TO ALL PEOPLE · A PODCAST & SHARED INQUIRY INTO OUR FUTURE

What Makes Us Human?

Artificial intelligence will reshape every human life, yet its future is being decided inside a remarkably small room. Then the world’s largest global institution published a 245-paragraph open letter on AI, addressed not to believers, but “to all people.” Over twelve conversations and a nationwide read-along, we bring that text to the table with AI researchers, workers, historians, and local reading circles, turning a historic letter into a public deliberation about power, work, war, and the future we want to build.

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Magnifica Humanitas · Season One Twelve Conversations & Community Reading Circles
Reach out ahead of launch Hosted by Catherine Connors (Los Angeles) & Michelle Bernabe (New York)
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A doorway to a larger conversation

Confronting the dominant story
245 paragraphs that spend the first 89 asking what a person is before turning to machines.
A doorway, not a doctrine
Education and public deliberation, not advocacy. For people of any faith or none.
Here are the facts. Here is the letter.
Testing both Silicon Valley’s promises and institutional power against lived reality.
Communities leading on AI
Local reading circles that write their own positions on what their institutions should and should not hand to AI.

Most debates about AI are trapped inside the tech industry’s own vocabulary, while the broader public is treated as a passive audience. Breaking that monopoly requires a shared text with global reach. At major turning points in history, open letters from Rome have shifted public consciousness at scale: after the 2015 letter on climate change (Laudato Si’), a Yale and George Mason study found public conviction among American Catholics jumped ten percentage points in seven months, from 64% to 74%. Now a new 245-paragraph letter on AI has arrived, addressed not to believers, but “to all people,” reaching 1.4 billion people worldwide and insisting that “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few” (¶107).

Yet the research after Laudato Si’ also shows a harder truth: by 2023, Pew found that without sustained local conversation, those views tracked ordinary party lines. Deliberation needs a place and a habit; without one, even a letter this widely read fades. Our show and read-along are built to supply that missing habit. Each episode takes one section of the letter and puts it on the table with a guest who lives inside the question: historians, workers, technologists, and critics. We don’t take the tech industry’s word for the future, and we don’t take the Vatican’s either.

We don’t take the tech industry’s word for the future, and we don’t put the Vatican on a pedestal either. The letter itself admits the Church at times helped legitimize slavery and took eighteen centuries to fully condemn it (¶176), and says the Church must answer for its own abuses of power (¶86–89). That tension sits at the center of our season: can an ancient institution’s global reach serve a human future today? We start where the text starts, and we don’t stop there.

What is being replaced?

What must not be lost?

What world would you build, if it were yours to build?

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Season One Episodes

12 episodes · 45–50 min · Transcripts & reading-group guides

Season One reads Magnifica Humanitas in order from first page to last, moving from human worth (¶1–89) and democratic governance (¶90–130) to labor, education, and hidden supply chains (¶131–181), and autonomous weapons, peace, and community action (¶182–245). Each episode pairs the passage with a guest on the front lines of the question; the sample voices below show the range of researchers, workers, and critics we are inviting to the table.

  1. Episode 01

    Can we trust a teacher that has been wrong?

    How an institution with a history of moral delay asks to be heard on the biggest technological shift of our lives.

    Sample voice: Shannen Dee Williams, historian of Black Catholic sisters & author of Subversive Habits

    INTRODUCTION & CH. I|¶1–45

  2. Episode 02

    What are we worth to each other?

    When AI systems measure human beings by output and speed, what happens to disability, dependency, and care?

    Sample voice: Sara Hendren, design researcher, humanist & author of What Can a Body Do?

    CHAPTER II|¶46–89

  3. Episode 03

    Who governs the machine right now?

    Inside frontier AI labs, compute concentration, and energy grids, and why voluntary self-regulation fails.

    Sample voice: Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder & interpretability researcher

    CHAPTER III · PART I|¶90–103

  4. Episode 04

    How would the rest of us get a say?

    How ordinary communities can shape AI rules instead of being “reduced to passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere” (¶108).

    Sample voice: Alondra Nelson, architect of the US Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, or Nanjala Nyabola, Kenyan writer & digital democracy scholar

    CHAPTER III · PART II|¶104–111

  5. Episode 05

    What should we refuse to optimize?

    What humans lose when we hand moral judgement, creativity, and friction over to predictive machines.

    Sample voice: Shannon Vallor, philosopher of technology & author of The AI Mirror, or Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human

    CHAPTER III · PART III|¶112–130

  6. Episode 06

    Who is teaching us what to want?

    Algorithmic amplification, synthetic companions, and what personalized AI tutors do to how children learn to think.

    Sample voice: Renée DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers, or Maha Bali, digital pedagogy scholar at the American University in Cairo

    CHAPTER IV · PART I|¶131–147

  7. Episode 07

    What is technology replacing, and what does that mean?

    The labor reality of AI: deskilling, workplace surveillance, and who captures the gains of automation.

    Sample voice: Molly Kinder, labor & AI researcher, or Mary L. Gray, anthropologist & co-author of Ghost Work

    CHAPTER IV · PART II|¶148–169

  8. Episode 08

    What is the real price of convenience?

    The hidden human and environmental supply chain behind AI: content moderators, data labelers, water, and rare-earth minerals.

    Sample voice: Daniel Motaung, former content moderator & labor organizer, or Sasha Luccioni, AI & climate researcher

    CHAPTER IV · PART III|¶170–181

  9. Episode 09

    Who answers when machines kill?

    AI-assisted targeting and autonomous weapons, and who bears responsibility when war moves at machine speed.

    Sample voice: Yuval Abraham, investigative journalist who broke the story on AI targeting in Gaza & co-director of No Other Land

    CHAPTER V · PART I|¶182–209

  10. Episode 10

    What does peace actually require?

