Propaganda and the Shocking Science and Psychology of Persuasion | #Marketing - Ep. 101

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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 wanna 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. What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson.

Hope you're doing great. Hey, did you see the, The Bernays VSL that I launched a little while ago.

I'm gonna tell you guys a little of the backstory.

I took my Atlas Group out to, to Agora. They're the company that does $1.5 billion a year selling info products, and they taught us how to do their VSLs. And I got home and I wanted to do a VSL like them. And so I started using AI, I got some things together, I wrote this VSL. It ended up being a 50, 5-0, 50-minute-long VSL. We animated it, we launched it, we did all sound engineering, sound design, plus video design, and it's insane. In fact, if you want to go watch it, you should go watch it. Go to Secrets of propaganda.com to go and watch it if you wanna see the entire thing. But you know what, the other day I was playing with it, I was playing it on the video on the side while I was working on something, I could hear it, I was like, this is just as powerful to listen to the audio, 'cause the sound engineering they did, and the story is so vitally important. So, yeah, so I actually just wanted to play the video for you guys. Again, it's long, but it's gonna teach you guys about propaganda, where it came from, all the way from Sigmund Freud to Edward Bernays to Dan Kennedy to Russell Brunson directly to you, and I think you're gonna learn some cool things, and it's a lot of fun. And at the end of this, as you will know, as you will listen to, I will pitch you on getting tickets to the next Selling Online event, which if you haven't done the event yet, you need to do it. It's $100, and if you have done it and you haven't done it in the last like 6 months, you gotta go do it again. We have a new event coming out soon, part 2 of Selling Online. That's all I'm gonna tell you right now. It's gonna be insane, but I want you to be prepared for it, so go through Selling Online if you haven't yet. So again, I think if you go to secretspropaganda.com/buy, let me, Let me double check that. Yes, that is the secret link that'll take you to go and get your tickets for $100, plus you get a copy of Brené's ebook and a bunch of other cool things as a gift just for going through that link. So anyway, with that said, I hope you guys enjoy this presentation. I'm gonna come back at the very end and make sure you have that link again so you can go get your tickets to the next Selling Online event and get your copies of Propaganda.

