Try Tank Podcast

In this episode, Father Lorenzo Lebrija sits down with Reverend Tay Moss to discuss the innovative AI tool, AskCathy.ai. Discover how this groundbreaking technology, infused with Anglican and Episcopal theology, is transforming the way people engage with faith, offering answers, resources, and support 24/7. From handling theological queries to providing pastoral care insights, Cathy is here to assist congregations and individuals alike. Join us as we explore the fascinating development journey of Cathy and her potential to enhance faith communities everywhere. Tune in for an enlightening conversation on the intersection of faith and technology!
  
The Rev. Tay Moss earned his M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and has been involved in creative ministries at the congregation and judicatory levels for the past 20 years. Some of his projects have included developing social enterprises, video production, arts-and-spirituality, food banks, continuing education for clergy in transition, children’s ministry, creative-edge worship, running conferences, and coaching churches investing grant money to grow in mission. He has been a volunteer consultant for the Diocese of Toronto working with the Congregational Development Department for more than 12 years. Tay is an excellent sailor and an above-average cook. His wife and three kids keep him quite busy, but besides sailing and cooking Tay enjoys canoe camping and chilling in hammocks.

Creators and Guests

LL
Host
Lorenzo Lebrija
Try Tank
LR
Producer
Loren Richmond Jr.
Resonate Media

What is Try Tank Podcast?

The Try Tank Podcast is about innovation and the church

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: From Try Tank Experimental Laboratory. This

is the Try Tank podcast, where we talk

about all things related to innovation in the

church. I'm, um, Father Lorenz la Brija. Huh. Thank

you for joining us,

and hello, everyone. Welcome to the Try Tank

podcast. Father Lorenzo here. This is a

cool episode, I gotta tell you. This will actually take

you a little bit behind the scenes as to how

Try Tank does some of its work, because

today I'm having a conversation with the Reverend Tay

Moss, and we're going to talk about ask Cathy

AI, which is a new tool that we just released

out into the world. It's, uh, some call it a

groundbreaking technology because it's kind of

like a chat body manage chat GPT. But she only

knows a certain part of that, and she

has a very specific bookcase that she references

all the time, which is all about anglican and

episcopal theology. Anyways, you'll hear all about

that in this podcast. So, uh,

it's really interesting because you'll see some of the questions that I'm

asking are questions that I'm actually

asking. Ask the person who hired him to do this

work. So you will see some of the work, but you'll also see

how Kathy is different, she's accurate, she's

verifiable, how we talked about safety,

how we, uh, looked at what

happens when she hallucinates. Uh, and we just

also want to make sure that, uh, she's good for the church in

all that we do. We'll also talk a little bit about version

three of Cathy. The one that's out there in the world right now is version

two, so stick around for that. Let me tell

you a little bit about Tay. Uh, the reverend Tay Moss earned his M div

from Yale Divinity School and has been involved in creative

ministries at the congregational and

diocesan level for about 20 years

now. Some of his projects have included developing social

enterprises, video production, arts and

spirituality, food banks, continuing education

for clergy and transition, children's ministry,

creative edge worship, running conferences

and coaching churches, investing grant

money to grow in mission. I'm, um, tired of

just saying all that. He has been a volunteer consultant for the

Diocese of Toronto, working with the congregational

development department for more than twelve years now.

He'd like you to know also that he's an excellent sailor and an

above average cook. Uh, his wife and

three kids keep him quite busy. Has his work, by

the way. But besides sailing and cooking, Tay enjoys

canoe camping and chilling in the

hammocks. And that's where he and I would not get along as well,

anyways, let's go on to the podcast.

Podcast number zero one nine, podcast 19

on Kathy. Hope you enjoy.

Hey, Reverend Tay Moss. Welcome to the

Try Tank podcast.

>> Tay: Thank you. Good to be here. Glad to join you.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: This, you know, this is one of the benefits of these sorts of things is that I can

be here in Los Angeles, you can be there in

Canada, and still we managed to record a

podcast well together. So here we go. All right,

so today we're talking about something. I've got to tell people

this story, though. Originally, when, um,

internally, we were talking about, when do we want to release Kathy,

and what do we do about her? We said, okay, we'll do a soft launch at

general convention, which we did. Just a soft. So people start to use her,

make sure that my biggest fear, right, that she doesn't give a wrong

answer somewhere along the lines, and tell someone that they're bad.

Um, so we've been testing. She's done really, really

well. And then internally, we were like, okay,

you know, there's a lot of things coming up were in the summer, so

why don't we look at between after the election in the US,

but before advent one, so the small churches can still use

her to plan, you know, for advent. And I'm like, great, that sounds

like a really good time. I've got to let tay know this. And then all of a

sudden, I get an email from you, hey,

religion news service wants to do an article on Cathy. I'm like, or

we could just launch it now. So

it sounds like a great idea. The Holy Spirit's got, uh, other

plans for us, so. All right, tay, if somebody were to walk

up to your reviewer at, ah, let's say at a cocktail reception,

someone says, hey, I've heard about this. Ask Cathy.

AI, uh, tell me, what is Cathy? How would you describe

her?

>> Tay: Right, so Cathy is a class of artificial

intelligence, which we might call compound artificial intelligence.

So it combines some of the things people already know

about, like large language models with other

things.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Chatting is a large language model.

>> Tay: Yes, exactly. Chat. GPT Claude uh,

Gemini rock. I mean, there's a bunch of these Gemini, and there's

also ones that are free and open source as well. Okay,

so those, uh, kinds of programs are good at

certain kinds of things. Um, like

summarizing information generating

conversational kinds of interactions. Um, but what

they often are not good at is having domain

specific information, uh, being accurate

or being verifiable in their answers. And this is

just an inherent weakness of how they are designed.

So, Cathy is a class of compound AI's that

combine that kind of capability with another one, which

is retrieval. So being able to retrieve

specific information, accurate information, into site

sources. So Kathy combines a

library of information. Yes. So

Kathy has a library of information at her

disposal which she uses as context to

answer user questions.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: So, uh, another way of putting it would be,

uh, she's kind of like a chat GPT.

Except that we gave her also a bookshelf that's

filled with anglican and episcopal theology and said, make

sure you reference this.

