Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - What ‘The True Believer’ Taught Me About Building a Mass Movement and Creating Raving Fans | #Marketing - Ep. 49

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Most people think mass movements are built by having the right product or flashy branding… but it’s actually way deeper than that. Back when I was trying to figure out how to turn Clickfunnels into a real movement, I came across a weird little book from the 1950’s called The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. This book hit me like a ton of bricks. I started seeing patterns everywhere… Why people follow, why they stick, and how belief actually transfers from one person to another. This book literally changed how I wrote Expert Secrets. It changed how I thought about sales and marketing. And honestly, it changed how I lead. In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I’m breaking down the core ideas from The True Believer… With my own commentary, how I’ve used this inside Clickfunnels, and how you can use it to build loyalty, momentum, and real belief around what you’re doing. Key Highlights: The 3 elements that fuel every mass movement (and why you need all three to create lasting belief) Why movements don’t start with logic… They start with emotion and shared frustration How to identify the “devil” your audience can unite against (and why you shouldn’t be afraid to evolve it) What I learned from watching the early Clickfunnels haters, and how we used their resistance to build stronger community The danger of becoming the thing your movement was created to fight This episode dives into the psychology behind why people buy, follow, and commit. If you’re building a brand, leading a tribe, or trying to grow something bigger than yourself, you need to understand how belief actually works. If you want to go deeper, I put together a special download with my personal notes and doodles from The True Believer and Expert Secrets. Just hit the link in the show notes and grab it for free! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Special thanks to our sponsors: NordVPN: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/secrets⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Northwest Registered Agent: Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠northwestregisteredagent.com/russell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to start your business with Northwest Registered Agent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn.com/CLICKS⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠RocketMoney.com/RUSSELL⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job’s visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Indeed.com/clicks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Russell Brunson Show. This book is called The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, first edition in the original slip covers and it also happens to be signed by Mr. Hoffer, which I love signed books. They're my favorite. This one I got for a steal of a deal was only $1,200 on eBay and it's about how mass movements are created. It's awesome. Towards the beginning of us starting ClickFunnels journey and I knew when we ClickFunnels, I wasn't trying to just sell a software product. I was like, I want to create a

movement. And somebody told me that there's all these books on how they dissected how different cults were built and just mass movements and big businesses. You should read them. And there are a bunch of them I was reading. And a lot of them were good. And actually my wife and I went on a trip to Kenya. And on the way out the door, I grabbed this book. It was not the first edition. It was a newer edition. And by the time I was writing my book, Expert Secrets, I remember we were on this bumpy road. My wife had fallen asleep. We're on this crazy bumpy road.

And I'm sitting there reading this book, and I'm trying to highlight stuff, and my hands going all over the place. And I'm reading this in every line. I was like, highlighting that line and the next line. And I'm like, this is insane. And I started going through all the things that are essential to create a mass movement.

And it started talking about all different types of mass movements and how they work. Anything from political movements you know, political movements to businesses to religious movements, both like the positive side and the negative side. And as I was reading this, it like, it became the foundation for what eventually became the expert secrets book.

Because the expert secrets book, when I wrote that, the goal wasn't just like how to become an expert, like how to tell your story, like those things are in there, but I was like, true experts have people that follow them, right, they have a movement, like that's the definition of it. I remember looking at like what we had done with ClickFunnels. It wasn't just Russell being Russell, like that wasn't what it was about. It never was about me. It was about the people, it was about

the funnel hackers, about the movement we created. And so, Expert Secrets was, yes, you're an expert, but the only reason why you're an expert is because your job is to find a group of people you're supposed to serve and to bring them to you. And so, when I read The True Believer, I was like learning all these principles about how mass movement has been created and like how a pattern was repeated over and over and over again, it became the foundation for the Expert Secrets book. And that's why I love True Believer. I have a bad habit whenever anybody recommends a book, I instantly as fast as I can grab

my phone, I just buy 100% of the books that people recommend. I don't read them all. I wish I could. I read as many as I can. But what normally will happen is that the good books will bubble to the top, right? Like I'll buy them all, but then if someone mentions it one time,

and I hear it again, and again, three or four times, then it's like, okay, I need to prioritize this book because like three or four people I respect have all talked about it. And so that's kind of how I start for me. Then typically for me, what I do is I start with an audiobook. The hardest part is reading initially.

