Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - The Propaganda Playbook: Scientology (A $380,000 Funnel And 65 Million Written Words) - #Marketing - Ep. 127

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

The most sophisticated sales funnel ever built isn’t from a tech startup. It’s not Amazon, it’s not Apple, it’s not from any business-school case study you’ve ever read. It’s a religion. The man who built it wasn’t a theologian or a prophet - he was a science fiction writer who held four Guinness World Records, published 65 million words on a custom typewriter with extra keys for common words like “and” and “the” so he could write faster, and engineered a customer journey that starts with a free personality test and ends with a $380,000 offer delivered on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. This isn’t an episode about what Scientology believes. I’m a Mormon, I’ve got friends who are Scientologists, and I’m not here to debate theology. This is about the architecture of one of the most sophisticated value ladders ever built in human history - and I walk you through every step in the language every entrepreneur in this audience actually speaks. Free lead magnet, $35 tripwire, $11,200-per-grade core offer, $30,000-a-year high ticket back end, a premium tier only deliverable on a boat, and an “unreleased” next level that’s been “coming soon” since 1986. Then I trace their closing technique back to my mentor Dan Kennedy’s “find the bleeding neck” framework, and I show you why all of it actually works using a 1951 book by a longshoreman named Eric Hoffer called The True Believer. Key Highlights: ◼️The complete value-ladder breakdown - the free Oxford Capacity Analysis as the lead magnet, the $35 “throwaway” intro courses as the tripwire, the $11,200-per-grade core offers, OT levels that top out on the Freewinds cruise ship, and OT 9 and OT 10 - the “next level” that’s been coming soon since 1986 ◼️The Jeff Hawkins direct-response case study every entrepreneur should study - $2,000 in production cost that generated $200 million over 35 years, and the Sigmund Freud unconscious-mind trick L. Ron Hubbard built right into the Dianetics cover art ◼️The “Dissemination Drill” - the 4-step closing technique Scientology recruiters are trained on (contact, handle, salvage, bring to understanding) - and why it’s the exact same psychology Dan Kennedy taught me as “find the bleeding neck” ◼️Eric Hoffer’s three insights from The True Believer that explain why intelligent, successful people stay in any movement for decades - people join for refuge not doctrine, every movement needs a devil more than a god, and conviction beats content every single time ◼️The single line that separates a movement from a cult - the techniques are identical, the architecture is identical, the psychology is identical, and the only difference is what happens to the person at the end At the end of the day, this episode isn’t really about Scientology. It’s about the fact that the same architecture that built a $380,000 funnel on a cruise ship is the same architecture I teach entrepreneurs to use every single day. The value ladder works. The bleeding-neck close works. The “us vs. the gatekeepers” enemy works. The conviction that makes people follow you works. The tools are neutral - the only difference between a movement and a trap is what you actually do with the person who walks in the door. So the real question I ask myself every single day - and the one I want you to sit with after you hear this - is: are you building something that genuinely helps the person at the end of your funnel, or are you building a system that uses their pain to keep them paying for forty years? ◼️If you’ve got a product, offer, service… or idea… I’ll show you how to sell it (the RIGHT way) Register for my next event → https://sellingonline.com/podcast ◼️Still don’t have a funnel? ClickFunnels gives you the exact tools (and templates) to launch TODAY → https://clickfunnels.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a funnel, but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com slash podcast. That's sellingonline.com slash podcast. This is the Russell Brunson show. The most sophisticated sales funnel ever built isn't from a tech startup. It's not Amazon. It's not Apple.

It's actually a religion. And the man who built it wasn't at the only. or a prophet. He was actually a science fiction writer who hold four Guinness Book World Records, publishing over 184 works totaling 65 million words. And the coolest thing is he built a custom typewriter with special keys for common words like the and and so he could write faster. He created a funnel that starts with a free personality test and ends up with a $380,000 offer that's delivered on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. Today I'm going to decode that system, not the beliefs, but the funnel that they're using.