This is The Russell Brunson Show. Right now, as you watch this, your brain is being hijacked. You think you're in control, but there's a backdoor to your mind that 99% of people don't know exists. In 1914, a discovery was made that should have stayed buried. The hidden switches that control human behavior were exposed. For over a century, a select few have used this knowledge to manipulate millions. They've made women smoke, nations fight, and complete strangers stampede to buy things that they never even wanted. The man who started it all wrote, "We are governed, our minds molded, our ideas suggested by men we have never heard of." He called it the engineering of consent, and it's being used on you right now, every day. The ad that read your mind, that video that made you buy, that post that made you furious. It's the same playbook, same psychological triggers, same invisible string. In the next few minutes, you're going to discover the exact system that's been hidden for over 100 years. The same dark psychology that built empires, toppled governments, and created billionaires. The question is, do you want to remain the puppet or learn to become the puppet master? So here it is, the paradox that changed everything. The same psychological discoveries meant to heal individuals were later weaponized to sway nations, sell cigarettes, and to make those who knew these dark arts of propaganda rich. Sigmund Freud identified the unconscious mind as the actual force that drives human behavior. He developed these concepts to heal patients, while his nephew, Edward Bernays, took those very same ideas and then used them to manipulate the masses. Before Bernays, people only bought what they needed. After Bernays, they bought what they desired. He discovered that by appealing to emotions rather than logic, You could persuade a nation to fight in a war it didn't agree with, convince women that smoking was an act of independence, and use Freud's discoveries as a tool for mass manipulation. Freud was horrified by how his work was being used, yet Bernays pressed on, believing that managing the irrational herd was the key to control. This moral ambiguity is the heartbeat of our story. In this video you're about to watch, we're going to unravel the dark lineage and show you these same tactics when used ethically can become the most powerful weapon in your online business. In this video, you'll discover how you can harness the stolen science to turn strangers into raving customers. In Vienna, 1914, Europe was descending into the bloodiest war in human history. Sigmund Freud watched in horror as millions of civilized men turned into savage killers overnight. But this carnage confirmed what he'd been warning about for years: that beneath the surface of every human being lurked dangerous primitive forces, sexual and aggressive drives from our animal past that we desperately repressed because if we ever broke free, civilization would collapse into chaos. Freud saw the war as proof that he was right. Governments had unleashed humanity's unconscious demons and nobody knew how to put them back. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, was living a completely different life. He was a small-time press agent promoting opera singers and circus acts in New York. Bernays kept in touch with his famous uncle and even vacationed with him in the Alps. But he was nobody special, just another hustler trying to make it in America. And then America entered the war and everything changed. The government hired Bernays to sell the war to the American people. President Wilson claimed that America would fight to make the world safe for democracy. And Bernays' job was to make people believe it. And he was disturbingly good at it. So good that when Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference, Bernays witnessed something that would change his life forever. Massive crowds surged around the president like he was a god. The propaganda worked so well, Bernays had turned a politician into a messiah. And standing there watching the screaming masses lose their minds over a man that they'd never met, Bernays had a revelation. If you could use propaganda to control people during war, why not use it during times of peace? Bernays had stumbled onto the power of propaganda, but it wasn't until he discovered his uncle's work and understood the science to explain it that he was able to replicate and exploit it. While in Paris, Bernays had sent Freud some Cuban cigars as a gift. Freud responded by sending his nephew a copy of his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Reading it, Bernays became fascinated by Freud's theories about the unconscious mind, these hidden irrational forces that secretly controlled human behavior. But where Freud saw danger, Bernays saw dollar signs. He studied Freud's work not to heal people, but to manipulate them. His first major test came from George Hill, president of American Tobacco. At this time in history, women didn't smoke in public. It was taboo. Hill was losing half his market and he wanted Bernays to fix it. So Bernays hired a psychoanalyst who told him that cigarettes were symbols of male power. And he believed that if women smoked them, that they would then symbolically have their own penises. It was kind of insane, but Bernays ran with it. So he hired some young socialites to march in New York's Easter parade and at his signal dramatically light up cigarettes. He told the press they were activists lighting torches of freedom. The story went global. Overnight, he linked smoking to women's liberation and sales exploded. This was the moment that everything changed. Before Bernays, Advertising told you why you needed something. But after Bernays, it manipulated what you desired. He didn't sell products. He sold feelings, identities, and dreams. He taught car companies to sell masculinity. He put products in movies. He brought celebrities to the White House to save a boring president's image. By the late 1920s, he'd helped create a consumer boom that transformed America. Millions of people were buying things that they didn't need because Bernays had figured out how to trigger their unconscious desires. But Bernays wasn't just selling soap and cigarettes. He was selling something much more dangerous: the idea that democracy itself was an illusion. In 1928, he wrote a book called Propaganda. The first line reads, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society." He went on to explain that the invisible government of persuaders actually ruled America, pulling the psychological strings that made the now puppet public dance. The masses were too irrational, too dangerous to actually have power. They needed to be controlled by people like him who understood their unconscious drives. When Freud read what his nephew was doing, he was horrified. His life's work, understanding the human mind to heal suffering, had been perverted into a weapon of mass manipulation. Freud had warned civilization needed to control humanity's dark impulses, but Bernays had figured out how to exploit them. This was the birth of modern persuasion. Every webinar that you've watched, Every sales page, article headline, or YouTube video that stirred your emotions, every political campaign that played upon your fears, they all trace back to this moment when one man took his uncle's healing science and turned it into history's most powerful manipulation machine. Bernays proved that whoever controlled the unconscious controlled the crowd. Once that door was open, it could never be closed again. Bernays died at the age of 103, taking many of his secrets to the grave. But his techniques