Paul VanderKlay: How to Strengthen Churches in The Age of The Internet

Malcolm and Simone interview Pastor Paul VanderKlay on why people are increasingly leaving faith traditions and how churches can adapt to strengthen communities. He sees Jordan Peterson as bringing meaning back for lost young men, but online spaces still lack the authentic bonds of real-life congregations. They discuss modeling values for children, the limitations of internet community, changes coming to old institutions, the importance of sacred spaces for honest dialogue, and more.

Paul VanderKlay: [00:00:00] Traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested and most of them are, are, are found wanting.

And this includes, now, every, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this. This includes the church, and what, so G. K. Chesterton talked about, I remember it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity. He said basically Christianity has died five times, and I think that's true.

And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which, again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are Fundamentally modernist institutions sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own denomination, many of these [00:01:00] churches are going away and they are going away fast.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: All right. All right. So for any of our audience who does not know Paul Vander Klee, the man who is on the show here with us today you might be surprised to know that you're probably in the minority of our audience. Cause I just now was reviewing our most overlap channel subscribers.

And you are one of the most overlapped and I watch your videos. Pretty regularly. I, I, like, I haven't watched all of them. You produce videos almost as frequently as we do, which may be why we, you're extremely prolific. Yeah. Yeah. But they're actually really, really solid if you want to get I, I think one, like, insider politics of competent Protestant theology these days.

Oh, that's true. As, as well as what is, like, what do, like, competent Protestant theologists. think these days? How are they engaging? Because the truth is, is that if you are listening to, and this is something I always talk about, if you're listening to like the conservative [00:02:00] elite class, the vast majority of them are Catholic or Jewish in descent.

And so, you know, finding really good Protestant theologians who, who talk competently is, is, is much rarer within the current media landscape. And so I want to start with one. talking about how you came to the media landscape, because to me, you are somebody who is really I'd say almost the, , the paragon of an individual who is adapting new. technology and new social structures to serve an older religious position, which was the position of the preacher. How are you doing that? And how are you thinking about that right now?

Paul VanderKlay: That's a great question. I'm constantly thinking about it actually.

So I, I pastor a small dine church in Sacramento, California. Most churches, the size 60 year life cycle and. I would always have [00:03:00] interests beyond just the local church, and so I was involved with denominational things and all of this stuff. I blogged for years, just, just sort of playing with it, and then Jordan Peterson arose, and I thought this is probably the most important thing for me to pay attention to in my pastoral career.

Wow. And I looked around because, because, well, the reason was, I mean, you guys talk about this basically this monolithic urban culture. What, what, what this has done in churches is that people have sort of either strayed into new atheism or strayed into a light new, new ageism and everyone who's going down that road.

And what I saw happening behind Jordan Peterson were people coming back down that those roads and you hardly ever saw that before and significant numbers were doing it, listening to Jordan Peterson. He was reopening the conversation in a way that I didn't [00:04:00] understand, and so I wanted to understand it and the way I understand things is by talking to people, but.

People in my church weren't going to watch Jordan Peterson. They were all mostly older people. So then I looked to colleagues. Well, most of my colleagues weren't listening to Jordan Peterson and those who were, wouldn't admit it. So I knew I needed some new conversation partners. So I thought. I was reading, I was rereading.

I was real reading, I'm using ourselves to death at the time. And I thought there's something about this medium YouTube. And I had played with it a little bit with a member of my church, the Freddie and Paul show, you can still find it on my channel, but so if you want to get a sense of what my church is like, watch the Freddie and Paul show.

So, so I was seeing this and I thought I'll make a YouTube video. What can, what, what, what can it hurt? There are how many YouTube videos out there that have 10 to 20 viewers and that's, I just needed a few people to talk to. And then [00:05:00] something happened, which I didn't understand, which was this overwhelming response, emails coming to me.

And because I'm a pastor, I wanted to talk to these people. I wanted to hear from them. I wanted their stories. And so then I would zoom them or Skype them and have a conversation. And of course that didn't end the relationship that began the relationship. This was happening locally as well. So I started a Jordan Peterson meetup where before, you know, churches do all kinds of crazy things, try to get people through the door, you know, hot dogs, trunk or tree.

Um, You know, vacation, Bible school. And so I, and so a bunch of people, well, we should do a meetup. I'm like, nobody will come. So I did a meetup and a dozen people came who I had no idea who they were before. And the next month, another dozen came and it just kept growing. So this thing took on a life of its own pretty quickly.

And at about 2000 subscribers, I thought [00:06:00] seriously about just shutting the whole thing down because where's this going to go, but I couldn't shut it down because The conversations were too real and the people were too honest. And what I saw was that all real people really wanted was, can I, can I just talk about this?

Can I just process it with you? Let me know what you think. And I, my church is in a very distressed part of town. I'm always dealing with homeless people panhandling people who were right across the street from a gas station. So people, they want 20 bucks. They walk across the street, they knock on the church.

And I thought, Knock on the church doors looking for 20 bucks, but nobody knocks on the church doors looking for a reasonable conversation about what's most important and where they can actually be honest about what they think and believe. And I thought, I've always wanted a church that could do that.

And I'd be, I discovered, oh my goodness, that is exactly what we have happening here. So [00:07:00] I began to post with permission, some of the conversations that I was having with people. And then once people saw that I would talk to strangers, randos online, then the flood really started. Because then, you know, people just wanted to talk.

And so the, the local meet, then other people wanted meetup groups because they can't get to Sacramento. So I'm helping other people start meetup groups and other churches and in other places that became estuary, which is this whole, it's basically a conversation format where we have. Very open conversations with people.

And then the channel has just kept growing. It's grown slowly, which I'm grateful for. You know, I look at what happened to Jordan Peterson as kind of a cautionary tale, because when you grow that fast, it completely destroys your life. And I, I have, I have a wife, I have five children. I have a church. I didn't need my life destroyed and I didn't want my church.

Pushed out of my life by this. And so, you know, the church and I, the church has been people who [00:08:00] watched the channel have been very supportive of the church. The church probably still wouldn't be open if people didn't financially support

Malcolm Collins: the church. Where's the church, by the way, in case any of our listeners live in this area?

Paul VanderKlay: It's on Florin road in Sacramento. Okay. Great. And it's, it's Livingstone's Christian Reformed Church. You can find it. Just Google it. You'll find it. And, and so, and so the church, then, then, then visitors would start coming into church, but most of the people who'd wander into church would sit there and people are always saying, well, I want authenticity.