This is the propaganda playbook where I take the biggest stories in the news and I decode the propaganda techniques that are hidden inside of them. And then I show you how to use the ethical versions of those same techniques to grow your business. So that said, let's get right into it. Now before I get too deep into this, I want to be really clear about something. The goal of this episode is not to talk about the theology of Scientology. I'm not here to debate what they believe. It all began 75 million years ago by the evil Lord Zinu. The cruisers then took the frozen alien body.

to our planet, Earth, and dump them into the volcanoes of Hawaii. That's South Parch's job, not mine. Look, I'm a Latter-day Saint, aka a Mormon, and one of our articles of faith, 11th 1, says this, says, we claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscious, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may. And I believe that. I have friends who are Scientologists, I love and I respect them, but here's the thing.

I'm also a marketer, and I've spent 20 years studying funnels, value ladders, ascension models, and cell systems, and the system behind Scientology, the way to, acquires members, it ascends them through increasing levels of commitment and cost, and then retains them through sunk costs and incentivize them through referrals and through commissions, is from a pure marketing architecture standpoint, one of the most sophisticated and brilliant funnels I've ever studied in my entire life. And I've studied a lot of funnels. So that's what I want to decode today, not what they believe, but how they sell. Now, I want to ask you get something right up front. Am I okay to do this? Or should religions be off base when we're looking at marketing analysis?

Or is it fair game to decode the system without attacking their beliefs? I really want to know. So let me know in the comments down below. If so, I may decode a couple other ones, which would be a lot of fun. Okay, so before I show you their funnel, you need to understand the man who built it, because the backstory is what makes this whole thing super interesting and it helps it to make more sense. His name was El Ron Hubbard, and before he was a religious leader, before Scientology, before any of that, he was a writer. And not just any writer, by almost every measure, he was the most prolific writer in human history.

1,084 published works. That's the Guinness Book of World Records for the most published works by a single author. 65 million total words across 500,000 pages, 3,000 recorded lectures, over 100 films, and more than 500 short stories and novels. He holds not one, not two, but four separate Guinness World Records, the most published works, most audiobooks, most translated author, and the most translated single book. Hoo, that is a lot. Now, here's one that blows my mind as a content creator. In the 1930s and 40s, Hubbard was producing 70,000 to 100,000 words per month, okay? and he was only working three days a week.

Now, for context, a typical novel is about 80,000 words. This guy was writing a novel a month on a three-day work week. He had a custom electric IBM typewriter built with additional keys for common words like, and the and butt, so he could literally press one key instead of three and write even faster. The man optimized his typewriter for speed.

That's the guy who understands systems and efficiency at a level that most entrepreneurs have never reached. Now, here's the important part. What was he writing? He started in the 1930s writing Pulp Fiction Magazines. These are the cheap, mass market publications, there were basically the Netflix of their era. 30 million regular readers, a quarter of the American population were reading these books,

and Hubbard wrote everything, westerns, mysteries, adventure stories, science fiction, fantasy, even romance novels. He wasn't a specialist, he was a machine who could write in any genre for any audience and sell. So here's a guy who spent two decades as a professional storyteller. He understands narrative, he understands audience psychology, he understands how to hook a reader, keep them turning pages, and makes them want more. And he's done it at his skill that nobody, history had ever matched. And in 1950, he takes all of that, the storytelling ability, the

understanding of human psychology, the production speed, the marketing instincts, and he channels it into a book that will change everything. The book is called Dionetics, the modern science of mental health. And the way Hubbard launched it tells you everything about this man's marketing brain. First, he didn't launch it through a publisher. He previewed it as an article in astounding science fiction magazine. The same magazine where science fiction fans already knew him and trusted him. He used his existing audience as a launch list. He didn't go find new people. He went to people who already read his stuff and said, hey, I've discovered something new. Does that sound familiar? Because that's what every smart entrepreneur does. You don't launch to cold traffic. You

launch to your warm list first. Okay, the article generated so much interest that before the book even came out, Hubbard and the magazine editor created the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation. He built the organization before the product even shipped. That is what we call a pre-launch. That's a wait list. That's what most of us would call a seed launch today. And when the book came out in 1950, boom, it was a massive bestseller. Dionetics was everywhere, and people were forming their own groups to practice the techniques inside of the book. It became a cultural phenomenon.

