Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - The Propaganda Playbook: AI Fraud (He Made $1.8 Billion With 800 Fake Doctors) - #Marketing - Ep. 126

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

There’s a moment when the future shows up and the people writing about it forget to check who’s actually building it. The New York Times just profiled a guy who built a $1.8 billion company from a house in LA with two employees and a stack of AI tools. The internet lost its mind. Sam Altman said he wanted to meet him. Inc. ran a glowing follow-up. There was just one problem - the entire customer-acquisition machine was built on more than 800 AI-generated fake doctors selling real weight-loss drugs to real people on Facebook, and the FDA had already sent a warning letter six weeks before the article ran. In this episode, I walk you through what’s actually happening underneath the headlines - fake doctors with profiles claiming to be from Kiev with interests in Bronze Age archaeology, AI-generated before-and-after photos so sloppy that one “patient” has her fingers melted into her phone, FDA warning letters the Times never mentioned, and 1.6 million patient records exposed in a data breach at the clinical partner. Then I trace it back 100 years to Edward Bernays, who invented this exact technique - “manufactured third-party authority” - by getting real doctors to endorse cigarettes and bacon. Same playbook. Same psychology. Same manipulation. Except now AI made it infinitely scalable, infinitely cheaper, and the doctors don’t even have to exist. Key Highlights: ◼️The full $1.8B AI fraud breakdown - 800 fake doctor profiles (including a “Professor Albus Dumbledore”), AI-generated patient photos with fingers melted into phones, 5,000 active Facebook ads, an FDA warning letter the New York Times never mentioned, and a 1.6M-record data breach at the clinical partner ◼️Why Edward Bernays’ 100-year-old “Manufactured Third-Party Authority” technique - the same one that sold cigarettes and bacon - is the exact playbook this company just ran through AI, except infinitely cheaper and scaled to people who never existed ◼️The on-the-record prediction I’m making: the FTC shuts this company down within 12 months (and why every entrepreneur celebrating it should be thinking about what “compliance from day one” actually costs) ◼️The 4-part playbook for building real authority the legal way - real testimonials from real customers, real expert relationships, knowing the FTC and FDA rules before you run your first ad, and the question that tells you whether your product is actually good enough ◼️Why every legitimate marketer pays the price when one billion-dollar fraud breaks - and the comment I want from you if you’re one of the entrepreneurs building businesses the right way At the end of the day, this episode isn’t really about one founder or one company. It’s about what happens when the people writing the headlines stop checking the work, and the rest of us treat that omission as proof of the future. AI doesn’t have a conscience. The technology doesn’t care if the doctor in your ad exists. You have to be the conscience. So the real question is: now that the same tools that build a legitimate business can build a billion-dollar fraud just as fast, are you the kind of entrepreneur who’ll be the conscience the technology doesn’t have - or the kind who finds out the hard way? ◼️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 selling online.com slash podcast. This is the Russell Brunson show. The New York Times just ran a story about a guy who built a billion dollar company with AI, two employees, $20,000, and a house in Los Angeles. And the internet lost its mind. Everyone was sharing it.

This is the future AI changes everything. And Sam Altman from OpenAI said he wanted to actually meet the guy. There's just one problem. He did it by creating over 800 fake doctor profiles on Facebook. Using AI to generate fake before and after weight loss photos, selling drugs of the FDA already warned him about six weeks before that article even came out. And the New York Times didn't mention any of it. This is the biggest propaganda story in business right now.

And the technique he used manufacturing fake experts to sell a property. was invented by the same man that I've been teaching about during the series. Edward Bernays literally wrote the playbook for this in 1920, except for Bernays used real doctors, and this guy used AI to make them up. This is the propaganda playbook where I take the biggest stories in the news and decode the propaganda techniques that are hidden inside of all 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. Okay, so let me tell you the story the way it was told to the world, and then I'm going to show you what actually happened underneath. happened underneath. On April 2nd, the New York Times published this glowing profile of a guy named Matthew Gallagher. The headline was basically a $1.8 billion company with just two employees. In the age of AI, it's possible. And the story was incredible. Gallagher is a guy from Los Angeles, self-taught entrepreneur. He took $20,000, his brother and a stack of AI tools,

chat, GBT, GROC, Mid-Journey runway, and he built a telehealth company called MedVee that sells compounded GLP1 weight loss drugs online. Same active ingredients as Lzempic, and we go V but cheaper. You sign up, do an online consultation, and the drugs get shipped to your door. The numbers were staggering. In his first full year, MedVee did $401 million in revenue, net profits of 65 millions with a 16.2% profit margin and 250,000 customers. And the company is projecting $1.8 billion for this year. The Times verified the financials. LinkedIn was going crazy. Every entrepreneur on the internet was sharing it. This is what AI can do, and the future is here. Sam Altman said he'd like to meet this guy. Ink Magazine

need to follow up and it was the biggest AI success story of the year, of the decade of all time. And I'm reading all of this and something doesn't quite feel right. Because I've spent 20 years in direct response marketing and I know what it takes to scale to those numbers. I know the compliance requirements. I know the FTC regulations. I'm sitting here thinking, how is a two person company doing a billion dollars in health products without massive compliance team?

