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The Russell Brunson Show
The Propaganda Playbook - Legos (Did Iran Beat America’s $886 Billion Military… With Legos?) - #Marketing - Ep. 129
00:15:10
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- [00:00]
A
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.
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B
First make Israel great again. Government is run by they ordered you to die for Israel.
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A
Okay, so that video you just saw, it was made by a group of anonymous students in Iran using AI, using Lego style animation. And it got more views than most Pentagon press conferences. Now I spent 20 years studying the science of persuasion right here. This is the first edition copy of Edward Bernays book called Propaganda. And this is literally the guy who invented public relations. And I used what I learned from that book to bootstrap the company past a billion dollars in sales without any venture capital. So I tell you that a group of Iranian students with laptops and AI just beat the United States in the propaganda war using children toys. I need you to understand how significant that is. Because the techniques that they used, Bernays invented them 100 years ago for Americans and now they're being turned against us. This is a propaganda playbook where I take the biggest stories in the news and decode the propaganda techniques that that are hidden inside of them. And then I show you how to use the ethical versions of these same techniques to grow your business. So that said, let's get right into it. Okay, so here's what happened. Major combat operations in Iran. When the Iran war started in late February 2026, something showed up on social media that nobody expected. Not military footage, not news broadcast, not government statements. Lego videos. AI generated Lego movie style animated videos with rap music in English mocking the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense. And the ent American military operation made by a group calling themselves Explosive Media. And these weren't amateur. These videos were fluent in American culture. They referenced the Epstein files. They mocked Trump's bruised hand that had been in the news. They called out the infighting in the MAGA base. And they used Trump's own promises to keep us out of wars against him. One video has an Iranian military commander literally rapping at Donald Trump. You thought you ran the globe, sitting on your throne. Now we're turning every base into a bed of stone. And the numbers were insane. Within a month, these videos had millions of views across every platform. Platform. The New Yorker called them Inescapable artifacts of the war. The Wall Street Journal gave them a name, Lego Ganda. They were referenced at Coachella. They spread from Iran to Pakistan, where the creators started making their own version. YouTube actually took down Explosive Media's channel and they just popped back up on other platforms. A propaganda scholar named Nancy Snow, someone who's written a dozen books on the subject, said something that I think every entrepreneur needs to hear. She said they're using popular culture against the number one pop culture country, the United States. Read that again. They use our culture against Legos, an American childhood staple. Rap music, an American art form, memes, the language of American Internet culture. References to Epstein Maga, Trump's own words. Everything about these videos was designed using our cultural tools to undermine our narrative. And it worked. Now, before we go any further, I want to know if you've seen these videos. Have they shown up inside of your feed? Did you watch one? Did you share it? And I want you to be completely honest because if you laugh at one of these and hit retweet, I need you to understand what just happened to you. And that's what the rest of this episode's about. So if you did see one, let me know in the comments down below. So if you've been watching the series, you know this man. His name's Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew. He's the man who invented public relations and the man who figured out over 100 years ago that the most powerful form of propaganda isn't telling people what to think. It's embedding your message inside of culture that they already live in. And I'm going to show you exactly how Iran did just that, using Bernays own playbook. In 1929, the American Tobacco Company had a problem. Women weren't smoking in public. It was considered taboo, socially unacceptable. So they hired Bernays. And did Bernays run ads telling women they should smoke?
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No.