Now, here's where it gets really interesting for marketers. That initial wave eventually faded. Through the 50s, 60s and 70s, Dianetics lost its mainstream momentum. The book was still selling, but it wasn't a cultural force anymore. And then in the mid-1980s, a Scientology marketer named Jeff Hawkins created what I consider some of the most brilliant direct response marketing ever made. Simple. White text on a black screen asking questions like, why are you unhappy? And is Dianetics for you? Edgy music on the background shot the book with a volcano cover at the end. And these ads cost

$2,000 to make, $2,000. And within months of their first nationwide appearance, Dianetics hit the New York Times bestselling list for the first time since its original publication in 1950. Hawkins estimated that over his 35-year career at marketing Dianetics, he generated over $200 million for the church. $2,000 in ads, $200 million in revenue. What's the ROAS on that? Okay, and I don't know about you, but every single marker should be listing right now thinking, how in the world do they do that? And here's the detail that connects this whole thing to what I want to teach you guys.

Hubbard told his marketing team that the volcano on the cover of Dianetics would make the book, and I'm quoting, irresistible to purchasers by reactivating unconscious memories. He was using Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, the same theory that Bernays used to sell wars and cigarettes to design his book cover, a science fiction writer using the science of persuasion to sell a book about the science of the mind. And if that isn't in full circle, I don't know what is. Now, here's the part that nobody talks about. And this may be the most important detail of the entire story.

And to be fair, Hubbard, the core insight behind dietics was actually legitimate. His central idea was that the human reactive mind, the part of us that fires off irrational fears, destructive impulses, and self-defeating patterns is the source of most of our problems. And from a neuroscience perspective, he wasn't wrong. The amygdala hijacking the prefrontal cortex is what causes reactive behavior. It is why people blow up relationships make terrible decisions on the under stress and act against their own interests. That's real psychology.

The underlying insight is valid. The problem is what happened next. Dynamics was offering what amounted to be medical advice, techniques for treating trauma, emotional conditions, and even physical symptoms. And the doctors and the regulators start pushing back hard. You can't practice medicine without a license. You can't claim to treat medical conditions without FDA approval.

So Hubbard, and this is pure marketing genius, whether you love it or you hate it, he found a loophole. He took the exact same techniques, the exact same auditing process, and restructure the entire office, operation as a religion. What was therapy became spiritual counseling. What was a patient became a practitioner. The treatment didn't change, just the wrapper. And suddenly, instead of

getting shut down by medical regulators, he had the First Amendment religious protection and tax-exempt status. Does that sound familiar? Because in the only fans episode, I showed you guys how Bernays took a cigarette, a harmful product, and reframed it as torches of freedom. And in the Medvi episode, I showed you guys how Gallagher reframed a marketing company as a medical provider. Hubbard reframed The self-help system as a religion. Same technique, the reframe. Three different applications, all brilliant, all ethically questionable.

But the reframe worked. Dianetics became the lead magnet and the Church of Scientology became the funnel. And that's where the real system starts. All right, so if you followed me for any amount of time, you know that I teach something I call it the value ladder. And the idea is simple. You don't sell some of your $10,000 product on day number one.

You bring them in with something free or low ticket, low cost, to prove your value, and then you offer them the next step up. free and then cheap and then mid-ticket, then high-ticket, then premium. Each step up the value ladder gets them closer and closer to you and delivers more value. Now, I want to walk you through Scientology's value ladder, step by step in the language that every entrepreneur in this audience actually speaks, okay? Because it's the most sophisticated version of this model I think I've ever seen. Every Scientology church offers a free 200-question personality test called the Oxford Capacity Analysis.

