“The quest for validation can muddy the waters of truth.”
I don’t necessarily mean that wanting validation makes people lie. Lying is actually the simpler version of this idea. If someone knows the truth and deliberately says something different, we understand what happened.
I’m more interested in what happens when the person telling the story doesn’t realize the truth is being distorted.
We all want some amount of validation. We want people to like us. We want them to think we’re interesting. We want to be respected. We want to belong. And when we’re talking to someone we particularly admire, someone we think is cool, successful, powerful, attractive, intelligent, or important, that desire can become considerably stronger.
Imagine telling a story to someone you desperately want to impress.
You’re watching their reaction while you tell it.
They laugh at one part, so maybe you spend a little more time there. Their eyes widen at another part, so you elaborate. They lean forward when you mention something unusual.
Then you get the reaction.
“No way.”
“What?”
“That’s crazy.”
That feels good.
And whether you realize it or not, you’ve just received feedback about which version of your story produces validation.
The next detail gets sharpened a little.
Something you were fairly sure happened becomes something you know happened.
Something that happened roughly a certain way becomes something that happened exactly that way.
The danger was a little greater.
The coincidence was a little stranger.
The other person was a little more unreasonable.
Your role was a little more impressive.
None of these changes necessarily require a conscious decision to lie. They can happen because human beings are social creatures, and social feedback influences us.
We’re telling the story, but at the same time, the audience may be helping us rewrite it.
The Joe Rogan Effect
This thought originally came to me while thinking about guests on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
To be clear, this isn’t really about Joe Rogan. I like Joe. I like his show. In fact, part of what makes his podcast so interesting is the exact thing that creates the effect I’m talking about.
It’s long-form, loose, conversational, and largely off the cuff.
Imagine you’re a relatively unknown person who suddenly gets invited onto one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
You walk into the studio and sit across from Joe Rogan.
You probably already know a lot about him. Maybe you’ve listened to hundreds of hours of his conversations. You know his mannerisms. You know what makes him laugh. You know the kind of story that makes him stop someone and say, “Wait. What?”
Millions of people may eventually hear your conversation.
You want it to go well.
Of course you do.
You want Joe to like you. You want the audience to like you. You want to justify why you’re sitting in that chair. You don’t want to be the boring guest everyone forgets about ten minutes after the episode ends.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, whether consciously or not, you probably want one of those moments.
“What? No way. That’s insane.”
Think about the incentive structure that creates.
You tell Joe something unusual.
He becomes interested.
You get a little dopamine hit from that reaction.
Now the conversation continues.
Does the next story become 2 percent more dramatic?
Does a probability become a certainty?
Does something you heard from someone else gradually become something you “know”?
Does an ambiguous event get cleaned up into a much better story?
Maybe.
And if it does, the guest doesn’t necessarily need to be dishonest.
They just need to be human.
That’s what I mean when I talk about The Joe Rogan Effect.
It isn’t something Joe is intentionally creating. It isn’t even necessarily something the guest knows is happening.
It’s what can happen when the human desire for validation meets an enormous audience and an unscripted conversation.
Status Changes the Incentive
Now imagine two different people sitting in that chair.
One is an enormously successful celebrity who has spent twenty years being interviewed. They already have money, status, fame, and millions of people paying attention to them.
The other is almost completely unknown.
They might be telling Joe the exact same story, but the psychological incentives acting on them aren’t necessarily the same.
The celebrity has less to prove. They already belong in the room.
The unknown guest has considerably more to gain from being memorable.
That doesn’t make the unknown person untrustworthy. I wouldn’t hear an incredible story from an unknown guest and automatically assume they’re lying.
But I would recognize that there’s a force acting on them.
And once we recognize that force, we can start thinking about how it might affect the information coming out the other side.
The same principle exists almost everywhere status is uneven.
A junior employee talking to the CEO.
A teenager talking to the cool kids.
Someone on a first date.
An entrepreneur pitching an investor.
A salesperson talking to an important potential customer.
Someone meeting a celebrity they admire.
The greater the desire for validation, the greater the temptation to become the version of ourselves that receives it.
And sometimes our stories come along for the ride.
Walking Through the Waters of Truth
That’s where I get the metaphor.
