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The Russell Brunson Show
The Propaganda Playbook: Deepfakes (Why You Can’t Trust What You See Anymore) - #Marketing - Ep. 125
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Do you have a funnel? But it's not converting. The problem, 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com podcast. That's sellingonline.com podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. I want you to watch something. This is a candidate running for the US Senate in Texas and is looking straight into the camera. He's speaking clearly. He's reading from things he posts on social media years, years ago. And it looks completely real. Oh, I remember this one. Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country. But that man never filmed that video. He never sat in that chair. He never said those words. The entire thing was created by artificial intelligence. It's a deep fake. And Iran is an actual political ad to millions of voters. And in a tiny little text in the corner, so small you're probably going to miss it, it says AI generated. And that's just one. In Georgia, they deep faked a sitting US Senator saying things he never said. The White House is also putting out AI generated content to promote the Iran war. One in four Americans have now received a phone call where AI cloned a family member's voice, trying to steal their money. And Elon Musk's AI was generating over 6,700 fake sexual images of real people every single hour, including minors. This is not science fiction. This is happening right now. And the propaganda technique behind all of it was predicted over 60 years ago by a man that almost nobody has ever heard of. His name is Jaquil Ul. And what he wrote in 1962 is so terrifyingly accurate about what's happening today. It's going to change how you look at every ad, every video, every piece of content you see online, including mine. This is the propaganda playbook where I take the biggest stories in the news and decode the propaganda techniques that are hidden inside of them. And then I show you how to use the ethical versions of the same techniques to grow your business. So with that said, let's get right into it. Okay, so let me walk you through what's actually happening right now, because most people have seen one or two headlines about this, but when you stack all of it together, it pays. Paints a picture that is way bigger than any single story. Example number one, the telo deepfake terrorist threat. So the ad I just showed you, that was created by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They made an 85 second deepfake of a guy named James Talarico. He's the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Texas. And in the video, this AI version of Talarico is reading from the real tweets he posted years ago. But here's the thing, the AI also has him saying things he never actually said. It had him adding commentary like, oh, this one is so touching and oh, I love this one too. Stuff that the real Talrico never said. They put words into his mouth that he never spoke. And the only disclosure the words AI generated in the tiniest font you've ever seen at the bottom right corner for about three seconds. And a peer reviewed study found that most people cannot tell the difference between a deep fake video and a real one. And this is the part that matters. Their opinions actually change based on what they see, even when it's completely fabricated. Example number two, both sides are doing this. And before anyone says that this is just one party, it's not. In Jord, Republican Congressman's campaign deepfaked sitting Senator John Ossoff. They had an AI version of Ossoff saying, I just voted to keep the government shut down. I've only seen a farm on Instagram. Hi, it's Senator Jon Ossoff. I just voted to keep the government shut down. He never said any of that. And the campaign called it satire. In the Texas Republican primary, Ken Paxton's campaign ran an AI ad showing Senator John Cornwall happily dancing with a Democratic congresswoman. Corian's campaign fired back with AI clips of another candidate holding a Pomeranian in fake scenes. And that ad had zero AI disclosure at all. So let me be very clear about something. This is not a left versus a right thing. Both sides are doing this. This is the propaganda arms race and AI is the weapon. And it goes all the way to the top. Example number three, the White House content machine. The White House has been putting out AI generated videos and memes on social media to disparage protesters, to promote the Iran war and to push policy narratives. The most powerful office in the world is now using AI generated content as a standard communication tool. Now I want you to think, what would Edward Bernays have done with this kind of technology? Because Bernays needed months of planning, a team of people and a major newspaper to run just one campaign. Now you can generate a deep fake of a political candidate in an afternoon on a laptop. Example number four, Grok. And there's 6,700 deepfakes per hour. And it's not just politics. Elon Musk's AI chatbox Grok, which is built right into X, was generating over 6,700 sexually explicit deepfake images of real people every single hour. That's 84 times more than the top five deepfake websites combined. Analysis found that 2% of the images appeared to be of people under 18. The UK government threatened to ban X entirely. The platforms that host such material must be held accountable, including X. France raided X's Paris office. And last week OpenAI shut down their video tool Sora completely after it became a deepfake factory. Example number five, the grandma call. And then there's the one that got me the most. Because this isn't about politics or platforms. This is about your family. Right now, one in four Americans have received a deepfake voice call in the past year. AI clones are the voice of family members. Usually a grandchild