Pope Leo Does the Lord's Work in Taking on Our AI Overlords w/ Christopher Hale

0:00Hello and happy Friday from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. This is your Friday edition of The 1600. This country was stone cold dead. Today, gang, I think we're going to take a little bit of a pause in our discussion, our ongoing discussion about the politics of the moment, the Trump of everything. And we're going to take a trip back to May 1891. So come with me on this ride back in time here. Benjamin Harrison was the U.S. president, a teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts, which putting the finishing touches on a game that would come to be known as basketball.

0:33Let's go, Knicks. And in Rome, Pope Leo XIII was wrapping up Rerum Novarum, a revolutionary text about the Catholic Church's responsibility to the working class, which was, remember, at that moment, dealing with an incredible amount of tumult, both here and just around the world. It was the middle of what would become known as the Second Industrial Revolution, the steam engine, the expansion of rail networks, the telegraph, gas, water lines, sewer lines, all of these innovations that we now take for granted were really coming in, being born, essentially, in those few years back then. Rerum Novarum, or of new things is the translation, was essentially about the dignity of labor in the face of all that, in the face of all of this extreme technological change.

1:17And it really preceded the workers' rights movement, fair labor standards, the minimum wage, it was that important, it was that influential. And it is, of course, considered the foundational text of modern Catholic social teaching. So fast forward to today, and another Pope Leo, this time Leo XIV, just dropped another landmark text that he's calling Magnifica Humanitas, sorry, my Latin's not great, or Magnificent Humanity. And it's about the responsibilities of the Church and humanity for this new industrial revolution that we are all living through, at least living through the early stages of, I'm talking, of course, about the rise of artificial general intelligence.

1:55So the encyclical that Pope Leo just put out, it's dense. It's a heavy read. It's about 50 ,000 words, but it's an important one to sit with, whether you're Catholic or not, whether you're just interested in this stuff. And to help me wade through it today is our friend of the show, Christopher Hale, joining us from the Letters from Leo Substack. Christopher, welcome back, man. Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here. It's great to see you in the flesh. Thank you for dressing up. If you're not watching, Chris is wearing a suit like a professional. I am dressed in a— I'm honoring, you know, Lower Manhattan, Wall Street, the World Trade Center, so I do my best.

2:28I'm wearing a 30-year-old Knicks t-shirt and khakis that are stained. That's also honoring the city, too. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, Christopher, we have a lot to get to. This is a fascinating topic. I've been thinking about it all week since the Pope dropped this thing on Monday. Let's start basic. What is an encyclical? What is a papal encyclical? And how often do popes put these things out? Sure. So a encyclical is really the second highest form of Catholic teaching. The one being above it is papal bull. Papal bulls happen once every few centuries. So an encyclical is like the ordinarily the highest teaching that a pope has.

3:02They kind of, I would say, state of the union is a little bit off because they don't really happen once every year. They happen once every three or four years. Maybe better to describe like an inaugural address of sorts. During Francis' 13-year pontificate, there was really four of them. He did a big climate change one. That's the one I remember. He did. And that was in 2015. And I think that's actually the most recent example of a papal encyclical kind of going into the American consciousness, the media consciousness. But what the word encyclical means is literally to encycle, to go around the world.

3:33So it's supposed to go to every bishop, every Catholic, and actually every person. So it's not just addressed to Catholics, but to all people. And so they usually address issues at a time regarding faith, moral, or the social issues. During the last two pontificates, we're really hitting on social issues in particular. And Leo XIV, as you very well introduced, I had no idea that Benjamin Harrison was the president during the first one. R.I.P. Benjamin Harrison, great president. I don't know, actually. I'm not sure. I need to read like a Meachum biography of him. But it was an attempt. Leo XIV basically says that in this encyclical, and he said from the get-go of his pontificate that AI was going to be his first issue at that.

4:15It takes it head-on, but as you kind of alluded to, it really hits beyond AI. And Rero Navarro was about capital and labor and the Industrial Revolution, but it hit on it so many things more. And so it is a dense read. I think a lot of critics might have a good argument that these documents that have more bang for their buck perhaps should be a little bit smaller. In fact, Rural Navarro was about a fifth of the size of this document. I didn't realize that. Yes. Interesting. Okay, well, we're going to get to the criticisms in a little bit. There have been some, and they're interesting. But one thing I was just thinking about in thinking back to Leo XIII back then during the Industrial Revolution, he was writing really at the end of that, right, 1891.

