‘The Grand Humbling’ — Silicon Valley Responds to Pope Leo XIV
Dean Ball, Doug Burgum, David Sacks, and Raymond Arroyo all came for Magnifica Humanitas this week. JD Vance praised it. The men who actually own AI said nothing. A field report from a busy week on television.
Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. If you find this work valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time gift.
I intended to send this yesterday. Media chaos intervened.
Since Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on Monday — the first papal document of the modern era to take artificial intelligence as its central concern — I have been on cable, on streaming, and on tech podcasts almost continuously.
I will have more to say about the substance of those appearances in another letter. For now, every clip from this week is gathered below, along with my April conversation with Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau on the same technological terrain.
Forgive me, again, for the late dispatch. I’m still new at this venture, and I promise as we go along this journey together, I will improve.
A word on the document itself before I turn to the response. I wrote about it before it dropped. I have spoken about it nonstop since. I believe it is a masterpiece.
The rollout helped. I was skeptical of releasing such a consequential text on Memorial Day weekend, when American attention scatters toward grills, beaches, and parades. The forecast intervened. Rain washed out much of the country; people stayed indoors, and the encyclical landed in millions of feeds with the kind of penetration most Vatican documents never achieve.
Silicon Valley noticed. Honestly, my biggest surprise of my week was probably twofold: Jack Dorsey — the founder of Twitter — shared the full Vatican text of Magnifica Humanitas with his followers and responded to an excerpt with a single word, “yes”; and TBPN, the flagship Silicon Valley business show, invited me on for a full thirty minutes to discuss a papal encyclical that had dropped on a Monday morning.
Now to the response — which has been more muted on the right than some expected, but a handful of voices have spoken out, and they are worth naming.