You walk in off the street, you take the test, and then train staff members sits down with you to go over all the results. And here's the key. The test is designed. The test is designed. to identify areas of dissatisfaction in your life. It finds your weaknesses, your insecurities, and the things you're struggling with. It's not a diagnostics tool. It's a lead qualifier. It tells the Scientology staff member exactly where you hurt so they know exactly what they need to sell you next. That's a lead magnet. That's a free PDF. That's the quiz, the assessment that every single one of you has on your website right now. Except instead of qualifying leads for a $997 course, it's qualifying them for $380,000 spiritual journey. But the mechanics behind it are identical. Once you've

identified your pain points from your tests, they offer you an introductory course, a communication course, a life improvement course. These costs as little as $35. Lita Remney, who spent 35 years in Scientology, she calls these courses throwaways because they don't even count towards you going up the bridge, which is their value at her. Their only purpose is to get you from free to pay, to transition you from a lead into a buyer, to break the psychological barrier of handing over money the very first time. That's a tripwire. That's your $7 book. That's your $27 mini course. That's your $47 workshop. The thing that turns the lead into a customer. And once someone has paid you money, even $35, their psychology shifts.

They've made an investment and now they're in. Getting them to spend the next amount is exponentially easier than getting that first dollar. Every marketer in this audience already knows that. And Scientology figured out decades ago. Now that you're in the system, the core offer is auditing. One-on-one counseling sessions where a trained auditor asks you questions while measuring your emotional responses on a device called the E-meter. You progress through a series of grades, grade zero, grade one, all the way through.

Each grade costs about $11,200 of the current rates. And each grade promises to handle a very specific area of your life, communications, problems, upsets, fixed conditions. This is the core offer. This is the $997 program, the $2,000 coaching program, the monthly membership. The thing that keeps you coming back

month after month, level after level, ascending through the structured curriculum that always has one more step. And the structure itself creates momentum because once you've completed grade number one, you need to go do grade number two. The investment of your time and your money in the earlier grades

makes it psychologically almost impossible to stop because it's a sunk cost creating retention. You don't quit a grade three because you already invested $30,000 in grade zero, one, and two. It's the same reason people don't cancel a gym membership, even though they haven't been in six months. They've already paid for it. So leaving feels like they're wasting their investment. But the grades are just the middle of their value ladder. Above them are the OT, the operating Thayton levels, okay? OT1 through OT8.

These are the premium high ticket offers. After you got through the first levels, you've achieved what's called a state of clear. you've handled your reactive mind, and the OT levels promise even higher states of awareness and ability. Now, here's where the Ascension model gets really interesting. Because a friend of mine who studied this really deeply, he said it perfectly. He said, the goal of Scientology initially is to achieve clear. But after you achieve clear, you find out there's more levels afterwards help you become more clear, and then more clear, and then more clear. The destination keeps moving.

The goalpost keeps shifting, and every shift costs more and more money. OT level seven alone costs $30,000 to $40,000 per year, and members spend decades on that level. Leah Remney spent 35 years in Scientology and only made it to OT Level 5. She estimates she spent about $5 million in total. And OT8, the highest level currently available can only be delivered on a cruise ship called the Free Winds, a ship that the church owns sailing the Caribbean. You literally have to get on a boat in the middle of the ocean to access the top level of the value ladder. Now, if that's not geographic exclusivity as a conversion tool, I don't know what is.

And if you have ever been to a high-ticket mastermind at a resort location, you've experienced the business version of this. Taking people out of the normal environment and putting them into an exclusive setting increases their willingness to commit. It's the same psychology. Scientology just does it on a ship. And here's the part that every entrepreneur needs to understand. Because this is the most brilliant and probably the most manipulative element of the entire funnel. OT9 and OT10 have never been released. They've been coming soon since 1986. That's 40 years. Four decades of the next level is almost here. And the condition for that release keeps on changing. At one point, members were told that these levels won't come out until every scientific.

Scientology organization in the world reaches a certain size, which means members who have already spent $300,000 to $500,000 reaching OT Level 8 are told to unlock the next level they need to recruit more people. They need to go grow the church. They need to bring in new members. Now, I don't know about you, but this looks just like gamification before gamification actually existed. It's like the coming soon feature on a SaaS platform that keeps paying customers from canceling even though it's not there yet. It's the next season tease that keeps people subscribing to a streaming service. Except in Scientology, the next season has been in production for 40 years, and there's no evidence that's ever going to ship. And finally, the referral engine.

