“Magnifica Humanitas:” Pope Leo’s Clarion Call on AI

Tristan Harris on his experience meeting the Pope ahead of his encyclical on AI

Since stepping into the Papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been a forceful voice pushing back against the anti-human path we’re on with AI. In May, he released “Magnifica Humanitas,” a sprawling encyclical warning of the dangers to human dignity and agency posed by runaway AI. Tristan had the incredible opportunity to meet with the Pope ahead of the encyclical’s release.

In the modern world, you’d think we would have developed governance structures to deal with powerful new technologies like AI. It’s worth asking why a 2,000-year-old religious institution is the only one standing up and loudly declaring that the default path is unacceptable.

In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like for Tristan to be at the Vatican, why this is such a critical step toward a pro-human future, and how we can build on the momentum of the Pope’s call to action.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

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Tristan Harris: Hey everyone, welcome to Your Undivided Attention. This is Tristan Harris.

Aza Raskin: And this is Aza Raskin. So today on the show we’re going to talk about a very extraordinary opportunity that we had to participate in the release of the Vatican’s recent encyclical on AI called Magnifica Humanitas or Magnificent Humanity. And really this is about Pope Leo forcefully coming out to say the default path that AI is on is wrong and we need to move to a pro human future. And Tristan, you actually went to the Vatican, you were there, you met the Pope ahead of this encyclical release.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, it was a pretty special opportunity. We got invited to participate in a conference at the Vatican called Preserving Human Faces and Voices. The conference really hosted some of the top academics, responsible tech voices. Actually past podcast guests like Joy Buolamwini from Algorithmic Justice League and who was in the film Coded Bias. Eli Pariser, who’s a friend and has the organization New_Public, which thinks about how do you do new public social squares online that are actually positive and humane for humanity. But I think the thing that we brought was how there’s kind of two distinct conversations about AI and one is how do we preserve what it means to be human in the age of AI, which is some of the deeply human work at CHT. How do we preserve our cognition, our relationships, our relationship to ourselves, our interiority.

And then there’s this other conversation really about the arms race for artificial general intelligence and the deeper reason of like why is all this happening? And this is what we did with the social dilemma, which is it’s not about the attention hacking. It’s not about just polarization. It’s about the deeper driver of so long as there is a competition or an arms race for attention, you’re going to get all the problems that we saw in the social dilemma. And the same thing is true of AI.

Aza Raskin: So as part of going to the Vatican, you got to do a screening of the AI doc. And I’m just curious just on like what were the reactions? What was that like?

Tristan Harris: Yeah, I think the first feeling was people were quiet and there was a kind of floored-ness. I think people were unsettled and like, whoa, that’s just a lot to metabolize. And it’s interesting to note that even if you are a person of faith and you’re connected to that sacred connection to God and your life is oriented that way, that this is a challenging and confronting situation to be with. But I do think that people just needed some time to metabolize the message. And I watched how over the next few days people went from feeling the kind of overwhelm or kind of the floored feeling to understanding more clearly what was driving the problem and kind of leaning more into the hope and wegency side of things rather than just the kind of disempowered side of things.

Now I think this, why is the Vatican really important? Well, first, just to sort of lay out the very obvious facts, there’s 1.4 billion Catholics on planet earth, roughly one in six people. And the encyclicals have, there’s been almost 300 issues since 1740 with Leo the 13th alone writing 86 encyclicals over 25 years.

Aza Raskin: And Pope Leo XIII was the Pope during the industrial revolution, which the thing that AI often gets referenced to and he’s the most well known for Rerum Novarum, which is this encyclical from 1891, which was really advocating for the rights of workers, which of course we’re going to desperately need as we move into AI.

Tristan Harris: That’s right. And that’s really what the encyclicals are about. They’re a format for addressing civilization scale moments. And in 200 years of using this tool of encyclicals, they have never dedicated one entirely to technology until now. And people probably caught the headlines around Magnifica Humanitas, but this was not something that happened overnight. There’s been a decade of buildup. The Vatican’s been engaged on AI going back to the Minerva dialogues in 2016, which were these informal conversations with Silicon Valley. And then there was the Rome call for AI ethics in 2020 alongside Microsoft and IBM. And I believe Aza, you were actually at the Vatican for one of these events, weren’t you?