So I'm like, do I get into this, listen to the audiobook? So I always buy the physical book and the audiobook 100% of the time. I listen to the audiobook, and if I listen for 10 reading initially. So I'm like, do I get into this, listen to the audiobook? So I always buy the physical book and the audiobook 100% of the time. I listen to the audiobook and if I listen for 10 or 15 minutes and I'm hooked, that's when I say, okay, I'm going to commit back to the physical book and then I go and get the book. And I like reading and highlighting. True Believer is a book that just had come up three or four times in different conversations

about different things. And that's why it had risen to the top. I always travel with like three or four books just depending and it rose to the top and I grabbed it. So that's kind of how I find out what books to read. Because there's so many books, like you can't read all of them. And so I wait for the best stuff to bubble to the top. But some of the principles that were powerful to me,

the first one, you look at the traditional world, what happens is like you go and you get an entry level job, right, and you work your way up and you get to the next level and you get to the next level and you're slowly like ascending through the levels. And so the no mass movement is built that way, right? A mass movement is all about like a charismatic leader coming in and disrupting that, right?

It's not about like slowly advancing, it's about changing and like moving directions. And it was interesting to me because I was thinking about that, like how many people in the corporate world are sitting there like waiting and they're slowly moving, going up the corporate ladder building over time.

And when he talked about movements, he's like, that's not the way it works. It's not like people are gonna slowly move up to you. Like you can start these things radically and very quickly by putting a flag in the ground and showing people, he's like, that's not the way it works. It's not like people are gonna slowly move up to you. Like, you can start these things radically and very quickly by putting a flag in the ground and showing people why that's wrong, why what they're doing is not the right way, creating a new opportunity where you're gonna take people

and move them away from the existing thing. And it's like, advancement is not the key. It's a new opportunity. So that was like a big one for me. The second big one, I'm gonna actually read this one because this is one that just struck me in a really interesting way because a lot of the mass movements he talks about in here are religious by nature but not all of them are. This was kind of something that that popped out.

He calls this unifying agents. How do you unify a movement? How do you get people to come together? And this is so cool because he said the most powerful unifying agent, the thing that unifies people the most is hatred which is kind of like, wait what? Hatred? I thought it was gonna be like this positive vision or this mission. It's like no the thing that unifies people the most is hatred, which is kind of like, wait, what? Hatred, I thought it was gonna be like this positive vision or this mission. It's like, no, the thing that unifies people the most is hatred. He says, hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.

It says mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without the belief in a devil. And so what he's talking about here is for you to create a mass movement, like you have to create a common enemy. That's part of it, right? If you get any good mass movement,

there's always like us versus them. Like that's what separates a movement and gets people to actually move and to follow with you, right? So you think about that. It's like, okay, think about religious, right? You always have like, there's always God and the devil. Like there's always two different things, right? And you look at how most religions work. Like the way they're getting people to move towards God is by focusing on the hatred of the devil. Like you don't want the devil. This is going to be bad, right? But I was doing the research for expert seekers, I was trying to find a lot of examples, because I didn't want people to be like,

oh that's a religious example, but I'm different, right? So I remember I was like, I'm gonna find a religious, so I looked at Christ, you look at Christ, like he was very divisive, he said, I came with a sword to divide, like he wasn't trying to make peace, he was trying to divide people. And then you, so you look at Christ,

who I believe is the greatest of us all, right? And you look on the opposite side, like the evil, you look at at Hitler like what did Hitler do? Like Hitler was the same way like they had a common good but they had a common enemy that he attacked the whole time, right? Two different people but same tactics and that was okay. I want to talk about religion anymore. I want to talk about different topics So we start shifting to businesses, right? You look at like what Steve Jobs is with Apple. It's like hey, here's Apple But then who are they fighting against? And so like I was looking at this business, religious, political things,

like politics are huge too, you see this every single time, right? Democrats, Republicans, what are they doing? They are picking a common enemy. And if you look at the last political cycle, it was a lot less based on, look at my candidate, how great they are. Most of the messaging was,

look how bad this other candidate is. That was the reality of the entire election cycle, right? It was all focused on hatred, right? Because it's the greatest unifying object that we have, according to Eric Hoffer. Devil for ClickFunnels, it shifted over time. Initially, when we first launched, it was us trying to prove that ClickFunnels were a thing.