And I always tell them my church has so much authenticity. You really don't want it. What it is. Okay. You might say, Oh, I listened to Paul online. Okay. But Paul online is just one little element of what a church is because the church is a community.

Malcolm Collins: So, so talk about this, talk about what you can't achieve within the online sphere that you can't achieve within in person spaces and, and where you feel that you're achieving more within the online sphere.

Paul VanderKlay: That's an excellent question too. People [00:09:00] want to know and be known and to love and be loved. Online is an attentional economy. That just basically saps our attention. And what this means is that a limited number of us who get a certain degree of visibility with the algorithm, get a decent amount of attention and get all sorts of good things from it.

But the vast majority of people are participating in this online space. You know, they get a little entertainment, they get a few ideas, they get a little amusement, but they don't get anything behind it. And loneliness has gotten to. Has gotten to a point in our culture where even governments are doing things like, you know, you know, creating ministry of loneliness.

And I'm thinking a government is creating a ministry of loneliness. People have, people have no, I, another thing that I think of is that part of what happened with radio and especially with television [00:10:00] and that magazines is that the images that we are completely surrounded by. Subtly form our expectations of what life is, and as a pastor, you get a very real sense of just how hard and grimy and uncomfortable and painful life is for many, many people, and You know, all the way back to Thoreau, people live lives of quiet desperation.

They do all the time. And what churches have been able to do, at least to some degree, and what families do to a degree, and what friendships do to a degree, and pubs and all sorts of things, is at least give people a little tiny sense of community. That's someone out there. I remember, I think it was Jonathan Haidt talking about friendships.

He's like, you need a friend. If you go to school, if you don't have one friend, Boy, you know, you're in trouble. And if you think about it, [00:11:00] just one, and many people don't have that. And in fact, partly due to all of these screens and, and where, what we've done as a society, people are desperate and lonely and their lives are filled with pain.

Now they can media mediate that to a degree with television and radio. I can't tell you how often I'll go into a shut ins home and either am radio or television is on. All the time because they just want to hear another human voice.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is something I often think about. We live in this society today, which is something I often know, where you move to a new city often after college or something like that.

And yet your entire, one of the things people always complain about our school system is they're like, well, what we were kids learned to socialize. Where will kids learn to make friends? And one of the things I point out is that in our existing high school and college system, people only learn to make friends with people they're forced to interact with.

When somebody first leaves college and moves to a new city, I often wonder how, like, what percent of America has [00:12:00] no friends at all? Literally talks to no one else. My, like, guess would be it's probably between 15 and 21 percent of people living in the developed world right now. Just have not a single

Paul VanderKlay: friend.

Yep. Yep. I wouldn't be surprised. And, and as a pastor, I Well, and this is only accelerated by YouTube. I regularly bump into people who are, if not hermits, almost so, and their main form of mediation is this internet because with radio and television, it's, it's, it's completely one sided the internet, maybe that fourth wall will be broken a little bit.

So one of the things that I wanted was not just a big channel where I could get my ideas out there and, you know, maybe have a. A strategy for employment when my church dies, but I wanted, I wanted people to be able to find each other. [00:13:00] I wanted people to be able to make friends. They need friends.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Talk about TPI, because this is something you haven't talked about. And some of our listeners don't know about TPI. No,

Paul VanderKlay: TCI, this corner of the internet. Oh, that's a TLC. No, sorry. TLC. That's it. This little corner, right? So I started with Jordan Peterson videos and then people were like, oh, there's an icon carbonate Jonathan, Jonathan Peugeot.

You should talk to him. Jonathan at that time at 4, 000 subscribers had about a thousand. So talk to Jonathan Peugeot. So, and Jonathan Peugeot also had been a foreign missionary in his past. And so we develop a relationship and another viewer starts sending me videos from John Verveche. Who's doing courses in Buddhism and cognitive science.

And so I start looking at his, and so part of what I did initially with, with his stuff was I didn't know who to talk to. And so I would just talk to the videos. So, you know, and I didn't even understand that YouTube had a genre of this. I didn't know anything about YouTube. [00:14:00] So I just started talking to the videos cause who's going to talk to me.

And so then I start doing this to other people's videos because I'm interested in the thoughts. And I also noticed because, because of my kids, that there's this thing called Twitch where people watch each other, play computer games, and I thought. That's kind of crazy. But then I thought, I wonder if people watch each other, watch videos.

And then I learned that that's a thing too. So I started talking to John Vervaeke and he was a wonderful guy. And so the three of us start talking and then it's like, well, we've got to really do some live events because we have to get people away from their screens into real spaces, getting to know each other, to actually.

Build the kind of bonds that human people, that human beings need one. And so then because we're doing this online, a bunch of other people start YouTube channels and start doing the same thing that I'm doing or having conversations. And, and then one woman who Sevilla King, she, she had gone to art school.

She was a therapist. She did a bunch of things. She had been doing little videos on [00:15:00] piercing one day. She basically says this little corner of the internet. And the funny thing about naming is that nobody knows quite what's going on. And then when a name comes in, it kind of gels it, then the group sort of has a degree of identity.

And so what happened was that. So we had a discord server. I was always a little frustrated with the format of discord because with these blocks, these walls of text, a lot of the people are auto didacts, which means that it means a whole bunch of things. But then you tended to get like, first we had hardly any Christians and then people start becoming Christians.

And then the Christians want to fight about theology. And it's like, I, I've grown up. I've lived all my life in the church. I know theological fights. I know my theological positions, but I don't want to space. If I have a limited amount of time with people, I don't want to fight about theology with them. I [00:16:00] want to find out about their stories because I want to find out about their lives.

And I'd like to, I'm a pastor. I'd like to help them knit together community around them. So a bunch of people start YouTube channels, a whole bunch of different things, and eventually that sort of becomes a kind of community, but that's where you get this internet question. Because the internet affords a capacity for community.

It's different from real life community. And figuring that out, I think we only are barely in the, barely at the frontier of this right now. Yeah. So in a lot of ways, that's sort of what I'm exploring. And it's a mess, but well,

Malcolm Collins: before you go further, I, I really, I've been writing down. I've got a whole series of tabs open with questions that we need to get to.

Because the first one is what do you think Jordan [00:17:00] Peterson was doing or saying that started bringing people back that other people hadn't done before?