    Why peace is more than the absence of war, and how nonviolent movements confront automated power.

    Sample voice: Paul Scharre, author of Army of None, or Maria J. Stephan, co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works

    CHAPTER V · PART II|¶210–219

  11. Episode 11

    Is love serious enough to govern?

    Testing the letter’s boldest claim: that civic friendship and care belong at the center of economic and political design.

    Sample voice: Léocadie Lushombo, Congolese ethicist & scholar of women’s political participation

    CHAPTER V · PART III|¶220–228

  12. Episode 12

    What if hope starts from below?

    How local communities, cooperatives, and reading circles build the future together from the ground up.

    Sample voice: M. Shawn Copeland, scholar of embodiment & solidarity, alongside a community cooperative builder

    CONCLUSION|¶229–245

Circles & Impact

New York·Los Angeles·Open Read-Along

Born in a local reading group: What Makes Us Human? began in an open New York gathering of fifteen people from all walks of life, artists, caregivers, skeptics, and believers, reading Magnifica Humanitas aloud every other Tuesday. The podcast is the anchor for a wider community deliberation designed so ordinary people hold real decision-making power over how AI enters their lives.

Open read-along & discussion guides

Every episode releases with a verified transcript, a read-along calendar, and a free one-page discussion sheet so any group can read each passage ahead of time and send voice reflections that air on the show.

Community-led reading circles

In libraries, congregations, campuses, and workplaces in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, local facilitators lead reading circles through the text. Each circle chooses which disagreements to pursue and writes its own unedited statement of what its institution should and should not hand over to AI, presenting that judgment directly to its own school, library, employer, or congregation.

Shared governance & evaluation

Circle facilitators meet quarterly with the hosts as an advisory group to decide how community statements are published and which concrete possibilities later episodes explore. Surveys after Episode 6 and Episode 12 measure shifts in public understanding and track how many people deliberate and put a position before their own institution.

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The Hosts

One of us has spent a career studying how the stories a culture tells shape who its people believe they can become. The other is a psychiatric nurse, systems builder, and AI governance researcher who brings New Yorkers together through Dear Crisis, a stewarded community, to face global crises in community instead of alone. Between us sit two ways of meeting a crisis: through the stories that shape a culture, and through the communities that hold people together when systems fail.

Black-and-white Polaroid photograph of co-host Catherine Connors wearing glasses, pinned at the top with a handwritten caption reading catherine connors.

Catherine Connors Los Angeles

A narrative futurist and writer who studies how the stories a culture tells shape what its people believe they can be. Former Editor in Chief of Babble and head of content for Disney Interactive’s Women and Family portfolio, co-founder of Maverick, and co-author of The Feminine Revolution (Hachette).

Her HIV-prevention work took her to the remote mountains of Lesotho, where the people doing the work were Catholic sisters: the experience that sits under the show’s question of how to hold an institution’s harm and its good at once.

Black-and-white Polaroid photograph of co-host Michelle Bernabe laughing in front of an ivy-covered wall, pinned at the top with a handwritten caption reading michelle bernabe.

Michelle Bernabe New York

Michelle Bernabe builds what systems forget to imagine. She began as a nurse in a psychiatric emergency room, then spent years at the frontier of what’s possible in psychiatry, bringing psychedelic medicine and evidence-based neuromodulation to patients and building a network of 250 clinics to reach them.

She has led meditation inside a maximum-security prison, won an award for reimagining money, and trained in narrative medicine at Columbia. Now she studies AI governance, AGI strategy and bioweapons with BlueDot Impact and has testified before the New York City Council on AI.

The Text

Pope Leo XIV·Magnifica Humanitas·245 paragraphs

Signed on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Magnifica Humanitas is addressed to 1.4 billion Catholics (nearly 70% of whom live in Latin America, Africa, and Asia) and “to all people,” reaching parishes, more than 220,000 schools, universities serving 7.2 million students, and over 5,000 hospitals worldwide. It frames the age of AI as a choice between two building projects: Babel, which trades human dignity for top-down efficiency, and Nehemiah, where communities rebuild their walls section by section (¶7–10).

“No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil.”

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, ¶233

Across 245 paragraphs, it insists that communities must “not be reduced to passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere” (¶108), extends the principle that the earth’s goods belong to everyone to algorithms, digital platforms and data (¶67), rejects the myth that AI is morally neutral (¶104), names the hidden labor behind training data and rare-earth mining (¶173), and demands human control over lethal weapons (¶197–200).

The letter is one answer. The show is about finding yours.

Read the full text at vatican.va →

Questions & Listening

Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube · Every podcast app
What is Magnifica Humanitas?
An open encyclical letter by Pope Leo XIV on artificial intelligence and the human person, addressed to 1.4 billion Catholics and “to all people”; 245 paragraphs; official text at vatican.va.
Is this a religious show?
No. Our stance is interrogative: education and public deliberation, not advocacy. We are not here to promote any viewpoint, the Church’s included. We use the letter as a shared text on the table with guests and reading circles of any faith or none.
How do the reading circles work?
Every episode comes with a free one-page discussion guide and read-along schedule. Local circles in libraries, campuses, workplaces, and congregations deliberate together and write their own unedited statements on AI for their institutions.
Where can I listen?
On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and other podcast apps from launch.
Who makes it?
Co-hosts and co-owners Catherine Connors (Los Angeles) and Michelle Bernabe (New York). It is an independent production.
Is this affiliated with the Vatican?
No. It is an independent production, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Holy See.

Reach out ahead of time

We are preparing Season One and our first cohort of community reading circles now. Write to us ahead of launch if you want to host a reading circle in your library, campus, workplace, or congregation, suggest a guest, or get the one-page discussion guides when Episode 1 drops.

Write to hello@allpeoplepod.com