So I started digging and what I found should scare every legitimate marketer who's watching this. It's the first thing I found. This is the one that like literally made my jaw drop. It's how he was actually getting customers. Because the New York Times made it sound like this brilliant AI-powered marketing machine. But here's what was actually happening. Gallagher and his affiliates, depending on who you ask,

create over 800 Facebook profiles pretending to be doctors. Not real doctors, completely fabricated human beings. These profiles all had AI-generated headshots, professional-looking photos of people who do not exist. And they're running thousands of ads on Facebook promoting Medve's weight-loss drugs. And here's where it gets absurd. When people started digging into these profiles, they found that Dr. Alistair Whitmore, who's supposed to be a weight loss physician,

had a Facebook profile that said he was from Kiev, lived in Russia, was female, and his interests include Bronze Age Aegean archaeology, I think. Another doctor named Dr. Matthew Anderson MD had an Anglian phone number. Another one, Dr. Spencer Langford MD, had contact info for a clothing store in the Republic of Congo. And my personal favorite, and I really wish I was making this one up, was a profile called Professor Albus Denglador. At one point, there were 5,000 active and campaigns running on Facebook, either mentioning or linking to Medvi. 5,000, all running under these fake doctor personas, selling weight loss drugs to real people who thought they were getting a recommendation from a real physician.

Now, I want you to think about that for a second. If you went to a doctor's office and found out that the doctor wasn't real, that the whole thing was made up, the credentials, the photo, the name, you would call the police, right? But because it's online, because it's on Facebook, because it's powered by AI, somehow we're calling this guy a visionary. Okay, quick question for you. And I generally want to know your answer on this one. If you found out that a product you bought was recommended by a doctor who doesn't actually exist, a completely AI-generated fake person, would you ask for refund? Yes or no?

Let me know the comments down below. Because I think your answer says everything about where we are today as a society. But the fake doctors were just the beginning because the website also loaded with before and after photos of patients showing dramatic weight loss results. Melissa C lost 40 pounds. Sandra K lost 35 pounds. Michael P lost 50 pounds, except none of these patients were real either. Futurism investigated back in May of 2025, almost a year before the Times profile,

and found that these before and after photos were all AI generated deep fakes. The people in the photos didn't exist, the weight loss never happened, the testimonies were completely fabricated, and here's the detail that really shows you how sloppy this was. When Futurism called them out, the image on site got swapped out, but they kept the same names. Melissa C, Sandra Kay, Michael P, except now those names are attached to completely different people. new AI generated images with the same fake names. And the name Sandra Kay, you can see in her photo that her fingers are melted together on her smartphone. That's a telltale sign of AI generated imagery.

So fake doctors, fake patients, fake before and after photos, fake testimonos, all powered by AI, all used to sell real drugs to real people. And the FDA caught it. On February 20th, 20, 26, six weeks before the New York Times ran the glowing profile, the FDA sent Midvey a formal warning letter. Warning letter number 7214-55. The FDA said the site was falsely implying that. that MedV compounded the drugs itself. It doesn't. It's a marketing company.

The drugs come from a third-party platforms called Care, validate, and Open Loop. The FDA also flag claims like same active ingredient as we go via and Ozempic because that language falsely implies FDA approval. These are compounded drugs. They have not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. Big difference. And the FDA's warning letter literally said the violations cited in this letter are not intended to be all-inclusive statements of violations that may exist in connection with your products. In other words, we found these problems and there are probably a lot more.

later the new york times profile him and didn't mention the warning letter and then there's this medvi's 's clinical partner open loop suffered a massive data breach in january of 2026 a hacker got in and claimed to have stolen records from 1.6 million patients names addresses days of birth medical information treatment history so you've got 500 000 people who signed up through fake doctor profiles who saw fake before and after photos who are taking drugs the FDA hasn't approved and now their medical records are exposed and we're calling this the future of business. I actually want you to see these fake doctor profiles because reading about them is one thing. Seeing them though is something completely different. Look at this. Professor Albus Danglore selling you weight loss drugs on Facebook in 2026 and a billion

