came in to speak to prisoners, and he played along with it too. Yeah, they basically did everything that you would think would happen in a real prison on a slightly scaled down level.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. But the upshot of all of this is Zimbardo saying, like, do you see what's going on here, everybody? Yeah, I just put some guys in, like, nine guys in at a time, or 12 guys as guards, 12 guys as prisoners. And their parents came for visiting hours. A lawyer came. That's the. That's how real the simulated prison became in people's minds. Just imagine what A real prison's like. Right. So. And he was saying they could have left at any time if they just said the safe word. And no one ever said the safe word. There is some evidence that these people were basically kept there against their will. Especially after Douglas Korpi basically faked his emotional breakdown and then was thrown into a broom closet in retaliation for it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That he should have very clearly should have been left or allowed to leave. And to even be led to think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently the idea that spread throughout the prisoners. That would be like keeping someone against their will.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he did leave, but was supposed to agreed to come back, supposedly to, like, play a different role as a prisoner who, like, maybe escaped and came back, I think.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

But didn't come back.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. And I think five people were released early before the whole experiment was called off. All prisoners, no guards left the experiment, which is telling.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, and they were working in shifts, though, which is important.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Okay. That is a big one, too. But if you consider that no one asked to be a guard. They all asked to be prisoners, but then none of the guards left the experiment. To me, that's interesting on its face. Right. There's something to that. But the whole thing just kind of falling apart. After Zimbardo's girlfriend at the time came the idea that up to this point, these people had engaged in this fantasy and thought that they couldn't leave when they really could. That's controversial in and of itself.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Because again, there's evidence that they were led to believe they couldn't leave. And that's different. That changes things entirely.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So you want to take another break and then pick this apart some more?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Kind of fun. Hey, come on in.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks so much. See you soon.

[Josh Clark]

Shop on small business Saturday, November 30th. That's the powerful packing of American Express.

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Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Thanks Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply see capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC Grammarly is a trusted writing partner that saves your company from miscommunication and all the wasted time and money that goes with it.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's true. Four out of five professionals say Grammarly helps them gain, buy in and action through their communication.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, and when every word your team.

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, the.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Final takedown I'm waiting for I'm waiting for Philip Zimbardo to release a book about like our Jackhammer episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's fine. I would read it. All right, so where are we here? Basically, we're at the point where he has ended the experiment and now we're dealing with the fallout since 1971 and how this should be viewed.

[Philip Zimbardo]

One of the big things that came out of that French book, the Birth of a Lie, is the filmmaker unearthed a recording that was. I don't know where he found it but he found it and released the transcript of it. That clearly has. If not Zimbardo, at least Jaffe. Definitely Jaffe. Coaching the guards.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. To be more brutal.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. Be a tough guard. Just think of, like, how the pigs do it and do it like that, I think, is what the quote was. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. When the whole idea of this thing is to try and prove that without any influence.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is what happens.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So there's a couple of things that happened. Methodologically, there's a lot of things that happened the moment they started coaching those guards. Number one, they took any organicness out of their behavior. They were then doing what they thought they were expected to do. Like John Wayne.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Who just went over the top is what it was. And then number two, they made them co experimenters. Like, the whole thing was supposed to be guards and prisoners. And we're going to watch as test subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards, they're co experimenters now. Now the experiment's entirely on the prisoners, which you can say, okay, well, then those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out when you base the whole thing on a guy who is faking. Right. But you make the guards co experimenters and you just completely take out any objectivity from this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, and the fact we already mentioned that one of the researchers was a warden, and I keep wanting to call him Zambrano.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That's fine. Go ahead. Zimbardo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Zamboni himself was the superintendent. Like, the minute he decided to do that, I looked up. I think he was like, in his late 30s when he did this. How did he not? Like, was he that bad at doing his job? How did he not know? Like, wait a minute. This will taint the experiment.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Do you want to talk about why people think that he was so.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Okay, so he was a. He wasn't, I think, still is a social activist for sure. And he had decided, and I can't really disagree with him, that prisons were brutal places where brutality lived and that they were inherently brutal. And so if you take somebody and put them into this place, you're doing a real disservice to humanity by throwing somebody in a brutal place that, you know, is brutal.