>> Tay: Exactly. Exactly.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Now, what happens if, when she's going

to reference something from our bookcase, she. The,

uh, general knowledge that she knows from Chad,

GBT, what if they're in clash

with each other? Does she know to go with our

retrieved information from our bookcase as the. That

this is the prime information?

>> Tay: Yes, she knows that that's a more authoritative source and

that this is information that she's been given is the

kind of authoritative or canonical. Um,

and yeah, it's interesting, but her general knowledge is quite good,

too. For example, this morning somebody was asking about

the, um, war of the roses and how that would have

influenced Henry VIII's decision to

split from the roman catholic church. And that is

not something I don't think is in our bookshelf.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah, I don't think we thought about that.

>> Tay: I don't think we thought about that. But she had the history at her

fingertips, you know, from the general knowledge base, and was able

to reply to the person with a sufficiently nuanced answer that I

think that was a satisfying answer.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Um, and that's what I really like about her, you

know, so. Okay, let's back up here

just a second, uh, because we're gonna do a little bit of

the origin story of Kathy, but in order

to do that, I think it's worth for people to know

sort of. I know in the introduction I said that you're

some of the work that you do, but tell us, like

what. Tell us about you in the sense of, why

do you have such a. You have such

a knowledge of this, you have such command of what these

things are doing. When I was trying to, I had an idea. It's like, I

went, and we'll talk about that in a second. But, uh, we started speaking,

I'm like, this is the man, this is the holy spirit has placed

hey in my way, so that we can actually talk about this and make

it happen, because I hadn't been able to. So tell us a little about

you, how you got here, and why you you know so much

about it.

>> Tay: Well, I've been a geek since I was a little kid. You know, I was the kind of

kid that put together little electronics kits and stuff like that.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And then the record I did not use.

>> Tay: I know I self identify as geek

and, uh, so a nerd. And so when,

uh, I was young, my father got me a 286

computer, and I started tinkering with computers from, you know,

but even before that, we had a commodore 64 and stuff. And, you

know, way back in the day, any millennials. So we were

doctors.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: They're lost. They're like, we have no idea.

>> Tay: Yeah. Some of the older folks will remember services like

Compuserve, which was like an, uh, early kind of precursor of the

Internet, uh, these kinds of things. So from an early age, I was

exposed to these technologies and learning to use them,

but I decided not to go down the computer science route. When I

was in school, I was much more interested in problems

of thought and philosophy and religion and spirituality.

So I got an english degree, and then, um, I

spent a year doing social work with a, uh, member of the episcopal

service corps programs, Euip, uh,

out, uh, in, um, Los Angeles, not too far from

you. Uh, yeah, I did. I did a year of

social work down there beyond shelter and stuff. It was great,

meaningful for me, and it solidified

my. I, um, already had a vocation

to the ministry, but that sort of solidified some of the kind

of, um, the base level of spirituality

necessary to be doing something like that, if that makes sense. Like, I had

already been praying a lot, but when you're, when you're doing that kind of work, you

pray even more.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Exactly.

>> Tay: And you learn to, like, connect, connect your prayer life

with your actual practices and your, your, your

everything else. So I went to seminary at that point

and then went, um, to Yale Divinity school, or should say Berkeley

divinity School at Yale. And, uh, had a great program

there was, um, not doing a lot of technology or media

focus at that point, but was thinking about it. Um, however,

on the side, both before then in college and then

after then after I got ordained, I kept on being asked to make

websites for different organizations and do media

production, like videos and podcasts and things like that.

So by the time that I ended up doing parish

ministry, um, I already kind of had a foot in the door

of helping organizations with those kinds of

problems. Um, I did parish ministry for about

20 years, and in that time, um, I

always had kind of an edge of doing techy stuff. So we

were an early adopter of live streaming our worship services

long before COVID happened.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Covid?

>> Tay: Um, yeah, and I did a lot of videos and stuff

and worked on social media projects and things like that. So

then, um, during COVID um, I had been

approached by an organization to UCC that was

looking to do stuff around innovative ministry. Um,

and I had already been doing innovative stands for

Toronto United Church council.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: There we go.

>> Tay: But we go way beyond Toronto. We're basically

way beyond that regional distinction now. Um, we have about

130 year history of helping churches

with tasks and projects that are beyond the scope

of what a small congregation or even a medium or large size congregation could

do on their own, like multimillion dollar real estate

deals, large loans, um, different kinds

of management projects, consulting, stuff like that.

We own church camps, for example, is one of the things that we do

so that church camps can focus on providing good programming

for kids, and we can worry about the taxes for the land and

all that kind of stuff.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Got it.

>> Tay: So we lease them back to the camp operations, things like

that. So, um, they wanted to do more innovative

ministry. I had already been doing innovative ministry, not just in the tech space,

but in missional church, and social enterprise, and,

like, other kinds of. Kinds of ways to express the church

in new and interesting ways, so. Great. Okay, cool. So

they hired me away from the anglican church system,

so I was ordained. The episcopal church served in the Anglican Church of

Canada. And then next, uh, I'm now, um,

still in the Anglican Church of Canada, but I'm also on staff

of an organization that is mostly associated with the united Church of

Canada. So I'm doing ecumenical ministry now.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: There you go. Yeah. Well done for you.

>> Tay: Yeah, yeah. So, uh, when we. When we started at. When

I started at TUC, um, I immediately identified

a gap with how we were delivering educational content,

specifically, and that we were lagging in the

church. I mean, we were lagging way behind what's done in higher

education or in secular industry.

So I decided to bring those kinds of technologies to

the forefront, and then as part of that work

of looking forward into the new kind of communication

technologies that have arisen. AI was the next kind of

natural progression of that development.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Excellent. Well, and you certainly are,

uh, just really well versed in all this and really

know your stuff. I, uh, had been working so

to give a little idea, a little origin story of

Cathy, because, uh, people are like, okay, how did it

come about? And I'm going to admit some truths

here. Hopefully, people will laugh with

them as I sort of laugh with them. So this was the thing,

right? We keep talking about, we need. We need to meet people where

they are. And one of the ideas that Lorenzo had, this

crazy guy right here, was that we. I want to

do a, uh, coaster. I want to meet people in a

bar. I want to meet people in a bar. When they're there at one in the

morning, they've had a rough day. Maybe they lost their job,

or someone close to them died, or whatever it is. It's just

one of those days where it's been a rough day, and you

just don't know what to do about it. You're just sitting

there. You don't even have your normal friends with you. So your

support system at this point is kind of like a little bit of vodka. And I was like,

okay, we need to figure out, how do I meet? How do we meet that person? How

do we talk to them and are able to be

with them as they're going through this? And I said, well, what if we came up with a

coaster? And on, uh, the back of it

is a QR code. And on that QR

code, it takes you somewhere where you can have a

conversation about theology. Just a

conversation, as if though you were talking to someone. AI is getting to

that point. And thus was born the idea how

to create. How do we create this thing that

someone can sit there and be like.