So the devil became like, anything that wasn't a funnel. Websites are dumb, like we did this whole death of the website campaign, stuff like that. So at one time, that's what it was. Other times, we actually picked companies. Like I remember thinking, okay, who's like, I'm very competitive.

So I'm always like, who's the next person I gotta be beat? Like when I was wrestling or I want to be a state champion, who's the state champ? And I would think about that person. I would dream about them. I put their picture on my wall. There wasn't a moment in my life didn't go past. I wasn't thinking about how I could beat that person. Right? When my state title, the next thing was the national level. It was obsessive for me. And so when we were launching ClickFunnels, after we started getting some traction, I was like, okay, who's ahead of us? And for me at the time, there was a company called Leadpages. Most people haven't heard about Leadpages anymore because we came pretty aggressively after them, right?

They had just gotten like, I think 30 or $40 million in funding. And I was like, that's our competitor. And so we were very aggressive trying to surpass them, positioning psychology, like different brands in a business. Like number two, always attacks number one, right? Pepsi always attacks Coke, but Coke can never even acknowledge that Pepsi exists, right? And so for us, it's like when Leadpages was the target, we were talking about them, we were trying to beat them, eventually we passed them and then we can't talk about them ever

again. They're now dead to us, we can't talk about them. And then our next target was like, okay, who's our next biggest person? It's Infusionsoft. And so that became the common enemy that we united against. We fought against this common enemy. After we surpassed them, we stopped talking about them. And then it started transitioning for us.

It was like, as opposed doing like actual companies or brands. Now in my older age, I don't feel comfortable doing that kind of stuff. I don't think I would do that again in the future, but it became more based on ideas. We started fighting like venture capitalists versus bootstrappers. And like we became bootstrappers, like our community, our people versus like venture capitalists who were cheating. Like they're not like they're in real businesses. They have horrible ideas, but they're just cheating by getting money.

Right. Like they're not, like they're in real businesses. They have horrible ideas, but they're just cheating by getting money, right? Like they became the common enemy. I did a whole presentation at Funnel Hacking Live about being a bootstrapper and people got, you know, they went around that. After I read Napoleon Hill's Outwin the Devil, he talks about, which by the way, Napoleon Hill is great at creating the common enemy, but he talks about the devil is trying to get people to become drifters. And so for our community, I did a whole presentation on being driven versus being a drifter. Obviously I wanted people to be driven, but the focus was on not becoming a drifter. And that became the common enemy. I use it a lot over and over and over again

in different areas, different aspects, different places, but I'm realizing that you have more power to unify people when you're focusing on hatred and on the devil than you ever do on focusing on the positive. One of the caveats I always give people who are in a lot of our higher end events is like, you have to be careful because you can use these powers for good or for evil, right? And you've seen it like you look at the mass movements throughout time like these Principles have been used for good and for evil I think one of the the biggest problems people have a lot of times is they don't know what they're doing, right? They get started

They start doing these things are applying these principles and they're doing with the good heart Fame is a scary thing like you see people who start having success and people start falling and then all of a sudden they start drinking their own Kool-Aid, they start believing their own bios and all these things are happening and like that's when things start shifting and that's when you see these big movements, these big companies and then they crash and burn. I think I was lucky when I got started early on.

I started building my first company, we started growing. And this is man, 14, 15 years ago, pre-Click funnels. And I got to the spot in my life where I literally was doing the same thing. When you're building a movement like a true believer, it's like it always leads with the charismatic leader. I got step number one, expert life where I literally was doing the same thing. And you're building a movement like a true believer. It's like, it always leads with the charismatic leader. I got step number one, expert secrets. If you look at the diagrams, like step number one is an attractive character.