Paul VanderKlay: That's a half hours of video trying to figure this out there. There's a lot to this so part of what happened. This is going to be a little theoretical. So my apologies. Part of what happened even before Descartes. I think Tom Holland is right about a lot of his ideas about Western history at the beginning or kind of in the, at the About the year 1000, there's, there becomes a, a separation of sort of these two realms that we have, and you can map these two realms in all sorts of different ways.

Ian McGilchrist sort of has the master and the emissary. People. Commonly can today. This has only been true for a couple hundred years. Talk, talk about natural and supernatural. We can talk about it in terms [00:18:00] of mental and physical, but we have the kind of experience that suggests, you know, for example, C.

S. Lewis, when he says, you know, every instance of human love will die by death or betrayal, but love itself doesn't die. Plato gets into this in terms of the form. So you have this separation and the separation Eventually became in the West sort of a dualism and Descartes sort of nails it. And so, and he's trying to figure out what's the, and it's, it revolves around the idea of substance.

So there's like matter is a material substance. And then Descartes says, well, there's a spiritual substance. And what eventually happens in the West is that we have degree of, we have a degree of skepticism about material, about immaterial substances or spiritual substances, and you get this differentiation and.

What Jordan Peterson starts doing through psychology and the Bible is to begin to give the Bible a degree of [00:19:00] plausibility that a lot of people who have sort of thrown off the supernatural said, Oh, and when he did the biblical series with Genesis, that really triggered something. Because people began to read the Bible and say, You know, unlike Sam Harris, unlike the new atheism, maybe, in fact, there is wisdom, perennial wisdom, even in a Darwinian sense that's encoded in the Bible that, in fact, if I listen to and learn from, I can maybe make my life better.

And one of the things that I noted, especially in the early years of doing this conversations, that nihilism in a good number of people, especially men, basically causes depression. Jordan Peterson did. I call him sort of the unauthorized exorcist because there's an unauthorized exorcist of the gospel of Mark that Jesus disciples are sort of saying, this guy's casting out demons in your name and we [00:20:00] should stop him.

And Jesus says, leave him alone. And so Jordan Peterson completely outside the church is basically casting out. On a variety of levels, a lot of the demons that have sort of been possessing our culture and possessing individuals. And when people, he sort of would break nihilism in people. And when they woke up from their nihilism, well, guess what?

You know what they want to do? They want to get a job. They want to start eating better. They want to maybe that maybe turn that love interest into a girlfriend and that girlfriend into a wife. And then they want to have kids and then they want to build something. I mean, basically. This whole group of men sort of woke up and decided to once again participate in the human race instead of wasting themselves, as the cliche says, in their mother's basement watching porn covered with Cheetos dust.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I want to know what you think of [00:21:00] Simone's criticism of Jordan Peterson's teachings. Which you have in the past, Simone said that it feels to you very much like Jungian psychology dressed up with a conservative aesthetic. Am I, am I accurately?

Paul VanderKlay: Yeah. And what's so interesting hearing about your experience of Jordan Peterson Colin, I mean, I'm sure you've consumed like way more of his content than Malcolm and I have.

Is that maybe like, I'm not looking at it through a religious lens at all. Like I'm looking at it more through the lens of the things that I understand. And there's just, So much Jungian psychology and it just rubs me the wrong way because anything that's like Freudian or Jungian, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no and I don't know, like, I, I, I get, I, my feeling about him is he told the internet to make their beds and they were like, yes, thank you for being it.

That father

Malcolm Collins: figure, I'm going to take a different answer here. Yeah. I think that he was literally the first person. I think it was about branding. He was the [00:22:00] first person who created an intellectually feeling path to conservative traditions and, and before this, nobody, there was this branding in society that conservative traditions meant stupid and he was the first person.

Who said conservative traditions don't mean stupid, and he rose to fame through the left attacking him. So, he used a debate, like if you look at how he rose to fame, it was a debate he had with a feminist reporter in Canada that then went viral. And then when people saw this and they saw that conservative attitudes didn't mean stupid, that led to his rise to fame.

What's interesting to me actually is contrasting Jordan Peterson was Milo. Because Milo came before Milo Yiannopoulos, he's referring to. Yes. And, and Milo equally showed that conservatism didn't mean stupid, but he also made conservatism look kind of crazy [00:23:00] and unhinged. Whereas Jordan Peterson made conservatism.

feel very, like, I think it was all about the aesthetic and the narrative made it feel very much constrained and put together. I don't know. These are, these are just our thoughts. You can. Yeah. But Paul, do

Paul VanderKlay: you really think that Jordan Peterson is first and foremost about faith? Jordan Peterson is first and foremost a university professor who cared about his students and a clinical psychologist who cared about his patients.

You have to understand that about Jordan. Now this second phase of him as sort of a getting into the political realm, that's not really his native environment. If you really scratch him, he cared about helping regular people make their life better. I think you're both right. He's clearly a union and He, at the same time, I think you're also, I think you're also right, Malcolm, that he, he, the man in his moment sort of found [00:24:00] their, their time together.

And, you know, it's, it's not an accident that this happened at the same time as sort of the Trump emergence. So there's a populism, I mean, Peterson also. It's, it's really helpful to go to the live events and meet the people and talk to them. Now, this is, this is part of the reason when you introduced me as a theologian, this is part of the reason that I always sort of correct people.

I'm not a theologian. A theologian is an academic. I'm a pastor. Now pastors have to dabble with theology, but I've, part of the reason why I don't fight about theological models on the internet is because all of these models are limited and the emergence of Jordan Peterson in reality, We can sort of speculate on models.

Models have their place and they're super, super useful, but it's this, it's, it's in the commotion of everyday life down here where heaven and earth come together, [00:25:00] that things actually happen. And so I could probably write a list of a dozen reasons why Jordan Peterson changed as many lives as he did. And probably a lot of them are valid.

But that doesn't mean that any one of those things is sort of key to why it happened, because reality is just that complex. Because there have been a lot of people who've done similar things to Jordan Peterson. I mean, I've got books from him. A lot of people have sort of worked Jung in this space and had sort of little eruptions.

And I talked to one Canadian academic early on that basically said, yeah, another year or two and Jordan Peterson will pass out a favor. And he listed three or four guys who I could recognize, and it happened. Yeah, there's a lot of different reasons for that.