Scientology has had a formal affiliate program since the 1960s. Members called field staff members, FMSs, earn 10 to 15% commission on every person they recruit for Scientology service. These aren't casual referrals. FSMs go through intensive training on how to find prospects, handle objections, and close them. There's even an FSM award of the year. It's a commission sales force with performance incentives and reference. condition. In the 1960s, before the internet, before affiliate marketing was even a term, that is their value ladder. A free front end, a low ticket tripwire, core recurring offers,

high ticket back in an unreleased premium that creates perpetual urgency and a commissioned affiliate force driving new leads into the top of the funnel. If you strip the theology out of this and show it to any market on the planet, they would say that is the perfect funnel. And they'd be right. The architecture is flawless. It's what they do with it that's the problem. But the architecture, I teach versions of this every single day. Okay, real quick, have you ever been approached by a Scientologist? Maybe you took the personality test. Maybe somebody hadn't you a copy of dionetics. Maybe you walked by one of their buildings and someone waved you in. Because if so, I want to hear your story. What was the pitch? What did they say? Drop in the comments because I guarantee

that the techniques they're using on you are the same ones that we're using in marketing every single day. All right. So I just showed you the architecture of their funnel, the steps, the pricing, the ladder, but here's a specific technique inside of that funnel, the way they actually close people that wanted to code separately. Because when I first read about this, I literally said out loud, this is Dan Kennedy 101. So inside of Scientology, recruiters are trained on something called the dissemination drill. And it's a four-step process that every single person who recruits for Scientology has to master. Step number one, contact. You approach the prospect and you start a conversation. Step number two, handle. You overcome any objections they have about Scientology. The weird stuff they've

heard online, the video, the reputation, whatever's holding them back. You don't have to argue, you just handle it and then you move on. Step number three, and this is the one I need you to really hear. Salavage. This is where you find the person's ruin. The ruin is the one thing in their life is so painful, so urgent, so broken, they would pay almost anything to fix it. It might be failing marriage, a health problem, a career crisis, anxiety, depression, loneliness, whatever it is, the recruiter's job is to ask questions until they find it. And then step number four, bring to understanding. Once the ruin is identified, the recruiter connects it to a solution, and Scientology happens to handle that. Now, my mentor, Dan Kennedy, has a concept that he calls, find the bleeding neck.

And the idea is exactly the same. Kennedy says, you don't try to sell someone something that they don't actually need. Instead, ask questions until you find out the problem that's so urgent, so painful that they will do anything to fix it. The bleeding neck, the thing that they can't ignore, and then position your product as a solution to that specific problem. Not your whole product, not every feature, just the one thing that's the one thing that you can't ignore. stops the bleeding. And here's what I need every entrepreneur who's watching this to understand. This is how every great sales call works. Think about a discovery call or a strategy session or coaching consultation. What does a good salesperson do? They don't pitch. They ask. They listen.

They probe. They're looking for the bleeding neck. And when the prospect says, yeah, that's my biggest problem. Then the salesperson says, oh, great. That's exactly what we happen to solve. That is the ruin find. It's the same technique, the same psychology, whether it's the Scientology recruiter at a folding table on Hollywood Boulevard or a SaaS rep on a Zoom call or me on stage for 9,000 people at the Funnel Hacking Live event. But here's where I think the line is, and this is what separates marketing from manipulation. When you find someone's bleeding neck and you genuinely have a solution, a product that actually works, that actually delivers, that actually helps them to solve the problem, that's serving, that's ethical, that's good

business. You found someone in pain and you help them out. But when you find someone's bleeding neck and use it to lock them into a system that costs them $380,000, takes up to 40 years and promises spiritual superpowers that nobody's ever actually demonstrated and then tells them at the end that the next level, the one that really is going to give them the breakthrough that they want,

isn't available yet. Is that serving or is that exploiting? The techniques are identical, the intent is everything. And I got to be honest with you guys, and I want you to be honest with me. Have you ever bought something because somebody found your bleeding neck?

A course, a coaching program, a mastermind, a gym membership, you know, the moment with a sales call when someone asks you the right question and suddenly you realize that you need that thing that they're selling. If so, that is the ruin find, the bleeding neck principle working on you.