4:56Like the steam engine had been around for 20, 30 years at that point. You know, he was coming out of something. Leo XIV is writing this at the very beginning of whatever this is. Nobody even knows. He doesn't even know, right? That's a very important part of this. Nobody knows what this AI revolution is really going to look like. And I think, you know, even if you're the pope, you're going to struggle with articulating and predicting the contours of whatever this thing is that's coming. He doesn't have the benefit of hindsight that his namesake did, right? No, and I think the Catholic Church, we are not known as the most on-top-of-it institution.

5:30And really, going through the modern—so, as you said, the Catholic social teaching really is birthplace since 1891. Since then, you don't really see evidence of an encyclical being on the cutting edge of something, preceding something, at least to date. So 1891, as you said, was a little bit late. Bennett XVI wrote about the financial crisis in 2009, really 18 months after it happened. Francis writes a lot of those on climate change that had really been a top tier issue in American politics for over two decades at that point. So this is really the first example of being on the cutting edge, which opens yourself up to more critique.

6:03And I'll be interested in seeing what it looks like in five or 10 years. But I think Leo, he's always been on the cutting edge of some degree. We forget. We don't know. But Leo is the first pope to have a cell phone. Sure. Yeah. He's the first pope. He's not a Luddite. Francis was a Luddite. Yeah. I mean, Francis was born in 1936. by the time he was 77 years old when he was like the Pope. So he did things the old-fashioned way. He was modern in many ways, but not in technology. And so you're absolutely right. He's not a Luddite. And I think that what you see in this is a lot of people expected what's called the butlery and jihad.

6:36I don't know if that phrase is familiar with it. It's a fictional phrase. And a lot of Catholics on the right really wanted a total jihad, a holy war against AI. And you didn't see that here. You really saw the middle way. Now, Silicon Valley is going to read it as a critique of criticism, rightly so. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about the accelerationist, accelerationist approach. But really, I saw it as a middle way. He acknowledges the inevitability of artificial intelligence. He wants to help use the church, use institutions to really guide where it's going. Right. And again, we're going to get into the criticism and all of this.

7:12But what he starts with is this image of the Tower of Babel. So for those of us, myself included, who are a little bit rusty on our theology, talk a little bit, what was the Tower of Babel in the Hebrew Bible, and why do you think he chose to peg his encyclical, his first encyclical, to this metaphor? Absolutely. So it was basically a project, a construction project of sorts, similar to the World Trade Center in some capacity. It was to ascend to the heavens. Right. It was to ascend to the heavens, and the project became plagued, if you will, by fighting and fighting. There was competitive languages at play, and it becomes a tower of Babel, if you will.

7:51It falls on top of itself. So God, if you will, does not bless the activity, and it becomes a conglomeration of errors and really an absurdity of sorts. And so in Christian theology, in Christian and Jewish theology, it kind of represents a project that is done on your own auspices. It's a grand scheme, but it's not in compliance, if you will, with God's will. And so I think a lot of people found that to be a very articulate understanding of what an LLM is at its worst. A good way to understand it is it's an LLM at its worst hallucinations. Right. Okay. I think that's very helpful. So one of the lines that Leo said as he unveiled this in Vatican City on Monday was— and this is sort of the headline that's been going around—is this thing he said about AI needing to be disarmed.

8:39Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences and indicating paths forward for humanity. First of all, it will never not be weird to hear a pope with a Chicago accent. I mean, awesome. Weird in an awesome way. So, I mean, I read that as him essentially calling for regulation of these AI companies and saying, you know, when we invented the nuclear bomb, like we didn't just let any Joe Schmo have access to the technology that split the atom. Is that sort of how you read the disarm quote?

9:21Yes, I think it was that phrase. If you follow Leo XIV, the first time he shows up on the balcony of St. Peter's, he says that we need an unarmed, so let's do the visual for a second, an unarmed, so I am not armed, and a disarming, so I take away your weapon, peace. And so he associates disarmament with a peace, but it's the totality of visions. He talks about a disarm economics, a disarm technology. So he views it as taking away the tools, if you will, that can cause damage. Now, I think that the reality of it is a lot of people on the right don't want to hear this, but that's really, I think, is calling for regulation.

