Propaganda and the Shocking Science and Psychology of Persuasion | #Marketing - Ep. 101
49m 16s
Russell Brunson introduces a video sales letter (VSL) he created, titled "Secrets of Propaganda," which serves as both content and a sales pitch. He explains that the VSL was inspired by techniques from Agora, a billion-dollar information marketing company, and produced with high-quality animation and sound design. The core of the VSL presents a historical narrative on the evolution of psychological manipulation, beginning with Sigmund Freud's discovery of the unconscious mind. His nephew, Edward Bernays, weaponized these ideas to create modern advertising by appealing to emotions and desires, famously exemplified by his campaign to make women smoke in public. This knowledge was later refined by marketer Dan Kennedy, who developed even more potent techniques for direct response and high-ticket sales. Brunson positions himself as a successor in this lineage, having studied under Kennedy's circle, and argues that these same psychological principles, when used ethically, are the key to successful online selling. The entire presentation is designed to demonstrate these persuasive techniques in action, ultimately promoting Brunson's "Selling Online" event as the means for viewers to learn and apply these methods to their own businesses.
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 funnel 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 Bernays VSL that I launched a little while ago? I'm going to tell you a little of the backstory. I took my Atlas group out to to Agora. They're the company that has $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 that. I started using AI. I got some things together. I wrote this VSL and it had been a 50, 50, 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 secretsofpropagandid.com to go and watch it. If you want to see the entire thing. But the other day 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 because the sound engineering they did and the story is so vitally important. Yeah, I actually just wanted to play the video for you guys. I get it. It's long but it's going to 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. I think you're going to learn some cool things and it's a lot of fun. 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. If you haven't done the event, yeah, you need to do it. It's a hundred bucks. If you haven't done it and you haven't done it in the last six months, you got to go do it again. We have a new event coming out soon, part two of selling online. That's all I'm going to tell you right now. It's going to be insane. But I want you to be prepared for it. I'll go through selling online if you haven't yet. I think if you go to secretsofpropaganda.com/by, let me double check that. Yes, that is a secret link. They'll take you to go and get your tickets for a hundred bucks. Plus, you get a copy of Bernays' e-book and much other cool things as a gift just for going through that link. Anyway, if that said, I hope you guys enjoy this presentation. I'm going to 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 switch is a control human behavior where it's exposed. For over a century, a select few have used this knowledge to manipulate millions. They've made women's smoke, nations' fighting, complete strangers, stampede the 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, to add the red germine that video 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 has 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 would change everything. The same psychological discoveries meant to heal individuals, related 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 an award didn't agree with. Commence women to smoking was an active 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 in managing the irrational heard 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 and horror as millions of civilized men turn into savage killers overnight. But this carnage confirmed what he'd been warning about for years. The 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 wars 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 in completely different lives. He was a small time press agent promoting opera singers and circus acts in New York. He's 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. 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. But propaganda worked so well. Bernays 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 have 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 has 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 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 the American tobacco. At this time in history, women didn't smoke in public. It was taboo. He was losing half his market and he wanted Bernays to fix it. The Bernays hired a psychoanalyst. He told them the cigarettes were symbols of male power. And he believed that if women smoke them, they would then symbolically have their own penises. It was kind of insane but Bernays ran with it. So he hired some young socialists to march in New York's Easter parade and at his signal dramatically light up cigarettes. He told the press they were active in sliding 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. After 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 and movies. He brought celebrities to the White House to save a boring president's image. By the late 1920s, he 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 "Crop a Gambit." The first line reads, "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in the democratic society." He went on to explain that the invisible government and 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 a 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, challenging you to attend it, every sales page, article headline or YouTube video that stirred your emotions, every political campaign to play upon your fears, they all traced 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. But 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 