The Propaganda Playbook: AI Politics (Spencer Pratt Spent $0 on AI Ads. Will He Beat the Mayor of LA?) - #Marketing - Ep. 132

**Russell Brunson** (0:00)
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Spencer Pratt, the guy from the TV show The Hills, just made an AI campaign ad for $0, and it got more views than the entire campaign for the sitting LA mayor. He had no donors, no consultants, and no political machine. And he's running for the mayor of the second largest city in America against a woman who's backed by hundreds of millions of dollars. AI just unlocked the political game for non-elites. The political establishment spent a decade building a system to control who gets attention. And one reality TV star with AI tools that we all have access to just broke it. And I'm going to show you exactly how. Because the same technique works for your business.
This is The Propaganda Playbook, where I take the biggest stories in the news and decode the propaganda techniques that are hidden inside of them. And then I show you how to use the ethical versions of those same techniques to grow your business. So that said, let's get into it.
All right, here's the backstory. January 2025, the Palisades fire burns through Los Angeles. Spencer Pratt, yes, the Spencer Pratt from the MTV's The Hills, loses his home. His wife, Heidi Montauk, loses her home. Their kids lose their home. And Pratt does something nobody expects. He starts calling out the politicians, Mayor Karen Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom. He says they failed. He says they let it happen. And on the one year anniversary of the fire, he's announced that he's running for mayor. Now here's where it gets interesting for everyone who's watching this. A filmmaker named Charles Curran, a guy who ran a four person studio called Menace Studios, started making AI-generated campaign ads for Pratt. And Pratt says he didn't hire him. He calls them all fan-made, but he reposts every single one of them from his official count. And the ads are insane.
The city's out. You need to stop him.
Nobody's ever done this before. Star Wars, Batman, The Dark Knight, AI versions of Newsom, Bass and Kamala Harris as supervillains, Pratt as the hero saving LA. Millions of views, NBC picked it up, Hollywood Reporter, Fox News, Blaze Media. And the cost to make these ads? Essentially zero. The AI tool he used is called Seed Dance 2 and it's Chinese. So an American political campaign is being powered by Chinese AI. Let that sink in for just a second. Meanwhile, Karen Bass has a full political machine, donors, consultants, traditional media buyers, and she's losing the attention of war to a reality TV star with a laptop. Her campaign response? Spencer's doing his best Trump impersonation, but it's not gonna work here at LA. And that's what the establishment always does when a disruptor shows up. It won't work until it does. Have you seen these ads? And be honest, do they make you feel something about the LA race even if you don't live there? I'm not gonna lie, I haven't seen any ads for any political race happening except for that one. Okay, if that's like you, let me know down below if you saw the exact same thing. Now, here's what nobody in the media is talking about. Why do these ads work? Because they don't look like political ads, they look like movies. And that's not an accident. There's a technique I teach called Breaking False Belief Patterns. In my book Expert Secrets, I teach that every customer, or in this case, every voter carries beliefs that stop them from taking action. And your job isn't to argue with those beliefs. Your job is to break them using stories and experiences that make the person realize that their belief was wrong on their own. And the filmmaker behind these ads, whether he knows my book or not, is doing exactly that. Watch what he does. Here's belief number one. Politicians care about regular people. The ad shows Bass and Newsom as literal super villains partying in a mansion while LA burns. Newsom eating cake, Harris drinking vodka, Bass in a joker makeup. The ad doesn't argue that they don't care. It shows you in a format that your brain already understands. A movie where the villains are partying while the city suffers.
All right, here's belief number two. The system works. Change happens to normal channels. The ad showed dramatic cinematic action. Pratt flying through a destroyed LA on a speeder. Lightsaber duel, citizens rising up. This is fantasy, but it breaks the belief that nothing will ever change by showing you what change looks like. Even if it's fake, your brain files it away as possible. Here's belief number three. You need money and connections to win. And this is the big one. Pratt has no money, no donors and no machine. The ad itself, the fact that it exists and it's this good and it costs nothing, breaks the belief that only rich, connected people can compete in politics. Now here's the genius part. The filmmaker matched each belief to an entertainment format that the audience already loves. Star Wars, Batman, The Dark Knight. He didn't make a political ad. He made a movie trailer and he chose movies that his dream audience, people who feel like the system is broken and want a hero already love. That's not random, that's targeting. He mapped his audience's entertainment preferences to their beliefs and then created content that feels like fun, but works like propaganda. So let me ask you a question. What is the biggest belief that your customer has about your product or your service? Think about it and then drop it down below. I wanna see what it is for you. Because the way you break that belief is the key to your marketing. Now a French psychologist figured this out about 130 years ago. His name is Gustave Le Bon. He wrote a book in 1895 called The Crowd. I talked about Le Bon in an earlier episode about the holy war and how they use propaganda. And his insight was simple, but it changed everything. Le Bon said that crowds are not moved by facts. They're moved by images. When you argue with someone, they resist, but when you show them an image, they absorb it before their defenses go up. That's why these AI ads work better than any speech, any policy paper or any debate. Nobody watches a three-minute Star Wars deepfake and changes their minds about zoning policies, but they feel something. They feel like Pratt is the hero and Bass is the villain, and their feeling is more powerful than any argument. Here's what's changed since Le Bon. In 1895, creating powerful images required money. Artists, publishers, distribution networks, the people who could afford to create images controlled the crowd. In 2026, AI makes images free. Anyone can create Le Bon's most powerful persuasion tool for $0.