Reason to Believe

On Popes, rock stars, and AI story rules

Habeus Papam

On Thursday, my teenaged daughter and I watched the live BBC coverage as white smoke billowed from the Sistine Chapel chimney, signaling the election of a new pope. Around an hour later, Leo XIV—formerly Robert Francis Prevost, the first pope to be born in the USA—stepped through a red velvet curtain onto a balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square. The ecstatic massed crowd, stretched from St. Peter’s Square to the Tiber River, gave him a rock star reception, cheering and whooping while waving flags, banners, and homemade signs reading “Habemus Papam” (“We have a pope”). As the new Bishop of Rome emerged to a sea of glinting smartphones, an opportunistic BBC cameraman homed in on two children, perched on their fathers’ shoulders, tears streaming down their faces. “Why are they crying?” my daughter asked uncertainly. “Because they’re watching history unfold,” I told her.

Choosing a new pope involves a centuries-old tradition known as a papal conclave, steeped in ritual and secrecy inside the Sistine Chapel. The word “conclave” itself comes from the Latin “cum clavis” (“with a key”), referring to the historical practice of locking the cardinal electors in a secure room to ensure they focus solely on the election and are shielded inviolably from outside influence—a process that, in 2025, requires disabling Wi-Fi, jamming cell signals, sweeping for hidden bugs or transmitters, and ferreting out rogue reporters who might opportunistically infiltrate a conclave by posing as waiters or other support staff.

Each cardinal elector receives a ballot paper inscribed with “Eligo in Summum Pontificem” (“I elect as Supreme Pontiff”). After secretly writing their chosen candidates’ names on the ballot, they approach the altar in the Sistine Chapel in order of seniority. Beneath Michelangelo’s painting of The Last Judgment, each says aloud, in Latin, “I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who before God I think should be elected.” They then place the ballot on a paten and slide it into an urn.

If any candidate receives a two-thirds majority, a pope is elected. If no candidate receives the required majority, the ballots are burned in a special stove, with chemicals added to produce black smoke, signaling an inconclusive outcome. This process of voting recurs until a cardinal gains enough support to be elected pope. The Dean of the College of Cardinals then approaches the chosen cardinal and asks, “Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?” ("Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?"). If he accepts, he is asked, “Quo nomine vis vocari?” (“By what name do you wish to be called?”) The ballots are burned again, this time with chemicals that produce white smoke, the bells of St. Peter's Basilica begin to ring, and ritual switches from an intensely private and secret one to a powerfully public display. The modern pope must be a learned theologian, an astute politician, but also a master of crowd psychology.

Watching with my daughter, and witnessing the crowd’s jubilant reaction, I was reminded of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ireland in September 1979, when I myself was a small child. On the morning of his arrival, my mother, baby sister, and I sat watching in hushed silence as an Aer Lingus Boeing 747, named the St. Patrick, materialized out of the clouds and began its descent to Dublin Airport. The tiny speck on the screen took an eternity to become a discernable plane, but I watched in awe as it floated gracefully from the skies and touched down, only to spend another eternity taxiing. This was only the latest installment in what my little boy’s brain experienced as the Age of Unendurable Waiting, as people filled the time putting up papal flags, painting their houses, and manicuring their lawns to perfection. My mother had cleaned our home from top to bottom and positioned a large picture of the pope in the center of the mantlepiece, as if John Paul II would be calling around personally for tea. And now he was finally here … in the country, at least, if still on the plane.

The pope eventually emerged—not the stentorian, humorless figure I had imagined a pope to be, but a relaxed, charming man, greeting enthusiastically cheering crowds with smiles and waves. As he knelt and kissed the tarmac, my mother was crossing herself and saying “God bless him,” and I could see tears in her eyes. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but it felt like something hugely important was happening—less a visit from a religious leader than something deeply transformational on a national level. That sense grew after he had greeted various waiting dignitaries and politicians and then immersed himself in the waiting crowd—shaking hands, letting people hug him, blessing children. It was my first time witnessing a masterful exercise in working a crowd. Even from a child’s perspective, I could see that he hadn’t come to visit the failed, ineffectual politicians who had let the north of the country descend into the violence and chaos of the Troubles. He had come, in a powerful exercise of direct diplomacy, to visit the Irish people—that was evident from his focus, his body language, his words, and in the emotional response he generated.