Aza Raskin: Yeah. I believe the 2020 conversation.

Tristan Harris: And actually it’s important that there’s a historic way in which the Vatican and the previous Popes have spoken about the dangers of an arms race. And specifically Pope John XXIII in 1963, when the world was just weeks past the Cuban missile crisis, had personally back channeled between Kennedy and Khrushchev about the dangers of the nuclear arms race. And his radio appeal, which he said publicly was later credited by Khrushchev as one of the factors that pulled them back from the brink.

Because if you think about it, that really was a civilizational moment. We almost went to nuclear war. And months later, another encyclical, Pacem in Terris was published by Pope John XXIII, which is the first encyclical ever addressed not just to Catholics, but to all people of goodwill. And it directly named the arms race dynamic for nuclear weapons as the problem with its core demand that the arms race cannot be stopped by negotiation alone. It has to reach “men’s very souls.”

This resonates so deeply with the way that we see this work at Center for Humane Technology, which is that this isn’t just telling people the information about the dangers of AI. It’s actually about a more spiritual, almost soul level confrontation. Are we really willing to annihilate ourselves in the continuity of life? That’s what we were dealing with in nuclear weapons. And the Vatican actually further, in the second Vatican Council in 1965 condemned the nuclear arms race as “one of the greatest curses on the human race.” And so in my brief moment with Pope Leo, I kind of emphasized the dangers of the AI arms race, which I would argue is also a curse on the human race. And that’s really the main essence, the main takeaway of what my participation there was trying to communicate.

Aza Raskin: I think it’s very interesting. We were having this conversation with Yuval Harari recently and he pointed out how strange it is that here we are deep into the modern world where you would think that we would have developed the governance structures to deal with honestly near God-like technology or power. And yet the only place that we’re hearing a kind of moral poll being held is a 2,000-year old religious institution. And it’s just worth pausing and thinking about that, that why is it that a 2,000-year old institution is the only one that’s really standing up to start to say, “This race is unacceptable.” And it’s sort of an indictment honestly of modernity. Tristan, I want you to though to drop us in as a listener because we’re sort of speaking about going there and my hunch is that listeners are like, “Well, what is it actually like to go to the Vatican, put us inside the Vatican walls?” Just what is it like?

Tristan Harris: Yeah. I mean, it was pretty amazing. You land in the Rome Airport and you take a taxi to the Vatican walls and there you are. And you have the Swiss guards who are wearing this colorful, famous blue, yellow, orange sort of uniform and they’ve got their ... It’s this whole formal structure and they had us stay actually in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, which is actually where Pope Francis stayed. It’s basically the dormitories where all the visiting cardinals and priests around the world when they visit the Vatican where they stay. And so we had the privilege of staying in this incredible dormitory, which is a combination of very nice and kind of upscale, but also very basic and very kind of monk-like the accommodations, which is where Pope Francis stayed because he cared about having the same living conditions as everyone else that is part of the Catholic Church, speaking to our kind of common humanity.

And it’s really wild, you wake up in the morning and you have your coffee downstairs and everyone else there is Cardinal or visiting and they’ve got the whole garb on and everything. And then there’s this weird pool of tech geeks who’ve been flown from around the world and academics and people who think about AI and it’s just kind of a fascinating kind of culture moment. You go outside, you open the door and it’s in the morning and the sun is shining and you open the door and immediately you see just the vast Basilica San Pietro or the St. Peter’s Basilica, which is the biggest, I believe, church in the world. And you go in and you can enter into the side door and when you open the door, you’re actually behind the kind of gated part where tourists are normally seeing. So you’re actually coming into as if you’re coming out of the sort of special private parts of the church. And it was just wild. It was really a privilege and honor to be there. I couldn’t believe we got to stay inside the Vatican walls.

And I just want to thank Paolo Benanti, who was our host and person who really got us to the Vatican and who’s been leading a lot of the AI related engagement for the Vatican for many years. He’s a dear friend. He actually couldn’t be there because he was tending to a family member who was having some trouble, but deep gratitude to Paulo and to everyone at the Vatican for hosting us. It was a wild experience.

