The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Reformed Subculture (Guest Michael Foster)

Sometimes I feel the weight of the world fall down on your voice with some good tea. Mix a manly drink, pepsi, shoe polish. And I hit the YouTube link, don't say hit that sound siren. And I feel my troubles all melt, ask with keen.

Show Intro and Housekeeping

Your Calvinist Podcast is filmed before a live studio audience. And welcome everyone to Your Calvinist Podcast. My name is Keith Foskey and I am Your Calvinist. It's good to have you on the show with me today.

And before I bring in my guest, I do have a few housekeeping issues that I like to get out of the way right in front. First of all, I want to remind you again about my friends over at 1689 Cigars. They're giving a special for anyone who makes a purchase using the coupon code Superior Theology.

And if you're watching this show, I hope you have Superior Theology. Go and get yourself your new cigars from them and use that coupon code and you will get a percentage off. I want to also remind you that this show is part of the ministry of Sovereign Grace Family Church.

So if you're in the Jacksonville area and you're looking for a church, come visit us at Sovereign Grace Family Church. And you can look us up online at sgfcjax .org. Now, Sovereign Grace is a reformed Baptist church.

And what that means is that we are part of the history of the Baptist movement which began in the 17th century as part of the Calvinistic wing of the Baptist movement. And some people say, well, you're Baptist, so you're not truly reformed.

What It Means to Be Reformed

So today we're going to be talking a little bit about what it means to be reformed. We're going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of reformed Christian subculture. And who better to talk about that with me than my good friend and now friend of the show, Michael Foster.

Michael, thank you for being on the show with me today.

Thanks for having me, man. I love that intro. That's an 80s throwback.

Yeah, it's exactly what I asked for. Hans Feeney at Lutheran Satire wrote it and performed it for me. And he asked me what I wanted. I said, I love the 80s. He said, you want 80s hairband or 80s TV show?

I said, 80s TV show. And he came through really, really strong. And so we filmed the video to go with it after he made the song. So it all worked out. So I know you, and I want to say something very quickly to my audience.

I want to thank you personally, Michael. Just a few days ago, I guess it's been a couple of weeks now, I reached out to you. I had a question about something. And you said, hey, man, call me. And you talked with me for an hour and a half.

I was on a drive home. I was driving home from the Y-Calvinism conference in Tullahoma, Tennessee. And man, you spent an hour and a half on the phone with me just talking about being a pastor, being a father, just life.

And man, I came home. I felt great. It actually was uplifting. Not just that day, but for a few days afterwards, I was like, man, a lot of what you said really resonated with me. So thank you for that right away.

I just want to say that that was very pastoral.

Well, thank you. Feelings mutual. It was a good conversation.

Awesome, brother. So for my audience members who don't know who you are, can you tell us just a little bit of who you are? And I know you're an author, you're a pastor, you're a conference speaker. You're also quite a quite a Twitter aficionado.

So tell everyone a little bit about you who might not know who you are.

Well, I am a pastor in terms of what I do vocationally. I'm a bivocational pastor. So I work as a sales director for a for a company. And then also I pastor East River Church, which is a we're about three years old.

We're out here in Batavia, Ohio, which is just outside of Cincinnati. And around 400 people these days and just growing. It's exciting. I have been married to my wife, Emily, for over 20 years. We have had eight kids together with the ninth on the way at the end of next month.

So I think it's a girl. So we're actually going to be five girls, four boys. But then I I've been involved in I actually get involved in kind of Internet culture that I don't really talk about this very often.

But given the context of what we're going to talk about today, it might be relevant. I was absolutely fascinated by the Boxing Day tsunami when it happened. So I think that's 2004, Christmas 2004. And that was back then.

YouTube still wasn't owned by Google. And there was a bunch of other like kind of video platforms you could share on. And so I started a blogger. I maybe had started a little earlier. And I created a page to put links to all these videos for the other people online.

They're obsessed with seeing the tsunami because that was the first time that big tsunami happened. And tons of people had handheld videos and videos got out. And then so I got quite a following on that blog.

And I wrote an article on why I hated Thomas Kinkade art. And I just thought Thomas Kinkade's terrible from an artistic point of view. That like that went viral like the second blog post I ever wrote went viral for a blogger back then.