In Dublin’s Phoenix Park that morning, 1.25 million people, fully a third of the Republic’s population, came together to attend one Mass. Dressed all in white, the pope was masterfully in control of this massive crowd—and even though I was merely watching on TV, I felt like he was waving at me, speaking directly to me. I stayed glued to the screen as the day’s agenda unfolded. Following the IRA’s murder of Lord Mountbatten, the Vatican had cancelled plans for the pope to venture north of the border—he went instead to the town of Drogheda, adjacent to the border. There, he directly addressed terrorists:

I wish to speak to all men and women engaged in violence. I appeal to you, in language of passionate pleading: On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the ways of peace. You may claim to seek justice. I too believe in justice and seek justice. But violence only delays the day of justice. Violence destroys the work of justice. Further violence in Ireland will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love and the values you claim to cherish.

The Troubles did not end that day—it took another 15 years—but change began that day as people, especially young people, began assimilating a different vision for the future, one based on cooperation, de-escalation, peace, and mutual respect. These were words we had never heard in our own communities back in those days—many of whom tacitly or even explicitly approved of sectarian violence—but they rang true to me: “Violence … will only drag down to ruin the land you claim to love.” It resonated with others too: When the pope uttered the now iconic quote, “Young people of Ireland, I love you,” the congregation of 300,000 young people applauded, whistled, and cheered enthusiastically for a full five minutes. The pope, bemused at first, began to smile and embrace the enormity of what he had done. This was hope and change in action—it was alchemical, immediate, and lasting. In just two days, the pope had steered a country enmeshed in destructive violent sectarianism onto a different course. We who were kids at the time went on to embrace different ideals of optimism, peace, prosperity, and transformation; our generation is still known as the Pope’s Children.

Boss Time

Five and a half years later, another Catholic would come heralding change—not from Rome this time, but from Freehold, New Jersey. On June 1, 1985, Bruce Springsteen played his first Irish concert, headlining at the legendary Slane Castle, where most of the rock greats—Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, U2—have played before or since. Irish reporter Fiona Looney, then an 18-year-old rookie at Hot Press magazine, recalled: “There was a lovely vibe. It was the first time I was in a large arena where everybody brought the best version of themselves. It was the first time I’d ever seen girls in bikini tops on top of boys’ shoulders. The video screens on stage were a novelty for us. It was a game changer.”

The promoters issued 65,000 tickets for the show and released 4,000 more at the last minute due to demand. But that was just the official figure, not accounting for many who had illicitly gained entrance to a poorly secured field on a hill in County Meath. Springsteen’s own memoir puts the attendance at 95,000, while others have estimated it well into the six figures. It was, regardless, the largest concert Springsteen had ever played, and it came at a career-changing moment. During his epic three-and-a-half-hour set, fueled by songs from his propulsive and wildly popular album Born in the USA, the likes of Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Elvis Costello watched backstage as Springsteen became synonymous with stadium rock superstardom. Again, this was a man who could work a crowd.

I wrote to my teenage penpal at the time, enthusing about Springsteen’s energy, uplift, ability to feed off the energy in crowds. She was unimpressed, heaping criticism on his latest music. “Dancing in the Dark,” for which Springsteen had made a heavily aired MTV video starring a 19-year-old Courtney Cox, came in for especial scorn—words like “commercial,” “derivative,” and “sellout” dripped from the pages of her letter. I told her she clearly just didn’t like Bruce Springsteen. “I do like Bruce Springsteen,” she replied. “I just don’t like this Bruce Springsteen.”

A few days later, a heavier than usual letter thunked its way through my letterbox, containing a beat-up, much-recycled cassette tape. On the label she had scrawled “Nebraska” with an arrow pointing to it and a message (double underscored) “Listen to this.” An accompanying note explained that she’d had to tape over her sister’s Madness album to send me demos that Springsteen recorded on a tape recorder in his bedroom. “The loneliness of it will draw you in,” she said—but it didn’t, not right away. I hated Nebraska on first listen—it was slow and echoey and mournful and sad, without Born in the USA’s moments of joyous exuberance—but something about it did draw me back and made me listen again, and again. Slowly, over time, while Born in the USA started to gather dust, it became my favorite Springsteen record, and still is. I bought the LP version, with its dark, dreary cover, a monochromatic 1975 photograph by David Michael Kennedy of a road beneath a cloudy sky, photographed through a car windshield. I played it and played it. I always wondered—how could the same person have made both Nebraska and Born in the USA just two years apart?