didn't die with him. They'd already infected every corner of American business like a virus. In the 1960s and '70s, a new generation discovered what Bernays had done. They studied his campaigns, dissected his methods, and realized something terrifying. Bernays had only scratched the surface. The human mind was far more hackable than even he had imagined. One of these students was a young, struggling copywriter named Dan Kennedy. Kennedy was broke, desperate, willing to do whatever it took to survive. He failed at everything— comedy, magic shows, even selling insurance door-to-door. But then he stumbled onto Bernays' work, and something clicked. Kennedy realized that Bernays had left breadcrumbs, a trail leading to even darker, more powerful techniques. And Kennedy became obsessed. He studied not just Bernays, but the people that Bernays studied. He went back to Freud's original text. He examined hypnosis, con artists, and cult leaders. He discovered that throughout history, there had always been a hidden lineage of what he called mesmerists, people who could take control of others' minds so completely that their victims had to hand over their fortunes while thanking them for the privilege. In his private notes, Kennedy wrote, Franz Mesmer was driven to exile in the 1970s for doing what I do every day. The difference is I don't call it mesmerism. I call it marketing. Kennedy spent decades perfecting these techniques. He tested them in the trenches, writing sales letters and producing infomercials that generated millions, crafting presentations that made grown CEOs cry and beg to write checks and max out their credit cards by night. But unlike Bernays, who served corporations, Kennedy realized that the real money was in teaching these secrets to others. By the 1980s, Kennedy had become the secret weapon behind dozens of industries. Real estate gurus, fitness experts, financial advisors, skincare companies, online marketers, they all came to Kennedy to learn how to hijack minds. He called them his renegade millionaires. He taught them things that would make Bernays blush. While Bernays had focused on manipulating the masses, Kennedy went deeper. He developed techniques to control high-value individuals, CEOs, investors, and professionals. People who thought they were too smart to be manipulated. Kennedy proved them wrong over and over again. In a rare moment of candor, Kennedy once told a small group of students, Bernays showed you that you could control the crowd by triggering their unconscious desires, but I discovered something even more powerful. You can make someone utterly defenseless by first making them believe that they're in control. It's not about persuasion anymore. It's about possession. Kennedy's students went on to dominate every market they touched. They became the gurus in every business category you can dream of, each one using variations of the same psychological weapons without even knowing the dark origins. But here's what's truly disturbing. These techniques kept evolving. Each generation discovered new ways to hack deeper into the human psyche. Social media algorithms that exploited dopamine, webinars that use cult indoctrination techniques, sales funnels that systematically destroy objections before the prospect even knows that they have them. And at the center of this evolution was one simple, horrifying realization that Kennedy put into words: the better you are at mind hijacking, the larger you can make the price of what you sell. Think about that. Bernays convinced women to spend a few cents on cigarettes. Kennedy's students convinced entrepreneurs to spend $100,000 or more on coaching. The techniques got better, the price tags got bigger, and the control got deeper. Which brings us to today. Right now, as you read this, these techniques are being used on you. That Facebook ad that seemed to read your mind, that webinar that had you pulling out your credit card before you knew what happened, that guru who made you feel like they were the only ones who actually understood you— they're all using the same playbook. A playbook that was started with Freud's discovery of the unconscious, was then weaponized by Bernays, perfected by Kennedy, and is now being deployed at scale and sophistication that would terrify even them. The question isn't whether these techniques work. The evidence is overwhelming. They shaped the last century of human behavior. The question is what happens when you learn to use them yourself? Because here's the truth that Kennedy understood that Bernays didn't. In a world where everyone's trying to manipulate everyone else, the only real power is in becoming the manipulator instead of the manipulated. As Kennedy wrote in his controversial Mind Hijacking Manifesto, he said, society literally divides between the mesmerist and the mesmerized. Those with the most power and wealth tend to be the most powerful mesmerists. Money and power and mesmerism are linked. Now, setting aside your possible squeamish feelings about mind hijacking, truth be told, wouldn't you like to exert undue, outsized influence over others? The answer, if you're honest, is yes. Because in an attention economy, influence isn't just power, it's survival. And that's where our story takes its next dark turn. And that's where I come in. Hi, my name is Russell Brunson, and if you don't know who I am, well, that's kind of the point of this whole story. I wasn't born rich. I wasn't famous. I was just a broke college wrestler from Boise, Idaho, trying to figure out how to support my new wife without getting a real job. So when I heard about Dan Kennedy, he was running a seminar that promised to teach what he called the dark arts of persuasion. I maxed out my credit cards and I flew to Cleveland. Now, I walked into that room expecting to learn how to write better sales letters. What I discovered instead changed everything. In fact, the speaker wasn't Dan. It was one of his students. And he said something that stopped me cold. There are two ways to get rich as a speaker. The first is to be famous. Tony Robbins, Oprah, they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars just to show up. But if you're not famous, let's be honest, you're not, there's a second way, a way that can actually make you more money than the celebrities. But it requires mastering an art that most people think died decades ago. He called it platform selling or one-to-many selling. The idea was simple. It's simple but terrifying. You get on stage not to get applause, but instead to get credit cards. You deliver a presentation so psychologically engineered that people are literally running to the back of the room to buy whatever it is you're selling. I thought at first it was BS until I saw him actually do it. Right there in that hotel conference room, he sold $180,000 worth of a speaking course in 90 minutes to maybe about 150 people. I watched successful business owners, people way smarter than me, stampede to the back tables fighting to hand over $20,000 each. After seeing this, I had to learn it. And so I tried. And you have no idea how hard I tried. My first attempt was at a marketing seminar in Atlanta. I'd spent weeks crafting what I thought was the perfect presentation. I studied every technique that I was able to remember from seeing other people sell on stage, and I thought I was ready. But after I gave my presentation, I tried to make my sell, I bombed completely. Not only did nobody buy, no one even got out of their seats to come and talk to me in the back of the room where I was standing with a handful of blank order forms but no orders. In fact, I remember hiding in my hotel room