[Chuck Bryant]

So his aim was to get reform to happen.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yes. From the outset.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, I can't fault that. But you can't call it a scientific experiment either.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No. And it actually supposedly backfired as well, because one interpretation of his findings is that. That it's all or nothing with prisons. Prisons are inherently brutal or you can't have them. So either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons, or you have no prisons. And so, faced with that choice and with rising crime rates in the 70s, a lot of people doubled down on getting tough and made prisons even worse and built more prisons and said, ts, we're not even going to try to reform you anymore. We're just going to send you to these brutal places that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do about it. So it would have backfired in that sense, but in the idea that he was doing something with the best interests of his fellow people at heart. Again, like you said, it's tough to fault him for that. He just really, really gave social psychology a black eye.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So one of the other things he did wrong, and this one I just can't figure out either, is he didn't have a control group. And one of his. This guy wasn't in the experiment, but one of his colleagues came by one day and was like, you know, what's your control?

[Philip Zimbardo]

What's your independent variable?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And he was like, what? Yeah, he's like, I don't have one.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So if you run an experiment of any sort, Grabster uses a great analogy where if you're trying to figure out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes, you pick a bunch of tomatoes, you weigh them, you check them for color, you make sure that they're identical to another set of tomatoes. So you have two sets of basically identical tomatoes. One you irradiate, one you do not. And after a set amount of time, you go back and see what the differences are, and then you can say probably that when you irradiate tomatoes, these are the effects, and the effects are the differences between the two. Same thing with the prison experiment.

[Chuck Bryant]

What would you have here? Two different cell blocks and one that literally isn't coached and completely left alone?

[Philip Zimbardo]

That's what I would have done for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then one where you're saying, hey, be brutal and we'll see if everyone falls into these roles.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Exactly. That would have been great. And actually, some researchers in 2001.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, they did.

[Philip Zimbardo]

They did exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with just that control group you suggested. It was called the BBC Prison Study.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Haslam and Riker.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. And basically they did the same thing. They did not do any coach, they didn't do any intervention. They did the thing exactly like you're supposed to or like Zimbardo should have from the outset, and they found that again, they made the control group to the original Stanford Prison Experiment. They found that the exact opposite happened. The prisoners stayed banded together. The guards were totally in disarray and disorganized. The brutality never emerged and there wasn't any violence from what I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and this is where it gets really scummy if you ask me. Zimbardo found out about this and supposedly Haslam and Riker said they discovered he was privately writing editors to keep them from getting published and claiming that they were fraudulent.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah. In the journal that they released their findings. And he wrote an appendage to their article and said, just don't even listen to these guys. I'm Philip Zimbardo, man. So yeah, I thought that was pretty scummy too, if he did that. So you've got. Methodologically, there's even more problems too. In the original newspaper advertisement, Chuck, he said, prison experiment. Prison experiment, everybody sign up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was a problem in and of itself. They shouldn't have known what they were doing.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No, exactly. Until they showed up. Right. So you're going to get a big wide swath of people and then once they find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say no thanks or whatever. But this was like, like attracting. A 2007 follow up study found narcissistic, hostile, overly aggressive, authoritarian types. Like flies to honey.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or the opposite.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Well, that seems to be the case in this case.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which was in fact, one of them was a liberal activist who kind of purposely went in there because he thought maybe these findings could be used one day for prison reform.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Well, I think also most of the. What I got from Jaffe coaching the people is say like, think about what the pigs would do and then do that because we really gotta show them how brutal prisons are. I think everybody who showed up basically was against prisons, but whether you were against prisons or for them, you were automatically tainted before you even showed up for the interview. Yeah, because they wrote prison experiment in the ad. So from the outset, there was bias. There was no control group. It attracted a biased cross section of people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Zimbardo participated.