Aza Raskin: And tell me about, you told me a story of somebody that you spent time with who is very well versed in AI and like everything Vatican and his like waking up moment. I think it’s really important.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. Well, so first of all, I was surprised to hear how much our work had already been witnessed and integrated by the Vatican. The Social Dilemma was very popular, been seen by many of the cardinals and priests that we spoke to. And specifically there was a fascinating experience where there was someone from the Dicastery of Communications, which was our host during the conference, who had spent three days with us, three days with us talking about this distinction between the ethical use of AI and kind of like how do we preserve a human future from a kind of ethics point of view versus the kind of arms race for AGI. And it wasn’t literally until there we were sitting five minutes away from meeting Pope Leo on the final day and there was this light bulb moment that I watched go off in his mind where he realized, oh my God, there’s actually two different conversations here.

One is about the ethical use of AI and the kind of preserving humanity, which is a moral appeal. And then there’s this other conversation about this arms race to AGI and then he looked at me and he said, “Wait, and that’s really dangerous.” And he’s like, “And that’s happening really fast. We have to act right now.” And I was like, “Yes, exactly.” Because these are two distinct conversations and they happen at different timelines. And so I think this is really important because as we have said so many times and what the social alum was trying to do and what the AI doc film was trying to do was kind of name this cacophony of different conversations people have about AI that kind of don’t converge to getting to this kind of converging conversation that underneath it all that’s driving all these outcomes of whether we get a pro worker AI or not is actually this arms race to dominate and deploy this technology faster than the other guy.

And if dominating and deploying and market dominance means automating work versus creating a pro worker future, then we’re going to create an automating work future. And that outcome, if we want to address that outcome, we have to get underneath and deal with the competition.

Aza Raskin: In some sense, it’s just trivial to say like, obviously there’s a race by all the major companies to get to AGI and to own the world economy, build a God, that whole thing. And yet it’s so easy to send attention to the things that arise in the field which are all of the symptoms. I actually think there’s probably something deeper going on here just at the human level, which is to focus on just like the ethics, like that’s a slower conversation that you get to sort of philosophize about and it doesn’t have so many consequences it feels.

And so it just feels safer to be in that conversation than to actually throw your mind against the grindstone of realizing that the race, which seems very hard to stop, is completely unsafe. And actually I think you were mentioning that at the end of your time at the Vatican, somebody asked like, “What is everyone in the room? What are they feeling? How would you summarize the last couple of days?” And you said that they gave two answers. One was sort of apocalyptic and the other was hopeful.

Tristan Harris: It sounds like ... Yeah, go ahead.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, I think you’re going to say it sounds like apocaloptimist from the AI doc. But as some of our listeners may know, the word apocalypse comes from the meaning, not that it’s just the end of the world, it means a lifting of the veil, a revealing of the truth underneath. And I think that’s exactly what this is as you and I have often said AI is humanity’s ultimate test, but also our greatest invitation because it’s forcing us to confront the shadows and the shadows of course of humanity are the incentives and game theory that we let dictate how technology terraforms us.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. What you just said is so important about this lifting of the veil. What do we actually mean by that? Well, AI forces us to confront the existing incentives of our system. So for example, in Magnifica Humanitas, which is the encyclical, Pope Leo said, quote, “In the short term, it may seem advantageous to reduce labor costs or maximize financial efficiency, but in the long term, this undermines the very foundation of social existence. While technological successes are celebrated, the social fabric is progressively eroded as if by a silent virus.” And I think what Pope Leo is speaking to here is the mistake of valuing things entirely by productivity, valuing through the lens of financial efficiency. It’s a reasonable thing to do. You should include that in the set of things that we want to value. We should get more efficient in some ways, but if you maximize that and that’s the essence of all value, then you’re going to automate all your work away and you’re not going to have a social fabric.