afterwards, eating coconut shrimp and Häagen-Dazs ice cream straight from the container for 3 days until the event ended, wondering what I'd done wrong. My wife called to ask how it went. I couldn't face telling her, so I told her it went great. But here's the thing about learning the dark arts: the failures teach you more than the successes. Every time I bombed, and there were many, I learned another piece of the puzzle. I started noticing patterns that weren't in any book. I watched other speakers obsessively. Not the famous ones— they could sell just by being themselves. I watched the unknowns who somehow generated millions. I sit in the back of the rooms with a notebook documenting every gesture, every pause, every linguistic pattern that they used. That's when I discovered something disturbing. The best platform sellers weren't using normal sales techniques. They were using something much older, much darker. They were using the same mind control techniques that Bernays had pioneered, but adapted for a live audience. After I realized that, I tracked down every master that I could find. Most wouldn't talk, and the ones who did spoke in code like they were protecting some nuclear secrets. Finally, I found my way to Dan Kennedy's Insider Circle, a group so secretive you couldn't find information about it online. And to apply, you had to know somebody, and they would give you a special fax number where you could send the request and then just pray that Dan was in a good mood when it showed up on his fax machine. The price of admission was $25,000 a year. I didn't I didn't have that, but I knew that I needed to be in that room at any cost. So I leveraged my credit cards, called my bank, and within a few days I was in. In that group, I learned things that would have gotten Bernays himself kicked out of Applied Society. They taught me about compliance triggers, specific words and phrases that bypass conscious resistance, about state control and how to manipulate the energy of an entire room like a conductor with an orchestra, about the close, which is a sequence of psychological pressure points that makes buying feel like the only logical choice, But the darkest secret was what they called the confession. Every great platform seller, they explained, doesn't sell a product. They sell absolution. They make the audience confess their failures, their fears, their secret shames. Then they position their offer as the redemption. It's not manipulation, they insisted. It's ministry. And I became obsessed. I practiced on any audience that would have me. Rotary clubs, Chamber of Commerce meetings, real estate seminars, network marketing events. Most of the time, I still failed. Slowly, something started to click. I began to understand that platform selling wasn't about the words you said. It was about the story you made the audience tell themselves. Every technique from Freud's unconscious drives to Bernays' emotional triggers and Kennedy's mind hijacks were all just tools to help the audience write themselves into your story. By 2007, I finally cracked the code. I was making 6 figures a year speaking at events, selling everything from marketing courses to coaching programs. Other speakers started asking me how I did it. And word spread there was this kid from Idaho who could outsell other speakers with 10 times his experience. And then 2008 happened. The financial crash didn't just destroy the economy, it destroyed the entire seminar industry. Events crashed, promoters went bankrupt, and overnight the stages disappeared. Platform selling, this art I'd spent years mastering, became obsolete. But what nobody realized was that something far more important had vanished with it: the knowledge itself. Itself. The dark psychology, the manipulation techniques, the carefully guarded secrets that had been passed down from Bernays to Kennedy to a select few of us— it all disappeared like ancient scrolls being buried in the collapsing temple. The masters went silent. Young blood moved on, and platform selling became a dead art. For almost a decade, the knowledge slept like some ancient artifact buried in the ruins. The secrets of platform selling lay dormant on old hard drives and in forgotten notebooks. The few of us who remembered the old ways had moved on, building businesses in the new digital world. During those years, we adapted. We built sales funnels, we wrote video sales letters, we figured out how to sell without ever seeing our customers' faces. And it worked. But something was missing. The raw power of looking someone in the eye and systematically destroying their objections in real time was gone. And then in 2014, something strange happened. Small seminars started popping up again. But they were different. Neutered. Nobody was selling from the stage anymore. Promoters made their money from ticket sales and vendor booths. The electricity, the stampede, the transformation that used to happen in those rooms was all gone. It was like everyone had collectively forgotten that once there was a time when people could make $1 million in 90 minutes with the right presentation. And that's when fate intervened. We had just launched our software company, ClickFunnels. I tried launching it 5 different ways, 5 different our funnels 5 different times. Each time we got a trickle of customers and then nothing. We were bleeding money and my partners were starting to panic. And then I got a call from an old-timer, a promoter from the pre-2008 days. Russell, he said, I'm putting together an event, small, maybe 500 people. You want to speak? I almost said no because speaking without selling felt pointless. Here's the thing, he continued, I remember what you could do back in the day. If you want, you can make an offer, sell yourself "Split it 50/50, just like the good old days." My heart started racing. Nobody did 50/50 splits anymore. Nobody sold from the stage anymore. This was a chance to resurrect the dead art. I spent the next week in my basement digging through my old hard drives like an archaeologist. I found my old presentations, the irresistible offer stack, the false belief patterns, the big domino, and reading through them was like finding an ancient manual of forbidden spells. I'd forgotten how powerful this stuff was. I rebuilt the presentation from scratch, adapting the old psychological patterns for ClickFunnels. Every slide was engineered using techniques that hadn't been seen on stage in almost a decade. The origin story that creates the rapport, the internal-external false belief breaks, the stack that makes the price irrelevant, the urgency sequence that triggers loss aversion so powerfully that people literally run to the back of the room while their hands are desperately seeking for their credit cards. The night before the event, I couldn't sleep. What if it didn't work anymore? What if What if people had evolved past these techniques? What if I'd lost the ability? The next day, I walked on stage in front of 500 entrepreneurs. For 90 minutes, I wove this spell. I could feel it working. The room's energy shifting, the audience leaning in, their objections melting away one by one. And then came the moment of truth. I made the offer. ClickFunnels for $997 plus bonuses worth $8,000, but only if they ran to the back of the room right now. What happened next still gives me chills. Over half of the room, more than 250 people, jumped out of their seats and literally ran to the back tables. Credit cards were flying. People were shouting their orders at my team. In fact, one guy actually threw his credit card at us to make sure he got in before the bonuses expired. In 90 minutes, we made more money