James Talarico

to those forces.

Who were the money changers?

We were talking earlier about religion being corrupted.

Folks who were going to the temple sometimes had to make sacrifices and part of that ritual.

And so the money changers were allowing them to participate in that temple economy and in the process getting rich off of those people.

This is, again, partly why we are so focused on trying to keep these traditions sacred, because in this case, the money changers are profiting off of people's search for the sacred.

And it's what we're called to challenge directly, just like Jesus did in the first century.

I just mentioned the billionaires who own the algorithms and the news networks.

They have created for-profit platforms with these predatory algorithms that divide us on an hourly, daily basis, dividing us by party, by race, by gender, by religion.

And they elevate the most extreme voices very strategically and

to provoke our outrage, to provoke our anger, because that leads to more clicks, which leads to more money for them.

Because anger sells, hate sells, fear sells.

These billionaires and their platforms are engineering our emotions so they can profit off of our pain.

They are selling us conflict and they're calling it connection.

It's almost like feeding someone empty calories.

And I think it's left people starving for actual community, for real relationship.

Well, and the business model depends on us leaving behind our real human relationships.

The biggest competitor to these platforms, to meta, is actually not TikTok.

It's not X. It's not Snapchat.

It is real human relationship.