9:58I talked to my Vatican sources, and one of the things that really struck them in writing this document was the Paris Summit in 2025, February 2025, about AI regulation. J.D. Vance famously goes to it. Oh, yeah. And he says, we need to talk less about guardrails and more about innovation. And really, this document says, no, let's talk about guardrails. Let's talk about displacement. Let's put these up front and center. Interesting. And I want to get back to Vance because he's actually come out and been, you know, him and Leo have had their differences, I guess would be a nice way of putting it.

10:30And he's actually come out and been relatively supportive of this, unlike some of his colleagues. You know, again, it's sort of like high level here. the way that I'm reading this encyclical is here you have a 2 ,000-year-old institution that is basically challenging these masters of the universe in Silicon Valley to do better, to do better for us, for all of humanity, and that we as human beings have this sort of like responsibility to use this power before us, before it subsumes us, and that we may not have all the answers. In fact, he basically says we don't have all the answers, but the church does have a pretty robust history at thinking around these ideas of what it means to be human.

11:15Does that sound fair to you? Absolutely. I think that this document was really put at three communities. I'll kind of go through them one by one. It was put at government. It was put at Washington. It was put at Brussels. It was put at governments asking them to get involved in regulation. I think the fact that we're here in the World Trade Center is actually a very good embodiment. It was really looked for leaders of business and industry. I think it's always remarkable when you fly into New York City and you're going into LaGuardia, you come up the East River and you see Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center, in many ways, the total arc of the American story.

11:49Beautiful. And I think that he looks at the people in the skyscrapers and says that you have a tremendous responsibility no matter what government tells you or not, and we'll talk maybe a little bit, that's really why Christopher Ola himself was there. Pope Leo thought his actions in February, Anthropics actions in February, under pressure from the Pentagon, were heroic in a way. But he's also talking to you and me. He wants us as consumers to start taking our own protocols, our own actions. He says that he wants us to spend less time on our phones. Taking a line from Pope Francis, he talks about, we need to learn the art of wasting time again.

12:26He wants us to waste time with our children, waste time with our families, waste time with strangers. He's concerned about an over-measurement of every moment. And he wants us to have like a solitude, a sense of being present, if you will, in every day. Yeah, which has become so hard. I mean, I even see it in myself. It's just like you forget those little, you know, when you're faced now with those little moments that used to be called boredom, right? Sure. Whether it's like waiting for the train or, you know, waiting for an elevator or just like everything, all these little moments in your life, you now, you just reflexively find yourself doing this, right?

12:58Everybody does it. Everybody does it. It's nobody's fault. I mean, it's the fault of the technology, right? And how these things are designed. And I think that's a really good point. So you mentioned this guy from Anthropic that was there I'm going to ask you about, but one person who was not there was Sam Altman, or I don't think anybody from OpenAI. Now, I think one of the reasons why Sam Altman wasn't there, if I had to guess, would be that he is crazy. I don't know. Maybe that's not fair to him. But I do want to play this clip. This is Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, recently talking about intelligence as a utility to be metered.

13:34I think this is relevant to our conversation here. Fundamentally, our business, and I think the business of every other model provider, is going to look like selling tokens. They may come from bigger or smaller models, which makes them more or less expensive. They may use more or less reasoning, which also makes them more or less expensive. They may be running all the time in the background trying to help you out. They may run only when you need them if you want to pay less. They may work super hard, you know, spend tens of millions, hundreds of millions, someday billions of dollars on a single problem.

14:07It's really valuable. But we see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for. Intelligence as a utility to be metered. This is what Leo is talking about, if you ask me. These companies, just think about what he just said there. This is a company – and I'm very passionate about this partially because I am at the center of it. I mean these companies are frankly destroying the news business and the media business real large. You're talking about a company that takes all of human wisdom, everything written by humans, copyright be damned.