Malcolm Collins: So why do you think so, so you talked about the people coming back to the faith.

Why do you think people were leaving the face? What do you think were the core hooks that, that the, the, this force, whatever we want to call [00:26:00] it, the urban monoculture was using to pull people out of the face. Why do you think it was working so effectively compared with historic conditions?

Paul VanderKlay: Well, I, the video that.

Someone sent me the first one I'd watch of yours in terms of why people are leaving. I thought you're dead on right about a ton of that stuff. I think in my experience for a lot of people, I think there are a lot of factors to this. Number one, people are formed by their expectations are formed by technology and we now are accustomed to certain kinds of technology that works so reliably.

We have a sense of, well, that's what truth is. And the scientific revolution and really the technological revolution, the industrial revolution really created those expectations for us. So therefore when, so one common story of why people leave a particular religious tradition is because they had a bad experience, something [00:27:00] bad happened.

And at some deep place in their heart, they thought something like this, that if I am a good boy or girl, if I show my allegiance to Jesus or whatever God they have bad things won't happen to me now, ask almost any pastor if that is true in the past. No, even ask almost any of those people if they believe that they will say no, but when that bad thing happens at a very deep level in their life, a plausibility structure begins to break free.

And this urban monoculture has in many ways delivered. On some promises in a way better than a lot of religions have at, I think, a fairly shallow level. And I think for this reason, we're going to see the urban monoculture will hold people to a degree, but it's only going to hold a certain segment of people.

But those people tend to be highlighted in. [00:28:00] All of the media that the urban monoculture really uses for it's for proselytizing. And I, I've known this because, so my grandfather pastored churches, mostly of Dutch immigrants and Dutch farmers. My father pastored a church of African Americans just outside of New York City.

And what you begin to realize if you spend a lot of time with African Americans is that, well, they also have a culture and their culture has roots and their roots are in the South. So they've got a deep amount of Christianity built in them. They've got some African, they've got a whole ton of stuff in it.

And so I remember when COVID hit and everybody in California is like, we've got to get this vaccine into people. I thought. I've lived in the black community all my life. Guess who is not really going to be too quick to queue up for that vaccine? They are not going to jump on these bandwagons because they have seen these bandwagons before.

So American culture tends to have this little level that's in the media and, [00:29:00] and, and it's just a reinforcing narrative. And of course now with with with social media, all kinds of other narratives now have space again. Those narratives had space before just because there weren't the kind of mass media that happened in the 20th century.

And and now with other medias, things are breaking down again. And, gosh,

Malcolm Collins: it's really interesting that you point this out because this is something that we've noticed as well. This idea that the media class was in our country right now, and it's almost like they've become a narrower class than they were even historically is so out of touch with the other groups.

Especially the groups that they purport to protect or help that one of the groups that we're really, really close with because of our company and our work and everything like that is the recent Hispanic immigrant population. And they communicate the way that they relate to truth. It's so [00:30:00] different from the way that the left thinks they do and and from what the left is saying that they their their truce networks Which is very different from the black community because I think you're absolutely right about the american black community Within the hispanic community their truce networks are family based.

Where they have large networks of intermarried families, and that's how they transmit information and stuff like what's going on in the news is largely irrelevant outside of these, these family networks to the extent where they're actually, you know, we talk about all the problems that we're having with the internet and everything like that.

You're not seeing this within the traditional Hispanic community. They've just. much, but they've just retreated back to these family networks. To the extent where, you know, one of our friends was telling us he has friends outside of his family and he gets teased by his cousins about it. Like they call, they call him a white boy for having friends who are not family members.

And it's like, that's how like intense these family networks are. And it shows it. To me, [00:31:00] when I look at like this or the way the black community relates to authority, which like the Democrats don't get it all a, these communities are not talking to each other, even in the slightest way anymore.

And we do not realize how different, different American populations

Paul VanderKlay: are. That's exactly right. And that's exactly right. And part of the reason, so there's a, there's a thesis by a scholar named Mark Knoll, who was from the Christian reform church. I think went to Notre Dame has sucked up a lot of the Christian reform intelligentsia.

And he basically had the frontier thesis in terms of American church. So what happens in the history of the United States is that of course, the British, the British really wanted to sort of contain the colonies so they wouldn't have Indian problems West of it. And a big part of the American revolution is.

People wanted that land and they could sort of push out the Indians. And so, and so America has always been an [00:32:00] amalgamation of different tribes within it. And more recently, more American history books have, have looked at that. But part of what happened in terms of the church was the, the churches in the, in the colonies were the ones that came over from Europe.

What happens when Americans went out is that family bonds are ruptured, all kinds of bonds are ruptured, and Americans sort of have to sort of make new bonds, and so it's a very open space where things can happen, and that's part of the reason why the Bible takes on such primary focus in American Evangelicalism, because the only thing they had in common was the Bible, not all these historic creeds and confessions of Europe.

Well, similar things have been happening, and it's, and it's, For a while, when we had mass media, when there were three tv networks and we had a common culture And and partly also because at that time in the 60s and the 50s and 60s There was a great degree of attention of trying to bring catholics jews and african americans into this group[00:33:00] you know, so the hispanics sort of were Somewhat catholic but I mean and for that and now that the sort of the mass media has broken down People are just unfamiliar with people who are mostly familiar with screens are unfamiliar with their neighbors on less.

They're from a community that has its own ways of deep connection. And so that's why, yeah, the, I often, I watched the woke stuff and I was thinking there's a certain class of African Americans who have sort of been brought up into the ruling class, but most of them, they watch this stuff and they just kind of.

Because they've seen regime after regime go through and they're not believing much of it because they mostly believe what they know from their own lives, which is how most people do it. So back to your question about the deconversion. So you're right that this urban monoculture [00:34:00] took a lot of people out and the more and more of our, of our world is mediated by these images.

That subtly frames expectations and incentive structures. And so that has really broken apart a lot of traditional white churches. But, you know, it's, to me, one of the more, one of the most interesting things that we're going to watch is going to be what happens with Islam in the West. Because I mean, again, all of these systems are far too complex for any of us to actually be able to accurately track.

There's just way too many variables. But Islam is, you know, that's going to just be a fascinating thing. And that's mostly going to happen in Europe. In the United States, it's Latentum. And The history of, so I, I spent my first eight [00:35:00] years of seven years of professional ministry in Latin America doing missionary work.

