It’s never been surprising to me why Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in the world. He has obviously worked on the skill of conversation–not easy amid all the preachiness and outrage of today. His pacing is good, people don’t talk over or past each other, and you get a sense of who each guest is as a human being. Every week he keeps millions of listeners engaged with episodes that are nearly half as long as the average audiobook.
But over the last year or two I witnessed, in real time, a tragic change in the mood of Joe Rogan’s podcast. His signature ability to host people with a variety of views, the very thing that made him interesting, has practically vanished from his show.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was heartened to see someone who I knew held different political views than those Rogan has been championing so vociferously in almost all his recent episodes. Great, I thought, Joe is finally getting out of his slump. But alas, in that one episode he avoided the subject of politics–and any opportunity to be challenged.
My takeaway is not so much that Rogan is a coward, but that few media personalities can withstand the terrible self-reinforcing feedback loop that goes with the enterprise. It traps them into telling their audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it. Audience capture is the neologism that describes this phenomenon–a term that, tellingly, has entered the parlance since the advent of podcasting.
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The Christian faith teaches us to pray and then say, “Praise God,” even if the answer is different from what we wanted. In the words of Daniel’s three friends, “God is able to save us but even if he doesn’t we will stay true to him” (Daniel 8:17-18).
As a practicing Christian, something about that teaching has always sat heavy with me because it can feel as if it lets God off the hook. But recently I heard something that brought clarity to the conundrum. A group of us from church watched a short presentation by Pete Greig. He believes God does answer prayer but that we all exist in a labyrinthine ecosystem of 3 W’s: World, War and Will.
World–Our world has to work a certain way for life to continue. Except for occasional miracles, God must remain true to the laws of nature or we would experience utter chaos. This affects how our prayers are answered.
War–Satan (original meaning: the accuser) works against God in individual situations, although Christians believe Satan will ultimately be defeated. This also affects how our prayers are answered.
Will–Despite our best intentions, our perspective is finite, and sometimes we are praying outside the will of God. Again, this affects how our prayers are answered.
While the 3 W’s don’t eliminate all the tension–tension is an integral part of faith–it reminds us that we do not exist in a vacuum. Each prayer we breathe is interrelated to countless parts of our lives, not to mention the lives of people around us.
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One of my personal goals is to be less judgmental and that people could feel mercy and acceptance from me. It occurred to me the other day that I often feel judgmental toward people because I feel indignant toward them. How can they do or think or say that, and I don’t! Sometimes, if we’re honest, we are judgmental because we secretly wish we were experiencing something of what they’re experiencing. If you think about it, a close relative of judgment is envy.
Of course, if the other party’s actions are truly wrong, the end results can never be attractive. Once we see things as they are, we either accept the merit of those we have been judging and join them, or we see the pain they are headed for. Either way our heart softens toward them. We certainly don’t get bent out of shape with any form of judgment, or of envy, which is its evil twin. Compassion and goodwill are the beautiful antidotes to judgment.