Recently I read Warren Zanes’ book, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which tells the full story of that album. Zanes describes Springsteen’s legendary No Nukes concerts of the late 1970s, then his epic 1980 tour to promote The River, a double LP that became his first number-one album. During that period, Springsteen fully mastered the art of making an audience eat out of the palm of his hand—thriving off his infectious, seemingly limitless energy. But after returning to New Jersey after The River tour, Springsteen become lost in reflection, depression, and self-doubt. He had broken up with his girlfriend, become ambivalent about the pressures of fame, and withdrawn to a rented ranch house, where he became reclusive to the point where many of his own bandmates didn’t know where he lived.

Having decided to start writing again, Springsteen asked for a way to record some rough demos in his own house. His roadie set up a TEAC four-track tape recorder in his bedroom, on which Springsteen recorded a series of stark, confessional, bleak interior monologues, most performed while sitting on the end of the bed with an acoustic guitar. The writing shows all the signs of a work in progress—similar phrases recur across songs—but the performances are undeniably raw and powerful, filled with anger, loss, despair, and mesmeric sadness. It is the very antithesis of the anthemic Born in the USA—an album to listen to late at night, in the dark, while alone, imagining that Springsteen is right there with his words, his thoughts, his guitar.

Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager, was one of the first to hear the new songs. He immediately expressed concern not about an abrupt artistic change of direction, but about Springsteen’s evidently deteriorating mental health. Candid conversations with Landau led Springsteen eventually to therapy and medication, while the fate of the songs themselves remained in flux. Some songs on the tape—“Born in the USA,” “Downbound Train,” and “Child Bride” (subsequently rewritten as “Workin’ on the Highway”)—worked well as full-band arrangements and migrated to the record that would become Born in the USA. For other songs, rearranging them with the E Street Band as Springsteen had intended just didn’t seem to work. All the while, Springsteen carried the cassette tape of his demos around in his pocket, getting dirt and lint in it, as he continued efforts to recreate the atmosphere and mood of those songs.

Springsteen’s eureka moment came when he decided to take the then-unprecedented step of releasing the unadorned low-fi acoustic demos themselves as the follow-up to The River. This required overcoming numerous technical challenges created by his amateurish recording and mastering process—but eventually Nebraska was ready, and Columbia Records had agreed to put it out under Springsteen’s terms and conditions. There would be no MTV videos, no snazzy cover art, no promotional tour, no photo of Springsteen on the cover. If some would accuse him two years later of “selling out,” he could proudly claim to have released the least commercial album ever by a major rock star—albeit one that would go on to be hailed as a masterpiece and featured on numerous “best albums” lists. Zanes book itself has spawned a forthcoming movie, Deliver Me from Nowhere, based on the making of Nebraska, starring Jeremy Allen White (Shameless, The Bear) as Springsteen.

Before reading Zanes’s book, I had never fully realized how Nebraska pulls one back into the experience of childhood. The title track, “Nebraska,” centers on the January 1958 killing spree by 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate—but even the opening lines evoke the innocence of childhood ruptured by sudden, unexpected violence—"I saw her standin' on her front lawn / just a twirlin' her baton / Me and her went for a ride, sir / And 10 innocent people died.” Other songs—“Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Cars,” “My Father’s House,” “Reason to Believe”—lean heavily on childhood perceptions of hope, despair, belief, family, and community. It is as if Springsteen decided, before unleashing the bombastic “Born in the USA” on the world, to retreat into meditations on the meaning of his own childhood—where he would also explore, as he later wrote in his memoir, “the distance between the American dream and American reality.”

Born to Run: Augmented Creativity

Walk into a bookstore and you’ll find numerous volumes promising to impart the “rules” for doing this or that—becoming a leader, becoming more mindful, becoming a better investor or parent or entrepreneur. And yes—even becoming a better artist, because there are rules for that now, too. We like rules because humans, by design, are fundamentally mimetic—living mostly under the influence of others, constantly under the sway of social conditioning from our families, friends, media, social media, and society in general. We are never as original or independent as we think we are; even allegedly free-thinking libertarians, ironically, are highly mimetic. But being mimetic has its downsides, because when everyone follows the same rules, everyone does the same stuff with the same results. They buy the same stocks, raise the same children the same way, write the same morning pages during their “miracle mornings.”

I’ve always been fascinated by genuine out-of-the-box thinking—which, despite being a business cliché, is as rare in business as in other fields. I’m interested in genuinely unique thinking and creativity that can produce massive impact or implications. What kind of thinking gives us a transformative visionary like John Paul II or an album like Nebraska? Because there just aren’t rules for that.