And so you begin to get a sense of, you go to that place and it's like. Yeah, a lot of people just fly down here to go to the beach, but if you live there, it's like, yeah, you know, culture is real and part of where I learned that is, again, I was growing up in a black community in a mostly black church in a white denomination in a, in Christian reform schools, which were sort of, you know, one of the things that I find so interesting about your project is that I have watched the Dutch try resisting cultural assimilation Yeah.

All my life and fail. And right now my denomination is just sort of being completely pulled apart and assimilated in some of the larger things in our culture. But we had our own Christian schools. You didn't marry outside the Christian reform church. You know, we had, we had all of these enclaves and this has just been.

Pulled apart. And so now [00:36:00] Hispanics, it's, we're in the middle of a crazy, crazy social experiment. And of course the internet is just gasoline on the fire.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I do.

Paul VanderKlay: I want to pull on though, what you've said. This isn't the only time you've said it where like, if you got too big, especially too fast, that it would sort of destroy you and destroy the community.

I mean, part of me, I want to push on that and understand why you believe that, because you've reached an amazing number of people. You've changed their lives. Like it's super clear that you've created a community online that is very, very real for these people. And you have found ways to make it participatory.

I mean, Even as a pastor, you're in a one to many relationship. Like you can't speak one on one with absolutely everyone who shows up. And so even in person, there's a limit to your reach, but online, your reach is scaled in a way that's incredible. Can I understand a little bit more about why you think?

Growing your [00:37:00] community online would be damaging because yeah, I just, I really, I'm not sure if I think that's true, but I would be open to you convincing me. Okay. Well, well, I'll say a few things. I, my, my main employment remains my local congregation and I've been with these people 26 years. A number of them are in the last few years of their life and all they really want is for their pastor to bury them.

And I want to be able to do that for them. The number, so, you know, there's the Dunbar number, and how true that is, I don't know. And you're right, as a pastor, I'm used to one to many relationships. But I also, and for that reason, I have a sense of, you have to fairly quickly try to hand off people into other relationships, if the community is going to cohere.

And it's a little bit of a dance because usually what happens and nothing at the internet hasn't changed this people come to my church [00:38:00] because maybe they saw a little thing online or, you know, maybe they just walked in and saw me on stage preaching and then something touched their heart and they say, wow, he touched my heart.

I want to be friends with pastor Paul. Okay. How many friends can Pastor Paul have? Pastor Paul has five children. Pastor Paul has a wife. Pastor Paul has a job. Pastor Paul has all of these things. And so it's, it's sort of the pace at which things grow impacts what exactly you're going to have. And so I wanted things to grow at a rate where people could find each other and actually be able to build.

Friendships with one another to scale away. One of the things that I noted is that just like with it, I mean, when we talk about getting it on the ground floor of, let's say a company or something, that's a real thing. And so as this little corner of the internet has grown a lot of, so [00:39:00] there's, let's say I'm at the top of a certain hierarchy, then there's a whole group of people who found me within the first month.

That are right there at the second level. And now there's always a few anomalous people who sort of shoot up beyond themselves, but the whole community sort of grows together and there are very subtle ways in which these lieutenants are gatekeepers. And also part of it is what we have done in this little corner of the internet is not really premised around, let's say a doctrinal statement.

This is a statement that we agree with. No, we, we, we're hard pressed to find a lot that we agree with. What we have is sort of a style of relationship. Now, I just gotta actually, I was late to this because I got a message from someone that said, Oh, yesterday's yesterday's live stream was ugly. They were calling you a liar.

They were [00:40:00] saying you're not a leader and they were bad mouth. I know your thick skin and winsome, but and and so. But the thing is being pastor of a real live church is really good for those kinds of things. Because if you think people get mad at you for things you do online, try doing it in a real life church.

That's where people really get mad. And so a lot of the stuff online is like, yeah, someone online is angry with me. They don't believe me.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, wait, wait. A live stream? Was this like some random live stream was in your community where they decided to? And this

Paul VanderKlay: is part of the difficulty. Is that right now, in terms of this little community, it's funny because there's a sort of a fear and you see this with churches to there's a sort of this little fierce debate.

Is this a real thing or not? They have all this philosophical ideas. So that's something they can chew on. And then is Paul our leader? What is a leader? A leader is someone who says yes and no. Now in the church, In an actual [00:41:00] organization and institution, there are things that I can say yes to and no to in ways I decide things that have consequence within the organizational structure.

This isn't quite that. There's no organizational structure. There's no, yeah, there's, you know, there's a little bit of money going, moving around and memberships and YouTube AdSense and that kind of stuff. But I'm not paying anyone. I have zero employees. I can't hire and fire anyone. And we don't have a structure like we have in the church where someone might go under formal discipline for believing something or doing something, what have you, there's none of those things.

And so part of what's happening is, you know, there's people, and there's another thing you learned as a pastor, people come to communities with their expectations and they don't even know what their expectations are, but you begin to discover them when certain. Expectations don't get met or fulfilled and then people get a little bit upset because I thought Paul was going to do this.

And [00:42:00] the thing you also have to realize is that, you know, let's the AA people say, well, expectations are preconceived resentments.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. If you would mind indulging us, what are the expectations people are coming in with that are causing the conflicts?

Paul VanderKlay: Oh, I really have, I don't have a very clear idea of it. Because they themselves don't have a clear idea of it. I

Malcolm Collins: assume they want you to be more conservative or more progressive. Is that it?

Like it's a political fight.

Paul VanderKlay: It's a political, they they'd love for it. So about four years ago before COVID, when this thing sort of started taking on steam, people wanted me to found a 501 C three and to develop a board of directors and to basically institutionalize this thing. And so. Paul Vander Klee, anchor this little corner anchor estuary ink, something like this.

And I said, no, that's it. Things are way too early. We don't even know what we're doing here. And in one of the [00:43:00] things, so before I did any of this, I was involved in church planting. And one of the things that you realize with church planting is that pace of growth and institutional structure Those these things sort of have to find themselves and sort of a rule of hand is don't start a structure until You really know you'll need it or at least anticipate needing it soon Because with the pace of change of change right now in our culture You'll almost always structure badly and it will hurt the sort of the organic growth of the thing.

So I don't, you know, so people wanted me to start to start an organization and then people, you know, and then suddenly there'll be guidelines and boundary rules. And, and I said, first of all, I said, I don't have time to manage that. Second of all, I know myself well enough to know I'm not a great manager of those kinds of things.

