There’s a moment when you can’t tell what’s real anymore. You watch a U.S. Senate candidate look right into the camera, speaking clearly, saying words that match things he’s posted online for years - and a few hours later you find out he never sat in that chair, never opened his lips, and never had a single thing to do with the video. That’s not science fiction. That’s a campaign ad that ran in front of millions of voters last week. And once you see what’s actually happening behind it, you can’t unsee it.
In this episode, I walk you through five of the AI propaganda moments stacking up right now - and then I introduce you to a French philosopher named Jacques Ellul, who back in 1962, before the internet, before social media, before AI, predicted almost exactly what we’re living through. But here’s where it gets uncomfortable for me. I’m not standing on the outside of this looking in. I use AI every single day in my business, and I’ve run the exact tension Ellul warned about - including one experiment that converted cold traffic perfectly and made my own community feel betrayed. So I share what those experiments taught me, and I give you the 3-question framework I now run every AI-assisted piece of content through.
Key Highlights:
◼️The five AI propaganda moments stacking up right now - from deepfake political ads on both sides, to Grok generating 6,700 explicit fake images per hour, to the grandmother scam calls one in four Americans have already received
◼️Why Jacques Ellul’s idea of “sociological propaganda” - written in 1962, before the internet existed - predicts every algorithm and “for you” page running today better than anything Bernays ever wrote
◼️The behind-the-scenes story of two AI ads I tested with my own audience: the deepfake “AI Russell” that converted cold traffic but made warm fans feel betrayed, and the cartoon “Baby Russell” that flipped both
◼️The 3-question framework I now run every AI-assisted piece of content through - the “Amplification Test”, the “Disclosure Test”, and the “Relationship Test”
◼️Why borrowed trust always comes back to bite you - and how to tell when AI is amplifying your real message vs. fabricating a fake one
At the end of the day, this episode isn’t about being anti-AI. I genuinely believe it’s the biggest opportunity entrepreneurs have seen since the start of the internet. But Ellul’s warning was that the most dangerous propaganda is the kind that gets built into the system itself - and right now, we’re building AI into everything. Into our ads, our content, our politics, our kids’ education, and the way we decide what’s true. So the real question is: when the propagandist is no longer a person but an algorithm with no conscience and no off switch, who do we hold accountable when the line gets crossed - and how do we know we’re not crossing it ourselves?
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