Imagine truth as a body of clear water.
You can stand on the edge and see straight to the bottom.
Then validation asks us to walk through it.
We want approval, admiration, attention, acceptance, belonging, status. We want the person standing on the other side to think we’re interesting.
So we walk.
Every step disturbs a little sediment from the bottom.
The water gets cloudier.
The truth hasn’t disappeared. Nobody necessarily poured poison into it. Nobody even had to intentionally contaminate it.
We simply disturbed it by moving through it.
That’s how I think validation can affect truth.
The quest for validation can muddy the waters of truth.
Certainty May Be the First Thing to Get Distorted
One of the easiest things for validation to change isn’t the event itself.
It’s our level of certainty about the event.
Reality contains an enormous amount of uncertainty.
We don’t remember every conversation perfectly. We don’t always know why somebody did something. We don’t know whether two events were genuinely connected. We don’t know exactly what another person was thinking. Sometimes we don’t even know why we did something ourselves.
But uncertainty makes for terrible storytelling.
“I think that’s probably what happened” doesn’t hit quite as hard as:
“That’s exactly what happened.”
One sounds tentative.
The other sounds authoritative.
Certainty isn’t always evidence of understanding. It makes stories cleaner. It removes annoying little complications that would otherwise require three minutes of explanation.
And it tends to produce a stronger reaction.
So perhaps the facts don’t change much at all. Maybe what changes is our confidence in those facts.
“I think this happened.”
becomes:
“I’m pretty sure this happened.”
Then:
“This happened.”
Eventually:
“I know exactly what happened.”
There doesn’t have to be a moment where someone decides, “I’m going to lie now.”
The story can evolve inside the storyteller.
Stories Get Better With Time, Which Might Be a Problem
We’ve probably all watched this happen in ordinary life.
Someone tells the same story for ten years, and it becomes fantastic.
The timing is perfect.
The dialogue is perfect.
Every detail arrives exactly where it needs to.
They remember exactly what everyone said.
Their comeback lands perfectly.
It’s almost suspicious how cooperative reality was in creating such a well-structured story.
I don’t think most of these people are lying.
I think stories evolve.
We naturally remove details that don’t matter. We emphasize the details that do. We tighten the sequence. We remember some things and forget others.
Then we tell the edited version again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually, something strange can happen.
The story we’ve been telling can start replacing the event we originally experienced.
We no longer remember the raw footage. We remember the edited movie.
Which means someone can be completely sincere while still being wrong.
That creates a much more complicated problem than lying.
A liar knows there’s a difference between what happened and what they’re saying.
A sincere person with an edited memory doesn’t.
Social Media Puts the Process on Steroids
Social media creates an almost perfect environment for this.
Imagine posting an accurate description of something that happened to you.
It gets a modest reaction.
Then imagine telling the same story with a slightly stronger conclusion, a more dramatic opening, and a little more certainty.
Ten times the engagement.
Now the feedback isn’t subtle.
The platform is effectively telling you which version of reality people prefer.
The outrageous version gets shared.
The confident version gets attention.
The complicated version disappears.
The algorithm doesn’t sit you down and tell you to exaggerate. It doesn’t need to.
It simply rewards certain behaviours.
And humans are very good at learning what gets rewarded.
Over enough repetitions, we may begin shaping not only what we say, but what we notice in the first place.
If outrage gets validation, we find things to be outraged about.
If victimhood gets validation, we notice evidence that strengthens the story of our victimhood.
If success gets validation, we frame our lives around success.
If certainty gets validation, we become more certain.
The incentive begins operating upstream from the story itself.
It starts influencing perception.
When the Embellished Version Becomes the Fact
This is where The Joe Rogan Effect becomes more consequential than one person telling a slightly better story.
A guest says something in an off-the-cuff conversation.
Maybe they’re genuinely an expert.
Maybe the underlying point is basically correct.
But in the moment, the claim gets pushed a little farther than the evidence really supports.
The number becomes cleaner.
The certainty becomes stronger.
The phenomenon becomes more unique.
The danger becomes more extreme.
The story becomes crazier.
And craziness is memorable.
Now imagine that one sentence gets clipped out of a three-hour conversation.
The surrounding uncertainty disappears.