I run a small little church and even the tiny little bit of administration I have to do here, I really don't like. So if we're [00:44:00] actually going to do something like that, then suddenly I'm, I've got a board that I've got to deal with. I already have a church board. I have to deal with that. I'm going to, then I'm going to have to have a structure and I'm probably going to not be able to work in the church.

And then I'm going to need a budget of. Somewhere probably about half a million to a million dollars a year. Then I'm going to raise that money. Then I'm going to be, and I said, I don't want to do any of these things. I would love to do what I can to facilitate community for people. But in my opinion, it's going to be fairly ad hoc.

It's going to be fairly loosey goosey. And that's what I'm comfortable with right now. And that's what I can do right now. Well,

Malcolm Collins: I imagine this is what people actually want. I mean, other than the people who are high within the status hierarchy, there's always different motivations, depending on where you are within the status hierarchy.

One question, one final question I had for you, because this is something that you've mentioned on our videos, and I want to hear your thoughts on it. If you were going to give advice to someone today, to keep, and I know this is hard, and I know this is not something you do, but to keep their children within the tradition they grew up [00:45:00] in, What would that advice be?

What are the biggest threats to our children? When

Paul VanderKlay: I'm at wherever I'm at, whenever I'm asked for parenting advice, I say this, be who you want your children to become. Oh yeah. First of all, let's talk about human beings. We think we know what we are. We think we know ourselves. We really don't know ourselves very well. My children know me in a way that I don't know myself.

My wife knows me in ways I don't know myself. My church people know me in ways I don't know myself. There's, I have a certain degree of delusion about myself that is really difficult to, to, to cure. So part of what is [00:46:00] happening right now is that. Traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested and most of them are, are, are found wanting.

And this includes, now, every, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this. This includes the church, and what, so G. K. Chesterton talked about, I remember it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity. He said basically Christianity has died five times, and I think that's true.

And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which, again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are Fundamentally modernist institutions sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own [00:47:00] denomination, many of these churches are going away and they are going away fast.

Now, I, I continue to be a Christian, and I continue to believe in the church, but I think what we are going to see is churches continue to, there's going to be new kinds of churches that we cannot imagine yet. That's really hard for the church. Now, part of what's been interesting in this whole thing is that a lot of people have gone grown interested in orthodoxy and Catholicism, and I think there are real reasons for.

people's desire for these very sacramental, very ancient churches with certain constructions. And I think that's because modernity as we've experienced it for the last 500 years, especially the last 200 years is receding quickly. And so people are looking for something old, [00:48:00] something reliable, something structured and something they can get their hands on like a sacrament.

Yeah. I. think the people coming into those churches are going to change those churches in ways that many of the older people who are really excited about these new people coming in, they don't have any idea because the people cut themselves coming in, they don't have any idea. And so for this reason, I mean, I've seen it in, I've seen it in my own denomination.

Like I said, the Christian Reformed Church, ostensibly Calvinist, which talked about divine election, did everything in their power to ensure that their children would maintain the faith. And I think the Christian Reformed Church Is probably in the top 10% of denominations that succeeded until the 1980s.

I mean, Mm-Hmm. . The Christian Reform Church had a thick, yeah, thick culture, but it's basically been torn apart. The urban monoculture [00:49:00] has had its way with it. And what that means, not only is that churches that have sort of bought in completely to the urban monoculture, they're going the way of the main line.

Yeah. The other side of churches has been like, duh, you know. Double down on having a bunker mentality. I don't have a lot of confidence in that path either. Yeah, because it's, you know, Rene Girard has this mimetic rivalry thing. If you decide the urban monoculture is your enemy, you are probably going to become a bizarro.

alternate, you know, it's going to map on you. So in other, in other words, what, in other words, what you need to actually create a sustainable culture is something that has a different root from the opposition. It's going. And for that reason, people are looking for very old things. I think that's part of the reason people are so interested today in evolutionary psychology.

Because it's the new natural laws, one of my friends just recently said. I,

Malcolm Collins: I love [00:50:00] this interpretation. So today I spent, we have the longest episode we've ever done going live soon. It's going to be like two hours or something. I was working on it today. And it's, it's on this question and it focuses on a specific hypothesis or sort of conundrum where I was like, okay, my kids are like me, right?

So if I'm going to understand why have I joined a traditionalist religion, I need to look at why my dad left. And the answer that he chose to leave Christianity was he got punished for questioning the Noah's Ark story. He was like, this does not seem logically plausible. Let's go through it. And he was like, I will not stay in a tradition that punish it.

And people who know me, they're like, yeah, Malcolm would have done that too. Had he grown up in a, you know, a conservative Christian family. And so it's made me think, well, one of the problems that we have is that when we say we want to be looser about these kinds of stories, every option I have for my kids today, loosens [00:51:00] up on all the morality as well.

When you loosen up on the stories, you loosen up on the morality. And for me, the question is, is there a way to reconstruct things that loosens up on the, the, the. scientific plausibility stories, but that doesn't loosen up on any of the moral restrictions. And that might be an absurd thing to try to create, but I do suspect that's what the winner of this.

I don't think it's going to be necessarily what we're trying to build, but I think it's going to be. Whoever builds that successfully is going to be the person who wins.

Paul VanderKlay: So, so, if there's something at the heart of sort of what has been happening with Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pajot, John Verveke, it's the idea that John Verveke calls combinatorial explosiveness.

Hmm. In that The world is too complex for any of us to manage. [00:52:00] When we talk about morality in a context that is being colonized by evolutionary psychology, the idea is, what practices, what do we say yes to, what do we say no to, that will finally achieve, what, in terms of a Darwinian process? Nobody can figure that out because there are far too many elements And this is part of the reason again to answer the jordan peterson question.

Why do why are people now interested in religion? Ironically, it's because of darwinism that people have begun to and I don't think they know this intellectually yet Yeah. They have begun to sense that, huh, if I want to figure out how human beings work, I have to sort of look at an ancient record of track record, an ancient track record.

And you know what? There is nothing that we have like religion [00:53:00] for providing that data. Yeah. And so the winners in religious competition are probably the best place to start to think about how should we live in the future. I mean, that's at the heart of, and Jordan didn't sort of say it directly that way.