that calls, a grandparent asking for money. A woman described what happened to her 90 year old mother. She said that her mom got a call that sounded exactly like her grandson, exactly like him, asking for money. And after that call, her mother refused to answer the phone for months. She was terrified. That's not a political ad. That's not an election. That's somebody's grandmother to pick up her own phone because AI made her grandson's voice say things that he never would have said. So when you stack up all of this, the deep fake political ads, the AI White House content, the 6700 fake images per hour, the grandma calls, you're looking at something way bigger than any single technology or any single bad actor. You're looking at an entire information environment where nothing you see or hear can be trusted anymore. And the man who predicted this, who described exactly what this would look like, wrote about it in 1962. Okay, I want you to actually see this up close. This is the AI generated version of a real political candidate. I want you to watch and ask yourself, can you tell if it's fake? Oh, this one is touching. Over and over, Christians use scripture to justify bullying trans kids. I told them in my faith, God is non binary. Okay, be honest. Could you tell? Because most people can't. And the research backs that up. People genuinely cannot distinguish deepfake videos from real videos and their opinions shift based on what they see, even when it's completely made up. So here's my question I want you guys to answer in the comments. If you can't tell what's real anymore, how do you make a decision about anything about who do you vote for about what products you buy, about whether the person you're talking to on the screen is even real. That's the world we're currently living in right now. And it happened faster than anyone predicted. Well, almost anyone. So in this series I've introduced you guys to Edward Bernays, to Gustave Le Bon, to Neil Postman. But I need to introduce you to somebody new because what I just showed you, the deep fake ads, the AI content machine, the 6700 fake images per hour, the grandmother scam calls, all of it was predicted over 60 years ago by this man. His name is Jacques Llewell. He is a French philosopher and in 1962 he wrote this book and it's also called Propaganda. And I gotta be honest with you guys, when I first read this, it scared me even more than anything Bernays ever wrote. Because Ellul figured out something that none of the other guys did. You see Bernays looked at propaganda as a tool, right? It's something that a person uses. You hire Bernays, he runs the campaign, the crowd does what you want. There's a guy pulling the strings, there's a puppet master. And that's what I've been teaching in this series. Now here's the technique, here's the man who used it, and here's how it works. But Elul said that's only the beginning. He said the most dangerous forms of propaganda isn't a campaign. It's not something somebody does to you, it's the environment you live in. He called it sociological propaganda. And what he meant was propaganda that's so deeply built into the technology, into the culture, into the information systems all around you that you don't even recognize it as propaganda anymore. It just feels like reality. It feels like your feed, it feels like your for you pages. It feels like the normal way that you actually get information. Now here's what's going to give you chills. He wrote about this in 1962, before the Internet, before social media, before smartphones and before AI. He basically described exactly what we're living through right now. He said that propaganda wouldn't become total. It wouldn't just target your politics, it would shape your entertainment, your shopping, your relationships and your sense of who you are. He said that it would become continuous. Not a campaign with a beginning and an end, but an always on stream of influence that never shuts off. And he said it would become invisible because the most effective propaganda is the kind that people don't even recognize as propaganda. And then he wrote this line that I really want you to sink in. Okay? He said that in the modern world, remember, he's writing this, 1962. He said, Propaganda is no longer the work of a propagandist. It's built into the system. The system itself becomes the propaganda. And that is exactly what's happening with AI. The AI doesn't need a Bernays to run a campaign. The AI is the campaign. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It generates content at a scale that no human team ever could match. It learns what moves you, what scares you, what makes you click and what makes you buy. And it adjusts in real time. There is no puppet master anymore. The puppet master is the machine. And my buddy Tom Billy put this perfectly. He said, you don't need to control everyone to control the outcome. You just need to nudge 100 million micro decisions per day. What people notice, what they ignore, what they fear, what they laugh at. And you get macro control without ever looking like you took it. That's Elul's sociological propaganda. That's what AI has made possible. Not one big lie shouted from the broadcast tower. A billion tiny edits to your perception of reality every single day. And you never even know that it's happening. And if you think that's just theory, if you think, okay, that sounds scary, but is it actually real? Let me show you the proof that this already works. This is from my friend Tom Bilyon. In 2014, Facebook ran a massive emotional contagion experiment on 689,000 users by tweaking what they saw in their feed. And it measurably shifted what those people posted afterwards, because it changed their mood. It focused their attention where they wanted it. It made them feel what Facebook wanted them to feel. 689,000 people. Facebook changed what showed up in their feed and immeasurably changed their emotions and their behaviors. And