The qualifiers disappear.
Nobody sees the two minutes before it where the guest said, “I’m not entirely sure about this.”
They see the twenty-second clip.
An expert appears to have said something extraordinary with complete confidence.
People share it.
Someone repeats it on another podcast.
A journalist references the clip.
Someone makes a TikTok explaining the “fact.”
A Reddit thread discusses it.
Another person remembers hearing it from somewhere and repeats it without remembering where it came from.
Eventually the claim becomes detached from the original conversation altogether.
It just exists.
Everyone has heard it.
Everyone knows it.
It becomes part of the zeitgeist.
And that’s a strange thing to think about, because the original distortion may have been tiny.
Maybe the expert didn’t lie.
Maybe they didn’t even consciously exaggerate.
Maybe they were simply excited, talking quickly, sitting across from someone whose reaction mattered to them, and they oversold the certainty or extraordinariness of an idea by 5 percent.
But the 5 percent is exactly what made the clip interesting.
So the 5 percent survives.
The nuance dies.
The extraordinary part gets selected for, repeated, amplified, and eventually remembered as the underlying fact.
The quest for validation muddied the water at the source.
The internet bottled the muddy water and distributed it.
Now What Does the Expert Do?
There’s another problem once the embellished version escapes into the world.
Imagine you’re the expert.
You wake up the next morning and your comment is everywhere.
The clip has millions of views.
People are quoting you.
Articles are being written about it.
Maybe you watch it back and realize you went a little too far.
You didn’t exactly lie.
But you know the claim wasn’t as clean as you made it sound.
Maybe you overstated the certainty. Maybe the number wasn’t quite right. Maybe you left out a qualification that changes how the statement should be understood.
What do you do now?
One option is to go with it.
Your ego has a pretty strong argument available.
Millions of people just watched you sound incredibly interesting. People are talking about you. The clip is spreading. Maybe you’ve gained thousands of followers. Maybe suddenly you’re being invited onto other podcasts to tell the same story.
Correcting yourself means admitting that the thing everyone found so extraordinary wasn’t actually quite that extraordinary.
So maybe you tell the story again.
And because you’ve already told it publicly once, the embellished version now has its own gravity.
You defend it.
You become more committed to it.
You add another detail.
The next retelling gets a little cleaner and perhaps a little crazier.
What began as an accidental embellishment can slowly become a position you now feel obligated to defend.
The other option is to correct it.
You write a post.
You record a video on your own channel.
You explain that you misspoke, overstated something, or left out some context.
But there’s a distribution problem.
The correction isn’t as interesting as the mistake.
“Expert makes extraordinary claim” is compelling.
“Expert provides additional nuance and slightly adjusts previous statement” is considerably less exciting.
And your YouTube channel probably doesn’t have Joe Rogan’s reach.
So the original clip gets 15 million views.
The correction gets 40,000.
Technically, the record has been corrected.
Practically, millions of people still believe the original version.
The misinformation has a head start, a better headline, and a better distribution network.
That asymmetry makes conversational misinformation particularly difficult to unwind.
The Caution With Podcasts
I love podcasts.
I probably consume more information through podcasts than almost any other medium.
But the thing that makes podcasts great also creates this risk.
They’re conversations—and what makes a good conversation valuable can also make it less controlled.
People speak off the cuff. They interrupt each other. They chase interesting tangents. Someone asks a question the guest wasn’t expecting, and the guest answers in real time.
Even experts can misspeak under those conditions.
Being an expert doesn’t mean every sentence that leaves your mouth is a peer-reviewed statement of fact.
An expert can remember a number incorrectly.
They can accidentally use the wrong word.
They can overstate something.
They can forget a caveat.
They can make a comparison that sounds stronger than they intended.
They can also say something completely factual and still have the conversation push it somewhere they didn’t intend.
Suppose an expert says:
“This is one of the more unusual cases we’ve seen.”
The other person responds:
“So this basically never happens?”
The expert might say:
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Now watch what happened.
The original statement may have been perfectly accurate.
The embellishment happened through interpretation.
The listener wanted the claim to be more extraordinary, consciously or not, and the conversation nudged it in that direction.
Then the clipped takeaway becomes:
Expert says this basically never happens.