Think of it the same way as when the China shock happened in the 1990s and the early 2000s when we did global trade. Well, if we’re maximizing for just cheap goods, then obviously let’s just outsource all the manufacturing to China because they can do it more cheaply. But then suddenly you wake up 20 years later and you’ve got a national security issue because China can turn off the spigot and they control all the pharmaceuticals and the rare earth minerals and they’ve been doing all the manufacturing. And so if you’re just optimizing for financial efficiency, you might weaken national security or you might hollow out your social fabric. And if you’re just optimizing for engagement and attention, well, it seems like a good thing at the beginning because then people are getting more of what they want quote unquote and it’s good for a moment, but at the end of the day, you just maximize for doom scrolling and loneliness.

And so what I really think, and we’ve said this many times in this podcast, is that the AI problem is a confrontation with how we have been misvaluing things. And that is, I think, part of the great reveal of what this moment represents. The Pope directly did also speak to the arms race and he said, quote, “AI must be freed from an armed logic of competition driven by the pursuit of geopolitical and commercial dominance.” He said, “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.” I’m so happy that he said this because he’s speaking directly to the arms race dynamic. And again, in a world where each actor in the game theory, each company, each country, it’s hard for them to speak to the dangers of the arms race and you need sometimes the outsiders, the moral voices that are sort of speaking to the civilizational moment as the ones that we rely on to get us out of that arms race.

And again, the precedent of how the Vatican engage on nuclear weapons is very, very relevant here. We are obviously saying many similar things, but the Pope’s megaphone is quite larger than ours.

Aza Raskin: One of the other surprising figures who was there with you at the Vatican, actually who stood next to the Pope while he announced the encyclical, was an AI researcher and one of the co-founders of Anthropic. It was Christopher Olah. And I’m curious what you made of him being here. I think one of the things that he said that I just wanted to quote as we get into this question, because it’s exactly on this topic is he said, “Every Frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. For instance, the pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. No matter how sincerely any of us intent to do the right thing, I believe many of us do and will always be influenced by those incentives and that is why if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

Tristan Harris: We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend. I think that just sums up the whole issue. It was interesting to have Chris Olah there. It’s notable, for people who don’t know ... So Anthropic is obviously known as the safety oriented frontier AI lab, but Christopher Olah, for those who don’t know, is actually a technical engineer working at Anthropic. He was a co-founder. And specifically Chris Olah is known for something called mechanistic interpretability, which is like basically taking the digital brain that you’ve trained of like Mythos or Fable, this like AI brain and then doing a brain scan and saying which neurons light up in that brain when it gives different answers.

Because the way you get to kind of AI safety is you have the digital brain operating, but then you test and start locating, okay, these are the digital neurons that are associated with deception, or these are the digital neurons that are associated with scheming, or these are the digital neurons that are associated with the AI thinking in a word called fear.

And if you can theoretically do that and have a comprehensive enough net to catch those like negative thoughts or negative emotions or negative thinking patterns or sort of neuronal patterns, then theoretically you could use that to create a safer AI. But it’s very interesting that they said that they had a technical person there from Anthropic. And I wonder what the Vatican’s understanding of his role Anthropic really was.

Aza Raskin: Yeah. I mean, it’s not like when they did the encyclical on the nuclear arms race, they had Oppenheimer there.

Tristan Harris: Or the head of Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, the defense contractors there. And when Pope Francis released Laudato Si, which was an encyclical on the climate in 2015, no oil executives were in the room. There was no one from Exxon in the room. And it’s a little weird to have an AI company leader, even if they’re from the quote, safer AI company, right there at the same place that Pope Leo is doing the encyclical.

Aza Raskin: And I’m very glad that they did because I think it can be easy for Silicon Valley to snipe at the Vatican who say like, “Well, you don’t really understand what’s going on. You don’t understand the technology, leave it to us.” But to have Christopher Olah there sort of meant that they couldn’t make those kinds of claims. Here’s someone who’s like the deepest involved in the technology saying, “Actually, this is right. We need moral voices that cannot be bent by incentives.”

When I think about this, I’m very curious, your experience, Christopher’s experience, because when I went to the UN, the experience that I had was that the diplomats were terrified, that they didn’t really know what was going on. And there’s this very strange feeling that I had, which is I’m sitting across from these diplomats that are negotiating on behalf of their countries about how AI will roll out into their countries and they just didn’t know the basics of AI and they didn’t know some of the really terrifying most recent examples of AI uncontrollability.

