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The Russell Brunson Show
The Propaganda Playbook: Scam School ($1.7 Trillion in Debt and AI Just Made the Degree Worthless) - #Marketing - Ep. 128
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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. It was Saturday, May 14, 2005. I was sitting in the middle of a packed auditorium. I've been following the status quo for the last 15 years. Elementary school, middle school, high school, high school, college, all building towards this moment. Graduation day. The day my parents have been telling me about my entire life. Get a college education so that you can go and get a good job. And I looked to my left, I looked to my right and I saw hundreds of people with huge smiles on their faces. And I was confused. Not for myself, but for them. Because I knew what was about to happen. The next morning they were gonna meet the real world. And for most of the people who graduated with me, if they were able to find jobs, they were literally gonna be starting with entry level positions, making 30 to $40,000 a year. Barely enough to cover the monthly payments on their student loans. Loans that by the way are non dismissible even if you declare bankruptcy. You can't get rid of them. They follow you around forever. The chains of debt and a job market that couldn't pay enough to cover the cost of their education, that's what they inherited the day they stepped into the real world and they were smiling about it now, something different was happening to me. Something happened my sophomore year that changed everything. I'm going to tell you what it was in just a minute. But first I need to show you how the biggest propaganda campaign in American history convinced an entire Generation to go $1.7 trillion in debt for a piece of paper that I just made worthless. 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 those same techniques to grow your business. So that said, let's get into it. So here's what I need you to understand. The idea that you need a college degree to be successful is not a fact. It's not a law of nature, it's not even an opinion. That's always existed. It was manufactured, it was engineered, and it sold to you by the same kind of system that Bernays used to Sell war and cigarettes. Think about it. 100 years ago most Americans didn't go to college. You learned to trade, you apprenticed under someone, you built a business and you worked with your hands. College was for the wealthy. And America built railroads, skyscrapers and the most powerful economy in human history without sending everybody to a four year university. So question is, what changed after World War II? The GI Bill sent millions of returning soldiers to college. That was a genuine good. It gave veterans a path into the middle class, but also created something else. A massive new customer base for universities. And once universities had that revenue, they needed to keep it. So they did what any smart business does. They marketed. And the message was simple and brilliant. College equals success. No, college equals failure. And they didn't just say it. They engineered the consent. They got employees to require degrees for jobs that never needed them before. They got high school counselors to funnel every student towards college applications. They got parents to believe that their children's futures depended on that acceptance letter. They got governments to underwrite student loans which made it possible for anyone to borrow enormous amounts of money. Which meant universities could charge whatever they wanted because the money was guaranteed. And in 1980 the average cost of a four year college degree was about $10,000 total. Today it's over $100,000. Some schools charge $200,000 or more. That's a thousand percent increase while wages have barely moved. And the total Americans now a $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. That's more than all the credit card companies in the country combined. But unlike a credit card, unlike mortgage, unlike virtually every other form of debt in America, student loans cannot be discharged in until you pay them off or you die, whichever comes first. Now that is not an educational system. That's a debt machine with a diploma attached. And the propaganda that holds it all together. You need this degree to succeed is the most successful example of manufactured consent in American history. Bernays convinced the nation to go to war. The college system convinced a nation to go into debt. Same technique, different product. I want to know something and I want you to be brutally honest. If you went to college, was it worth it? I don't mean did you have fun or did you make friends. I mean did the degree itself, the piece of paper, the education received in the classroom, did it actually help you build the life you have today? Yes or no? Drop it in the comments down below. So let me tell you my story because I'm not standing outside of this throwing stones. I went to college, I got a degree, I sat in the auditorium on graduation day. But I didn't go for school. I went to Boise State for one reason and one reason only. Wrestling. I wanted to win an NCAA title, and that was my goal. College was a necessary evil. It was the hoop I had to jump through to compete in the sport that I loved. And honestly, the wrestling was incredible. The discipline, the competition, the teammates who became lifelong friends. The experience of pushing your body and your mind to the absolute limit every single day. I wouldn't trade that anything. But that had nothing to do with my classroom. My second year of school, I met my wife, Colette, and within four months, we were engaged. A few months later after that, we were married. And after we got married, I very quickly found out how much life costs when your parents aren't supporting you anymore. She was making about $10 an hour, and between wrestling and school, I was making exactly $0 an hour. I still remember one day, and this is one of those stories that's funny now, but it wasn't funny at the time. Okay, I went to a CD exchange and I sold all of my wife's CDs, 114 of them for $50. That was what we needed for groceries. They paid us less than 50 cents, and my wife was not happy about it. So I had two choices. Quit wrestling, which was not gonna happen, or figure out some other ways to make money. With no skills, no experience, and no money, the $10 an hour my wife was making was enough for rent and for groceries, let alone starting a business. And that's where the thing that changed my life happened. I was sitting in my economics class, and my teacher, as usual, was boring me to death. And then he started talking about a concept he called opportunity cost. And the basic idea is this. When you have two choices and you pick one of them, what's the cost of not picking the other one? As he was explaining this, I'm thinking about how earlier that week, I spent 12 hours to design a logo in Photoshop. 