top writer named Dan Kennedy. Kennedy was broke, desperate, willing to do whatever it took to survive. He felt that everything, comedy, magic shows, even selling insurance stored at work. Then he stumbled onto Bernays' work and something clicked. Kennedy realized that Bernays had left breadcrums, a trail leading to even darker, more powerful techniques. And Kennedy became obsessed. He studied not just Bernays, but the people of Bernays study. He went back to Freud's original text. He examined hypnosis, conarses, 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, "Fran's 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 kept 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 rule 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 markers, they all came to Kennedy to learn how to hijack minds. He called them as renegade millionaires. They 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. Next convinced women has spent a few cents on cigarettes. Kennedy's students convinced entrepreneurs spent $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, these techniques are being used on you. That Facebook ad has seemed to read your mind. That webinar that had you pulling out your credit card before you knew what happened. That guru 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. It 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 isn't becoming the manipulator instead of the manipulated. As Kennedy wrote his controversial mind hijacking manifesto, he said, "It's the side you literally divide between the mesmerist and the mesmerized." Those with the most power and wealth tend to be the most powerful mesmerist. Money and power and mesmerism are leaked. 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 intention economy, influence isn't just power, it's survival. And that's where story takes this 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 bro-call address lawyer from Boise, Idaho, trying to figure out how to support my new wife out getting a real job. So when I heard about Danny Kennedy, he was running a seminar to promise 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, where I discovered and said 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 they can actually make you more money than the celebrities. But it requires mastery and art that most people think died decades ago. He called it platform selling or one to many selling. The idea was simple, but terrifying. You get on stage not to get applause, but instead to get credit cards. You deliver presentations so psychologically engineered that people are literally running to the back of the room to buy whatever it is you're selling. I found it 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 he's stamping 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 the marketing seminar in Atlanta. I spent weeks crafting what I thought was the perfect presentation. I studied every technique that I was able to remember from seeing other people selling stage. And I thought I was ready. But after I gave my presentation, I tried to make myself, I found completely. Not only did nobody buy, no one even got out of their seats coming, talking to me in the back of the room. We're outstanding with a handful of blank order forms, but no orders. In fact, I remember hiding my hotel room afterwards, eating coconut shrimp and hoggandas ice cream straight from the container for three days until the event ended. Doing what I did wrong. My wife called Athcawen. I couldn't face telling her, so I told her when 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 I could find. Most went talk. And the ones who did spoke in code, like they were protecting some nuclear secrets. Finally, I found my way into Dan Kennedy's insider circle. A group so secretive, you can find information about it online. And to apply, you had to know somebody. They would give you a special fact number where you could send the request and then just pray that Dan was in a good mood when it showed up on his facts machine. The price of the mission was $25,000 a year. 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 and called my bank. Within a few days, I was in. In that group, I learned things that would have gotten Bernays himself kicked out of a fight 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 clothes, which is a sequence of psychological pressure points that makes buying feel like the only logical choice. But the darkest secret is what they call the confession. Every great platform seller they explain 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. I wrote a reclubs chamber of commerce means real estate seminars, network marketing events, most of the time I still failed. But 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, the Kennedy's mind hijacked through all just tools to help the audience write themselves into your story. By 2007, I finally cracked the code. I was making six figures a year speaking at events, selling everything from marketing courses to coaching programs. Other speakers started asking me how I did it. In words further, there was this kid from Idaho who would get out sell other speakers with ten times his experience. And then 2008 happened. The financial crash didn't just destroy the economy. It destroyed the entire seminar industry. Events crashed, motor's went bankrupt. And overnight, the stages disappeared. Platform selling, this art I'd spend years mastering, became obsolete. But when nobody realized, was it something far more important than vanish with it? The knowledge itself. The dark psychology, the manipulation techniques, the carefully guarded secrets that have been passed down from Bernays to Kennedy to a slugged 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. [music] 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 a new digital world. During those years, we adapted. We built sales funnel for real video sales. We figured out how to sell without ever seeing our customers faces. And it worked. Something was missing. The raw power of looking someone in the eye and systematically destroying their objections in real time was gone. And then 2014 something strange happened. Small seminars started popping up again, but they were different. Newter. Nobody was selling from the stage anymore. Users made their money from ticket sales and vendor boost. They liked tricity. 