14:51It doesn't matter who wrote it. We're going to feed it into this machine. And now they want to meter what it spits back out at us even though what it's spitting back out at us is ours. It's our content. It's our thoughts. It's our creativity. It's our intelligence. It's like it really drives me crazy. But I think that it's notable that Altman wasn't there. The other thing, Christopher, sorry, I don't want to just go on a tangent, you know, ripping on some of these AI guys. They make it so easy, but it's not fair. It's not fair to them. And it's not what we're here to do. Again, thinking it's sort of like the thirty five hundred, you know, thirty five thousand foot view of this.

15:28It's really more the encyclical when you look at it as a fully formed thing. It's more than just about AI. It's really about digital technology writ large, right? I mean, there's stuff in here about data privacy, social media age limits. He mentions the danger of all this power being concentrated in a few companies, right? It's not just AI. It's kind of a broadside against the tech panopticon as an industry. And I think that what you just played there from Sam Altman, he said that the day after the encyclical was released. And so it struck me as either he didn't listen or did not care. And I think it was truly that clip is exactly what Pope Leo XIV is talking about and what he's fighting against.

16:14Step back for a second from a theological level. Your listeners, your readers might not know about what original sin is. but original sin in the Garden of Eden is basically where Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan, by the snake, to basically be as powerful as God, to take God's place. Leo XIV is pretty clear. That is the original sin of Silicon Valley. Intelligence is not owned by private companies. It's a gift of creation. It's available to all. It should not be something that's— It's a human right. It's a human right. Absolutely. And I think that what strikes me is the fact that you could—the idea that you could commodify it, that you could make it as something that is sellable.

16:54But also striking is it's not even a public utility is the way they say it. It's a private utility. That's a great point. It's not water. It's cable. Yeah. No, that's a really good point. I guess the question is—and you're talking about how Altman's saying this right after this. Leo just drops this profound treatise on this stuff. The obvious follow-up is, how much influence does the Pope actually have in our secular Western world? I mean, I guess that is sort of the question, right? Because he can speak to the 1.4 billion Catholics and all of us who do take his words very seriously, and also people who are not religious who take him as the Bishop of Rome to be a very serious thinker.

17:32People like this don't care. Sure. Let me still man him for a second. I think the best argument he has is when Peter Thiel—we can talk maybe a little bit about him— When Sam Altman, when Silicon Valley imagines working with a leader, they exist on a currency where people can be bought. Yeah. They can be indicted. Right. They can be tariffed upon. They can be deported. They can be voted out of office, impeached, et cetera. They have never dealt with someone who is answerable truly to no person on this planet. As Catholics, we believe he's answerable only to God. And the Pope, just to clarify, cannot be removed from office.

18:10Yeah. You cannot take him out of office. No one can vote on him. He cannot be impeached. And so I think that his greatest strength is that. And I think what Silicon Valley is hoping for is that they can outlast him and they can outlast his message. I think that is naive. Here's what I find fascinating. Me and Matt Walsh don't agree on much. He's a famous right-wing commentator with Daily Wire, a Catholic. Michael Knoll is a good example as well. Nick Flentes as well. I'm on the left of the Catholic Church. We're all unified about this. And so I think that there's a unification around this issue that does not exist on almost any other issue that Catholic Church faces.

18:49Pope Peter XIV, his motto, his papal motto is, And so that's another Latin, but that means, in the one, we are one. He's very concerned about starting his papacy, his pontificate, with issues that unify the Church. And this is something that I think unifies the Church. So if me and Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, and as much as I have to say as Nick, when does I have anything to say with it, you know, his message will resonate. I think that's absolutely right. And it's also true among secular people. Because I know plenty of people who, you know, probably couldn't care less what the Pope says, frankly, but they understand what's happening now as sort of becoming the issue of our time and that all of this wealth and all of this power accumulating among, you know, a handful of companies, a handful of people who are answerable to really no one except themselves and I guess their shareholders.

19:36It's just not what we want as a country, right? Right. And, you know, add to that, we have an administration that is in sort of a, you know, let it rip, you know, point of view on the stuff. Right. Like there's not we're not getting any regulation on this from the Trump administration. And what strikes me is you've got to imagine what kind of mindset does one have as a political animal. So let alone he thought the idea. Sam Altman thought the idea. But number two, he spoke it. Yeah. And so that stressed to me that he is not afraid of politics or political consequences. I think if Pope Leo XIV is successful, the populist skeptics, the middle of the country that are fighting against data centers, the media, folks who are skeptical, I hope what he has provided them is a moral grammar to operate upon.