The expert technically said the words.
But those words may not accurately represent the expert’s considered position.
That kind of thing is much harder to do in a written paper, article, blog, or even a carefully prepared written statement.
Writing introduces friction.
You write something.
You read it again.
You realize the sentence is too strong.
You check the number.
You add the qualifier.
You notice that a reasonable reader could interpret your sentence in a way you didn’t intend.
So you rewrite it.
You might spend twenty minutes deciding whether the correct word is “rare,” “very rare,” or “almost unheard of.”
That sounds tedious.
It’s also part of what makes written communication valuable.
The delay between thought and publication gives truth a chance to settle.
A podcast doesn’t necessarily have that.
The thought can become public almost immediately after it enters the speaker’s mind.
And once it becomes public, the internet begins selecting the most interesting interpretation of it.
Not necessarily the most accurate one.
Sincerity Is Not the Same as Accuracy
We tend to divide information into two categories.
Truth or lie.
Honest person or dishonest person.
Reality is messier.
Someone can sincerely believe something that isn’t true.
Memory can distort it.
Ego can distort it.
Fear can distort it.
Group identity can distort it.
Political incentives can distort it.
Financial incentives can distort it.
And the desire for validation can distort it.
This gives us a better question to ask when we hear an extraordinary claim.
Instead of immediately asking:
“Is this person lying?”
I think it can be more useful to ask:
“What incentives are acting on this person while they tell me this?”
What do they gain if I believe them?
Do they want my approval?
Do they want status?
Do they want to belong?
Are they performing for an audience?
Would the less dramatic version of this story receive the same reaction?
Again, none of this proves dishonesty.
It simply recognizes that humans aren’t neutral recording devices.
Information passes through us before it reaches somebody else.
And we leave fingerprints on it.
Then Turn the Question Around
Of course, this becomes pretty useless if I only use it to question other people.
The much more uncomfortable application is turning it toward myself.
When I tell a story, am I telling it the way I originally remember it, or am I telling the version that has gotten the best reaction over the years?
Am I more certain today than I was when the event actually happened?
Do I emphasize the details that make me look smarter?
Braver?
Funnier?
More successful?
More victimized?
More interesting?
Have I removed inconvenient details because they make the story harder to tell?
Have I repeated an interpretation so many times that I now remember the interpretation as the event itself?
Those are difficult questions precisely because I probably won’t catch every instance.
If I knowingly exaggerated something, correction is fairly straightforward. I know where the distortion happened.
The subconscious version is harder.
I may genuinely believe I’m staring through perfectly clear water.
Validation Has an Epistemological Cost
Validation is usually treated as an emotional subject.
We talk about people seeking validation because they want to feel accepted, attractive, successful, intelligent, or important.
But there’s another consequence.
Validation can affect how we know what we think we know.
It can influence what we notice.
It can influence what we remember.
It can influence how we interpret an event.
It can change how certain we become.
And finally, it can influence how we communicate all of that to somebody else.
Then, on a large enough platform, something else can happen.
The distorted version can outlive the person who distorted it.
It can be clipped, repeated, quoted, summarized, reposted, and absorbed into public consciousness until nobody remembers where it originally came from.
At that point, we aren’t just dealing with one person’s slightly embellished story anymore.
We’re dealing with a piece of supposed knowledge.
Truth is still down there.
Validation isn’t necessarily poison being dumped into the water.
It’s us walking through it.
The harder we chase approval, admiration, attention, or belonging, the more sediment we risk kicking up from the bottom.
And when that muddy water flows into an audience of millions, the sediment doesn’t necessarily settle.
Sometimes it spreads.
That’s The Joe Rogan Effect.
Not Joe Rogan making people lie.
Not guests intentionally deceiving millions of people.
It’s what can happen when the quest for validation, an enormous platform, conversational spontaneity, interpretation, and the internet’s preference for extraordinary claims all meet in the same place.
A slightly embellished claim becomes the memorable part of the discussion.
The memorable part becomes the clip.
The clip becomes the takeaway.
The takeaway becomes the fact.
And if the person who originally said it later realizes they went too far, the truth now has to chase something far more interesting than itself.
Sometimes it never catches up.