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A
He organized the Torches of Freedom campaign during the New Year's Easter parade. He got young women to light up cigarettes in public and told the press they were lightning torches of freedom. As a feminist statement. He didn't sell cigarettes. He hijacked the women's liberation movement and then embedded cigarettes inside of it. That's cultural hijacking. You take a cultural movement that already has emotional power and you embed your product or your message or your service inside of it. Now look at what Iran did. They didn't try to create a new cultural form. They took Lego, something every American grew up with. They took Rap music, something every American listens. They took memes, the dominant language of the American Internet, and they embedded their anti, war, anti American message inside of all of it. They didn't invent a new delivery system, they hijacked ours. Exactly like Bernays hijacked the women's movement to sell cigarettes. Same technique, 100 years apart. The second thing Bernays figured out is that the most powerful propaganda ever comes from the propagandist. It comes from the audience. When Bernays wanted to make green the most fashionable color in America so that Lucky Strike packs would match women's outfits, he didn't take out ads saying that green is fashion. He got fashion designers to showcase green. He got department stores to put green in their windows. He got society pages to write about green. The message spread through hundreds of third parties who had no idea they were part of a campaign. Now look at the Lego videos. Iran didn't need a media empire to distribute them. They didn't need CNN or Fox News. They made the videos entertaining enough that Americans distributed them for Iran. Every person who laughed and shared a Lego video became an unwitting distribution channel for Iranian propaganda. A researcher at Clemson University put it perfectly. He said Iran's strategy isn't to create new narratives. It's to amplify division that already exists inside of American society. They find the cracks, Epstein. Anti war sentiment, distrust of government. And they pour their message into those cracks. And then Americans share it themselves because it validates what they already feel. Bernays called this the invisible government, the puppet master. You can't see because the puppets don't even know that they're being moved. And with these Lego videos, the puppets are us. Every American who shared one of these videos was doing Iran's property began to work for free. Now I'm going to ask you something that might be uncomfortable. Think about the last time you shared a meme about the war. Any meme from any side. Did you check where it came from? Do you look at who actually made it? Or do you share it because you thought it was funny or because it confirmed what you already believed? I want you to be really honest about that because that's exactly how this works. I want you to actually watch one of these videos now. Not a clip, a full one. Because the Atlantic Council said something important. They said these videos are the real innovation of the war because they tell a story and you only really get it if you sit through them. So watch this.
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Hey, orange pigs. America first. Oops. Oh boy. That was the slogan you stole but bibby's pulling strings and your vote is getting cold. We're not just fighting for Iran. Hear this clear. Your people reached out to us. Yeah, we got the DMs here. If one nation's gon stand against the Epstein regime's fear, it's us till the last breath. We've been doing it for years. We're standing here for everyone. Your system ever wrong. They've known all along. The anime was always you. The real threat wore a suit and sung a patriotic song while selling their own citizens and calling it strong. Stealing from your own people, making them bleed. Taking tax dollars just to fund your own greed and waking up to the lies, the illusions of burst. You screamed America first. Now you put loosers first.
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A
That was made by a group of students in Iran with AI tools and laptops. And it got more engagement than the Pentagon's entire public affairs operation. Now there's a second layer to this I need you to understand. Because Bernays explains how they did it, culture hijacking and third party distribution. But there's another author who explains why it works. And it's someone I've talked about before in this series. Neil Postman, 1985. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman's whole argument is that there are two types of dystopia. George Orwell's and Aldous Huxley's. Orwell feared we'd be controlled by what we hate. Censorship, surveillance, government banning information. And Huxley feared that we'd be controlled by what we love, entertainment, distraction. A flood of irrelevant information that makes us passive. And Postman said that Huxley was right. The real danger isn't the government suppressing the truth. The real danger is the truth being drowned in a sea of entertainment so that nobody even cares about it anymore. Now apply that to the Lego videos. Nobody watches the Iranian Lego video and thinks that it's real news. Nobody thinks Lego figures are actually fighting a war. The content is obviously fake, obviously satirical, obviously propaganda. And it doesn't matter because it's entertaining. People share it because it's fun. They share it because it's clever. They share it because it makes them laugh. And in the process of being entertained, the narrative shifts. The message embeds. The propaganda works not because anyone believed it, but because everyone enjoyed it. That's Postman's nightmare. Propaganda that doesn't need to be believed, it just needs to be entertaining. Researchers are calling this Slopaganda, a combination of slop, meaning cheap, mass produced AI content and propaganda. And it's made fast. It's Made cheaply, and it's tailored to be so entertaining that people spread it voluntarily. The content doesn't need to be sophisticated. It doesn't need to be accurate. It just needs to be shareable. And that every entrepreneur in this audience needs to hear this. That is the most important marketing lesson of 2026. All right, so here's why I take everything that I just showed you and turn it into something you could actually use. Because what Iran just did to the United States military with Lego videos is the same thing that's happening in your market right now. And if you don't understand it, you're going to get left behind. Here's the lesson. Entertainment beats authority every single time. Think about it. The Pentagon has unlimited budget, the world's most advanced