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 a million dollars in 90 minutes with the right presentation. And that's when fate intervened. We had just launched our software company, ClickFunnels. I trained launching it five different ways, five different funnels, five 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 was 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, we'll 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 Office Act, the False Belief Patterns, the Big Domino, and reading through them was like finding an ancient manual for bin spells. I've forgotten how powerful the 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 phrase, the stack that makes the price irrelevant. The urgency sequence that triggers loss in versions so powerfully that people literally run to the back of the room while their hands are deschely seeking through their credit cards. The night before the event, I couldn't sleep. What if it didn't work anymore? What if people had evolved past these techniques? What if I lost the ability? The next day, I walked on stage for 500 entrepreneurs. For 90 minutes, I woke this spell. I could feel it working. It brings energy shifting the audience leaning in. Their objections melting away one by one, and then gained the moment of truth. I made the offer. ClickFunnels for $990,000, 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 250 people jumped out of their seats and literally ran to the back tables. Credit cards were fine. 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 bonus was expired. In 90 minutes, we made more money than the previous six months combined. That night at dinner, I told my co-founders Todd and Dylan, based on what just happened, we're going to be rich. Not because of money we made from today, because I just proved that the old magic still works, and nobody else even remembers how to do it. Because I flew home staring out the airplane window, different thoughts consumed me. Its platform selling still work. The events were rare. Stages were still limited. What I needed wasn't just to resurrect the old art, I needed to evolve them. Back in my basement, staring at my computer screen, a crazy thought form. 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 massive noses, but deliver it through a screen? Everyone 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 boys with the problem. We just proved the platform selling could generate $250,000 and 90 minutes. But there were maybe a dozen events a year where I could actually do this. And at that rate, click the thumbs would die before I could scale. The solutions seemed obvious, put the presentation online. But everybody who tried traditional webinars before failed miserably. They got 2-3% conversion rates at best. The magic happened in the room, the massive noses effect, supposedly couldn't translate to their 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 getting home, I was messaging everyone I knew on Skype, Facebook, and to text messaging. Anyone with an email list? I got something that's comparing it to 50% I told them. This is your webinar, cheer list, and we'll split the profits. Most people thought I was delusional, but six people said yes. I spent the next three days building what would become the first real webinar funnel. Not just the registration page in a broadcast link, but a complete psychological journey. Every page, every email, every element was designed using the same mind controlling principles that worked from the stage. The first webinar was scheduled for Thursday at 2pm Eastern. 600 people showed up live. I delivered the exact same presentation I gave 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 got one tenth of a work 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. I had another webinar scheduled for 8pm that same day. In the four 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 read about dozens of slides answering these objections before people can 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'd been given the answer key to a test I was about to take. The second webinar started with another 500 or 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, four times better, and just four hours. That's when I became obsessed. After every webinar, I had to export the questions. I then studied them. I could detect it with examining evidence. I find the hidden objections, the unconscious fears, the false beliefs, people that you know that they actually have. And then I rebuild the presentation to destroy those objections before they can 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, Joel Avery. Russell Brunson, I'm an 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. The sequence, the stack, the FAQs, the video testimony was the offer, almost every objection plan for it obliterated. It count down 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 will be on anything the platform's selling world has ever seen. We took ClickFront from zero to $10 million in sales, not in a year, but in 10 months. It's nothing but this one presentation delivered over and over through a computer screen. Other markers started calling it the perfect webinar. They never seen anything convert like this online. What they didn't understand though is I wasn't doing a webinar. I was doing platforms selling through a digital medium. I was using psychological techniques that had been hidden away since 2008, involved 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. There's from an event promoter with a massive vision. Russell Lee said, "I'm putting together the biggest marketing event history. 9,000 entrepreneurs in one room. I want you to be one of my keynote speakers." "Can I sell?" I asked. "You left. 