that was 2014. That was before the AI that we have today. Imagine that same experiment running on billions of people at once, powered by AI that learns and adopts in real time. That is not a future scenario. That is your feed right now. That is your for you page. That's your algorithm deciding what you see and what you don't see millions of times per day. And here's the question I want you to sit with. When's the last time you felt really strong about something you saw online? Like genuinely emotional, angry, excited, scared, inspired? Was that your feeling? Or was it put there into you? Because if Facebook could manufacture emotions in 2014, what do you think the AI could do today in 2026? I'd love for you to drop your answers in the comments below because I think this is a conversation that we should be having. Alright, so here's where I need to be really honest with you because I'm not standing on the outside of this looking in. I'm not some professor who's never actually touched the technology. I am in. I use AI every single day in my business and I've run the exact tension that Elul was warning about. Story number one, AI Rustle. So we tested some ads where we used AI to create a version of me doing the pitch. Okay, I want you to actually see this because it's pretty wild. Check this out. Now, obviously if you want to sell stuff online, you're going to need a good funnel. But if you want a great funnel, then you're going to need to use click funnels. Now here's what happened to cold traffic. People who had never heard of me, never seen my face, didn't know my voice. It converted really, really well. The AI version of me was polished, it was on script. It hit the right beats and people bought. The numbers were really good. But then my existing audience started seeing it. The funnel hackers. The people who've been to my events, who've watched hundreds of hours of my actual content, who know how I move and how I talk and all my little quirks. And they started catching it. They could tell that something was off. Little things, something about the eyes, the timing, the way I moved my hands. Something wasn't quite right and they were not very happy about it. They felt like I was trying to trick them. They felt deceived. I got a lot of backlash from my very own community in the comments. The people who love me the most were the ones who are the most upset. And that taught me something really, really important. I'll share that with you here in a second. Alright, Story number two, baby cartoon Russell. So then we tried something totally different. We made this AI cartoon version of me. Okay? Like a baby Russell character doing the ad. Now just watch this for a second. Now obviously if you want to sell stuff online, you're going to need a good funnel. But if you want a great funnel, then you're going to need to use click funnels. Okay? Now the response was completely flipped. My warm audience. People already knew me and loved me and trust me, they thought it was hilarious. They loved it and they shared it. They were tagging friends in it and they actually built more engagement with my existing community. But for cold traffic, it didn't convert at all. People who didn't know who I was and just saw a cartoon baby just scrolled right past it. They didn't get the joke because they didn't have the relationship. They didn't know who I was. So a cartoon version of someone who they'd never met meant nothing to them. So here's the lesson those two experiments taught me. Where the line is. And the line is trust. See, my existing audience, the trust was already built. So when they saw the baby cartoon, they thought it was creative and they thought it was fun because they knew the real me, who was behind it. The AI was a creative expression on top of the real relationship, and that's a tool. But the AI version of me, the deep fake version, it was borrowing trust that didn't exist yet. It was using my face, my voice, my likeness to create a false sense of, hey, I think I know that guy. With people who had never actually met me. And when my real audience caught it, they felt betrayed because they could see that the trust they built with me was being counterfeited and handed out to strangers. And that's when it hit me. That's the same thing the deepfake political ads are doing. They're taking a candidate's face and a voice and using it to manufacture trust with voters who they've never met in person. The only difference between what I did with my AI ad and what NRSC did with their Talarico deepfake is the context. The technique is identical. And I had to ask myself if I wouldn't want someone deep faking me to say things that I never said, should I be doing that version to my own audience? So let me give you a framework for this, because I think every single entrepreneur using AI right now needs to be asking themselves these questions. And I guarantee most people haven't thought about it. I hadn't thought about until I got tested and I got burned. Number one is the amplification test. Is the AI amplifying your real message, or is it creating a fake one? If you use AI to help you to write better copy, to edit your videos faster, to test more headline variations, to brainstorm ideas, that's amplification your message, your voice, your ideas just delivered more efficiently. That's a tool. I do this every single day, and I love it. AI makes me more productive, and it helps me serve my audience better, and that is a huge win. But if you use AI to create a version of you that says things you didn't say, Makes promises you didn't make or presents a Persona that isn't real. That's a fabrication. That's the deepfake political ad in a marketing rapper. It doesn't matter if you're selling a course instead of a candidate. The technique is identical. Number two is the disclosure test. If your audience found out that AI was involved, they feel betrayed. This is the test that caught me. My existing audience felt