than the previous 6 months combined. That night at dinner, I told my co-founders Todd and Dylan, based on what just happened, We're gonna be rich. Not because of the money we made from today, because I just proved that the old magic still works and nobody else even remembers how to do it. As I flew home, staring out the airplane window, different thoughts consumed me. Yes, platform selling still worked, but events were rare. Stages were still limited. What I needed wasn't just to resurrect the old art, I needed to evolve it. Back in my basement, staring at my computer screen, a crazy thought formed. What if you could do platform selling without a platform? What if you could create the same psychological experience that happened in the room, the social proof, the urgency, the mass hypnosis, but deliver it through a screen? Everyone who knew the old art would say that it was impossible. You needed the energy of the crowd. You needed physical presence. You needed to read the room. But they were thinking like it was still 2007. This was 2014, and I was about to break every rule that they thought was sacred. I landed back in Boise with a problem. We'd just proven that platform selling could generate $250,000 in 90 minutes, but there were maybe a dozen events a year where I could actually do this. And at that rate, ClickFunnels would die before I could scale. The solution seemed obvious: put the presentation online. But everybody who tried traditional webinars before had failed miserably. They got 2 to 3% conversion rates at best. The magic that happened in a room, the mass hypnosis effect, supposedly couldn't translate to a computer screen. I had a theory. What if everyone was failing because they were trying to do a regular sales presentation online? What if nobody had tried to port the actual psychological architecture of platform selling into digital? Within hours of getting home, I was messaging everyone I knew on Skype, Facebook, and through text messaging. Anyone with an email list. I've got something that's converting at 50%, I told them. Let's just do a webinar to your list and we'll split the profits. Most people thought I was delusional, but 6 people said yes. I spent the next 3 days building what would become the first real webinar funnel. Not just a registration page and a broadcast link, but a a complete psychological journey. Every page, every email, every element was designed using the same mind-controlling principles that work from the stage. The first webinar was scheduled for Thursday at 2 PM Eastern. 600 people showed up live. I delivered the exact same presentation I'd given to the event word for word. When I made the offer, I pushed them to a sales page instead of the back of the room. We made 30 sales, 5% conversion. I wanted to punch my monitor. This was supposed to be my breakthrough. I'd gotten one-tenth of what worked live. But then something happened that changed everything. I opened up the webinar chat log and started reading through the questions people had asked during the presentation, hundreds of them. And suddenly I realized I've been given a superpower that didn't exist on physical stages. On stage, you can feel confusion in the room, but you don't know exactly what's causing it. Online, every objection, every concern, every moment of confusion was documented in real time in the comments. It was like being able to read 600 minds simultaneously. Sleeve. I had another webinar scheduled for 8:00 PM that same day. In the 4 hours between the webinars, I went through every single question. I found the patterns. How does this work for WordPress? What if I don't have a product? Is this just for info products? I rebuilt dozens of slides answering these objections before people could even think of them. I restructured the entire flow to address concerns in the exact order they appeared in people's minds. It was like I've been given the answer key to a test I was about to take. The second webinar started with another 500, 600 people on live. Instead of questions, I saw comments like, it's like he's reading my mind, and how do you know I was thinking about that? When I made the offer that night, 120 people bought. 20% conversion, 4 times better in just 4 hours. That's when I became obsessed. After every webinar, I had to export the questions. I then studied them like a detective examining evidence. I'd find the hidden objections, the unconscious fears, the false beliefs people didn't even know that they actually had. And then I rebuild the presentation to destroy those objections before they form. It was like natural selection on steroids. Each iteration got stronger, more persuasive, and more impossible to resist. The presentation evolved from a sales pitch into a psychological weapon that could predictably convert 30 to 40% of any audience. Look at the comments I got from one legend of the game, Joe Lavery. Russell Brunson, I'm in awe at how good you are at webinar pitching. Watching it right now. Every trick in the book is being used like a pro. Every slide, every section, every word crafted intentionally. Everything. The sequence, the stack, the FAQs, the video testimonials, the offer, almost every objection planned for and obliterated, the countdown timers, overwhelmingly awesome execution. I don't think I've ever seen a better presentation. Over the next 10 months, I performed this webinar live over 75 times, sometimes twice a day, each time refining, tweaking, perfecting. I tested every psychological trigger, every linguistic pattern, every visual element, and the results were beyond anything the platform platform selling world had ever seen. We took ClickFunnels from $0 to $10 million in sales, not in a year, but in 10 months, using nothing but this one presentation delivered over and over through a computer screen. Other marketers started calling it the perfect webinar. They'd never seen anything convert like this online. What they didn't understand though is I wasn't doing a webinar. I was doing platform selling through a digital medium. I was using psychological techniques that had been hidden away since 2008, evolved and weaponized for the internet age.. But the real test was still to come, because in 2015 I got a call that would change everything. It was from an event promoter with a massive vision. Russell, he said, I'm putting together the biggest marketing event in history, 9,000 entrepreneurs in one room. I want you to be one of my keynote speakers. Can I sell? I asked. He laughed. Russell, my events, if you don't sell, you don't get invited back. And that was it, the ultimate test. Can I take everything I've learned from 75+ webinars, all the all the psychological refinements, all the objection-destroying sequences, the mind control techniques, and bring them back into the physical stage. And not just any stage, but the biggest stage our industry had ever seen. What happened next would break every record in platform selling history. Grant Cardone's 10X Growth Conference, February 23rd, 2018, Mandalay Bay Event Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. 9,000 entrepreneurs packed into a stadium all looking for the secret to 10x their business. I was backstage, hands literally dripping with sweat, watching the other speakers through the monitors. Lewis Howes had just spoken the day before. Daymond John was coming up after me. These were actual celebrities. People paid just to be in the same room with them. Me? I was still the kid from Idaho that nobody knew. But I had something that they didn't. I had the lost art. I was about to use it to set a world record. The lights dimmed and the announcer's voice boomed through the stadium.