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 learned from 75 plus webinars, all the psychological refinements, all the objection-distoring 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-sellering history. Grand Cardone's 10X Girl Conference February 23rd, 2018, Nandale 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 House had just spoken the day before. David John was coming up after me. Those were actual celebrities. I was still a kid from Idaho, and nobody knew. But I had something that they did. 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 confounded the software company ClickFunnels that has grown to over 100,000,000,000,000 customers in just three years. He is the King of Funnels, the internet's favorite entrepreneur, affiliate marketing genius, 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 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 the psychological arsenal I refined, or was 75 webinars. But the question is, would it work? For the first 60 minutes, I told them stories and explained strategies while they secretly reprogramming their subconscious beliefs in a way that would have made both Freud and Bernadier's take a second look. But exactly the 60s, 70s mark, I started the close. If you want to click funnels, and make 8,000-hour bonus package, if you want to transform your business in your life, you need to run, not walk. Run to the back of the stage, go to section F2 by the bathrooms. My team was there with the order forms, but we only brought 500 forms, and there's 9,000 of you here. And then what happened next was chaos. Over 1,000 people, one 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 in their orders, deligned to get pictures of me after they purchased my offer, wrapped around the Mandalay Bay three times. I didn't know the actual numbers yet, but I knew that they were good. While taking photos, one of Grand Sells guys grabbed me. What was that, yes? I've never seen anything like that, Damon John, an actual celebrity, literally speaking right now in an empty room, because everyone's in line buying from you. After the dust settle and 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 have 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. That's what 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 sales people in the world can maybe do 20 calls a day, closing 30% of them, makes six 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 on sales calls. I was spending 45 minutes to an hour with each prospect, hoping to close $1,000.000. Meanwhile, I just closed 1,079 sales at $3,000 each, and the same time they said, "We're just two prospects." The difference isn't skill, it's not challenge, not even the product. The difference is an 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 loss art wasn't just alive. It was more powerful now than ever. The psychological techniques of Freud discovered that Bernays weaponized the Kennedy perfected, and they had been buried since 2008, they still worked. In fact, they worked better now than ever because nobody else even remembered how to defend against them. The other speakers that weekend, the celebrity's 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 loss to forgot 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 already proved I could do it online to 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 art 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 written books, created a program, had all the knowledge, or 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 how to break through. She could use the 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 values, 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 wrote the business where tens of millions of dollars teaching others where she learned. She didn't just master the art, she used it to save lives. Or take care of them Poland. She was a fitness competitor who wanted to help women lose weight. Using my one-to-may selling framework, she built Lady Boss Wayloss. A single webinar presentation has now been seen online by over 1.3 million women. Let that sink in. An athlete who never sold on a webinar before, used those techniques to build a business landed on the Forbes 5,000 fastest growing companies and transformed over a million lives. Stacey Martino used them at 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 Gibbon, Ryan Lee, once in selling financial services door to door to giving over a thousand people to show up live to the webinars where they sold their services once and got hundreds of clients in single night. Jamie Cross, scale their soap company from farmers markets to winning multiple comic 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 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 to part with large sums of money without having to think it over. For three days, I downloaded everything. They had LP 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 a complaint? How to structure a presentation to create maximum psychological pressure. The exact moment when resistance 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. But when you make $10,000 from your first one to many presentation, I'm going to give you this award. It's called the Prime Move Award. A physical trophy took a memory at the moment. They prove 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 to generate 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 follow the blueprint, who plug in their ideas and their offers, who are willing to use the dark arts for good, it works. It works fast. Unfortunately, it was 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 transform the kid from Idaho, and to 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 attend is 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 of 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 when you talk to 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 three days of complete immersion, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., 