If Books Could Kill on Dale Carnegie.
One of my go-to podcasts for entertaining insomnia brain food, they tackle exploitative easy-answer self-help books and this episode is the ur-text that started it all - How To Win Friends and Influence People. What struck me was how Carnegie comes over as an undiagnosed autistic who has figured out how to interact with normies and is selling that skill to businessfolk.
People who struggle with dealing with people will often get good at studying how social interactions work, mapping them out and developing strategies to survive (and occasionally thrive) in them. I’ve definitely done this, and have occasionally been paid cashmoney to point out the bleeding obvious to people who haven’t needed to think about it before and are shit at context switching. Early social media, for example, was quite lucrative for folks like me, at least until the straights figured it out and weaponised it for marketing. But that’s another story.
Point is, if anyone says there weren’t all these neuro-whatsit autistic people in the old days, Dale Carnegie was totally on the spectrum in the 1930s.