For the past 10 years, this man has built a following of entrepreneurs in the millions. He sold hundreds of thousands of his books, popularized the concept sales funnels. He's co-founded the software company ClickFunnels that has grown to over 100,055,000 customers in just 3 years. He is the king of funnels, the internet's favorite entrepreneur, affiliate marketing genius, a container of expert secrets. He is an American storyteller. Ladies and gentlemen, bring to the stage with a thunderous 10x applause, Mr. Russell Brunson.

I walked out and for a moment I couldn't breathe. 9,000 faces staring at me, the biggest stage I'd ever been on, the ultimate test of everything I learned. For the next 90 minutes, every word, every gesture, every slide was choreographed using psychological arsenal I refined over 75 webinars.

Ours.

But the question is, would it work? For the first 60 minutes, I told them stories and explained strategies while I was secretly reprogramming their subconscious beliefs in a way that would have made both Freud and Bernays take a second look. At exactly the 67-minute mark, I started the close. If you want ClickFunnels, my $8,000 bonus package, if you want to transform your business and your life, you need to run, not walk. Run to the back of the stadium, go to Section F2 by the bathrooms. My team was there with order forms, but we only brought 500 forms and there's 9,000 of you here. And what happened next was chaos. Over 1,000 people, 1 out of every 9 people in that room, jumped up from their seats and literally sprinted to the back tables. Credit cards were flying, people shouting their orders. The line to get pictures with me after they purchased my offer wrapped around the Mandalay Bay 3 times. I didn't know the actual numbers yet, but I knew that they were good. While taking photos, one of Grant's sales guys grabbed me. "What was that?" he asked. "I've never seen anything like that. Daymond John, an actual celebrity, is literally speaking right now in an empty room." 'cause everyone's in line buying from you. After the dust settled and we ran all their credit cards, we found out in 90 minutes we collected $3.2 million in sales. That night at dinner, I couldn't stop thinking about what had just happened. Yes, the money was incredible, but the math was what blew my mind. If I had tried to have the same conversation with each of those 9,000 people one-on-one, it would've taken me 810,000 minutes. Working 40-hour weeks, that would take me almost 6.49 years just to reach the same amount of people I reached in just 90 minutes. And that's when it really hit me. One-to-one selling will always keep you trapped. No matter how good you are, you're limited by the number of hours in your day. The best salespeople in the world can maybe do 20 calls a day, closing 30% of them, make 6 sales, and that's their ceiling. But with one-to-many selling, there's no ceiling. I thought about all the entrepreneurs I knew grinding it out on sales calls, spending 45 minutes to an hour with each prospect, hoping to close one $2,000 sale. Meanwhile, I just closed 1,079 sales at $3,000 each in the same time they spent with just 2 prospects. The difference isn't skill, it's not talent, it's not even the product. The difference is in understanding that selling one-to-one is like trying to fill a swimming pool with a teaspoon, while selling one-to-many is like opening a fire hydrant. But here's what really mattered about that night. I had proven that the lost art wasn't just alive, it was more powerful now than ever. The psychological techniques that Freud discovered, that Bernays weaponized, that Kennedy perfected, and that had been buried since 2008, they still work. In fact, they work better now than ever because nobody else even remembered how to defend against them. The other speakers that weekend, the celebrities making $100,000 to $300,000 just to show up, they gave inspirational talks. They built their brand. They got their applause. But I used the lost, forgotten mind control techniques to generate $3.2 million in sales. As I flew home from Vegas, one thought consumed me. If I could do this in a room, and I'd already proven I could do it online through webinars, what would happen if I systemized the entire process? What if I could teach others not just the mechanics of a presentation, but the actual psychological architecture that makes people buy? What if I could resurrect the lost art, not just for myself, but for an entire generation of entrepreneurs? That question would lead to the creation of something that would change everything. The question everyone asks after hearing about the $10,000 event is always the same. Was it just you, or could anyone learn this? Let me answer that with a story about Annie Grace. Annie had already overcome her own struggle with alcohol and developed a powerful method to help others do the same. She'd written books, created programs, had all the knowledge, but she was stuck. She couldn't figure out how to get her message to the masses who desperately needed it. Then she discovered my presentation framework and had a breakthrough.