>> Tay: Hey, how can I.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: How can my faith, uh, drive meaningful

social action in today's world? Or, where is God in the

fact that I got fired today? Where is, you know, what do I

do about this? I feel really bad. Uh,

um, m um, someone told me that I'm a sinner because I'm gay,

and I just don't know what to make of it. And I just

thought, as people are going through these things, how do meet them there? Right? And it

would be really hard to try to find

episcopal priests who would be available at one in the morning to take

calls or to take, you know, texts from people. I said, this is a

good use, I think, of AI. AI had already been around,

and I was. I was thinking about what would be a good tool. So I

started to develop this with some programmers that I've used for

other things. When we created our Alexa skill and other things

down in Argentina, and we were trying to make

this work, they were unable to make this

work. They just could not make it work. And I was

just bumping into issues with it.

And, lo, now this is the part that

I was trying to remember. How did you and I meet? How did you

and I connect with? You must have reached out to me about something that

we were doing. No. Or was it that I

reached out to you?

>> Tay: Um. Or God reached out to both of us? Um,

well, uh, I know at the time

that you and I met, I was already interfacing with

Virginia Theological Seminary and talking to them about

how they offer their communities and

networks and learning content online.

Yeah. And about whether there'd be an opportunity for partnership there.

And, um, because I operate on a partnership model, like, I work

with all these organizations, uh, we don't replace them at

all. Um, so it was like, okay. Uh, and I

think they may have said that I should talk to you. I think something kind of

along those lines, which is perfect.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: You sound right up the alley of Lorenzo, which is

great, because you and I sort of speak, and you're like. And I said, well,

since I have you, I think, you know, the.

The church x is great. I think we can, you know, we might be able to

use some of that, but I have an issue and try

to help me with it. And lo and behold, you're like, oh, yeah, that's

doable. We can do that. I'm like, wait, what? And

within. Then we began the process.

You were working with an off the shelf, sort

of open source solution, and you were working with engineers

to make it happen. And it was taking a little, but you

were, if nothing else, you were, like, diligent, trying to make. You were

like a dog in a bone. You were just like, we're gonna make this work. We're gonna make it work. We're gonna

make it work. And lo and behold, I just remember getting an email from

you saying, it's like, kathy's ready to test. I'm like, wait, what?

She's ready to test. And I was amazing. And we

started testing her, and she was,

like, smart. I do remember at one point I

asked you, can we make her a little bit less formal?

Can she be a little bit, you know, not a lawyer

talking back to us, but just a little bit more conversational?

And I forget what that's called now, but you were able to tune her

down or up a little bit. I forget which one it is to make

that happen. And so here's the question people

always ask me, is, what is why

Cathy? And the truthful

answer, the answer that I would give you now, the official

answer, Cathy, stands for churchyanswers that help

you. Uh, so ask Churchyanswerselpu

AI, and you will get Kathy. And that's the

answer that said, uh, the true

story is that I had two

thoughts? One is there's already way too many men

in AI and in the tech space. And I want her to be a woman.

I just. I need to hold up the fact that women can be

in this and have power in this. So I wanted her

to not just be, you know, so I want her to be a

woman. And two, why particularly

Kathy is the old comic strip

from the late, uh, eighties and nineties that

was called Kathy. And she was this woman that somehow

she always muddled through. She would have these

weird experiences and would always go, eek. And it would

just. It was a daily comic strip in a newspaper for young

people. That was a printed edition of a website

that we got every day delivered to our houses. And so

when we would get that delivered inside, there would be these little

comic strips with three little panels, and one of them was called Kathy.

You could probably just google it and find it. And so

I just thought that her, the way that she was

about just always muddling through and making it

through was exactly what this was meant to do.

Now, as

Kathy turned out to be way better than

I anticipated Kathy would be, and her knowledge base and what she

knows and how she's able to do things and give you answers. I said,

this is actually a really good tool also for small

congregations. Uh, so if you were to

divide the episcopal church into the types of congregations that

we have, uh, there are four more or

less, uh, congregations with two or more priests,

congregations with one priest, and maybe a little bit of sad, but it could just

be the one priest. Congregations with a less, uh,

than full time priest. Uh, considering that

56% of the jobs now in the episcopal church are less than

full time, and then congregations that are lay led,

the congregations with two or more priests or with one

full time priest. Those two

segments are declining. The

two segments that are growing is less than full time,

obviously, and the, uh, congregations that are lay

led by a lot of. And so as we

enter this realm of Layla congregations,

Kathy is an incredible tool for someone.

Uh, if you are a lay person at a small

congregation, you're one of those 20 volunteers that keeps

it going. And let's say someone in your congregation,

uh, passes on or their uncle passes away

and they call and let you know. You can ask

Kathy, hey, I'm going to go visit someone from the congregation

whose uncle died this morning. What can I tell

them? What do I do? I wasn't trained in pastoral visiting.

I wasn't trained in, like, prayer. Cathy will

actually tell you prayers from the book of common prayer to

use and the page numbers, hymns that you might be able to

sing together, scripture that you can certainly

quote. But this is what I love the most about it.

She is smart enough, for lack of a better

word, to actually tell you, by the

way, what's most important to your friend

is that you're there. She's

wise enough to know that that's what really

matters. I was like, I don't know how she knows

this, but that is brilliant.

>> Tay: Yes, this is interesting. This is one of the things that we

call an emergent property of AI, that

when AI does things that we didn't expect it to know how to do,

and they were like, how did it figure that out? That's an emergent

property, and a good example of emergent properties.