8 hours a day. That's 24 hours over three days of me downloading two decades of testing, refinement, and mastery directly into your brain. Why three days? Because you can't learn this from 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 you 90 minutes. I have to install it. Installation takes three full days. Here's what you're going to discover. Day number one, the psychology of mass persuasion. Seven core psychological triggers the bypass logical resistance. Freud identified three. Bernays found two more, and I discovered the final two. The big domino theory, how to identify the one belief that once toppled, it's 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, defaults belief patterns. These are the three stories that destroy the three core objections that everyone has. Day number two is the perfect presentation architecture. My word-for-word script is generated over $100 million. You're going to get it and you can model it. The stack had to make any price the insignificant compared to the value. Trial closes tie-downs, psychological commitments, they make saying no almost impossible. The urgency sequence, the ethically triggers loss of versions so powerfully that people literally run to buy. And how to structure your slides for maximum subconscious impact. There's a sign to this that most people will never learn. And the day number three is the implementation. How to adapt this for your specific market. Coaching, e-commerce, services, B2B, anything you want, we're sure you how to install it. And then you learn how to convert your presentation into an automated webinar. It sells 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Default sequences capture 90% of those who don't buy immediately. You want to test, refine, optimize until you get 20 to 30% conversion rate. And then building your complete selling system, it can generate money on demand. Plus you're going to discover the hypnotic language patterns that make resistance melt away. And LP techniques that are used by master manipulators, but we'll show you how to use them ethically. The 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 we're going to get. First, you can get three full days of training. That's 24 hours and three days. Total value of $30,000. The second thing is my complete presentation template and script, a total value of $10,000. Then my slide-by-slide breakdown on my record-breaking presentation, value of $5,000. Access to a private private move or community, value is $2,000. If you implementation blueprint to go from zero to your first $10,000 presentation, value $5,000, total value is over $52,000. So obviously I'm not going to charge you $52,000. But why don't you understand that the regular investment for selling line is $997. And honestly, if you use what I teach you to make even just one sell of your own $997 course, you break even from just one sell. 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 so anything to any one at any time. But I want to reward action takers. Instead of charging a normal $997 for an event like this, I've opened up early repricing and you can get your ticket now for just 10% of the normal cost. 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 10 extra investments. It's insane. But it's also pretty cool. I want you to win and learn 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 at 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 word. So what do you think this will be worth to you? If you can 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 can replace a team of sales people with one presentation that converts to 20%. If you can speak to up to a thousand people in the same time it takes you to have two sales calls and he finally had certainly to know that you now have the skills 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? It is one last special bonus help push you over the edge. I also want you to be accessed to the lost, out-of-prip book, The Start of the Assault. I paid $12,500 for first edition copy of Propaganda by Edward Bernays. And it was worth every penny I paid. That tiny $12,500 investment has made me a hundred times more money than if I took a same money and put 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 it passes the first 100 seats. Now this is a moment of decision. You were at a crossroads. You can keep doing what you're doing, grinding out one-to-one sales, hoping things will get better, and watching other seemingly print money online while you struggle. Or you can master the lost start. You can learn the psychological weapons that Bernays use 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 get a hundred registrations, the price more than doubles. And once we hit it, 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. Your 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 repricing 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 lives you change with this power will also thank you. But only if you act right now. Click on link down below and I'll see you inside. Oh, a PS. 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 three days of your time, I don't know what it is. So click on the link right now and get your tickets to the selling online three day event right now. As you see here with your finger hovering over that order button, why you understand something profound about what you're really getting access to. This isn't just a sales train. This is the culmination of over a century of psychological discovery. It started with signal fluid and Vienna, uncovering the unconscious forces that actually drive human behavior. Forcing the most people never even know exists 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 it 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 Dad Kennedy came along. He took these dark arts and codified them for entrepreneurs. He showed me he didn't need to be a corporation or government to will this power. You just need to understand the principles and be willing to use them. Kennedy taught a 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 discovery to Bernays' weaponization and Kennedy's codification to my digital evolution is all available to anybody who's willing to learn. Not to corporations with a 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've already registered, you already clicked on that button and secured your seat and congratulations. Your life is about to change the ways you can't even imagine it. 