Group.

She could use these same selling techniques to help others get freedom from alcohol. She wrote a webinar using my framework, but instead of breaking false beliefs about buying a course, she broke false beliefs about alcohol. Instead of stacking value, she stacked reasons to quit. Instead of creating urgency to buy, she created urgency to change. That webinar has now helped tens of thousands of people overcome alcoholism. And Annie, she built a business worth tens of millions of dollars teaching others what she learned. She didn't just master the art, she used it to save lives. Or take Kaylin Poland. She was a fitness competitor who wanted to help women lose weight. Using my one-to-many selling framework, she built LadyBoss Weight Loss. That single webinar presentation has now been seen online by over 1.3 million women. Let that sink in. An athlete who'd never sold on a webinar before used those techniques to build a business that landed on the Forbes 5000 fastest-growing companies and transformed over a million lives. Stacey Martino used my one-to-many framework to help save marriages. Her webinar has rescued thousands of relationships from divorce and built an amazing business in the process. She's literally using this framework to help people fall back in love. Garrett J. White took his Warrior Movement for men to the next level by using my presentation structure. Brad Gibb and Ryan Lee went from selling financial services door-to-door to getting over 1,000 people to show up live to the webinars where they sold their services once and got hundreds of clients in a single night. Jamie Cross I scaled our soap company from farmers markets to winning multiple Comic-Con awards, all by using my one-to-many framework. The pattern is undeniable. This wasn't just something that worked for me. Anyone who learned the actual psychological architecture, not just the surface tactics, but the deep structure, could replicate these results in any industry. After watching hundreds of my private $50,000 per year inner circle clients crush it with these presentations, I made a decision. I was going to do a one-time-only live event where I'd reveal Everything. Every psychological trigger, every manipulation technique, every secret I learned from studying Freud, Bernays, Kennedy, and my own decade of testing. I called it Selling Online, but those who attended this event are now secretly referring to it as Subconscious Selling. For that event, I promised them that I would teach them my most dangerous sales persuasion and mind hacking techniques, the stuff that would make Bernays himself feel uncomfortable, and then give them my proven step-by-step blueprint that would persuade even the coldest audiences part with large sums of money without having to think it over. For 3 days, I downloaded everything. The NLP patterns, the hypnotic language, the trial closes, the persuasion techniques, the reframes that made objections disappear, how to take cold traffic and make them hot, the exact psychological sequences that make buying feel like the only logical choice. I didn't just teach tactics. I taught them the art behind the science. Why certain words trigger compliance, how to structure a presentation to create maximum psychological pressure, the exact moment when resistance senses collapses and desire takes over. At the end of the event, I made everyone a deal. I bribed them, actually. Take what you learned, I said. Create your own presentation. Do it live. And when you make $10,000 from your first one-to-many presentation, I'm gonna give you this award. It's called the Prime Mover Award, a physical trophy to commemorate the moment they proved they could move crowds, not just individuals. Since that event, almost 100 people who attended have already won that award. Think about that. Almost 100 people who had never done this before who took these techniques within weeks or months, generated at least $10,000 from the presentation they created. Some did less and some did much more. Now, does it work for everyone? No, nothing works for everyone. Some people are too scared to even try, and some people think that they're above using psychology to sell. For some reason, some people want to keep doing things the hard way. But for those almost 100 people who actually followed the blueprint, who plugged in their ideas and their offers, who were willing to use the dark arts for good, it worked. And it worked fast. Unfortunately, it was a one-time event. We filmed it, documented everything, but we've never done it again. The recordings exist, but they're locked away in some kind of marketing Area 51. People have begged me weekly to do it again. They've heard the stories, they've seen the results. They want access to the secrets that transformed a kid from Idaho into someone who can generate almost unlimited sales in any market with a microphone and PowerPoint. But here's the thing about teaching the dark arts. All who attended swore to follow the first rule of Fight Club: don't talk about Fight Club. But then the word got out. Someone mentioned during a podcast interview when someone asked the secret to their success. And just like that, the news spread like a virus. People found out that there was an underground movement of people who had learned the lost art. And the begging started. Every day, messages flooded in. Russell, I heard about the event. When are you going to do it? Please, Russell, I need this training. I'll pay anything to learn what you taught them. For months I said no. Teaching these techniques takes everything out of me. It's not just about sharing information. It's literally installing a completely new operating system into someone's brain. It's rewiring decades of conditioning about how selling works. But then I realized something. The world needs us now more than ever. With AI and automation threatening jobs, with traditional businesses collapsing, with the economy more uncertain now than ever, people need the ability to generate money on demand. They need the power that comes from being able to move crowds, not just individuals. And so I'm doing it one more time. Selling Online, the final event. This isn't some 90-minute webinar. This isn't a weekend workshop. This is the full 3 days of complete immersion, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, 8 hours a day. That's 24 hours over 3 days of me downloading 2 decades of testing, refinement, and mastery directly into your brain. Why 3 days? Because you can't learn this from a PDF. You can't master by watching a quick video. These psychological patterns have to be installed at a deep level. It took me 20 years to mine these nuggets out of the mountains of failure and rejection, to synthesize everything from Freud to Bernays to Kennedy into a flawless, repeatable script. I can't give this to you in 90 minutes. I have to install it. Installation takes 3 full days. Here's what you're going to discover. Day number 1, the psychology of mass persuasion. 7 core psychological triggers that bypass logical resistance. Freud identified 3, Bernays found 2 more, and I discovered the final 2. The Big Domino Theory. How to identify the one belief that once toppled makes all other objections irrelevant. The exact 15-minute origin story framework that creates instant rapport with any audience. How to use future pacing to make them buy the destination before you ever reveal the vehicle. The False Belief Patterns. These are the 3 stories that destroy the 3 core objections that everyone has. Day number 2 is the Perfect Presentation architecture. My word-for-word script has generated over $100 million. You're going to get it and you can model it. The stack, how to make any pricing insignificant compared to the value. Trial closes, tie-downs, psychological commitments that make saying no almost impossible. The urgency sequence that ethically triggers loss aversion so powerfully that people literally run to buy. And how to structure your slides for maximum subconscious impact. There's a science to this that most people never learn. And then day number 3 is the implementation. How to adapt this for your specific market— coaching, e-commerce, services, B2B, anything you want. We'll show you how to install it, and then you'll learn how to convert your presentation into an automated webinar that sells 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the follow-up sequences to capture 90% of those who don't buy immediately, how to test, refine, and optimize till you have a 20 to 30% conversion rate, and then building your complete selling system that can generate money on demand. Plus, you're going to discover the hypnotic language patterns that make resistance melt away. NLP techniques that are used by master manipulators, but we'll show you how to use them ethically. Commitment ladder that moves people from skeptical to sold in just 90 minutes. How to read a room, either virtual or physical, and adjust your energy in real time. And the secret to making people feel like buying was their idea. So here's what you're gonna get. First, you can get 3 full days of training. Okay, that's 24 hours in 3 days. Total value of $30,000. Second thing is my complete presentation template and script, a total value of $10,000. Then my slide-by-slide breakdown of my record-breaking presentation, value of $5,000. Access to a private Prime Mover community, value is $2,000. The implementation blueprint to go from zero to your first $10,000 presentation, value $5,000. Total value is over $52,000. Now, obviously I'm not gonna charge you $52,000, but I want you to understand that the regular investment for Selling Online is $997. And honestly, if you use what I teach you to make even just one sale of your own $997 course, you'd break even from just one sale, and then everything you made after that would be pure profit. And also realize that after you've learned the skill set, you'll then have it for life. You can use it to sell anything to anyone at any time. But I wanted to reward action takers. Instead of charging the normal $997 for an event like this, I've opened up early bird pricing, and you can get your ticket now for just 10% of the normal cost. Yes, you can literally secure your own seat for just $100.