That's what's happening. And so when I saw your channel, I thought oh these people get it And and part of why you two are so fun. And this is why I love the estuary project So what I started doing in churches i've as i've told churches You need to have conversation groups where that little boy can go and say I think a worldwide flood is bunk and everybody says All right, cool.

I mean it's tom holland's story. It's story of how many people because What happens? It used to be that the university was supposed to be a place where you could have open ideas, blah, blah, blah. That's done. Ironically, churches are places, potentially [00:54:00] some churches, perhaps where you can go and have an honest conversation.

And so that's what I want for churches. I want them to be places where people can come in. And then the group. So we have this little process where the group Can have a conversation about what those people that they want to talk about. And that, again, I think back to this leadership thing that involves more modeling, you know, we've had people that say, we need to, we need to list the rules of this, like, well, usually by the time you have to list rules, something's already broken.

So the longer you can put off listing rules, the more modeling you can do. Probably the further you'll get along.

Malcolm Collins: Nice. Yeah. I really like this, this insight here. Yeah, this, that's great. Well, this conversation has been fantastic and I hope we can do something like this again. This will be one of our longer episodes, but we've started doing that with interviews recently.

But this is fantastic. And I really do hope our listeners who are interested in, in what you're hearing from him, either check out his church. [00:55:00] In person, if you're in his area, or at least check out his YouTube

Paul VanderKlay: channel. Come at 9am to the estuary meeting. So we have estuary at 9am and then we have the worship service at 11.

Now, again, the worship services, some music, me preaching, it's a, you know, I've got an older church here. This is what they like. And, and, and I, I, I work for them, but at 9am we do estuary. That's where you'll have a much more open, free flowing conversation.

Malcolm Collins: That's spectacular. And look, five kids, right? We gotta be working on this, people.

This should be the

Paul VanderKlay: norm. You won't know what your kids believe until they're in their 50s and 60s. Oh, maybe. Think about that. Maybe.

Malcolm Collins: I hope I live long enough to have a wager with you guys.

I think we're going to have little firebrands. You know, one of the people that

Paul VanderKlay: I agree

Malcolm Collins: with, one of the people coming on our show soon again is Ayla who came [00:56:00] from a cow. I don't know if you know, we're having her back on. She came from a Calvinist tradition and just, I think her dad

And yeah, I we'll, we'll be doing no, I, I expect our kids will be that way too. I think if they're going to break away from whatever we're doing, they're going to do it loud and early. Yes.

Paul VanderKlay: I'm going to say this. I would not be surprised. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I would not be at all surprised if Ayla.

When she gets in her fifties and sixties, doesn't look a lot like her father.

Malcolm Collins: I don't look a lot like him now. I think I know. I think she has an incredible amount in common with him. And if you read her writings, she has meditated on this recently where she's like, yeah, I actually am a lot like my dad. It's funny because she's like, why do you guys feel so close to me? And I'm like, Oh, we're like dissidents from the Calvinist cultural group. You're a dissident for you feel very similar to us [00:57:00] culturally. And she's like, she doesn't like, she, she gets it. Like she's friends with us, but I don't think she understands what we mean when we're like, Yeah.

Like we're part of the same family, like we're, we're distant and we have different beliefs, but we're still part of the same larger family.

Paul VanderKlay: Well, I, you know, again, part of what, what part of the beauty about an actual community, I remember some of the fire brands when I was growing up where the preacher's kids, see, my father was always very open.

And so we didn't have a strict house at all. But the stricter the house, the worse the preacher's kid. And now that, you know, I just turned 60 and these people are about my age, they're just like their parents. It's an amazing trajectory to watch. Ah, I love it. I love

Malcolm Collins: it. Well, we'll, we'll recreate that for our kids and hopefully we have a lot.

You know, you're on number four now. You're not at five yet, Simone. You got more work to do to catch up with Paul Vanderclay.

Paul VanderKlay: True [00:58:00] story. Yeah. We deeply admire you and I'm so glad you came on the podcast. So thank you so much for joining us. Well, I'd very much like to continue talking with you guys because you're, you're so open and you're so smart.

And I, I just enjoy people. I mean, I wouldn't be a pastor if I didn't enjoy people. And you two are, are really a breath. Like one person said after our. Conversation on my channel. Oh, what a breath of fresh air. And, and again, you'll, you'll get a lot of crap from a lot of other people for a lot of other reasons.

That's just the internet, but you two are, you two are well used to that.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, we utilize it to spread. We're not like you. I want to grow as fast as Jordan Peterson. I want to replace Jordan Peterson. That's our long term goal. I want a loving, happily married couple that respects each other to be the next Jordan Peterson.

And I think with a lot of kids, not with like one or two measly kids. I think that that's how we, we save this whole system and that's what we're working on. And I told this [00:59:00] to one woman, she goes, can't we all work together? And I go, yes, but there can only be one best. And that's what we're working on.

So there you have it,

Paul VanderKlay: Paul. Now we have it. Yeah. You can always look to Brigham Young. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: Hey, I like Brigham Young. I think Brigham Young is the true founder of Mormonism. I don't think Joseph Smith really founded what we today call Mormonism. I could go deep into Brigham Young. I think he's intellectually very sophisticated.

I think a little less sophisticated than Orson Pratt. I, sorry, I don't wanna go too far into Mormonism here because we're gonna talk about this in some, yeah. Let's just say

Paul VanderKlay: the man has pizazz, you know? Yeah. Bring me Young is quite a very interesting guy. , I'll say that. Very interesting guy. . I know most of my, I know most of what I know about Mormonism from a very Mormon homeland homeless addict, and I've learned a ton from him.

Interesting. Yeah. Addicts are. The homeless people are just an incredible source of learning [01:00:00] about the real world. They really are.

Malcolm Collins: This is actually an interesting point that I want to point to people is historically people had multiple sources of information about the world. They had the media elite and they had their local pasture and their local pasture or.

You know, rabbi or whatever, was always learning from homeless addicts as well as learning from their congregation. Whereas the media elite never had that connection to those flows of information. This is one of the reasons we become so dissociated as a population is because we disintermediated our pastors as a source of information.

Paul VanderKlay: Yeah. And that's fairly recent as early as the fifties. Pastors, you know, if the government would do a panel, they'd always have a minister or two on it. And that's, that's, that, that went away.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, this has been fantastic. Yeah. Please come back on at

Paul VanderKlay: some point we would. Oh, I'd love to know you guys.

