The Crowd Whisperer: The Psychologist Who Gave Hitler His Playbook

I'm a show you how great I am. But that body power. I just wanna say 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 is Ben 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 quote 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 Gustave Laban who did pioneering research on the behavior of crowds and apparently Hitler studied his work. So, I went through and read Laban'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 a big speech to an auditorium or at a protest or political rally or anything like that. Right? In Mein Kampf, 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 Gustave Le Bon had to say about crowds and what Hitler might have learned from his work. Now before I get started, I do have to clear Le Bon's name a little bit. I want people to listen to this. So I'm going to give it some clickbait title. Right? Like, I don't know what I'm gonna 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 …