And so I immediately was kind of pulled into the new Calvinism movement through blogger and type pad back then. Steve McCoy was a big blogger and still remains an acquaintance of mine. Haven't talked to him in a while.

But I met a lot of people back then that were kind of momentarily a big deal. Adrian Warnock was everyone was talking about him back then. You don't hear about these guys anymore. But so I got put into that sort of online community and I've been an early adopter on things like my space.

My first church plant we use my space to plant. And then I've been on Facebook forever kind of doing my thing. But when I started it's good to be a man in 2018 officially. That's when things really started to take off for me.

And people started listening to the podcast that me and my friend Dominic Tennant did. And then we eventually wrote a book that was published by Canon Press that sold very well. And so I've been kind of involved.

When I was first on Twitter I thought it was really terrible. I hated it. I just didn't understand it. So my early tweets are prime numbers and bones of the body. So I put out a prime number every day or a bone of the body.

It's like it's all disconnected. It doesn't. But then when I wanted to reach kind of younger men and engage with them as I was researching for it's good to be a man. That conversation was happening at that time on Reddit and Twitter.

It's not really happening on Reddit at all anymore and still is pretty strong on Twitter. So that's how I got really involved in the social media scene. It's been for a long time, but it took off. But what I really do is I'm a pastor and I use all the content I make for my congregation and I just rework it and tweet it out.

So a lot of the stuff I tweet out I wrote like 10 years ago. It's like I'm not sitting in my office thinking, oh, this is gold every once in a while. That's kind of who I am.

Yeah. It's funny just if you scroll through your Twitter and I have you pulled up here. I went back to February 15th because that was when you posted the tweet that I mentioned. I mean, like, I mean, a lot of this stuff is great.

So you're saying a lot of this just is stuff that comes out of either a sermon quote or something that you've said and you just posted. And I mean, it gets a lot of engagement. A lot of people are.

Yeah. So I write a thousand words every morning when I wake up Monday through Friday. And then I write about about two thousand on Saturdays and then about a thousand on Sunday. That's been my habit for years.

So I've got three books in different stages. I'm ADHD, you know, so I don't like to work on one project at once, but I'm always writing stuff. And then I have kind of my prioritized content, which is my sermon first.

Then our monthly men's meeting, congregational emails, and then the youth gathering that I teach twice a month. Derivative content comes out of that. So I just go, oh, yeah, that's cool. That'll tweet.

I'll cut and paste that or I'll turn that into a podcast or I'll grab part of my sermon or part of it that'll get turned into a reel just from the sermon. So I make the sermon the most important part of my week and anything else I'm doing that's connected to my local church.

And then out of that, I pull my content for that. And it's crazy. People say, oh, you spend so much time on Twitter. I don't spend much time at all. You can tell people spend time on Twitter if they're arguing back and forth.

Right. So if you make more than five comments a day, right. Maybe you spend a lot of time. That's about all I'll say in a couple of words. I don't I don't engage in those arguments and stuff. I don't.

It's Twitter. It's not going to go anywhere. So, yeah, I just that's how I do my content. And that way I can keep an online presence to send out flares to say, hey, there's other people out there that think these things and believe these things.

You're not alone, but also not get my time totally dominated by what can turn into a time suck, you know.

Sure. I have people ask me that question a lot, too, as a pastor. They say, oh, it looks like you spend a lot of time on social media. I say, well, look how many people I follow. I don't follow a ton of people.

I'm mostly there to post content. And and it's not I don't argue. Like you said, I don't I don't spend time. I post stuff. People say ugly things about it. I mean, I've had guys really rip me apart for various things being funny or different things.

And I'm just like, I don't care. I'm going to do what I think is right. And I'm going to put out what I think is good. And I'll let people hash it out in the comments. I'm not. I'm not I'm not there to defend myself.

You know, I do have I do have people that come to my defense, which is nice. It's like I'll see somebody say something, you know, in my defense.

And I'm like, well, that's that's gracious. You cross that 10 K, that kind of 10 K mark on Twitter. You really start to have people that are really kind of go do the dirty work for you. It's kind of nice.

Yeah, I got I got my friends. They come to my rescue. Yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier the new Calvinism movement. You know, I became I got saved in 99. I became a pastor in after having gone to seminary.