But maybe there are rules, but we just can’t see them yet because our possibility space is too small. I’ve written before about how the world of chess, a centuries-old bastion of human intellect and strategic thought, has, in recent decades, become a frontier for artificial intelligence. And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Google DeepMind's AlphaZero—an AI system that taught itself superhuman ability in chess, as well as other games such as shogi and Go—as a landmark achievement in transcending humans’ mimetic limitations. AlphaZero not only revolutionized our understanding of ancient games but defined a pathway into the burgeoning future of AI-enabled creativity.

AlphaZero's approach to chess was a paradigm shift in AI. Unlike other computerized chess programs, which were typically trained on databases of human games and expert human knowledge, AlphaZero started with little more than the rules of the game and an instruction to defeat its opponent. Through a process of reinforcement learning—playing millions and millions of games against itself—it gradually learned to identify patterns, evaluate positions, and devise winning strategies that diverged from, and even surpassed, conventional human understanding of chess. In just nine hours, AlphaZero had massively exceeded 1500 years of human chess expertise, adopting a playing style that was seen as dynamic, unconventional, and at times, breathtakingly "creative," filled with moves that human experts initially questioned (such as daring queen sacrifices) but later recognized as deeply insightful. This ability to generate novel, effective solutions in a complex, rule-bound system is the crucial link to AI’s potential in creative domains.

One might wonder what connects papal visits, low-fi acoustic albums, the structured battlefield of a chessboard, and the boundless potentiality of AI-powered artistic creation—and yet the underlying mechanisms share compelling similarities. Responding to inspiration involves understanding the existing patterns, conventions, and “rules” of a domain—be they religious belief, crowd psychology, music theory, visual composition, or narrative structure—and then innovating within, or intentionally breaking from, those established frameworks. AlphaZero demonstrated a powerful ability to do precisely this. And by exploring the vast possibility space of chess without human biases or fashions—chess has its fashions too, as approaches, systems, and strategies cycle in and out of favour—it unearthed strategies that had remained hidden despite centuries of human scrutiny. This capacity for unsupervised discovery, and the generation of emergent, unexpected solutions—its capacity, in short, to break the limitations of what is popular or socially approved or culturally favored—is precisely what makes AI a potentially revolutionary tool for creativity.

The revolution of consciousness that John Paul II embraced in the first year of his papacy alone took down not only terrorism in Ireland but communism in Eastern Europe. The stripped-down homespun aesthetics of Springsteen’s Nebraska unwittingly produced a generation of artists willing and able to make music at home, spawning a freewheeling do-it-yourself vibe that has been incredibly influential. Nobody could have anticipated these impacts. Nor can we anticipate the effects of AI as it becomes more deeply intertwined within various creative fields. Google is exploring music generation with Lyria, text-to-image generation with Imagen, and video generation with Veo. Beyond Google, AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are enabling artists and designers to conjure complex visuals from simple text prompts; platforms like AIVA are assisting in creating original music. These technologies are not merely automating tasks but acting as collaborators, sources of inspiration, and tools for overcoming creative blocks. They can analyze vast datasets of existing art, music, or literature to identify underlying patterns and then generate novel outputs—doing for art what AlphaZero did for chess, in making up its own rules that may well accelerate what we can do on our own.

The development of AlphaZero, therefore, is more than just a triumph in game playing; it is a demonstration of AI's potential to learn, adapt, and innovate in ways that can both augment human ingenuity and redefine the limits of creativity. Google's own journey from developing game-playing AI like AlphaZero to investing in creative AI tools reflects our growing understanding of artificial intelligence as a general-purpose technology. The core principles of deep learning and reinforcement learning that enabled AlphaZero rapidly to uncover new chess knowledge are now being applied to solve real-world problems and unlock new forms of creative expression.

Just as the legacy of John Paul II extends far beyond the Catholic Church, and the legacy of Springsteen’s Nebraska extends beyond some demo tapes released as a record, the legacy of advanced chess engines like AlphaZero extends far beyond the 64 squares of a chessboard. The sophisticated self-learning mechanisms and the creative flair they have uncovered in a domain long considered a pinnacle of human strategic thought have provided a compelling glimpse into the future. As AI continues to evolve, drawing on these foundational breakthroughs, its role in augmenting and transforming human creativity is set to expand dramatically—doing for “story rules” and storytellers what AlphaZero has done for chess theory and chess players. We don’t yet know where this will take us—but we can and will find out.