[Philip Zimbardo]

He was a participant. And that actually, Chuck, led to the second set of findings that Zimbardo had influenced this and become a participant himself. And here's the current interpretation of all of it. Okay. This seems to be the current du jour interpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Not that people are inherently cruel and inherently will just crumble in the face of authority, although that might still stand, but that people will be. Are capable of Cruelty if they're recruited by an authority figure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Philip Zimbardo]

The second set, and there's actually been three sets of interpretations. The second set was that Zimbardo inserted himself and that it actually demonstrated what's called situationist theory.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that's basically that external circumstances are the drivers of human behavior.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So the point was not that people are inherently cruel on an individual level.

[Chuck Bryant]

But the situation that they're put in. They will quickly find those roles if.

[Philip Zimbardo]

There'S a power structure above them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That is. That has normalized this and is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this really tied in with, you know, this is 1971. People were still really trying to figure out what the heck had just happened with the Nazis. It was only like 25, 26 years before.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So this idea that this banality of evil, this made perfect sense in that respect. Right. There is a bureaucracy that had normalized evil, and you were just following orders.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That was the second interpretation of the Stanford Prison experience.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but everything like the Vietnam War, which was. I mean, this was 1971.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And like the Maille massacre. And, you know, I was just following orders like this, tied in. This has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics of the day.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right. So apparently it also tied in really well to Attica. And Zimbardo must have just couldn't believe his. His good fortune that there was a. The bloodiest prison riot in American history happened like a couple weeks after he made the news in the New York Times Magazine with this journal article or this article that he wrote. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Philip Zimbardo]

But that actually played into it too, because apparently following orders, a lot of guards just fired blindly into the tear gas smoke of this prison riot and killed tons of unarmed prisoners and hostages. So. So Zimbardo's like, okay, that's fine. However we're going to interpret this, I'm cool with that. The third one, I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with the current one, which is bad science, I think. So what I saw is that a lot of social psychologists said, we've known this as bad science all along, but the findings were really interesting and worthwhile. So we didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The third one is that Zimbardo inserted himself. And what this study really showed was that people will engage in acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause. And in this case, it was Zimbardo making the guards Co experimenters, by coaching them to be cruel and in the name of prison reform, ultimately, when they showed the world what happens when you put normal people in a prison situation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which is what the John Wayne guy very much has said all his life since then, is that this is what they. I thought they wanted was for me to be a bad guard.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we could prove ultimately that prisons need reform.

[Philip Zimbardo]

And that is why he's still complicit, because he's still engaged in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners in the study. And that's why he should still feel bad and still does feel bad. But he did it because he was recruited in the name of this righteous cause by somebody who was in authority.

[Chuck Bryant]

So is this being taught this way in classes now?

[Philip Zimbardo]

I don't. I think that they. Especially once it came out that Zimbardo and at the very least his warden, a co experimenter, was coaching them to do this and that the organic cruelty is just totally out the window. I think they don't know what to do with it. Right now. They're trying to figure out, like, how to get these findings across or what to make of them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because one of these quotes from the article you sent, the guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in the typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific. It's typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, not an experiment, and as a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. So that's almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example of how to not do a study correctly.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which is interesting.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Oh, yeah. I mean, methodologically inserting yourself, like lying about the findings later on or misinterpreting the results or using spin. Yeah, there's a lot here.

[Chuck Bryant]

But it was approved by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee at the time. Those were Zimbardo's experiments, who he presented this to. And they're, you know, he still says that it was ethical.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Well, it was at the time, under the guidelines, it was ethical. But then after they changed the guidelines.

[Chuck Bryant]

You couldn't do this today.

[Philip Zimbardo]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or at least not with, like, he did it.

[Philip Zimbardo]

So I did. You remember the very brief Psychology is Nuts series?

[Chuck Bryant]

I watched that.

[Philip Zimbardo]

I did one on the Stanford Prison experiment.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I watched that today.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Did you? What did you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

It was good.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Thanks, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cute little background.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, I thought so, too. And let's see. You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

No. I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but we were.