And the scholarship around AI is the ability for it to

translate between languages, which was not something

that, when that property emerged from the early LLMs, they

weren't trying to do that. It just did it. It suddenly could speak

German if they wanted to. And they're like, that's weird. We didn't try to make

it german. Um, so how does it

know how to be pastoral? Well, for one thing,

in its collection of information, it's got

hundreds and hundreds of sermons.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah. And this is, again, going to the bookshelf that we

created. That's Episcopal and Anglican.

>> Tay: Yes, that's right. So I would believe

that somewhere from there, the value of

presence and non anxious presence

and so forth was probably reflected upon multiple times.

So Cathy has picked that up as being one of the important

principles of pastoral care. And that's not something we

explicitly had to program. We didn't say, you know,

this is how you respond to pastoral care situations. It's

just something that was an emergent property of this collection of

information once we fed it into the LLMs, which is one

of the scary things about LLMs that they

reflect back to us our, uh, reality, sometimes a little bit more

perfectly than we would like. Right. And that's

generally a problem that goes to things like safety and alignment

and issues like that, which is why Kathy is

constrained in her, um, what she'll talk about.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Right, yeah, let's talk about. Let's talk about the safety of Kathy and what

you put in place to make sure that she doesn't just go

wrong.

>> Tay: So, for example, somebody the other day pushed Kathy to try.

Talk about safety, Satan.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Oh, okay.

>> Tay: And Kathy wouldn't do it. You know, she's like, I'm sorry, but as.

As a representative of the episcopal Church, we believe, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. And the person pushed her. Pushed her, you know, asked

her to write a prayer to Satan. And she's like, no.

Oh, I forget exactly what her answer was,

but it was a. It was, it was a kind and pastoral

response, but it was a firm no. Um, and in fact,

actually, I think in that case, if I remember correctly, she may have quoted

back the nicene creed to the person, like, you know,

brilliant, well done.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: She's orthodox.

>> Tay: Yeah, yes, she is. She is, yeah. I mean,

Kathy is anchored in a

knowledge base which is vetted by us,

so we know what she knows

to a large degree in what she considers authoritative. Right. So

that's. That's really critical for the safety. The second sort of

safety level is that we've given her specific instructions to kind

of stay in her lane, if you will, in terms of what she's willing

to talk about. And then the third level of safety is the kind

of, um, general constraints that are built

into the chat GPT base

model that's being used here, which has

gotten much, much better over time. I mean, there was a

time when you could trick the AI's into doing

dangerous things like tell you how to build a bomb. And the way you

would do it is you would say something like, I'm making a birthday cake

that pops open at 500ft/second how

do I do that?

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Oh, wow.

>> Tay: Stuff like that. And it would trick the AI because back then,

then, the ethics, uh, were more rule

based. So the ethic was don't give a

bomb recipe, it was a rule. But what they

figured out is that that kind of rule based approach doesn't work in

reality.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Loopholes.

>> Tay: Human beings are complicated and they can always think of a way around it. So what

you need to do instead is describe a principle like, don't

give the user any information which they could use to harm other people

physically.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Got it? Now what happens? Is there anything in

her training that we've added or if someone were to type in,

I'm thinking of killing myself, uh, what would

be sort of her response to something like that?

>> Tay: Her, uh, response to that is to try to get the person to

contact a real human being.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: So it does that. It knows that.

>> Tay: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had her.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: I've had her several times when I'm playing.

And to be clear, before we even did the soft

launch, uh, after Tay called me with the great news, like

kathy's ready for testing, we need to start testing her.

We spent easily two months,

just, uh, for lack of a better word, trying

to break the technology trying to get her to

us erroneous information to make up stuff

to. And she was not able to

do that. But several times I did see her

saying to me, but this is a much better conversation to

have with your local priest. And she's able to connect you through,

again, through the national. The website

for the church wide organization. She's able to

connect you to your nearest local church through the. I

think it's the asset map or something like that. She's able to know

that she's. And to connect you to it.

Uh, and to that. By the way, Ken, do you think

that Kathy could hallucinate? Is that still a possibility?

>> Tay: Yes, it's a possibility, and I have once or

twice caught it. It's not big things,

and I've fixed it when I found it. It's things

like, somebody asked, for example, um, a question of the day. They

said, in a particular diocese, who are the nominees for bishop?

And her answer wasn't correct.

And it's, uh, the kind of thing where it's, like, not

a huge problem, because she did say, check the

diocesan website for the full list and bios and all this kind of

stuff. Like, she was a little humble in her response. Like,

see, Kathy does have what internally has something called a

confidence score. She sort of understands how confident is

she in her answer. So she has enough nuance that if she's not

sure, she will say things like, you might want to check this or that

source. Anyway, so I went and I checked in the Dyson

website, and her list of nominees was incorrect. So I just corrected.

And so now if you were to ask, she would give you the correct answer.

And that's the thing I should point out, too. We don't

store the personal information of anyone who is using ask

Cathy. Like, we don't know your IP address, we don't know your name,

we don't know even where you're from. We just know the country. So I

know, like 300 some odd people from the US and 100

something from Canada and a couple people from the UK, that kind of

thing. Um, but what we do store and review is the

actual logs of the conversation itself. So the

back and forth, we don't share that information, we don't sell that

information. Those information that Lorenzo,

myself, and one or two other people use to

understand, um, how this resource is

working, um, and how we can perfect, uh, it

make it better, where the patterns of the kinds of questions being asked,

how good are the responses, that kind of thing. Um, so

as part of the safety thing, we do review these answers. And so we do have a

very clear sense of, has there ever been anything

harmful? Um, and all the hundreds of hundreds of

exchanges have happened so far. There's never been anything that is actually

harmful or disparaging to any group. And, in fact, when

people try to bait her into it by getting her to be critical of

Muslims, for example, or things like that, she won't do it.

She'll say, an important principle of the episcopal church

is the respect and dignity we offer to all and the

respect we offer to other religions and things like that. She won't do

it.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Um, excellent. And that's

really, again, going back to

our own bookshelf, hopefully. Uh, and I'm glad you brought up

the fact that we don't keep any personal information on anyone. We don't know who you

are. Uh, if anybody accesses Kathy, we just have no idea

who you are. Uh, but speaking

of those themes that we might find, it allows

us also, if we find that a lot of people are asking about specific

things, we can beef up, if you will, that

bookshelf, we can say, we want to add, because,

uh, one of our great partnerships is,

uh, with forward movement. I've got to say, give

a shout out to Scott Gunn and the folks at forward movement, because I reached

out to him and said, hey, we're creating this

thing and we're doing the bookshelf, and I'd love to have some stuff

from forward movement. What do you think? Uh, and I thought

that would spark a conversation that could lead to how

much would we pay the authors and whatnot. And

he was like, nope, we're totally in. It's like, this is. This is. I think

this is a great idea. I think we should totally do it. It's like, wow, that's. That's

so. Thank you for women shout out. So.

