Prometheus’ gift can light a room or burn it down. Smoke in the air can signal outdoor cooking or a rushing wildfire. Fire may be the greatest technology humanity has ever stolen and according to the Pope, the next one may usher in an era of Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). For an anxious world, the news couldn’t come at a better time.
On Monday, three things happened at once:
- The new Pope released his first authoritative letter addressed to the world, and he called it Magnificent Humanity.
- A man who lost a brother to heart disease created a new drug whose results suggest we may soon prevent the disease that kills more people on Earth than anything else with a single infusion.
- And I sat at my desk and realized the speech I gave in October about the railway, the Great Fire of 1870 and AI had understated the opportunity investors have. I was right about the railway and the fire, but even I underestimated how fast the fire could spread.
Why New Technologies Always Trigger Fear
Every new fire has been greeted by the world in the same way—with fear. The printing press, electricity, the railway, antibiotics and the internet were all resisted. Experts predicted that their adoption would bring doom in their wake. Instead, all were absorbed into ordinary human life vastly improving its quality in the process. Fear is still the default, even today.
We all feel it. The job-displacement headlines, the deepfakes, the labs themselves saying be afraid, the family dinners about whether the grandkids should learn to code. Smoke is in the air—it raises our collective anxiety. And then, last Monday, one of the highest moral offices on Earth said something entirely different. Whatever your beliefs, Catholics and non-Catholics can benefit from reading it.
What Pope Leo XIV Means by Magnificent Humanity
The Pope’s name is not an accident. In 1891, Leo XIII wrote what is still considered the most important social document of the modern Catholic Church. The world was in the middle of the railway-and-factory boom. Workers were displaced, and the landscape was changing.
The Pope didn’t tell anyone to stop the trains. He told the world that the people building the trains, and the people getting rich from the trains, had a moral obligation to the people whose lives the trains were changing. That document titled “Of New Things” (Rerum Novarum) is why we now think of safe working conditions and fair wages and a day off as basic things. Leo XIII didn’t invent any of that. He used his platform to insist on it and the world is a better place because of it. Just as Leo XIII told the train-builders they owed something to the workers whose lives they were changing, Leo XIV tells today’s AI-builders the same thing, warning against letting a handful of companies set the terms on their own.
One hundred and thirty-five years later—to the day—the new Pope Leo signed his first encyclical. He called it Magnifica Humanitas—Magnificent Humanity. It’s about AI. Here’s the opening line:
“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
Read that again. He’s telling us to use this new technology to light the room—not burn it down. That is not the voice of doom. That is a blessing with conditions attached.
How AI is Transforming Healthcare
Which brings me to the brother.
On September 12, 2012, a father lost his son on his own birthday. Years later, the surviving brother would keep a silent promise to him. Senthil Kathiresan was forty-two and training for a race when he came home from a run dizzy and sweating. He called 911 himself, but he had a seizure before the paramedics arrived. His brain was deprived of oxygen during the heart attack. A little over a week later, he died.
The brother who got the phone call was Sekar Kathiresan, a Harvard cardiologist who had spent his entire career studying who gets heart attacks and who doesn’t. He knew (in the most painful way possible) that some people are simply born with one little gene switched off, and they walk through life with low cholesterol and protected hearts. His brother wasn’t one of them.
The Personal Story Behind a Potential Heart Disease Breakthrough
The grief did what grief sometimes does. It galvanized him. In 2018, he left Harvard and started a company called Verve. The plan was almost absurdly ambitious: build a one-shot infusion that would turn off the gene his brother had been born with switched on. Mimic the lucky people. Use AI to to stop the disease before it started.
The road was brutal. The science is hard. The first version of the drug had a setback, causing the stock to drop. Eli Lilly bought the company last summer for about a tenth of what it had been worth at its peak.
And then, on Monday—the same day the Pope blessed the fire—the new version of the drug read out its first results in human beings. With a single infusion treatment, the cholesterol-driving protein decreased by as much as 88%. LDL cholesterol down by as much as 62%. A treatment that could eliminate heart disease. The thing that killed Senthil Kathiresan on his father’s birthday in 2012 may not need to keep killing the rest of us.
Build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.
That line lands differently for me because building is where my story began.
Before I was an investment advisor, I was an architect. I had gone to school for it, earned my license, and expected to spend my life designing buildings. Then Canada’s economy rolled over in the early 1990s, the building industry collapsed, and with the arrival of Briana, I had to find a new fire to work with.
I found it in technology.
Building the Future Instead of Fearing It
It started with a brand-new Intel 386 computer and a modem that made R2D2 sounds when I plugged it into the phone line. When the daily prices of Canadian mutual funds began cascading down the screen, it felt like magic. What took hours by hand could suddenly be done in seconds. I did not fully understand it then, but I had stumbled into the digital revolution in finance.
Today, Briana is my associate at Evans Family Wealth. The little girl whose picture once hung beside my phone while I made cold calls is now helping me serve families like yours. We still build, only now we build financial plans, portfolios, and confidence.
AI and the Case for Optimism
Last October, I told a group of clients that we had front row seats to the Railway Boom of our time. The infrastructure was being laid. The smoke was in the air. Fear was everywhere. I warned that fear could cost investors more than risk itself. I did not yet understand how quickly this new fire could move from infrastructure to medicine, from anxiety to hope.
But here we are.
A cardiologist took his grief and helped build a possible cure. A Pope took his office and gave us permission to build, with a warning to build wisely. And in our small corner, Briana and I keep building too. With you. For your family.
That is the city.
That is Magnificent Humanity.
Glen