Just think about it.

If you just did one presentation after the event, and you only sold one person your $997 course, you'd have already 10x'd your investment. It's insane, but it's also pretty cool. I want you to win, and learning the skill set is how you win. But here's the thing: we can only handle so many people in this intensive format, so price goes up fast. The first 100 seats are $100, the next 100 seats go to $250, and the final seats are back to the full $997. As I write this, we've already sold 73 seats, and the price can jump any moment. Why so cheap for now? Because I want hungry people, people who actually use this to change their lives and their businesses. The person who jumps on this at $100 is the person who's ready to move, not just learn. So what do you think this would be worth to you if you could literally print money by turning on a camera and delivering a presentation? What would that be worth to your business or to your family or to your future? If you could replace a team of salespeople with one presentation that converts at 20%, if you could speak to up to 1,000 people in the the same time it takes you to have 2 sales calls, and if you finally had certainty to know that you now have the skill set that you need to create your own economy, no matter who's in the White House or who's running Wall Street, what would that be worth? And as one last special bonus to help push you over the edge, I also wanna give you access to the lost out-of-print book that started this all. I paid $12,500 for a first edition copy of Propaganda by Edward Bernays, and it was worth every penny I paid. That tiny $12,500 investment has made me 100 times more money than if I took that same money and put it in Bitcoin back in 2014. Propaganda is out of print. I was able to acquire the rights to make a copy for attendees of Selling Online. When you get your ticket now, I'm going to give you a rare digital copy of Propaganda, as well as my personal notes from this book and a video showing the things I discovered and how I then implemented those things into my presentations. But that bonus, as well as the $100 ticket, disappears when we pass the first 100 seats. Now, this is a moment of decision. You are at a crossroads. You can keep doing what you're doing, grinding out one-to-one sales, hoping things will get better, and watching others seemingly print money online while you struggle. Or you can master the lost art. You can learn the psychological weapons that Bernays used to manipulate nations, that I used to build a billion-dollar company, that countless ordinary people have now used to transform their business in just weeks. But you have to decide now, because once we hit 100 registrations, the price more than levels. And once we hit 200, it goes up 10x. This is the final time I'm teaching this. There won't be another chance. The recordings won't be sold. This knowledge will either be yours or it won't. The choice is yours, but you got to choose quickly because while you're thinking about it, others are taking action and the seats and the early bird pricing are disappearing fast. So click on the button down below to secure your seat at Selling Online for just $100 while it lasts. Your future self will thank you, your bank account will thank you, and thousands of people whose The lives you change with this power will also thank you, but only if you act right now. Click on the link down below and I'll see you inside. Oh, and P.S., remember, this isn't about learning how to sell. It's about learning how to move the masses, to create movements, to generate money on demand. It's about taking control of your financial destiny with nothing but your voice and a presentation. If that's not worth $100 and 3 days of your time, I don't know what is. So click on the link right now and get your tickets to the Selling Online 3-Day Event right now. As you sit here with your finger hovering over that order button, I want you to understand something profound about what you're really getting access to. This isn't just a sales training. This is the culmination of over a century of psychological discovery. It started with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, uncovering the unconscious forces that actually drive human behavior, forces that most people never even know exist, yet they control every decision they make. His nephew, Edward Bernays, took that knowledge and weaponized it He showed corporations and governments how to manipulate millions. He proved that whoever controls the unconscious controls the crowd. And for decades, this knowledge remained locked away in corporate boardrooms and government agencies, used by the few to control the many. Then Dan Kennedy came along. He took these dark arts and codified them for entrepreneurs. He showed that you didn't need to be a corporation or a government to wield this power. You just need to understand the principles and be willing to use them. Kennedy taught us select few. I was one of them. I spent the next 20 years refining, testing, and perfecting these techniques for the digital age. And now, for the first time in history, this complete system from Freud's discoveries to Bernays' weaponization to Kennedy's codification to my digital evolution is all available to anybody who's willing to learn. Not to corporations with million-dollar budgets, not to governments with propaganda departments, but to you, the entrepreneur, the person with the message, a product, a mission to share with the world. And then for those who have already registered, you already clicked on that button, secured your seat, and congratulations. Your life is about to change in ways you can't even imagine yet. You're about to gain the ability to hit your goals with absolute certainty, to generate money on demand, to move crowds instead of chasing individuals. And here's what happened next. The Monday before the event starts, we have a mandatory kickoff meeting. Do not miss it. This is where I'll prepare your mind for what's coming, where I'm going to help you to clear out the mental space needed to absorb what you're you're about to learn. Then make sure that those 3 days are completely blocked out. No meetings, no distractions, no like, I'll just pop in and out for a few hours. This is total immersion or nothing. Be prepared to order Uber Eats or pre-make your meals because we're not gonna be taking breaks. Every minute builds upon the previous one. Every session's a crucial piece of the puzzle. If you miss just one piece, the whole picture won't come together. This is not casual learning. This is an installation. An installation requires your complete presence. Okay, now back to those of you guys who are still deciding. If you're still staring at that button, let me be direct. This moment right now could be the hinge upon which your entire future swings. This could be the beginning of becoming the person you've been dreaming about, the person who can walk onto any stage, virtual or physical, and move hundreds or thousands of people to action. This could be how you finally get your message out to the world, how you learn to sell your products to the masses instead of begging for individual sales. If you don't have a product yet, This is how you'll create an offer so irresistible that people literally run to buy it. Here's the truth. Whether you get started today or not does not matter to me. My life will not change one bit. I've already mastered this. I've already made my millions. But for you, this decision will echo through the rest of your life. Every struggle you have from this point forward to sell your product. Every time you watch someone else seemingly print money online while you grind. Every moment you wonder, what if all this could be avoided for just $100? The price of a decent dinner for two. The cost of a pair of shoes you're gonna wear twice. $100 to gain the most important and valuable skill set on the planet. The ability to move masses, to create movements, to generate wealth through nothing but your words and a presentation. So this is your moment of truth. Napoleon Hill, who learned many of these same principles from the old masters, said it best when he said, "Successful people make decisions quickly and change them very slowly, if ever." Unsuccessful people make decisions slowly and change them often and quickly. Okay, you have all the facts. This knowledge has been used to build billion-dollar companies. Hundreds of people have already proven it works across every industry. The early bird price is a fraction of what this is all worth. This is the last time I'm teaching this. The only question left is, what kind of person are you? The kind of person who makes decisions quickly and firmly when opportunity presents itself? Or the kind of person who hesitates, overthinks, and watches opportunity opportunities pass by. Your destiny isn't waiting for you somewhere in the future. It's waiting for you right here and right now on the other side of this decision. The button is down below. The price is $100 for now. The power to transform your business and your life is just 3 days away. So click the button down below or don't, but know that this moment, this decision is one that you're gonna remember forever. Either it's the day that everything changed or it's the day that you let it all slip away. Your destiny is waiting. Click the link down below. Right now.

Alright guys, hope you enjoyed that VSL. Once again, if you wanna go see the whole thing and go watch it in all its visual glory, go to secretsofpropaganda.com, and then if you wanna come to our next Selling Online cohort and participate in that event, and you want the Propaganda book as a gift, all you gotta do is go to secretsofpropaganda.com/buy, B-U-Y, and that's where you can go get your tickets right now. So, that's it, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode, and I hope you learned a lot about propaganda, how it works, all the things. All right, thanks so much.

Talk to you soon.

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