So you lead with that. And so I was building my company, it was building and everything. I started getting that spot where again, I believe my own bio. I was drinking my own Kool-Aid. Like I thought it was something special. And I remember about that time is when my entire company collapsed. Like it fell apart overnight. I had to fire almost a hundred people in a day.

We had to move from a big huge office building to shrink down this little tiny thing. We were scrambling just to keep alive. And I remember going through that process and it was very, very painful. I remember thinking during that time, I was like, okay, I now know that this was not me. There's a lot of other external forces besides me that created this thing, right? Including God, which was one of the biggest things for me. I'm like, I now know that what he gives, he can take away. And I was like, if I'm ever in a spot

where I have a chance to build something big again, I have to be very, very careful and be humble because there's a scripture that says that either you can humble yourself or he will humble you. And that verse scares me to death. Because I'm like, okay, I don't wanna be humble, so I need to maintain and be humble. And I think that's one of the biggest things is like,

when you get put in a spot of leadership, like you build an audience, you have people following you, you have a big responsibility and the key is like you have to remain humble. That was not something that you created, something you were given. It's remembering those things as you're trying to lead the movement and not making it about you. As soon as it becomes about you, that's when it shifts from a very positive thing to a very negative thing. If you guys want a copy of all my notes from True Believer, as well as some of my doodles,

and also the doodles that I put inside of Expert Secrets on how I see creating a mass movement. Again, it came initially from this book, True Believer. There's three things every mass movement must have. If you haven't read Expert Secrets, it's a charismatic leader, it is a future-based cause and a new opportunity. I have the doodles where I kinda show that

from Expert Secrets. I'm gonna put all those down in the show notes. Down below, if you click on that, send you out a PDF that's got all my notes from the book plus all the stuff from Expert Secrets so you can see how to actually apply this to your business and your movement as you are trying to build your following of people and change their lives.

It all comes down to these very core, very simple principles. And when you learn how to use them good, you can change a lot of people's lives and in the process, it'll change your life as well. Of my three core books I've written so far, Expert Secrets is the one that sold the most. And I think the reason why is change a lot of people's lives and in the process it'll change your life as well. Of my three core books I've written so far, Expert Secrets is the one that sold the most and I think the reason why is because a lot of

people don't understand funnels. Yes, dot-com secrets might be over the head or traffic secrets but like most people know that like they have a message, right? A lot of people feel called. I always tell people that like I believe that entrepreneurs, people who follow me a lot of times, you've heard what my friend Alex Sharpen calls the call to contribution. Like you feel this thing. I want to serve people and I help people and usually it's someone who's gone through something really hard in their life. It could be a trial they went through or maybe problems

they struggle with and they came on the other side and they've had success. They want to go back and serve the people who are just like them, right? And they like, I have these ideas. I have this experience. A lot of times they don't maybe not like consider themselves an expert yet, but like, yeah,

I want to be an expert. I want to share these things. Like I went through these things and I've learned so much. I can help with other people. And so when they see the book, expert secrets, I think it's the one that they connect with like, oh my gosh, like I'm not an expert yet, but maybe much I can help the other people and so when they see the book expert secrets thing it's the one that they connect with like oh my gosh like I'm not an expert yet but maybe that book will help me to figure out how to take these ideas and package them away

where I can I can help people as well and so it's interesting I love watching again people's YouTube videos and stuff you see it in the in the book on the shelf on the back and it's crazy like if you look at the who's who of who's read this book it always blows my mind like we at Funnel Hacking Live we had Andy Grammer come and actually do a presentation. I hadn't met him yet. I didn't get him in backstage because like, you know, they have all their security team and everything. So the first time I saw him, he came on stage, he sings the first song and then grabs the microphone. He literally tells the entire audience like, hey, Russell, I read Expert Secrets during COVID and it changed my life. And I was like, what? This is it? Like, how did you

never tell me this? You should have messaged me. It's just really cool to see how many people have read this book and used it to find their voice and to be able to find their audience and their tribe and bring them together and actually create a movement of people's lives who they can actually change. And it's just been very fulfilling to watch this book come from an idea to something now that's been, hundreds of thousands of copies have been sold

around the world.