If so, I want you to know, like, tell us about it in the comments down below. I'm curious. I've got no judgment because I've been on both sides of this. I've done it to audiences and I've had it done to me. Okay. And again, it's not always bad. It's just how it's used and what you're selling somebody into. Okay, so everything I just showed you, the value ladder, the ruin find, the unreleased

carrot, the affiliate commissions, that's the mechanics. That's the how. But there's a deeper question I keep coming back to you. Why does it all work? Why do intelligent people? I include Scientologists, is some very, very intelligent, very significant. people spend decades of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars inside the system. And the answer is inside of this book right here. It's called The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.

And his story alone is worth telling. Because Hoffer wasn't a professor, he wasn't an academic, he was a longshoreman. He worked on the San Francisco docks loading and unloading ships. He had zero formal education. He actually went blind as a child and mysteriously got a sight back at 15. And from that point on, he just read everything you could find, anything and everything. And during the day, he'd work on the docks. And in night, living in railroad yards he would write. In 1951, he published this book, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movement,

and it became a national bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it on one of his first ever television press conferences. A longshoreman with no education wrote the most important book on mass psychology since LeBahn's The Crowd. I love this guy. And here's what Hoffer figured out

that explains everything about Scientology. And honestly, about every movement, about every brand, every community, anything that inspires fanatics people to be in love with what you're doing. site number one. People don't join for the doctrine. They join for the refuge. Hoffa wrote, and this is one of the most important senses I've ever read. A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrines and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the

anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. Okay, read that again. People don't join because of the what, they join because of the why. They're in pain, they feel lost. They feel like their life as an individual isn't working. And the movement, whether it's religion, a political party, a brand community, or a coaching program offers them something that their individual life couldn't. Belonging, purpose, identity, a tribe. And if you're an entrepreneur, they should hit you like a truck because your customers aren't buying your products for the features. They're buying because of their individual attempts to solve their problem that isn't working and they want to be part of something bigger, a community that understands them. A movement

that gives them identity. That's what ClickFunnels became. Not a software tool, a movement. Okay, we all call ourselves funnel hackers. The language, the events, the share identity, that's Hoffer's insight applied to business. All right, insight number two, movements need a devil more than a God. Hoffer wrote the mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but they never without a belief in a devil. Every movement needs an enemy. In Scientology, they're called suppressives, people who are declared enemies of the church. In politics, it's the other party. In business is the status quo, the old way, the broken systems your customers are trapped in. In my world, the enemy was traditional marketing, the gatekeepers, the agencies, the people who told entrepreneurs they need to

spend $50,000 on a website before they can sell anything online. ClickFunnels was the movement against that. You don't need a gatekeeper. You need a funnel. Okay. Now in your business, you need an enemy, not a person, an idea, a way of doing things that your audience already hates. And then you position your product as the weapon against that enemy. That's Hoffer's inside. That's what every successful movement does. And this is the one that'll make some people uncomfortable. Hoffer wrote, the quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in the mass movement leadership. What consists is the arrogant gestures, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the single-handed defiance of the world. What that means is the content of your message matters less than the

conviction of your delivery. People don't follow ideas, they follow certainty. They follow someone who acts like they've already read the book of the future to the last word. Someone who is so certain of where they're going that following them feels safer than standing still. And that's true in religion, it's true in politics, and it's true in your business. If you get on camera in your wishy-washy, if you're hedging, if you're saying, well, maybe this, and it depends, nobody's going to follow that. People follow the person who plants their flags and says, this is the way. Follow me. Now, the danger is that conviction without integrity creates a cult. Conviction with integrity creates a movement. And the audience can't always tell the difference,

at least not at first. That's what makes it so powerful and so dangerous at the exact same time. So here's where I need to draw the line. Because everything I just showed you, the value ladder, the ruin, find, the enemy, the conviction, these aren't good or bad. They're just tools. A hammer can build a house or can break a window. And the same tool that built Scientology's $380,000, can build a business that genuinely changes people's lives. And I want to be fair about something. Underneath all of the manipulation, underneath the high pressure tactics

and the psychological traps, there are real insights in Hubbard's works about how people think, decide, and take action. His core idea that the reactive mind causes self-defeating behavior, that's legitimate psychology. The understanding of how to communicate with someone in pain, that's real. And honestly, that's what I do with Bernays.