12 hours. And the logo turned out horrible. And then I found a guy in a computer lab who is great at logos. I paid him $10, and 20 minutes later, I had something a thousand times better than anything I ever could have made. And I started doing the math in my head. If I could get a job on campus paying me $10 an hour, those 12 hours I wasted on Photoshop just cost me $120. I still didn't have a usable logo. Then I spent $10 and got a great one in 20 minutes. And right there in that Lecture. I wrote down six words in my notebook. Okay, And I promise you, everyone else in the class had heard the exact same lecture. But something about those six words hit me different. Everything around me stopped. I remember my heart started racing, my palms were sweating. And this is what I wrote down. What's the value of my time? And next to I wrote $10 an hour. Then I crossed out, I said, no, my time is worth $50 an hour. And I made myself a promise. From that moment forward, anytime I needed something done in my business, I was first going to look at the opportunity cost of doing it myself. If I could find someone to do it better, faster, and cheaper than my time was worth, I'd hire them immediately. And that one concept, not a single other thing I learned in four years of college. That is what built my business. By my senior year, I'd made $250,000. And within a year of graduation, I made over a million dollars. And the only thing college taught me that actually mattered was a concept I literally could have Learned from a $15 book or from a YouTube video. Four years, thousands of hours in the classroom, and one concept from one class on one day was the only thing that transferred into the real world. That's what I was thinking about on graduation day. When I looked around, I saw all the smiling faces. Now, here's why I'm doing this episode right now. Not last year, not five years ago, right now. Because something has happened that makes the college scam exponentially worse than it's ever been. And most people haven't connected the dots yet. AI just made almost every skill that college teaches obsolete. Think about what colleges charge 100 to $200,000 to learn. Programming. Okay? AI writes better code today than most developers. Okay? Right now, today, you don't have to go and get a computer science degree to learn how to do software anymore. All you got to do is go and learn how to use Claude code. You can do that from watching a couple YouTube videos. Okay? And what's crazy about it is you can build software now without even having to type. You can just do text prompts, talk to your computer and build out insane good software. Accounting and finance. I can analyze financial statements, do tax prep, build forecasts and budgets in seconds. Not approximately. Precisely. Better than humans with a calculator and accounting degree. Graphic design. AI generates professional quality logos, websites, marketing materials, presentations in minutes, not hours, not days. Minutes. Writing and journalism. AI writes articles, reports, marketing, copy, research, paper, emails. Faster and often better than college trained writers, legal research. I can analyze case Law draft contracts, summarize regulations in a fraction of the time it takes a paralegal with a degree marketing, AI can build your campaigns, write your ads, analyze your data, segment your audiences, and optimize in real time. Now, I'm not saying humans aren't needed. I'm saying the skills that colleges are charging $200,000 to teach are the exact skills that AI can now do for free, or nearly for free. The value of the technical education has collapsed, and it happened in about 18 months. Now, here's the part that really gets me. I was at a church activity last night, and I was teaching a group of young men, and I asked them a question. I said, how many of your teachers at school let you use AI? And they all said the same thing. We're not allowed to use AI. They said that it's cheating. You can't use it to write your papers. You can't use it to get with your homework. You can't use it to solve problems because it's cheating. I stood there thinking, in the real world, the opposite is true. In the real world, you're rewarded for using AI. The person who uses AI to write better copy gets the promotion. The person who uses AI to build faster gets the contract. The person who uses the AI to analyze data gets the raise. Every single skill that the job market rewards in 2026 involves knowing how to use AI effectively. And schools are banning people from it. Okay, they're charging students $200,000 to learn skills that AI already does better, and then they're banning those same students from learning the one tool that actually matters in today's. That's not education. That's a system protecting itself from becoming irrelevant. Because if students realize they could learn more from AI in the weekend than from a semester of lectures, why would they keep paying tuition? The schools aren't banning AI because it's bad for students. They're banning it because it's bad for the business model. If you're a parent right now or if you have kids in school, I need to hear from you. Are your kids teachers banning AI? And does that make you nervous? Because it makes me nervous. The world is moving in one direction and the educational system is moving in the other. So tell me what you guys are seeing right now. So if most of what college teaches is already obsolete, what should education be focusing on? I think there are two things that actually matter, and both of them are being ignored or actively suppressed by the current system. Number one, learning how to read. I don't just mean Reading words on a page. I mean, learning how to read deeply, how to study principles and frameworks and psychology and ideas that actually determine whether someone succeeds or fails. The books that changed my life, like Bernays propaganda, Hoffer's True Believer, Dan Kennedy's marketing books, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, I didn't find any of those in my college curriculum. I found them on my own because I was curious and because I understood that the real education happened in books, not in classrooms. The ability to pick up a book and extract the principles and apply them to your life and your business, that still matters. And you don't need a university to develop it. You need a library card and some discipline. Number two, learning how to use AI. I said this earlier, but I need to say it again because I don't think people understand how urgent this is. AI is not a trend. AI is not a tool that some people will use and