The Crowd Whisperer: The Psychologist Who Gave Hitler His Playbook

I'm going to show you how good I am. Yeah, but have a tiny talent. I just want to say that from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize. To absolutely nobody. Hello, and welcome to How To Take Over the World. This has been Wilson. Today's episode requires a little bit of explanation, I think. I'm working on a series about Adolf Hitler, perhaps you've heard of him, Austrian fellow. I'm sorry, it's been taking a long time. I just want to do a lot of research, cover all the angles. And one of the interesting things about Hitler is that he was so limited in so many ways. He wasn't necessarily a great strategist. He was quite lazy. He was smart, but he wasn't brilliant. And one biography points out that he was so limited in so many ways and that the one thing that he was truly exceptional at, indisputably, was his ability to speak to a crowd. He's an unbelievable public speaker. That's how he came to power. The biography says that he "literally spoke his way into power." So of course, I wanted to see how he learned to do that. And one source that I saw mentioned multiple times is this guy Gustav Lebon, who did pioneering research on the behavior of crowds and apparently Hitler studied his work. So I went through and read Lebon's work on crowds and I found it really, really interesting as a manual on how to really engage, persuade and motivate people in a crowd. For example, like a big speech to an auditorium or at a protest or political rally or anything like that, right? In mind, Comf, Hitler says, quote, "Every great movement in this world owes its growth to great speakers, not to great writers." Okay? Great speakers. He really emphasized that. That great movement can only come from the mystical connection that materializes when a great speaker engages with the masses. And even though Hitler was obviously wrong about a lot of things, I think he is right about this. You should probably doubt Hitler's judgment on just about everything. However, his ability to build a mass movement is not one of them. He is one of the foremost experts of all time on that. And Hitler did speak to crowds better than perhaps anyone in modern times. So we'll be discussing exactly how he did that in those Hitler episodes. And in this episode, we will look at what Gustav Lebon had to say about crowds and what Hitler might have learned from his work. Now before I get started, I do have to clear Lebon's name a little bit. I want people to listen to this. So I'm going to give it some click-baby title, right? Like, I don't know what I'm going to name it, but like Hitler's secret mentor or something like that. And Hitler apparently did learn a lot about how to engage a crowd from Gustav Lebon from his work. The irony is, Gustav Lebon wrote his work on the crowd as a warning against demagogues and extreme political movements. He was already old and out of the spotlight by the time Nazism rose, so we don't have any direct comments on how he felt about Nazism, but he was almost certainly opposed to it. He was an old aristocratic reactionary, with a very kind of pessimistic and scientific worldview, sort of a conservative in the most basic sense of the word of like not wanting things to change, didn't like extreme movements from the left or from the right. So I just can't emphasize the extent to which his book, The Crowd, is actually a warning against people like Hitler. It is the ultimate irony that in writing about the dangers of crowds and demagogues who can take advantage of them, he sort of accidentally wrote the playbook on how to do that. It's a little bit like COVID actually. Most people now agree that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan and why did this lab exist? It existed to study potential coronaviruses and how they could mutate and become even worse and affect humanity. They were trying to prepare for something exactly like COVID and in so doing, they created COVID. And LeBon basically does this exact same thing, he says, you really need to look out for these demagogues because conditions are changing in this new modern world and they could gain unprecedented power and they could gain this power by doing X and Y and Z and then people like Lenin and Hitler and Mussolini go, hmm, that sounds really interesting. Oh, that's how you would do it if you were trying to come to power that way. So I'm just clearing Gustav LeBon's name, not a Nazi, not an extremist, not a revolutionary, though his work did end up inspiring revolutionaries across the political spectrum from far right all the way to communist movements and the far left. He would have disliked all of these movements but that is just how life goes. So this is a premium only episode. If you'd like to hear about Gustav LeBon and how to captivate a crowd, you will need to either go to Apple podcasts and subscribe there in app or go to takeoverpod.supercast.com where you can get all premium content in either case that is $7 a month helps keep the lights on helps keep this show going helps me put out more episodes. I hope you'll consider becoming a premium subscriber if you have the financial means to do so. So if you are a premium subscriber, then the rest of the episode, the premium content is going to start right now and if not, thank you for listening to how to take over the world. [Music]