dollar company was built on top of it. Now here's the thing. This technique, manufacturing fake experts to sell a product is not new. It's actually one of the oldest tricks in the propaganda playbook. And the man who invented it used real doctors instead of fake ones. But the principle is identical. So if you've been watching the series, you know this man. His name's Edward Bernays. And one of his most famous techniques, maybe the most important one for every entrepreneur watching this today is what I call manufactured third party authority. Here's what it means. Brnays figured out that people don't trust companies. They don't trust sales people. They don't trust ads. But they do trust experts. They trust doctors. They trust scientists. They trust independent authorities. So if you

want to sell something, don't sell it yourself. Get an expert to sell it for you. And Bernays was a genius of this. When the pork industry wanted to sell more bacon, didn't run ad saying buy more bacon he went to doctors real doctors and got them to publicly state that a heavier breakfast was healthier for Americans and then he convinced that recommendation to bacon and eggs suddenly bacon eggs wasn't a marketing campaign it was a medical recommendation and sales went through the roof when the American tobacco company needed to sell more cigarettes but he's got real physicians to endorse smoking as a way to stay thin actual doctors telling women that cigarettes were good for the

weight management and women believed it because it came from a doctor this is the technique, you manufacture the appearance of independent expert endorsements. The audience doesn't see a company selling a product. They see a trusted authority making a recommendation, and they buy. Now, here's the difference between what Bernays did and what Gallagher did. Bernays went to real doctors and got real endorsements. Was it manipulative? Absolutely. Were those doctors wrong to endorse cigarettes? Obviously. But the doctors themselves were real people making real statements. Gallagher took Bernays techniques and ran it through AI. Instead of getting real doctors to endorse his product, he created 800 fake doctors out of thin air.

AI generated faces, AI generated names, AI generated credentials. Running thousands of ads on Facebook to real people who genuinely believe they were getting medical guidance for a licensed physician. It's Brnay's playbook on steroids. Same technique, manufacture the authority. But AI made it infinitely scalable and infinitely cheaper. Bernays needed months and a relationship to get a few real doctors on board. Gallagher needed a laptop and an afternoon to create 800 fake ones.

Same technique, same psychology, same manipulation, 100 years apart. Except now the doctors aren't even real. I'm gonna make you a prediction right now, and I want you to tell me if you agree or disagree. I believe the FTC shuts this company down within 12 months, probably less. I want you to drop your prediction down below if you agree or you disagree. And let's come back to this video in a year from now and see who is right. And by the way, the National Consumers League has already filed for an FTC investigation.

I want you to hear what they said. What Medvee is doing violates the FTC Act. Okay, so here's where I need to talk directly to every entrepreneur, and every marketer, and every business owner who's watching this. Because the story isn't just about one guy who broke the rules. It's about what happens when people see someone like this, get celebrated, and they think they can do the same thing. I've been in direct response marketing for over 20 years now. And in those 20 years, I spent a lot of time and energy and

money making sure that everything we say, every claim we make, every testimony that we use, every result we show is real. It's documented, it's compliant with the FTC guidelines. And it's not because I'm some saint. It's because I've watched what happens to people who don't. I've watched companies that were doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and get shut down overnight because they made claims they couldn't back up. I've watched the FC go after the marketers, smart, successful marketers and take everything, the money, the company, the personal assets, everything. So here's what I think is going to happen with Medvee.

And this is my opinion, okay? But based on everything I've seen in 20 years, I've watched the FTC and the FDA operate, I believe this company is going to get shut down. I don't think it's going to take very long. Because here's what the FTC cares about. They care about deceptive advertising. Fake doctors are deceptive advertising. AI generated before and after pictures of patients who don't exist.

That is literally deceptive advertising. Claiming your drugs have the same active ingredient as Lysmpic without FDA approval. that's also deceptive advertising. Every single pillar of how this company acquired customers is built on something, the FDA and the FTC have explicitly said that you're not allowed to do. 800 fake fake doctor profiles, AI generated before and after pictures, fake patient testimonials, false claims of FDA equivalents,

FDA warning letters, 1.6 million patient records exposed, FTC investigations, and it goes on and on. You can make a billion dollars by breaking all the rules, but you can lose it all really, really quickly. And the thing that kills me about this is that legitimate marketers, People like you and me who spend the time and the money to do things the right way, we're the ones who pay the price. Because every time a story like this breaks, it makes regulators tighten the screws on everybody.

It makes Facebook tighten their ad policy for everybody. It makes consumers more skeptical of everybody. One guy breaks all the rules and the rest of us who play by them and get punished for it. If you're a marketer or an entrepreneur who actually takes compliance seriously, who actually make sure your claims are legitimate, who actually use real testimonials from real people, I want you to type real in the comments. Because I think the people watching this who do the right things, to be seen right now while the guys who are breaking the rules get all the New York Times profiles.