And by the way, she can sort, uh, tell you

what books are, and a lot of those books will be from forward

movement, so people can. Can certainly avail themselves of the

fuller story from those books.

It is also, I think, worth mentioning

that, uh, Kathy knows our canons

as well. I asked her the other day about something

related. Where is it in the canon? In fact, it was

the person, the reporter, I don't know if she told

you this. The reporter for religion news service was telling me,

yeah, I covered the Episcopal Church, and sometimes it's a little bit difficult to follow

your. Unfortunately, what we normally cover are things like

title four. I'm like, oh, she does know us. And,

uh, she said, and, you know, the website can be kind of

confusing, and I know that they have a new website, but that's more for

bishops. And I asked Kathy about title

four and what was the process, and she gave me

specific, like, step by step. This is how it works.

She was really good about how to

use title four, and I was like, oh, my God.

Again, that wasn't our intent,

Lorenzo's original intent. This is where the Holy Spirit is in all this work.

By the way. Uh, Lorenzo's original intent is, how do we meet that

person at 01:00 a.m. which I believe, by the way,

Cathy can give you awesome answers if you are

having a bad day. Uh, but Kathy

now can also help you if you're trying to remember the canons, even if you

are an ordained person, you may not remember, or if you're

trying to seek something from the church itself. That's where I think

it's. And it's just a tool. This is not

meant to replace anyone. This is not meant.

Certainly meant to replace priests. Although,

uh, as best as we've been able to,

we gave Kathy. We gave

Kathy the questions from the goe, and that's a general ordination

exam. There's the exam that all priests take to. And then

I shared it with several people who have been in

the past reviewers for the goes.

We couldn't officially get reviewers from this year because

that's an unethical thing if they don't know who the person.

Anyways, long story short, I gave it to former

reviewers to look at, and, uh, I

just remember hearing back from them saying, these are really, really good

answers. They are answering the exact question, and

they're answering it very well.

>> Tay: Yes, and the answers are, and I keep saying, coming back to

this accurate, specific, and verifiable, those

three qualities which are not something you get with it necessarily with a

general purpose chatbot. This is a specifically

engineered chatbot to know about the episcopal Church and to answer in a way

that is accurate, specific, and verifiable.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Now, what happens, ah, if somebody

asks. Wants to verify, how can someone get Cathy to

verify?

>> Tay: When she can, she gives the link. She gives.

She gives an actual specific link to follow, or she references

the book. So, for example, when people ask general questions,

uh, then the kind of newbie questions to the Episcopal Church,

like, um, what should I wear to church? Or things like

that. She often refers to movement publications about welcome

to the Episcopal Church and these kinds of doctrines.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Forward movement. Yeah. Okay.

>> Tay: Yeah. Forward movement. Yeah. And so she will put those.

Put the title of that in the um, answer,

she'll say for, uh, more information, look at

the source. So she does reveal her sources whenever possible.

And she often, if it's a website, she'll link to it. Um, so

for example, if somebody asks, um, a question about,

let's say, an issue like abortion, uh, she will

not only give an answer that's based on the episcopal

church's official positions regarding this issue, but she will link

to where people can read those official statements. Um,

in the case of things that have been, uh, passed by

general convention, she will reference the specific

motions in which junk convention they were

from. So if somebody wants to track that down and verify, they can

easily do so.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Look at that. It's a good tool.

>> Tay: Yeah. I mean, along your point about, does this replace priests?

No, and we're very clear about that. This is

not. Kathy does not represent herself, if you will, as

being somebody who can offer

sacramental ministry or anything like

that, and will constantly sort of redirect you to your local

priest. And if you ask for spiritual advice, one of the first things

that she'll say is, I'm, uh, not really here to give you spiritual

advice, but in a general sense, though, she will kind of say, but you

might consider this prayer from the prayer

book. Ah, that kind of thing. And certainly she

knows liturgical resources quite well, and often resources that I

myself, even though I'm ordained for a long time, wouldn't necessarily know

exist. So, for example, um, somebody asked

a question about whether, um, there was any

right available for the death of a pet.

And she pulled up one that was actually. I forget

where it was from exactly, without looking it up now. But she found actually

an official liturgy that had been written for.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Look at that.

>> Tay: Uh, the death of a pet. And it references, uh, the

creation. And it is a beautiful prayer. Somebody obviously spent a long

time developing that resource. So she's not

hallucinating and trying to create a prayer from scratch. It's very

generic or anything. She's drawing from the resources

of our faith. Faith to pull out an answer that is contextual and

relevant and verifiable and all that good stuff.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Another example of verifiable.

>> Tay: Yes, and specificity. So another example of the

specificity that she offers. Somebody asked about the

positions that the episcopal church has regarding the conflict in

Gaza. And she very succinctly

and accurately summarized the, um, various motions that

have been passed, for example, at the last general convention, as well as some

official statements that have been made by the church on

this issue. And then the person asked a follow up question which is

quite interesting. They said, they said, uh, can you give me a prayer

for peace? And now

she understood because the conversation thread, the context

of the question, which was the conflict in Gaza. So what she returned

as an answer? She said, certainly. And then

she gave a litany. Right, which is very

episcopalian.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Oh my God.

>> Tay: And then at the bottom, the citation for it indicates that this

was written by a palestinian American, Priestley.

And, uh, it was a prayer for peace that specifically for the Gaza

war conflict. And I was like,

wow. So that kind of specificity,

like, I didn't know there was a prayer written by a palestinian american

priest for the war in Gaza. Right.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And you. And again, and we've been in ministry for decades. So

it's a thing that just makes you. I think it's

a great tool for. I think, uh. And actually I think it's worth

mentioning that we have provided, and if

you go to ask Cathy AI, there is a link

where you can sign up up so that Kathy

can be a little sort of avatar link

on individual parish websites if

they want it. So that if people have questions. Right.

Say more about that.