[Philip Zimbardo]

This is like vaping level scathing. This is way worse than vaping. I'm sure the vapers are like, God, they were really hard on that guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the movie, you know, the documentary is probably a little more accurate, but the movie wasn't bad. Yeah, I mean, it's not great.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But it was okay. It felt like a movie of the week.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Gotcha. It's an airplane movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Watch it on your next flight. That's my recommendation.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Thanks, buddy. Well, if you want to know more about the Stanford Prison experiment, type those words in the search [e-mail] and it'll bring up this Grabster article. And since I said Grabster, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys. I spent the last two years fixing up the yard in our house in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Oh, that sounds like a pleasant place.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it is. My husband actually introduced me to your show a few years back. And thank God he did, because I've literally listened to you for hours and hours while working in the yard.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible work schedule than he does, so I volunteered to absorb most of the responsibility. Although he did a lot of heavy lifting, too. I enjoyed the show so much, I stopped allowing myself to listen to to it any other time. You were only allowed during yard work. This made me much more ready to get outside and get into it. You guys were with me while I carried literally tons of redstone uphill and buckets, hauling rocks for a firing landing, planted pachysandra ferns and hostas in the rockiest soil I've ever had to work with and just clearing away overgrowth.

[Philip Zimbardo]

It sounds like Tonya Harding training for the Olympics in that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

That one montage, which it turned out included a fair amount of poison ivy. During it all, I learned about tiny, adorable little creature called the tardigrade. The business of head transplants. The hookworm. Her favorite episode.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

And some haunting information I cannot unhear, such as you provided in the bullfighting and drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining, full of information. Even when I think it's boring. You make it fun. There were times you had me lol ing in my backyard alone and covered in dirt and sweat like a crazy person. Attached are some pictures of the progress, all from your climate controlled studio. That is from Sharon Prashinsky. And Sharon, you did a great job. That is one beautiful yard you got going.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is lovely.

[Philip Zimbardo]

It is nice work. We're glad we could be there with you to help you get up that hill.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And down the hill. And then back up the hill. And then back down the hill.

[Philip Zimbardo]

That's right. And then back up again. If you want to get in touch with us to let us know how we've helped you out, we love hearing that kind of stuff. If you're Philip Zimbardo, we expect to hear from your lawyer. And in the meantime, you can hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyou should know.com where you can find all of our social links and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcastowstuffworks.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff youf Missed in History Class. Do you like podcasts, music, and audiobooks? Because when you subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited, you get all three in one app. Imagine listening to your favorite podcasts and music on the go to work, school, the gym, or better yet, vacation. Now imag Imagine being on vacation with your favorite audiobook from Audible, then listening to a new one every month from a huge selection of popular titles. That sounds like a pretty good vacation, right? Audible is now included on Amazon Music Unlimited. Download the Amazon Music app now to start listening terms. Apply.

[Chuck Bryant]

Odoo is business management made so simple.

[Philip Zimbardo]

A kid could explain it. Sometimes business software can't talk to other programs, but Odoo, Funny word, has every program from CRM to HR to accounting in one platform. Platform. It should cost a lot, but it doesn't. So you should use Odoo because they save you money.

[Chuck Bryant]

Odoo makes a lot of sense, but doesn't cost a lot of sense. Sign up [e-mail] that's o d o.com Good job.

[Philip Zimbardo]

Thanks.

[Holiday Inn Express]

Wake up at Holiday Inn Express to a can't miss breakfast that's free with every stay. Count on all the hot, fresh coffee you need and an incredible breakfast buffet that has something for everyone like eggs, eggs, cinnamon rolls, and even hot fresh pancakes with all the toppings you crave. Next time, do yourself a favor and stay at a Holiday Inn Express with a can't miss breakfast that's free with every stay. So when you wake up at Holiday Inn Express, you'll wake up happy. A part of IHG Hotels & Resorts.