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 about to learn. Then make sure that those three days are completely blocked out. No meetings, no distractions, no like I'll just pop it in out for a few hours. This is a total immersion or nothing. Be prepared to order Uber Eats or pre-make your meals because we're not going to 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, can 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 will 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 cells. 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 going to 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 Hale, who learned many of the 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. You have all the facts. The personalities have been used to build billion-dollar companies. Hundreds of people have already proven it works across every industry. The early-bird price, the 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 would opportunity presents itself? Well, the kind of person who hesitates over things and watches 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 transfer your business in your life is just three days away. So click the button down below or don't. But know that this moment, this decision is one that you're going to 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. All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed that VSL. Once again, if you want to go see the whole thing and go watch it in an all its visual glory, go to secretsofpropaganda.com. And then if you want to come to our next selling online cohort and participate in that event and you want the propaganda book as a gift, all you got to do is go to secretsofpropaganda.com/byBUI and that's where you can go at your tickets right now. So that's it. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. And I hope you learned a lot about propaganda and how it works, all the things. All right. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The speaker argues that most sales funnels fail due to poor selling skills, not the funnel itself, and promotes a paid online event to teach effective selling.
He shares a personal story about creating a long video sales letter (VSL) using AI and professional production, inspired by techniques learned from a successful company, and encourages listeners to watch it.
The VSL content explores the history of propaganda and psychological manipulation, tracing a lineage from Sigmund Freud's theories to Edward Bernays' application in advertising, then to Dan Kennedy's refinement in direct marketing, and finally to the speaker's own adaptation for modern online sales.
The narrative emphasizes how understanding and ethically using these psychological tactics can transform marketing effectiveness, turning strangers into customers by appealing to unconscious desires rather than logic.
The speaker concludes by pitching his "Selling Online" event as the way to learn these powerful techniques, offering a discounted ticket and bonus materials through a special link.
Summary:
Russell Brunson introduces a video sales letter (VSL) he created, titled "Secrets of Propaganda," which serves as both content and a sales pitch. He explains that the VSL was inspired by techniques from Agora, a billion-dollar information marketing company, and produced with high-quality animation and sound design. The core of the VSL presents a historical narrative on the evolution of psychological manipulation, beginning with Sigmund Freud's discovery of the unconscious mind.
His nephew, Edward Bernays, weaponized these ideas to create modern advertising by appealing to emotions and desires, famously exemplified by his campaign to make women smoke in public. This knowledge was later refined by marketer Dan Kennedy, who developed even more potent techniques for direct response and high-ticket sales. Brunson positions himself as a successor in this lineage, having studied under Kennedy's circle, and argues that these same psychological principles, when used ethically, are the key to successful online selling.
The entire presentation is designed to demonstrate these persuasive techniques in action, ultimately promoting Brunson's "Selling Online" event as the means for viewers to learn and apply these methods to their own businesses.
FAQs
According to Russell Brunson, the issue is often not the funnel itself but a lack of effective selling skills. Improving your sales techniques can significantly boost conversion rates.
The 'Selling Online' event is a training session by Russell Brunson focused on enhancing sales skills. You can get tickets by visiting sellingonline.com/podcast, with a cost of $100.
It's a video presentation that explores the history of propaganda, tracing its origins from Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays to modern marketing techniques, and how these principles can be applied ethically in business.
Edward Bernays applied Freud's theories of the unconscious mind to manipulate public desires, shifting advertising from selling needs to selling emotions and identities, which laid the foundation for contemporary persuasion techniques.
Dan Kennedy studied and advanced Bernays' methods, developing deeper psychological tactics for high-value sales and teaching them to entrepreneurs, leading to more sophisticated and expensive marketing strategies.
You can watch the video at secretsofpropaganda.com. By using a special link like secretsofpropaganda.com/by, you can also get tickets to the 'Selling Online' event and receive a free e-book by Bernays.
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