How powerful is propaganda—really?

In this episode of The Next Best, Marcel Dirsus speaks with Gavin Wilde, a former White House official and U.S. intelligence analyst, about why we consistently overestimate the impact of fake news, disinformation, and "information warfare."

From World War I and Edward Bernays to Russian hybrid warfare, social media bots, and AI-generated deepfakes, Wilde argues that propaganda is far less decisive than we like to believe.

We discuss:

• Why democracies struggle with persuasion and media literacy

• How Russia exploits existing social fractures rather than creating them

• Why calling out disinformation can sometimes backfire

• Why "ignoring it" might be a more rational strategy than constant outrage

The conversation also explores AI, deepfakes, hybrid warfare, and the limits of deterrence in the information age—challenging many of today’s dominant assumptions.

Timestamps:

00:00 — Why ignoring propaganda might be the most rational response

00:29 — Introduction: Gavin Wilde on propaganda, Russia, and hybrid warfare

00:53 — What propaganda actually is (and how it differs from persuasion)

01:04 — World War I, democracy, and the birth of modern propaganda

03:40 — Edward Bernays, psychology, and “torches of freedom”

05:10 — Propaganda as belonging, not mind control

06:29 — Propaganda in democracies vs. autocracies

06:50 — Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and reinforcing existing beliefs

09:18 — The internet, bots, deepfakes, and how the game supposedly changed

09:57 — Computing, social science, and the myth of predictable persuasion

12:20 — Why propaganda and advertising oversell their own effectiveness

13:50 — Russia, hybrid warfare, and election interference

14:17 — Do we know Russia interferes in Western elections?

15:30 — Soviet history and the roots of Russian information warfare

17:32 — Opportunism vs. grand Kremlin strategy

18:58 — The risks of overestimating foreign interference

19:28 — Why blaming propaganda undermines democratic agency

21:35 — Exploiting existing divisions & the Doppelgänger operation

23:10 — When exposing disinformation backfires

24:40 — Policy takeaway: why “ignore it” may be the best option

25:58 — Should democracies fight back with information warfare?

26:11 — Why information warfare is fundamentally autocratic

27:30 — Telling a better democratic story (not just better facts)

29:24 — Kinetic hybrid warfare: sabotage, terrorism, and fear

31:34 — Attribution, deterrence, and why resilience matters more

34:10 — Artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and the “dog that didn’t bark”

36:51 — What we still get wrong about human behavior and propaganda

37:54 — Closing remarks

The Next Best with Marcel Dirsus offers deep dives into geopolitics and international relations. We provide serious political commentary on foreign policy challenges, modern warfare, and global security.