This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, November 2nd, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

In his new book, How to Be a Dictator Frank Ticotter examines the cults and propaganda surrounding 20th century

dictators from Hitler and Stalin to Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung, and a few lesser-known dictators whose stories are nonetheless instructive.

We spoke last month.

Frank, this is at least your third appearance here on the Cato Daily podcast. I enjoyed your other books immensely, but I gotta tell you, after having read this one, I don't feel very well positioned to actually become a dictator.

Well that's very wise indeed because I can assure you

it's a lot of work and it's a pretty awful retirement plan.

Now you a pretty awful retirement plan.

Now you go through a series of case studies here.

Some of them, it seems pretty obvious why you chose them, but some of the other ones in fact one Ethiopia I had

not even heard of the gentleman unfortunately.

I mean gistu you're not the only one I picked eight, it could have been seven, it could have been nine,

ten, eleven. What I wanted to do is illustrate how these very unique individuals operate in very unique and utterly different conditions to gain power and hold on to

hold on to it.

So you go from literary Italy, Germany, reasonably advanced countries all the way

to quite desperately poor ones like Haiti under Duvalier Papa Doc. The point is to illustrate diversity, which is why I've included

Mengistu. You do need somebody from Africa and he is Africa's greatest mass murderer with about 2 million who died unnecessarily under his reign.

So are there commonalities here because it's seen as you as you note that they are such

dramatically different circumstances Mao Hitler Chochescu but are there certain commonalities in terms of either gaining or keeping power

that we ought to be aware of?

Well, the key really is, again, by picking eight individuals, we avoid what I call typology.

Sociologists love that.

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