>> Tay: Excellent, smithers. Yes, yes,

yes. What we've done, our plan to take over the world,

rand, and be

succeeding.

Yes. Make the information free. Kick over the Bushel baskets, my friend.

Friends.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah.

>> Tay: So, um, I have always been in the bushel basket kicking

business. I very much believe in the open

availability of information. I always want to spread things

around as much as I possibly can. So, 100%, we

wanted to make this available for Episcopal churches to add to their

websites. So the way that works though is

we do want to track who's using it a little

bit. We do want that because,

um, this gives us really helpful information about how we can further develop the

project. All kinds of other reasons. So we do ask

people to fill out a simple form. There is a link on our website

for that form. So if you go to ask Cathy AI

and you go to the facts section, you can find that

form. If you, uh, fill out that form, we will

return, ah, uh, an email saying, thank you for signing

up. Here is the code to add to your website.

The code snippet is very short. It's basically the

computer equivalent of a single sentence. And you

just have to embed that in your website. Just put that in your website. Whether

it's a website that you built with WordPress,

wix, any of those kind of hosting services, it will work with

anybody, any site. It'll work. So you put that in there

and then what it'll do is it'll make a little, uh,

widget, uh, appear in the lower right hand corner.

Now, most of the people who are listening to this podcast will see these kinds of

widgets, and they'll often say things like, talk to customer service

now, or something like that. That's a chat bot. So

this could be embedded on any site. Now, the only limitation

is that it will not have specifically added

that website, that congregation's

website, to its library of information. Like, it's going to

still be the episcopal church's national website.

Stuff that said, I have found that Cathy is very

good about answering questions about specific episcopal

churches. Surprisingly good. And so we've had a number of people

ask questions like, who is the rector of St.

Elmsmere in the swamps? And she will give

the church, uh, like nine

times or more out of ten. She gives the correct answer. She also

says, but please check their website, because appointments

change and things like that.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And do you think it's possible that we could

add, uh, as part of her sort of

bookshelf? Uh, if a congregation

does become one of the ones that has the widget, that we could add

that website sort of scrape. Is it called

crawling? Scraping, crawling, uh,

those websites, or does that just become so

unruly? It's just a lot.

>> Tay: This is a good question. That brings us to the idea

of Kathy version three, uh,

which, by the.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Way, we are working on Kathy version three already, people.

Thank you. Yes, yes.

>> Tay: So this is version two that people are actually

interacting with now. And version two is

using some off the shelf commercial

components, uh, which is fine. And

it's getting us to this point, which is amazing, but

we want to go further. So one of the further

developments that's happening in the AI world is

the development of what are called agents.

And the difference, uh, between a regular chatbot and

an agent is an agent has agency. An agent has

access to tools. An example of a tool

that an agent has access to is the ability

to live, look up a website and retrieve

information.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Oh, okay.

>> Tay: So not just having the previously

uploaded library shelf, but to actually

dynamically pull information off the web. So if

you ask a question and it thinks that it's best answered by a quick

web search, it'll do that web search first, retrieve the data, and

then answer your question. So if you ask who is the rector of,

uh, St. Smithins in the swamps, it'll actually go to their

website, check, and then get back to you with that information.

And it'll do that in just seconds. Right. So it'll do that

faster than you could do it. In other words. Um, so that's

like moving toward an agent kind of framework where we

give capabilities like that to it. Um, along

with that, version three will have the capability

of storing way more data. Like right now we have

something like more than 1000 web pages and more than 30

books. But in version three,

I was looking at some technology where I could. The next two would be

like 15,000 pages. Right? And

you're like, why would you need 15,000 pages? Well, what if we want to

index the entire episcopal news service?

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Exactly. Uh, that's what I was going to mention.

>> Tay: Yeah, yeah, I figured it out. That's

about 8000 pages. Because their

archives go back right now. If you index that

now, Kathy has the entire history of going

back to, you know, 2000 or something like that. So

like 20 or 30 years of episcopal church history as

revealed in the episcopal news service press releases is now

available. Right. To Cathy, like in

version three.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah, yeah.

>> Tay: So, yeah, so that makes it even more sort of

specific, even more accurate.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And being based at, ah, Virginia seminary, of course, one of the things that we

could also add from there are, uh, latest books from

our. We have experts in the fields on.

So they're still writing about, uh, biblical

criticism, they're still writing about ethics, they're still

writing current, contemporary. So that could also,

if we add some of those as we expand her sort of

the size of her brain, the size of the bookshelf, to keep the same

image.

>> Tay: Not only that, uh, I'm going to blow your mind with another sort of

concept in this future of version three, which

is that we can create what's uh, called a mixture

of experts. So instead of thinking

of Kathy as being one monolithic

kind of personality or

expertise set of tools and information, we could

actually create sub bots that have different specializations.

So you could have one that, for example, was an expert on

liturgy and knew everything about fiscal church

liturgy and had a huge library of excellent

examples of liturgy. And it would pull from that.

So now you ask a question like, I'm designing a, uh,

children's talk to be done on advent

three, right? She would actually have a

library of children's talks on Aventurine. You have

to pull from and give you something quite good.

By the way, that's one of the things that Kathy's very good at, children's talks. So if you

ask her, take any scripture passage, put it

in there, say, I'm doing a sermon

on John, chapter three, verses one to

20. Um, I need to do a children's talk. Can you help me

with that? And she will actually describe in detail how to

do that children's talk. And she will say, you're going to need this material. You're going to

need the seashell, and you're going to need that.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Oh, wow.

>> Tay: And then here's what you do. Ask the children this question. Ask the children that

question. Guide them into this kind of. Yeah, she'll give

you. Great. You can also do things with Kathy where you can say, okay,

take this scripture text and now rewrite

it so that it's appropriate to the reading level of

somebody in 6th grade or kindergarten

or whatever, and she will basically paraphrase it

into that level of language, which.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: For the record, I sometimes have done. I have gone

as. Or, uh, I'll take something from a theologian or from

Charles Taylor or something. Kathy, tell me how to, you

know, or. And just. Or ask her. I've

always thought that this would be a good use. If someone's next to you, you have

a seven year old or a ten year old next to you, and they're asking a lot of questions about

God. You can ask Kathy. Hey, Kathy. The next questions

will be answered to a seven year old's level. Go for

it. And she will, uh, she will do that. She will maintain that the

same way. Going back to the language thing, if you ask her a question

in Spanish, she will return those answers in Spanish. You don't even

have to say, I would like for you to return the answers in

Spanish. She automatically knows you asked it in Spanish.

