In a revealing conversation on The Zach Show, investigative journalist Scott Carney exposed a troubling pattern within the pop-science influencer ecosystem. He says that they’re all playing the same game, and it’s borrowed from improv comedy.
Carney explains that successful improv comedians follow a simple rule—”yes, and”—where each performer builds upon the previous statement, no matter how absurd.
What starts as “I met a duck on the walk today” becomes “I met a magic duck” and escalates to “my uncle was abducted by aliens.” It’s collaborative storytelling that creates entertainment through mutual support.
But when this principle migrates to the influencer world, the consequences aren’t funny. Instead of comedic escalation, we get a self-reinforcing network of pseudoscientific claims where everyone amplifies everyone else’s message.
Carney uses Dave Asprey‘s Bulletproof Coffee as an example, claiming butter and coconut oil in coffee makes your brain smarter.
When Asprey appears on another influencer’s podcast like Huberman’s, that host doesn’t challenge the claim. Instead, they add their own: “Yeah, I’ve also found that my cognition gets better with resveratrol.”
This creates an ecosystem where products and personalities mutually validate each other. As Carney notes, “you can’t go on another person’s podcast and be like no your bulletproof coffee doesn’t do anything except raise your cholesterol and actually makes your brain worse.” There’s simply no incentive to break the “yes, and” pattern because doing so means losing access to those lucrative platforms.
Meanwhile, skeptics get frozen out entirely. They can’t access these massive audiences because they refuse to play the game. The result is a hierarchy where the largest platforms belong to those with the most money to promote their podcasts and spread their message—often funded by the very products they’re endorsing.
Carney contrasts this with how truth-seeking communities operate. Rather than building on each other’s claims, they argue over nuance and fracture into competing factions. As he puts it, this creates “a rhetorical problem that is not very fun to watch.”
The influencer “yes, and” game has created what Carney calls the “Griftoverse”—a self-sustaining universe where pseudoscience flourishes because everyone benefits from mutual amplification. It’s brilliant marketing strategy but terrible for public understanding of science.