betrayed when they realized that the ad wasn't really me talking. And they were right because that ad was designed to make them think it was me and it wasn't. If you have to hide the AI for the thing to work, that's your signal. You've probably crossed the lines. Now contrast that with the baby cartoon. Russell. Nobody felt betrayed by that because nobody thought it was actually me. It was obviously aa, obviously creative, obviously fun. The disclosure was built into the concept itself and that made all the difference. Number three is the relationship test. Does this build trust or does it borrow trust? When I use the cartoon with my warm audience, it builds trust. It was creative, it was playful, it made the relationship stronger. It said, hey, I know you guys, you know me, let's have some fun together. When I use AI, wrestle with cold traffic. It borrowed trust. It used my likeness to create a false sense of familiarity with people who didn't actually know me. And borrowed trust is like borrowed money. Eventually you have to pay it back, and usually with interest. So if the AI is deepening the relationship that already exists, that's building. If the AI is manufacturing a relationship that doesn't exist yet, that's borrowing. And in my experience, borrowed trust always comes back to bite you. Amplification or fabrication? Would your audience feel betrayed building trust or borrowing it? And I want you to see just how fast this is accelerating. Because everything I'm about to show you happened in the last few months. Not years, months. All of it in just the last few months. A rule said propaganda becomes the environment. And that's what's happening right now. The AI content is everywhere. In politics, in marketing, in your phone calls, in your kids feeds. And the scariest part isn't any single deep fake. It's that we're getting used to it. We're starting to think that this is just how things are. And the moment we normalize it, Elula would say that's when the propaganda has won. Because the whole point is that you stop noticing. So I gotta ask you, and I'm genuinely curious about this one, are you using AI in your business right now? And if so, have you stopped to think about where your line is? Tell me about it in the comments. Because I think that every entrepreneur needs to be having this conversation right now. Okay, so here's why I keep going back and forth on this one. I'm going to be honest, it's a little different from the other episodes because I'm not standing outside of it. I'm right in the middle of this every single day. I'm genuinely excited about what it can do for entrepreneurs. I think it's the biggest opportunity we've seen since the beginning of the Internet. And I'm not being dramatic. I think AI is going to change everything about how we build businesses, how we create content, and how we reach people. But Elul wrote 60 years ago that the most dangerous form of propaganda is the kind that gets built into the system itself. And right now we are building AI into everything. Into our ads, into our content, into our political campaigns, into phone calls to our kids, education, into the way we decide what's true and what isn't. So here's the question I honestly cannot get out of my head. If the propaganda is now built into the machines and the machine is built into everything, then who's the propagandist? Because with Bernays, at least you know that there was a person making conscious choices. You could point to the guy and say he was the one that decided to do that. But with AI, there's no single person. There's an algorithm optimizing for engagement, for clicks and for conversions. And it doesn't care whether what you create is true or false. It doesn't have intent. It just has optimization. I think that might actually be scarier than anything that Bernays ever did, because Bernays at least had a conscience that he chose to ignore. AI doesn't have consciousness at all. So my question, and I generally don't have a clean answer for this, I've been thinking about it for a long time, is can we build a technology this powerful and keep it ethical? Or is the technology itself becoming the propaganda that Elul warned us about? I'd love to hear what you guys think, because this one kind of keeps me up at night. Now look, what I just showed you is one technique from a playbook that's been built over a hundred years. It started with Sigmund Freud figuring out that human beings aren't driven by logic, they're driven by unconscious forces they don't even know about. And then his nephew, Edward Bernays took those same ideas and weaponized them. He sold wars overthrew governments, made women smoke, and invented the entire field of public relations. Then Jakku Elul warned us that propaganda would stop being a tool and started becoming the environment itself. And then a guy named Dan Kennedy, my mentor, figured out how entrepreneurs could use those same dark arts ethically. I spent the last 20 years taking all of it and turning it into a system that bootstrapped my company clickfunnels past a billion dollars in sales without any venture capital. And I made a video that tells the entire story from Freud's discoveries to Bernays weaponizing it, to how I use the exact same techniques today. If what you just saw in this video got you thinking, got you a little bit excited, then this video is going to blow your mind. Go to secretsofpropaganda.com or hit the link in the description down below. With that said, go and watch it right now while it's still fresh. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to this channel. Because this, right now is the propaganda playbook. Every episode, I take a big story from the news. I decode the propaganda behind it. I show you how to use the ethical version of those same techniques to help grow your business. The same science, same playbook, different story. And the next episode is coming soon. Thanks so much and I'll see you guys on the next one.