I actually took over as pastor in 2006. And I was going through a period of reformation at that point. I had introduced reform theology in 04 while I was in seminary. But my seminary said, if you believe this, you're it's going to your church will never grow.

It's going to destroy your church. You're going to be a heretic, all these things. So I was afraid of it, you know, for a while, because, I mean, I was I was sort of force fed the idea that it was evil.

And but God led me into it anyway. And God showed me the truth of it in the scripture and the beauty of it. And so I would say I really adopted the term reformed Calvinist around 2007, 2008 ish. And then it was in 2010 that our church name change.

We actually went through a what I call a real revival of theology and history and those things. And we went from being I grew up in this church. It used to be part of the Disciples of Christ, which is the old, you know, very liberal Church of Christ restoration movement, that leftist movement.

But then we became Sovereign Grace Family Church. So so that was during all this new Calvinism. I remember there was a Time magazine article. It was like the top 10 trends and in religion. And one of them was new Calvinism.

But I didn't know what any of that was. I was I just know I was hearing guys like R .C. Sproul. I got a chance to meet him a few times. He lived two hours south of me, so I would get to go to his church.

I got to meet, you know, Steve Lawson and all these other guys who were teaching these things. But I didn't know it was part of a movement. I didn't care. I was preaching. I mean, I had I had three sermons a week to prepare for, you know, and I didn't have time to care about a movement.

I cared about the word. And and but I was still, you know, I just got on Twitter like two years ago. It's not even been a part of my life. And so you mentioning it being weird, I thought it was weird, too.

I didn't know. I didn't know what it was.

Threaded comments take away, take a long time to understand how the conversations. It's like your brain. It's almost like your brain's got to get broken so you can understand it. My wife's like, I don't know who's responding to who and how to respond.

It's like this. You got to do it for a long time and your brain stops working right. And then you're able to do it. Yeah, that's that's a good thought.

You got to get X brain because it's not Twitter anymore. I won't call it X, but I'll call it X brain. So so when you said you became or the new Calvinism movement came into your life, were you already a Calvinist theologically or was that influential on you?

Did guys like Roland and others influence you? So I got saved in 1997. My I grew up an agnostic atheist, so I never belonged to a church or religion or anything like that. And I don't I don't really ever remember seriously praying to God or believing in Jesus or anything like that.

So my my brother and my mother started going to church around that time and I wouldn't go because I thought it was just for charlatans and for sheep and that sort of stuff. So then I do end up going through kind of a difficult period of my life.

And then I attend a basketball tournament that was also this sort of outreach and a guy preached the gospel. And I seriously went from death to life, darkness to light overnight, became a Christian. And that was I believe it was Friday or Saturday.

I think it was a Friday. So I go into school on Monday, went to public school, walk into the library and go to the card catalog because I'm old enough that we had card catalogs and go to Christian. And there was two books.

There was only two books underneath Christianity. It was the Crossing the Switchblade by David Wilkerson and Augustine's Confessions. So then I take those two books. I read them that week. So I started with kind of a blend, to be quite honest.

And so I start reading the church fathers. I've been reading the church fathers since I first got saved. So I've got a kid named Athanasius, a kid named Cademan, a kid named Cyprian, a daughter who passed away named Nicaea.

I've got, I love church history. And so then I'm reading all that stuff and really Calvinistic in a lot of my assumptions. But I didn't know that world. You know, I had never really read the Bible before.

And I ended up leaving the charismatic church that I was in because they made me a junior high youth pastor. And I taught in junior high youth group that you couldn't, you couldn't have women pastors.

And the only reason I taught that is I was literally reading and teaching through 1 Timothy 2 for the first time in my life. And I got to this and I was like, right here, it says that a woman shouldn't be a pastor.

And they're like, but wait, my mom's a pastor because we had women pastors at the church. And I was like, yeah, but I don't know what to tell you. It says she shouldn't be. She's got to step down. So I got removed.

So I got removed from there. I stayed in the church for a bit, but I ended up leaving. I actually left on good terms. And I went to a Calvary chapel church over in Northern Kentucky. And they introduced me to Chesterton and Lewis.

And I started reading all that stuff. And then I slowly became reformed through friends and books. I never went through a cage stage. Like, I think the internet, the form of media really shapes people.