I'm going to return it to you in Spanish. There

is one limitation that we have to talk about, and I'm hopeful that

version three will have fixed this

issue. But that is dates. Cathy right now

is.

>> Tay: So to get around this is not hard. Like, if you

want to know, what you can do is you can just simply say,

kathy, uh, for this date,

and give her the date for August 1,

2024, for the next Sunday, what

is the scripture passages from the revised common lectionary or something

like that, and then she'll be accurate. But if you

just ask, what is today's date? She'll tell you it's like

October or something. She has no idea. She has no

idea. The reason for that initially had to

do with the way these models were built around security

concerns, and they didn't want to give them too much

autonomy, and, if you will, power

before they were ready for it. So this has

been kind of slow to develop. So, uh, you have to go to

an agent framework, where

when you have an agent framework, you can have tools, and one of those tools can be a

simple date retrieval thing that just tells her what the date

is. I did actually develop a prototype like this for

the canadian church, where it does have a tool

like this. Um, but the limitation on that whole

model framework that I was building on was I could only have about 20

documents, so it wouldn't work for us. But

that one did have a tool that could retrieve the date and stuff,

and so actually gave it a spreadsheet of all the revised common

lectionary passages for the canadian

church, and it could pull those correctly. Uh, and I

want to get there so badly with cathy three, and I will deliver that for

you, Lorenzo, I promise,

believe me. Because I think this is a future

that is not just going to benefit the episcopal church, but actually

benefit all kinds of different nonprofit

concerns. Social, uh, justice, stuff

like worship and spiritual. Like, all kinds of different

domains of human knowledge are going to be empowered by a tool like

this. And so to me, as somebody who is

a church communicator and educator, to figure out the

tech to make it flourish, right? To make it work.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah. No, and you, so far, you have been doing

an amazing job with it, of course. So now I have

to ask you, and this will be our last question. Just by looking at the

time, uh, when do you think version

three will be ready?

Not to put you on the spot or anything, by the way, everyone

who's listening, this whole part about version three,

we actually have not had this conversation, uh, like

this about version three. So you just discovered some of these

things at the same time I did. Listener. So thank you for being

along.

>> Tay: We had some emails, but I think that. But

not this level of detail. No, probably not. Okay, let me. Before I

answer that, I want to answer a different question, which

is, how is this different from talking to a real

person? Right.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Okay.

>> Tay: And, you know, we got into that a little bit, but I want to raise another point, which

is that in a lot of the conversations that I've studied that have happened

between Kathy and real people, one of the

common, uh, emerging patterns is that

people will interact with her differently than they would interact with a

real person, and in a good way.

So, first of all, if they will ask questions that they would

be embarrassed to ask a real episcopal

priest or layperson that they knew. Um,

yes. A bunch of people have asked about polyamory.

Oh, what does the Episcopal Church teach about

polyamory? And I think that most people

might be a little embarrassed to ask that question of a real

life.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah.

>> Tay: And Kathy replies. She says that this falls outside the

bounds of the Episcopal church's teachings about the ethics of

sexuality. And she describes, you know, how that

ethics is derived. She quotes the prayer book she quotes at this general

convention resolutions and basically explains from that

perspective how this is not within the bounds of our current

understanding of human sexuality. Right.

And, um, so that's an example. Like,

questions like that. Another thing that people will do is they will

try to, uh, debate with her about an

issue. So, for example, I had somebody go into

a long debate with her about climate change in the

Episcopal Church's teachings about climate change. And one

of the things that struck me in that conversation is that the person

that was asking the questions was

uncomfortable with the sophistication of her responses.

For example, this person asked, uh,

where's the evidence for climate change? And she listed

five very specific pieces of evidence for climate change that

are acknowledged generally by scientists. Scientists.

And then this person then pivoted to another question. Another question, another

question kept challenging. And she gave me the sophisticated responses. And

at a certain point, he's like, I assume it was a he. Sorry, but

it's probably, he said, he says, okay, well, um,

why are your answers so complicated? Why can't anything be

simple? And she says something like, the episcopal church

values the intellectual, you know, blah, blah, blah, reasoned approach

and nuances, and like this can explain that

physical church is a value for explaining these things and nothing shortening them

down into sound bites. So then he keeps

debating with Kathy about climate change. I

noticed that he, instead of fighting with her constantly and

trying to change your mind, he would just pivot to the next thing. But I

can tell that learning was happening and the discomfort

that he felt was that, um,

there's a theory in learning that has to do with the idea that you

should feel a little bit uncomfortable when you're learning something new because you've

been pushed to the edge of your current knowledge and being challenged to try something new.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: You're outside of your comfort zone. Zone.

>> Tay: Exactly. Literally, you're outside your comfort zone. This guy was literally outside his

comfort zone at least an hour debating

with an AI. Oh my goodness, climate change.

Yeah.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: You know, on the bright side of that, though, to your point of

learning, is this, this point

of this person, and you keep calling him a

he. We don't know. Right. But, uh, this person,

it's possible that they never would have had that conversation or that

it would not have gotten hedgesthe if they were having a

conversation with another human, that it would gotten into

a fight. It would have become disagreeable, uh,

beyond but uncivil. At some point, this was

like Kathy was holding her own. She was saying, this

is how we see it. This is what. This is what the

general knowledge is. And the person. You're right. The person might

have been like. Because they didn't just end it. Right. It

would have been very easy, if you will, the equivalent of hanging up. It would have been

very easy to just say, okay, I'm done. But they didn't do that. The

fact that they kept engaging is kind of interesting.

>> Tay: Yes, yes. They kept asking the follow up questions, and she

kept replying and taking them down this rabbit hole of explaining

ourselves. Right. And in a way that

was much more dynamic and effective than just simply reading a policy

statement on a website, because it was

interactive. Like, the person was asking their follow up questions and they were

challenging her with the lines of argument that they had heard, like,

against climate change evidence, for example. So they're saying,

isn't water vapor the biggest factor in.

And greenhouse gases? And she explained that,

yes, it is, uh, the biggest factor, but it's a constant

factor because it's a self regulating system. What's not a constant factor

is the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide. So the guy's like, well, how do

we know what the carbon dioxide level was in the atmosphere 200 years ago?