20:22Because I think we oftentimes talk about these in very policy-driven ways. And he just talks about it in just straight morality. And really, as you said, like a lot of his document precedes religion. It is a universal moral language that you can be a secularist, you can be atheist, you can be non-Christian. I think you find value in it. So I think he's trying. I think he's trying specifically to give voice to these communities and give them a language, a universal language to operate upon. So let me put it this way. I think that if he's successful, it's because he is going to help mobilize a populist movement.

20:54Interesting. You know, there's been all this talk that I'm sure you've seen this. This is your beat that Leo, you know, came out of the conclave, was chosen in the conclave, at least in part because the Cardinals wanted somebody who at least understood Trump as a person and also just as a movement. And, of course, he could do that because he's an American. I don't know how true that is. I mean, you probably know better than me. Maybe there's some truth to it. I think that, so I thought it was BS on May 8, 2025. I thought it was BAS on December 1, 2025. I'm growing more open to the idea. I think that what he has done so well is I think he has countered Trump in a way that, once again, Trump does not understand.

21:32Trump talks about him like he is a Democratic Senate candidate from Iowa. He doesn't understand this office. He doesn't understand the papacy. And what Leo does, and going back to the Bible again, he does what Jesus talks about in the Gospel of St. Matthew, where he says, turn the other cheek. And that phrase is oftentimes misappropriate. People think it means to just sit down and take it. But if you actually look at the origin of the story, turning the other cheek is about fighting non-hand-to-hand to basically be evasive, creative. He doesn't talk about Trump, but he clearly is opposing Trump.

22:05He's a very docile. He's very strategic. he's a very savvy operator. And I think that's what makes him powerful. It's becoming clear. And I think I remember Francis, a lot of people didn't really understand at the beginning how savvy he was as an operator. And I think you're seeing a lot of that with Leo too. But I think that, you know, for me at least, the reason why it's just such a blessing that we have an American pope right now, putting Trump aside, because Trump's going to be gone in a couple of years, Leo, God willing, will be around for a while. He understands because he is American that our country is run by sociopathic billionaires.

22:37And these ones in particular have God complexes. And that's a bad combination. It absolutely is. And I think you're absolutely right on the God complex. And I think that that is something that is underappreciated. I'll give you an example. So Peter Thiel does these anti-Christ lectures all throughout the fall in San Francisco and then in the spring in Rome. And so The Guardian wrote about this. And The Guardian kind of buries the lead. like the Guardian like kind of like let off with you know oh Peter Thiel thinks that Greta Thunberg's the Antichrist but hidden within it and was that basically he said that he was afraid of a woke American pope his words um creating Francis the woke pope too is every pope woke now it's yeah go ahead no and I think that I think that what what what Thiel said I think that was this was under appreciated is he said that he told J.D.

23:27Vance um who obviously he financed his career he was the first job and his Senate campaign all the way up to the vice presidency, he told J.D. Vance to ignore the Pope on moral matters, including AI, and to just pray for him. And I think that what strikes me is that they understand that there is a moral competition at play, and they view the Bishop of Rome as a threat. And so I think that what you see in Peter Thiel, you see this quasi - Christianity, but here's the original sin. They do not think that there is a Savior, a Messiah, that's outside of themselves. They write themselves as the Messiah of the story.

24:02Right. No, they believe that they are God and they believe they are building God in the machine. Correct. And the Pope is here to check them on that. And I'm so thankful that he is, frankly. Amen, yeah. Amen. So you mentioned this guy, Chris Ola. I want to also play a clip on him. So this, I don't, I actually didn't know him. He's a co-founder of Anthropic, which is the other one of these big AI labs. This one is known as sort of like the quote unquote good guys. You mentioned how they were in this fight with – they're still in this fight with the Pentagon and Pete Hegseth over – he designated Claude, their big LLM, as a supply chain risk basically because they said, no, we actually don't want the Pentagon to use this – our technology to just autonomously kill people with no human oversight.

24:45God forbid, right? That was too much for our bloodthirsty administration. So this guy Ola is here on the dais with the pope. Let me just play a little bit of what he had to say. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models. What is actually happening inside them? And I will be honest. We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that, functionally, mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don't know what that means.