Bernays was a manipulator. He overthrew governments. He made women smoke. But the principles underneath his work, the understanding of how groups think, how consent is manufactured, how authority is created, those principles are real. And I use them ethically every day.

So the question isn't whether these tools work. They obviously work. The question is, where's the line? How do you know if you're building a movement that helps people or a system that traps them? Okay, so here's where I need your help. Because this episode opened a door that I think we need to talk through together.

Everything I just decoded, the value ladder, the ruin, fine, the movement psychology. It doesn't just apply to Scientology. These same techniques show up in nearly every religion, every cult, every mass movement in history. The structure is the same, the psychology is the same, the architecture is the same, I've been thinking about doing a whole series decoding them,

not attacking people's beliefs. You know, that's not what I want to do, but decoding their systems. The funnels, the marketing, the movement building. I could do it on Mormons because, as you know, that's my faith, and I grew up inside of it, and I know the systems inside and out. And I think it's only fair if I'm going to decode other people's religions.

Maybe I start with mine. I can also do Jehovah Witnesses. I could do the FLDiest Church with Warren Jeff. I could do David Koresh. I could jump in a whole bunch of modern movements. I'm just curious if you'd be interested. And if so, what are the cults, the movements, the businesses,

you want me to dissect and break out for you and the religions and the political movements, whatever you want. This stuff is so fun for me. I'd love to kind of share it. All right, so here's a question for the comments. Which religion, which cult, which movement do you want me to code next? Drop in the comments, let me know because I'm building a series based on what you want to see. And then question number two is where do you draw the line between being a cult and a religion? I'm curious on your thoughts. Because I've been thinking about this for weeks. I generally don't have a clean answer. Is it the theology? Is it the money? Is it the control, isolation? Like, where's the line between cult and religion. Tell me what you think because this might be one of the most

important conversation we've ever had on this channel. So here's like he'd come back to with this video. Elron Hubbard was by every measurable standard one of the most prolific creators in human history. 1,084 published works, 65 million words for Guinness Book of World's Records. A custom typewriter, $2,000 ads that generated $200 million. The man understood production, marketing, and audience psychology at a level that very few people in history have ever matched. And he built. built a system that works. That's the uncomfortable truth. The value ladder works, the ruin find works, the enemy works, the unreleased carrot works, the affiliate commissions work. Every single piece of the funnel is the sound marketing architecture. I teach versions of these same

principles every single day. But Eric Hoffer warned us that the same tools that built a movement can build a prison. The same convictions inspires people can also enslave them. And that's the line between a leader and a fanatic that is thinner than any of us probably want to admit. So the question for every entrepreneur watching this, I ask myself this every single day, Am I building a movement or am I building a trap? Because the funnel looks the same from the outside. The psychology is the same, the techniques are the same. The only difference is what happens to the person at the end.

Now, what I just showed you is one system from a playbook that goes back over 100 years. It started with Sigmund Freud, figuring out the human beings are driven by unconscious forces. Then his nephew, Edward Bernays, weaponized those ideas to sell wars, overthrow governments and invent public relations. Then Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman with no formal education, figured out why people joined mass movements in the first place. Then Dan Kennedy, my mentor, took all of the first. of it and turned it into a framework for ethical entrepreneurship. And I spent the last 20 years

building on top of all of them turning these principles into a system to help me to boot shop my company ClickFunnels to pass a billion dollars in sales without any venture capital. I made a video that tells this entire story from Freud's discovery to Bernays weaponizing it to how I use the exact same techniques today. And if what you just saw got you thinking, then this video is going to blow your mind. All you got to do is go to secrets of propaganda.com or hit the link in the description down below. And then after that, please subscribe because this is just the beginning. I'm going to keep on decoding the funnels and the propaganda techniques and inside these movements, the religions and cults, for as long as you guys keep on watching.

Again, the same science, same playbook, different story. Drop which one you want to hear next in the comments. I'll see you guys on the next video.