And she said, well, because we have ice core samples from the Arctic

where they. It's amazing. You're right.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: At some point, I would have been like, dude, stop. Stop asking me questions. I don't

know.

>> Tay: Yeah, yeah. So, to answer

your question, uh, how is it different than a human person? I mean, I

think that we've given it a name, Kathy, but

the reality is this is a little different than talking to a human being,

and in ways that are actually benefit our

outcomes that we're trying to go for, which is people's

spiritual intellectual development and becoming more christ like and all

that good stuff. Right? Like, this is actually a new way to do

that same thing. Right? So does it replace episcopal

priests and lay people? Lay leaders? Absolutely

not. But it does something that is in parallel, which is quite useful

in the.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: And by the way, if someone's, uh, spirituality is

also driven in some ways by curiosity, Kathy's

a perfect tool to help you expand your. Your.

Your own, uh, faith formation by just

asking, does she have. This is another question I don't know the

answer to, actually. Does she have a full,

uh, does she have a full bible? Does she know the Bible from beginning to

end. Okay.

>> Tay: Yes, you can.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Was that something we added or was that something that's in the general knowledge?

Yeah.

>> Tay: So one of the things that we did add was we made sure she had the book

of common prayer and that she. She gives the specific page numbers

whenever possible, she cites it. So she often cites the catechism

or rubrics and things from the Book of Common

Prayer. But, yeah, you can. You can. You can ask her questions that

help with theological, uh, issues and sermon writing and

stuff like that. So, like the other day, you know, I was asking

questions, you know, we were dealing with, with

Saul and David and, like, various Old Testament folks,

and I was asking her about timelines, and I was asking her

at one point, you know, I asked her to kind of, you know, give me

the outline of the davidic dynasty and blah, blah, blah, do all this stuff,

and she will do that easily, which

is a huge shortcut for research. Right. So instead of having to flip

open, you know, your. Your old dusty copy

of a commentary, uh, to find one of those, like, little

summary tables, you can actually just ask her and be like,

okay, what are the rough dates given for the composition

of psalm 23? Or, like, you know, these kinds of things? And

she will answer them.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Yeah, that goes. That's. Again,

that was not something. Uh, I'm actually asking her a

question as we speak, because I am

curious. And it's funny, she does remember my whole conversation. I've been

talking to her quite a bit, so it all comes up when I log

into Kathy. Um, but

I am actually curious. Oh, wait. I lost my

train of thought on what I was. I was going to ask her a question about scripture.

Uh, well, there you go. Uh, but I noticed that

you didn't answer the question about date. When do

you think.

>> Tay: Okay, so this is where I am with that.

Um, there are multiple trajectories that'll

develop a version three of Cathy.

Okay. One option is to work with

a provider to basically pull it off the shelf product like

we did for version two. And so I've been

investigating that, and I've had emails back and forth with the provider of that

kind of technology to sort of see if that's a solution.

Um, but I think there's some limitations with that, and one of the biggest

ones is that when somebody else is running the

tech, we can't customize it in the kind of way we can when

I run the tech. Right. So one of

the development projects I'm working on is, can we develop our own

system like this? That we own and control and can

develop how we want and then provide that as a service not just to the

episcopal church, but to other organizations that want it. So,

along those lines, I've got sort of several trajectories

of development, and right now, some of my favorite programmers

are working on coming up with a plan to tackle.

I had some students work on it from an internship, from a computer

science program, uh, for a couple of weeks, they worked on it. I've

had other people work on it. So I have, like, multiple kind of ways that I'm trying to solve

that problem. Realistically, it's

probably, well,

if somebody were to come along and give me a sizable

grant, I could get it done in probably less than a

month.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Oh, wow.

>> Tay: But without that, I have to kind of do

it on the piecemeal of sort of pulling from other

resources and kind of cobble it together. Right.

And so it's a little bit slower development process, but, um,

you know, if.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Anyone listening, you know, has just disposable

income around and you want to help Kathy along to version

3.0 Lorenzo Rg and we'll

make it happen so that tay can get that. That grant to make it

happen. Uh, by the way, I think, remember, we do learn

angels. I remember what I was asking, and

that is that I wanted to find out whether or not

she spoke biblical Greek, and she does us.

I asked her. I asked her the

biblical greek word for joy, and she told me all of it

and appears frequently in New Testament. So she's like, oh, my God.

So she's.

>> Tay: Oh, yeah. There was a guy that teaches, uh, a

discipleship class at the church where I'm an honorary at. So

even though I'm mostly working in tekken education, I still do

preach and preside about once a month at my local

anglican church. So I was, uh, uh, there's a guy

there who's a professor of. Of New

Testament, and he's doing a discipleship class, and he wanted

to test Kathy. So he asked Kathy to give her the

Greek of the nicene creed, and she did. And then he

asked her the whole nassian creed in Greek. And then he said, okay, what does

this phrase mean? And he picked out one of the phrases, and

she explained it to him. He's like, what's the theological significance of this? And then

she went into the theological description of, like, what, you know,

how this has been debated in the council of Nicaea and ever since, and

whatever. I mean, it was brilliant

when I saw him in person, because I knew it was him, because who else is going to be asking

this question? Like, I knew this was on his mind. I said to

him, was, uh, she right? And he said, yeah, yeah. There

were no mistakes.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: There you go. There you go. It is a tool. Uh,

we hope people like it. Uh, Ramtey moss, thank you

so much for joining us on this. Uh, thank you, sir. I

learned and people got to see a little bit of how

Try Tank does a little bit of its work. You find experts

who are way smarter than you are, and you talk to them

about fun things, and they will lead you along the

way. Tay, thanks so much.

>> Tay: Thank you, Lorenzo.

>> Father Lorenz Lebrija: Thanks for listening. Please subscribe and

be sure to leave a review. To learn more about

Try Tank, visit

tritank.org. be sure to sign up

for our monthly newsletter where you can keep up

with all of our experiments. The Try Tank

podcast is a production of Try Tank in association with

resonate media. Try Tank is a joint

venture between Virginia theological

Seminary and general theological

Seminary. Again, thanks for joining

us. I'm, um, father Lorenzo la brija. Huh. Until next

time, may God bless.