communications technology, and an entire public affairs apparatus built over decades. IR has a group of students with laptops and AI tools. Who won the narrative war? The students. And they won it because they made content that people wanted to share, not content that demanded respect, not content that cited authority, content that entertained. And this is the same dynamic playing out in every market. Right now, the big brands with the big budgets are losing attention to creators with phones and AI who make better content. Because attention doesn't follow authority anymore. Attention follows entertainment. So here's the framework. I call it the Lego lesson, and it's four principles. Principle number one, use the audience's culture, not yours. The Lego videos worked because they spoke in American cultural language. Legos raps means Epstein. If they'd made the same videos using Iranian culture references, no America would have watched them. Same thing in your business. Stop making content about your world. Make content in your audience's world. Use their language, their references, their cultural touch points. The content that goes viral isn't the content that's about you. It's the content that's about them. Number two. Entertaining beats convincing. Iran didn't present logical arguments about why the war was wrong. They made Lego characters rap. And it was more effective than every think piece and press conference combined. Because people don't share arguments, they share entertainment. If your content is educational but boring, it won't spread. If it's entertaining and educational, your audience becomes your distribution channel. Number three, Fast and frequent beats. Perfect and rare. Explosive media was putting out at least two videos a week. They weren't perfect. Researchers literally called them slopaganda because the AIM AI generation was rough, but it didn't matter. Speed and volume beat polish. You don't need a $50,000 production. You need a phone, AI tools and discipline to publish consistently. Number four, the audience is the distribution. This is the biggest lesson. Iran didn't need a media empire because Americans distribute the content for free. Every share, every retweet, every look at this text that you send to a friend. That's free distribution powered by entertainment value. Your business works the same way. If your content is good enough that people share it without being asked, you have infinite distribution at cost. If you're paying for every eyeball through ads, you've already lost the game. Use their culture, not yours. Entertaining beats convincing. Fast and frequent beats perfect and rare. Make your audience the distribution. All right, so I want to test something. If you're an entrepreneur or a marketer, which of these four is the one you struggle with the most? Is it using your audience's culture? Is making content entertaining instead of just educational? Is it publishing fast and enough? Or is it making content shareable enough that your audience distributes it for you? Drop your number in the comments. 1, 2, 3, or 4. And then tell me why. I'm honestly curious about where you guys are getting stuck. And I want to show you something that really drives us home. This is the clip that Iran's embassy in South Africa posted after the ceasefire was announced. Say hello to your new world superpower. That's a government account posting a meme about a war. And then a propaganda scholar says this in response. This world order is really changing overnight, and the US is not going to end up necessarily as the state that everybody listens to. So here's what I keep coming back to. For a hundred years, America was the world's propaganda superpower. We had Hollywood, we had Madison Avenue, we had Bernays himself, literally. We had CNN and Fox and every social media platform in the world built by American companies. We wrote the rules, we ran the game. And a group of students in Iran using American Legos, American rap music, American memes, and American AI tools, just flipped the script. They didn't beat us with better weapons. They beat us with better storytelling, using our own cultural language, our own platforms, distributed by our own citizens. That should humble every single person who's watching this. Because if the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a narrative war to students with laptops, your business can lose its audience the same way to someone who tells a better story, who's more entertaining, who understands your audience's culture better than you do. And here's the part that really keeps me up at night. Bernays wrote propaganda in 1928. He laid out every technique that was just Used against US culture, hijacking third party authority, invisible government, engineering of consent. He wrote it all down in a book that anybody can buy. And somehow, 100 years later, a group of anonymous students in Iran understood his playbook better than the country that produced him. The last question. This is going to be a big one for you. We invented propaganda as the modern science. Bernays was American, Hollywood is American, social media is American. But Iran just used all of it against us with Lego figures and rap music. So my question is this. Who wins the next propaganda war? Is it still America? Or has AI leveled the playing field so completely that any group with laptops and cultural fluency can now go toe to toe with a superpower? I want to hear what you think. What I just showed you is one technique from a playbook that goes back over a hundred years. It started with Sigmund Freud figuring out that human beings are driven by unconscious forces. Then his nephew, Edward Bernays weaponized those ideas. He sold wars, overthrew governments, made women smoke, and invented the field of public relations. Then Neil Postman warned us of the most dangerous propaganda wouldn't look like propaganda at all, it would look like entertainment. And then Dan Kennedy, my mentor, figured out how entrepreneurs could use the same dark arts ethically. And I spent 20 years taking all of it and turning into a system that bootstrapped clickfunnels past a billion dollars in sales without any venture capital. I made a video that tells that entire story. If what you just saw got you thinking, this video is gonna blow your mind, all you gotta do is go to secretsofpropaganda.com or hit the link in the description. Watch it right now while still fresh, and then subscribe to the Propaganda Playbook channel. Every episode I take a big story from the news. I decode the propaganda behind it and show you how to use the ethical versions to grow your business. Same science, same playbook, different story. And the next episode is coming soon. Thanks you guys so much and I'll see you on the next one.