Because with the internet, you can at least act like an expert really quick because it's hastily gained knowledge. It's very cheap. Where books, you have to work for it. And books, especially older books, require meditation, digestion, thought.

And when you have friends who are Calvinists that actually preach the gospel and are evangelistic and full of joy, you don't think of them the same way you would if you meet a lot of these guys online, kind of the stereotype or whatever.

So through reading actually Calvin's commentaries, I slowly became what you'd call a Calvinist. And then around that time, I was really frustrated. I left Calvary chapel on good terms again. But they're very anti-Calvinistic.

And I ended up at a PCUSA church. And it was a fairly conservative as the PCUSA went back then. That was 2004. And I got introduced around that time to E .M. Murray, who wrote like Revival and Revivalism, Puritan Hope and all that.

So I bought Murray's books and read all of those. And then I ended up becoming what you would call a kind of a Reformed Baptist, I guess. But I was more Reformed and Baptistic than a Reformed Baptist.

So in other words, like time in a mode wasn't a big part of my identity. It was just kind of a happenstance of being saved in a non-denom charismatic church. But I was really frustrated with how weak the churches were and the lack of good preaching.

And I was like, man, I just want a church that actually reaches men, that preaches, that doesn't grow through transfer growth alone, but also like makes disciples of local people. And I don't know where there's anything like this.

And my friend of mine had just gone back from Seattle. He says, dude, dude, I know a guy. You got to check out this guy. Just met him. His name is Mark. And so he hands me this binder. He'd just gone back from an Acts 29 boot camp in 2004.

And so I read that and reach out to Acts 29 and I come in to Acts 29 through Matt Chandler's church in 2005 and planted a church in downtown Cincinnati. And it grew to about, you know, 40 adults. And but I was only in my early 20s and really not fit to be a pastor.

Not that there's any moral stuff. It just didn't have the experience you needed. And I also was becoming increasingly reformed in my ecclesiology. So I came into kind of the deeper reform movement, not through sacramentology, but through ecclesiology.

I think that's been something that's a little unique about me the more I've been around. Like I wasn't obsessed about baptism or the Lord's Supper, but because I was a church planner and I was very interested in authority structures and who sends who and how that all works out.

And who, if I'm telling people they have to submit to me and have membership, like who am I submitting to? Who am I accountable? How's that all work out? Is there apostolic succession? If there's a break in apostolic succession, how's that work?

You know, all that stuff. And so I actually decided to take a break. I unplanted the church. That was in 2008.

I've never heard that phrase, but that's interesting.

I just talked to a good friend of mine a couple of minutes before I hopped on here that apparently you just did a podcast with my friend Michael Clary and Michael had just moved to Cincinnati. And so we sent some of our core group to his core group that was forming at the time into another PCA church.

And then I decided I'd go get three years of training and come back. That three years turned into 10 years. I went to a Bible college. I went to seminary down in Greenville, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Slowly became more and more confessional and Presbyterian in my commitments. And that's kind of how it happened. But I was part of that new Calvinism. But I was just a little bit before it really exploded.

And I'm thankful that I came to my convictions by books and friends and not YouTube videos and PDFs and online arguments. Because I think that would have shaped my culture a little bit differently.

The Good of Reformed Culture: Robust Theology and Ecclesiology

Yeah. Something you said, you said that what you were frustrated by weak churches. And if we think about the, again, going back to the theme of good, bad and ugly. Do you think that's one of the good parts of Reformed culture is that the reason it formed was because people were tired of weak churches and they wanted a more robust theology?

They wanted a more robust ecclesiology. They wanted a more robust faith. Because, I mean, I grew up in the 90s. You know, I was an 80s, 90s kid. I remember, you know, do you ever see the movie Saved? I talk about this movie a lot.

I know what it is, but I wouldn't watch Christian movies like that. It's a second movie making fun of Christian youth groups with Mandy Moore.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nicole Culkin's in a wheelchair and Mandy Moore's in it. And it's all about how this, you know, the church sort of, if you're not a part of the church, you're not a part of the cool club. And I just remember one part in the movie where the youth pastor comes out and says, is everybody down with G .O .D.?

And I remember thinking that was the most perfect representation of the 90s youth group culture, of this sort of like, let's just turn the church into this clubhouse where it's this goofy acting and everybody's, you know, enamored with the band that, you know, is covering these Christian songs that are on the radio and everything.