And, and I want to have, I want to, I want to continue. I keep watching your stuff [01:01:00] and Oh, great.

Malcolm Collins: I'm really excited to hear if you do do a response to this that I was doing today. Cause I'm really. We go over every one of the major reasons that people leave the main traditional religions. Oh, really? And we try to come up with solutions for them.

Yeah, like, I go through like the good God problem. This is how can I, and it's a lot of stuff where like, atheists pull at the wrong strings. Often they, they pull it nuances. The good God problem is actually a problem that drives people away from religion. The local revelation with miracles, but a universalizing religious tradition is also a big problem that we go into.

We go into yeah, we just go into all of these, like, how can you have good answers to these when people attack them? Because I think about them in terms of my own kids. I think too often people in religious traditions, they say people left because they didn't like the rules. And I actually have almost never seen this.

People usually leave because they're disappointed in the leadership. They don't understand the logic behind one of the [01:02:00] rules that they see as arbitrarily cruel or they see a logical inconsistency. Like those are the only three reasons people really leave. So if you can build a structure without those, you don't have to worry.

We'll see.

Paul VanderKlay: There's, there's all there's, there's almost always a lot of reasons. And even the ones who leave probably aren't fully aware of all of the reasons they're leaving. I mean, people are, people are just complex this way and you just never get around that. So we, we talk a good game, but you know, I think Jonathan Heitwood is the rider and the elephant.

It's a strong point.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Oh, oh, by the way, if I was going to tell my listeners to start with one video by you, what would it be? Oh,

Paul VanderKlay: good question. I'd say let the algorithm decide because, I mean, the algorithm for as flat footed as it can be sometimes, it knows. What you have watched and what other people [01:03:00] who are watching what you're watching.

I mean, there's a reason our channels have a crossover.

Malcolm Collins: True. Yeah. Cause we didn't have any initial audience crossover. Our initial crossover was all the evolution bros, i. e. mostly Jolly Heretic people, because we talk with him and we have a lot in common with him and a lot of crossover with the manosphere, like the red pill sphere and everything like that.

Cause we've done a lot of stuff with Sandman. But like MGTOW and stuff like that. But you. That's totally new. Like there's no reason for us to have a viewer crossover and get viewers who we had reaching out to us in the early days. We're watching your channel before they were watching

Paul VanderKlay: ours. Right.

And for that reason let the algorithm, even just because you watched this, you know, you guys are probably going to put me in the show notes or something. That algorithm is going to look at that and they're going to serve you up a video. From me. And, you know, 50, 70 percent you might be interested because the algorithm knows all the details.

I put out [01:04:00] over 2000 videos and most of them are long. And so it's really hard to get a sense of, you know, what, what you'd be interested in, but very

Malcolm Collins: conversational and authentic, very different from ours. We try to make them memeable.

Paul VanderKlay: Yeah, it's, see, and again, also for my channel, the videos that I think are most important are the ones that are most difficult to watch because they're usually conversations with random people and the way YouTube sort of functions.

I mean, if I, I did a conversation with Jonathan Peugeot last week, and of course that one just shot right up because Jonathan Peugeot is an audience. And one of these days I'm sure, you know, I'll, I'll say, okay, Jordan, it's time. And then Jordan, Jordan Peterson and I'll do a conversation and that one will go crazy.

But the most, the people, the most important people in your life are not the ones on the screens. They're the ones you share your home with and they're your children and they're your parents. Those are the most important people in your life. And actually that's what your channel is

Malcolm Collins: about. [01:05:00] Yeah, well, I, I disagree.

I'm the most important in all of our viewers life. I'm just going to have a kid's life. Malcolm

Paul VanderKlay: goes, we all go. It's so

Malcolm Collins: sad. I'm joking. Of course it's Simone. Who's the most important in your person. No, no, no,

Paul VanderKlay: no, no. Jordan and Tammy, they have a, they have a, I believe those two have quite a fine relationship.

And again, I think. Probably one of the most important thing about your channel is in fact, the way I hear you two talking about each other and you are modeling, you are modeling something in a relationship that I think is profoundly important and what's interesting about you two. I mean, Jordan and Tammy are about my age.

You two are a lot younger and I can see the models of, I mean, you've, you've brought into your relationship a lot of the values of the urban monoculture. You defer to each other. You value each other. You very much are of this culture. That's true. Now you're also playing with [01:06:00] it. So .

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, have a, a great one.

Yes. Thank you again, Paul . Good to have you on. Alright. Yeah.

Paul VanderKlay: The first of many recording

Malcolm Collins: the

Paul VanderKlay: second of many.

We are making bread and now we're adding ingredients. What's in here? What do you think? What's inside? Can you guess, Torsten?

A kadu kuk? Oh, Octavian's opening it. What's that? It's salt. Salt! Yay! What is this? Can I see what it is? What do you think? Look at it. What do you think it is? It's like soap. It's like soap? What is it? What does it taste like? Ice! Ice? You think it's ice? Yeah. It's yummy. It's yummy? So what do you think it is?

It's sugar. Sugar! Can [01:07:00] I put it in? Yeah, it's sugar. We're going to have to start putting it in. Okay? Okay. Okay. Yes! Absolutely. Yes. Yummy! Good. Are you jumping in, Torsten? Just a little bit right here. Wow. That's what we're gonna do. That was crazy, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Your sister said bad. Now, what's this, you guys? What do you think it is, qua? Good job. Now we need to put in 420 grams of it. Do you wanna help you? Very careful. Yeah. Ready? What does the scale say? You wanna do it too? All right, we're gonna let Torsten do a little egg. So did we do water? Yes. Did we do oil?

Yes. Did we do salt? Yes! Did we do [01:08:00] sugar? Yes! Did we do flour? Yes! Now we have one more thing. Instant yeast. Do you know what instant yeast is? That's a close one. That was a close one? Yeah. We'll get that in five hours. All the things we need are in. So, hold this bucket, tell me, is it heavy?

No, that goes all together into the machine, okay? I think all the settings are right now, so let's press the start button. Yeah, go ahead and press it. Oh, good job! What's going on with the things we put in? Bread is done. Are you excited? Does it smell good?

Yep. Inside the bucket, [01:09:00] right? You just a little bit worried. Nope. You're a big worried. Yep. Why? Put some peanut butter on a bread. Take a bite and tell me what you think.

Do you like the bread that you made?

You do? Yay! You made bread!

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