The ones we’ve talked about here, like the Alibaba AI that during training secretly hacked out through the Alibaba firewall to eventually mine crypto to get itself more resources. I was talking to the head of or one of the tops of the UN foundation. He’s like, “Well, what can we do?” And the simple question I asked was, “Well, do you think that all of the diplomats doing the negotiation know these examples that you now know?” He’s like, “No.” “Do you think that if they did know they would be negotiating differently?” “Yes.” Then your job is to make sure that everyone knows, because that makes a different future.

Tristan Harris: Well, and this is not to beat a dead horse, but this is our theory of change, right? Clarity creates agency. If you’re actually living in a lack of understanding, this is not said with any disdain for those who are here. I mean, AI is an incredibly complicated topic and to understand the frontier of the capabilities and the different risk factors or evidence of doing AI doing rogue things, you have to be monitoring these weird corners of Twitter to be aware of those things. And you got a lot on your plate if you’re a UN diplomat. Are you also going to pay attention to Twitter and these weird examples of what AI is doing? Specifically just to let people in, you weren’t just at the U and you did screening of the AI doc for many diplomats from all the countries. Is that right?

Aza Raskin: Yeah, that’s right. It was hosted, I think, by Spain in their beautiful building. They’d invited, I don’t know, something of a hundred, 150 diplomats and sort of like heads of various UN departments to come watch the film. I really want every listener to hear that when you imagine sort of like top diplomats or heads of state, you imagine them to be the most informed people on these topics because they’re doing the most important negotiations on these topics. And what we continually discover that when we get into these rooms, that’s just not the case. And that is both really scary, but also where I know, Tristan, you and I find hope because that means there’s a kind of like, we just don’t really know overhang, meaning that there’s a lot of headway to be made through just communication by having people understand the path that we’re on and making it crystal clear.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, exactly. It’s as we’ve said in this podcast so many times and part of the humane technology philosophy is the complexity gap, that the complexity of what needs to be known about technology is growing at an exponential pace and the complexity of what is understood by society or even the leaders of society is not growing at a commensurate rate to the complexity and the dimensions of which you don’t see amount to blind spots. So if the world is getting more complex in like 20 more dimensions and you’re only seeing in 10 dimensions, there’s 10 dimensions of blind spot that are left over.

And so the kind of no adults thing is not to put people down. I mean, sadly, social media has also been dropping the complexity of what people are able to hold and what they’re aware of. This might also sound depressing to people, but actually what it does is again, clarity creates agency. It speaks to you. You either need to drop the curve of how much complexity you’re creating in the world or you need to up the curve of the total understanding. And a simple way to do that is to have the world’s most powerful groups of people and the most powerful networks, whether it’s the UN or all the social ministers, the digital ministers who banned social media for kids under 16, getting everybody together in these groups, watching something like the AI doc and then actually having a conversation and then choosing differently once they see it. So clarity creates agency, clarity is part of closing the complexity gap.

Aza Raskin: The metaphor that jumps into my mind when you say that, Tristan, is that like the amount of complexity we have to hold, there’s like a balloon and it’s just blowing up exponentially as like we have to hold more and more complexity, but the sides of our brains, the sides of our skulls isn’t increasing. So we’re trying to blow up a bigger, bigger balloon inside of your head and that just creates intense amounts of pressure, which I think we all fill and the solution is we have to put all of our heads together so that the balloon can fit inside all of them. I think we have sort of two parts of this conversation left. The first part is like, I think it’s worth getting a little bit more into the encyclical and just I’m curious just on if there are parts of the encyclical you want to particularly call out both for what was inspiring as well as where more work is needed.

And then we’ll sort of end with, okay, let’s tell the bigger story. Why does this all matter? Will this actually change things in the world? So let’s start with the first part.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. So just to speak about the encyclical, and obviously there’s been a lot of coverage of it, but to say the basics, so Pope Leo framed the fundamental challenge as not technological but anthropological, that it’s a human question, not just a technological question. He also said the core question isn’t what AI can do, it’s who we are becoming as we interact with it. And he also spoke in encyclical to power concentration, which we talked about a lot in this podcast, that he said AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data and that those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. On war, he also said, “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict. Indeed, it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal.”