The ones doing it right don't get the headlines. So let's change that. Type real in if you build your business on actual integrity. So let me give you the actual playbook for building authority in your business without getting shut down by the FTC because authority is the game. Bredaise was right about that. People buy from people they trust and people trust experts. That part of psychology is real and it works and you should absolutely use it. But here's how to do it without creating Professor Albus Dengelor. Dongle door. Number one, Get real testimonials from real customers. I know this sounds obvious,

but the reason people resort to fake testimonials is because they're lazy or they don't have a product good enough to generate real ones. If your product works, your customers will tell you, ask them, make it easy for them, then record their stories.

Those real testimonials are worth 1,000 AI generated fakes and they won't get you sued. Number two, build real relationships with real experts. If you're selling a health product, find a real doctor who believes what you're doing

and then feature them. Pay them fairly, give them editorial control, let them speak in their own voice. One real expert who genuinely endorses your product is worth more than 800 fake profiles and it's actually legal. Number three, know the rules before you break them and then don't break them. I mean, don't. If you're selling supplements, health products, weight loss products, anything in the health space,

you need to know what the FTC and the FDA allow you to say and what they don't. This is not optional. This is not, I'll deal with it when I get bigger. This is one day before you run your very first ad because the FEC doesn't care how big you are. They'll come after a company doing $10,000 a month just as fast than one doing a billion. The rules apply to everyone. Number four, if you need fake experts to sell your products, your products isn't very good.

This is the bottom line. If your marketing only works when you invest in people who don't exist to endorse it, the problem isn't your marketing. The problem is your product. Fix the product and the authority will follow. Real testimonials from real customers, real relationships with real experts. Know the FTC FDA rules from day number one. If you need fake experts, your product isn't good enough.

And then I want to leave you with the detail that I think sums up this entire story because this one really stuck with me. Look at your hand. See how many fingers are melted onto the phone? That's because Sandra K doesn't exist. She was generated by AI. And somebody at Medvi or one of their affiliates looked at the damage and thought,

yeah, it's good enough, run it. That's what happens when you stop caring about people you're selling to. You don't even notice when their fingers aren't real. Because the people were never real to you in the first place. All right, last question. I really want you to hear from you on this one. We talked about Bernays using real doctors

to sell cigarettes, which was manipulative, but at least use real people. Now we got AI creating 800 completely fake doctors to sell weight loss drugs. Where does this go next? Like, what do you think is the next version we're going to see of people doing things because of AI because of this? Because I guarantee you that it's coming. The technology only gets better and the fakes get harder to spot.

What do you think the next big fake is going to be? I want to hear your predictions. So here's what I keep coming back to with this one. New York Times profile called MedV a glimpse of the future. And honestly, in a way, I think they're right. It is a glimpse of the future. It's just not the future that they were celebrating. It's a future where one person with a laptop and AI can generate 800 fake doctors during thousands of fake tests.

testimonials, manufacture a billion-dollar company from a house in LA, and get profiled by the most prestigious newspaper in the world as a visionary before anyone even checks whether the doctors are real or the FDA has already sent a warning letter. This is the future, and whether it's good future or a terrifying one depends entirely on who's building it and what rules they follow. So here's what I'll say to every entrepreneur watching. You now have access to the most powerful tools ever created. AI can help you to write better copy, create better content, reach more people, build faster, test faster, grow faster. I use it every single day and I love it. But the same tools that can build a legitimate business can also build a billion dollar fraud. The technology

doesn't care. It doesn't have a conscious. You have to be the conscious because at the end of the day, Professor Albus Danglore doesn't show up to defend you when the FTC comes knocking. You're on your own. And the rules haven't changed just because the tools got better. Build something real with real people, real results, real experts, and real integrity. Because a business built on lies, even billion dollar lies doesn't last. It never has. And AI doesn't change that. Now what I've just showed you is one technique from a playbook that's been built over 100 years. And it started, as you know, with Sigmund Freud figuring out that human beings were driven

by unconscious forces. Then there was his nephew, Edward Bernays, who weaponized those ideas. He sold wars, overthrow governments, and invented the field of public relations. He literally created the technique of manufacturing expert authority that Gallagher just ran through AI 100 years later.

Then a guy named Dan Kennedy, my mentor, figured out how entrepreneurs could use these same dark arts ethically, and I spent 20 years taking all of it and turning into a system that bootstrap my company ClickFunnels passed a billion dollars in sales without any venture capital without a single fake doctor i made a video telling the whole story if what

you saw i got you thinking that video is going to blow your mind so go to secrets of propaganda com or hit the link in the description and watch it right now while it's fresh and then subscribe to this channel because this is the propaganda playbook in every episode i take a big story from the news i decode the propaganda behind it and i show you how to use the ethical versions to grow your business same science same playbook different story and next episode is coming soon thanks so much and i'll see you guys on the next one