some won't. AI is the new literacy. If you can't use AI effectively in 2026, you are functionally illiterate in the modern economy. That's not hyperbole, that's reality. And the school should be teaching this from day number one. Not banning it, not calling it cheating, teaching students how to prompt, how to iterate, how to use AI as a thinking partner, how to build with AI, how to create with AI, because that is the skill that the job market will reward for the next 50 years. And right now the education system is actively preventing students from developing it. Reading and AI, that's what education should be. Everything else AI can handle. Okay, so people always ask me, russell, what do you tell your kids about college because you went to college, you got a degree, what do you actually say to them? So here's what I tell my kids and I think it's the most practical framework that any parent can use. I tell them you gotta stay in school until you're making more money than your teacher. Here's why I think that works. First off, it doesn't say don't go to college, okay? I'm not anti college. I think there's value in the social experience. Meeting people, building relationships, networking, getting exposure, new ideas and learning new perspectives. Learning how to be an adult outside of your parents home. Okay? I got a lot of that from college. I met my wife in college. Some of my best friends came from my wrestling team. That stuff has real value. But the value isn't in the degree. The value isn't in the classroom education. The value is in the social growth and the connection. And you can get that without spending $200,000 on tuition, if you're intentional about it. Second, it gives them a goal. Instead of go to college for four years, because that's what everyone else is doing. It's, let's build something on the side while we're there. And the moment your business or your skills are making you more money than the person teaching you, you have my permission to leave. That gives them incentive to actually create something, to build, to develop the skills that'll have real world value. And third, it's measurable. It's not abstract. It's not follow your passion or go find yourself. It's a number. It's a benchmark. Are you making more than your teachers? No. You gotta stay. If so, keep building. Okay? Yes. And if the answer is yes, then you've outgrown the system. It's time to go. My goal for my kids is that they stay in school for the social life and the forward momentum, but that they're building something on the side the entire time. And the second that thing is generating more income than the person standing at the front of the classroom, that's when the real education begins. Okay, so my question for you guys in the comments is, what do you tell your kids about school? Okay? Do you tell them to go to school, to not go to school? Do you agree with me? Do you think I'm crazy and insane? Like, I would love to hear down below what you think and what you're telling your kids about college, Because I generally want to hear your perspective on this. Okay? I don't think I'm completely right about everything or anything for that matter. But this is kind of the direction we're testing out with our kids right now. Because when all said and done, I'm a guy who went to college, I got my degree, and I don't use it. And in the real world, nobody cares which framework you learned in school. They care about whether you can build a thing and ship it. I had three MBAs working for me at one time. 3. Three people with master's degrees in business administration. And I let them all go, all three of them, because they couldn't grasp the simple concepts I was teaching them in my basic training. Concepts of my students who never went to college. Master in 2.3mbas gone because 4 years of college plus 2 years of graduate school couldn't teach them what real world experience can teach them in months. That's not an indictment of those people, okay? They were smart, they worked hard, the system failed them, it took their money, gave them a credential and didn't teach them how to actually build anything. Here's what I keep coming Back to. On May 14, 2005, I sat in that auditorium and looked around at hundreds of smiling faces. And I knew that most of these people were about to walk into a world that their education had not prepared them for. A world where degrees would qualify them for jobs that couldn't pay enough to even cover the cost of getting those degrees. Degrees. That was in 2005, before AI, before everything that those degrees taught became automatable. Today, in 2026, a student can graduate with $150,000 in debt, a degree in computer science, and walk into a job market where AI can do most of their entry level work faster and cheaper. The debt is still there, the skills are already obsolete. And the system that sold in this path is still running the same ads, still sending the same mailers, still having the same guidance counselors push the same message. You need a degree to succeed. Succeed. That is propaganda. It was manufactured, is maintained by a $1.7 trillion industry that cannot survive if people stop believing it. And it's failing an entire generation of young people who deserve better. So my message to every parent watching this, every young person watching this, every entrepreneur who's building something real, the education that matters is the one you give yourself. Read, build, create, use AI, solve real problems for real people, and stay in school until you make more than your teacher everything. I just showed you the manufacturer consent behind the college system, the AI revolution that's making degrees obsolete, the framework for building a real education, it all comes from the same playbook I've been coding during the series the Science of Persuasion that started with Sigmund Freud, was weaponized by Edward Bernays, and has been used for over 100 years to manufacture consent of an entire nation. I use the same playbook ethically to bootstrap my company. Clickfunnels past a billion dollars in sales, without any venture capital, without a single MBA on the founding team. And I made a video that tells the whole story. If what you just saw got you thinking, then that video is going to change how you see everything. All you gotta do is go to secretsofpropaganda.com or hit the the link in the description down below. And on top of that, don't forget to subscribe because this is the propaganda playbook where I take the biggest stories, the biggest systems, the biggest lies, and I decode the propaganda behind them. And I show you how to use the ethical version to grow your business. Same science, same playbook, different story. Let me know down in the comments below what you want me to decode next, and I'll see you guys on the next video. Thanks.