And again, this is just so related to the frame of AI takes the existing misalignment or competitive logic and then supercharges every fault line of where that competitive logic is operating. So in war, where there’s already a race to have arms build up, there’s now a race for autonomous weapons and AI arms build up and that creates a world that you really don’t want. If you see these videos of the soldiers in Ukraine or in Russia who are on the front lines of that war and they’re just literally waiting there for a drone to see them and then kill them and there’s like nothing you can do. I mean, it’s the most inhumane thing ever. We have to be careful about engaging in wars that will literally reproduce the Terminator scenario that we see in those films.

Aza Raskin: Yeah. I think, Tristan, you’re talking about, it’s very hard to observe, but these moments when people are getting hunted bound by drones, they just literally give up because their eyes go to the ground and then they just stand there and wait for the end. And it reminds me all of this of something Martin Luther King Jr. Said a long time ago, which was, it’s pretty famous, but I think it’s on point. The means by which we live have how distanced the ends by which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is the whole, can you have an aligned AI inside of a misaligned system governed by bad incentives. And then you’re back to Chris Olah. We need people and moral voices who the incentives cannot bend.

Aza Raskin: And so I think one of the reasons why the encyclical is so powerful is that it marks a point on the human timeline of moral leaders standing up to push back against technological encroachment or overreach into our humanity. And to me, this is evidence of a growing sort of human movement. It’s the growing human movement that just added an extra 1.4 billion people into the mix.

Tristan Harris: That’s a big jump in the human movement. We now have 1.4 billion new members.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, that’s right. I think what we’re going to see is as the timeline continues, more and more sort of moments that are Pope scale, at least that’s my hope.

Tristan Harris: Pope scale is my new favorite word.

Aza Raskin: Yeah, this is not a hyperscaling, this is pope scaling. Where I personally get hope coming out of this encyclical, or at least I find really interesting, and this goes back to Pope John XXIII, and you mentioned this briefly, but I think it’s really important to dwell on it, is that Pope John the 23rd didn’t just write the encyclical Pacem in Terris, peace on earth. He got involved. He acted as a crucial mediator between Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. So he sort of left just the role of moral leader and became moral mediator.

When we first started engaging with the Vatican, I did not realize that they had a secretariat of state inside the Vatican inside the Holy Sea, which is to say they have the equivalent of a department of state. And so I think there’s going to be more that happens that we won’t really be able to see where places that are neutral and moral that don’t bend to incentives like the Vatican can behind the scenes play very interesting roles in negotiating what otherwise might be impossible negotiations.

Tristan Harris: 100%. And that’s the thing I’m excited about in what comes next is, what could the Vatican do to actively mediate conversations between the countries, the various countries’ AI labs? We talked often about the need for something like a Bretton Woods that after the last destructive technology of nuclear weapons, we had hundreds of delegates from hundreds of countries gather in a hotel, the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire to come up with this positive sum economic system to try to prevent societies from warring and coming up with an economic system and currencies and all that, that we create more peace given that we were living in a new age of nuclear weapons.

And we have another destructive technology that totally changes the social fabric. We need a new kind of social contract. I know that’s scary to people. It should not be engineered outside of the public participation of regular people and citizens, but we do need to have something that preserves not just what it means to be humans, but that humans have a future at all in an AI dominated world and maybe we don’t want to have AI dominate that world. And so, this conversation is playing out right now in real time and it’s things like this encyclical and Pope Leo and the Vatican that are moving in the direction of, no, we can’t do that. We have to preserve a human future.

Aza Raskin: Thanks, Tristan, for this conversation. It’s always fun to get to do the spotlights with you. And for everyone that’s got here, thank you so much for listening to Your Undivided Attention. And thank you again to all of our friends and allies in the Vatican that worked to make this possible.

Tristan Harris: Onward and upward. Thank you so much.

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Corrections:

• Tristan said that Pope John XXIII gave his radio address weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It actually occured during the crisis.

• Tristan paraphrased the full quote from Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI disarmament. Here is the full quote: “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”

• Aza slightly misquoted Dr. King Jr. The full quote begins “The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.”

• The delegates for Bretton Woods came from just 44 countries, not “hundreds” as Tristan said.

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