And this was what the youth group was. And then that became the church in the 2000s. So many churches were youth groups that grew up. And I talked to Michael about this. It's funny you mentioned him because his show is going to go out before yours.

So people who keep up with the show, they'll have seen my show with him and then you. So that's great. But that weakness in the church, I think, was part of what drove the new Calvinism. I mean, would you agree with that, that that's what many people were looking for?

Yeah, I think so. I think new Calvinism and old Calvinism, what they have in common is that they were very shaped by media. So the initial reformation by the printing press. Right. But new Calvinism was the advent of kind of social media, 1 .0, blogging, YouTube and all that sort of stuff.

That just hit with like Desiring God had all this free stuff. Guys like Driscoll knew really how to take advantage of that. You know, I was friends with some of the people that created the resurgence and all that.

They're getting really kind of savvy in SEO. So I think suddenly there's like people like what's instead of going to the library, they just went to the Internet to look things up. And this content was there.

So that was part of it. They're looking for something deeper. And it was the 90s is the very end of old America. Right. It's the very end of it. It's the beginning of like 88, like things like methylphenidate, Adderall, all that stuff and really hurt the boys.

In the early 80s, it's still very rare to have divorced parents. But that like that exponentially changed to the 80s and the 90s. And then right when you come to early 2000s, that's the beginning of the epidemic of pornography.

That's the beginning. Cell phone usage did something to young women that they there's a weird correlation between that. I have to go get the stats on this between women adopting porn and having cell phones at that time.

It's very weird correlation. But basically all this stuff like that has been building built up to that moment or you had new technology coming out. And it just created like a real chaotic time across the board.

And that's where you get things like the emergent church where they're saying like the early emergent church, which is really called the emerging church. If you go to like Alan Frost or something in the early days, it was like this sort of empty institutionalism.

Is there something else like there's a book to shape into things to come, I think. And so early emerging guys were asking, like, is this all there is? And that was a great question. But there's guys like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell who are really snakes.

Right. They really didn't want the truth. But as it would turn out, guys like Ed Stetzer, I think, kind of were trend riders and not the same level of snake. But I don't trust that man. But Driscoll was asking those questions.

A lot of people were and I was in that emerging church early on, but we're actually looking for answers. We're looking like, is there something. So we started to turn back to older things and Google guys like Jonathan Edwards or whatever.

You Google Edwards back in that time or a certain dog pile, Metacrawler, whatever you're using, you're going to find you're going to find John Piper. And so I think it's all that stuff's going there. I don't know that the reformed church is as strong as they imagine they are.

But theologically, at least, was a move in the right direction that people are looking for something older, more robust.

The Subculture of Reformed Nerds and Identity

Yeah. Yeah. So in your in your initial tweet, again, the one that kind of got me thinking in this direction and thinking about what we were going to talk about, you did mention that the reformed culture is nerds competing to prove who's the most hardcore.

And this kind of goes back to what we just said. OK, so there's this seeking of the robust for some people, not necessarily all. I think there's also I think there's also a bandwagoning and trending that happened.

You know, it was cool to be it was cool to be Calvinistic because it's it's it's not my mom's way of doing it. It's not my grandma. Michael and I talked about it's not my grandmother's church. Right. I'm doing we're doing it different.

You know, it was another way of being different. But you said so much of reform culture is nerds competing to prove who's the most hardcore, truly reformed. I, I fight that battle all the time. Well, let me back up.

I don't fight the battle because I don't care. But I see the battle being fought all the time of people who are trying to determine who's really reformed and who's not. OK. R .C. Sproul is reformed. But wait, he's not because he wasn't actually part of a presbytery or something.

And I heard that, you know, that his church wasn't connected to this or something. And or this person, you know, is truly reformed. But this one's not. And of course, John MacArthur is a dispensationalist.

So he's out, you know, you know, in this. And guys like me, I sit back. I don't care. I don't care what you know. And that's why, honestly, people say, why do you use the word Calvinist? Because I think it's easier than reformed.

I think, you know, Calvinism typically ties me to the five points of Calvinism. Which I affirm. Yeah. Yeah. It's not necessarily connected to, you know, some variation of covenant theology, which I, you know, I would hold to.

And this is pretty well known. I'm more of a Wellman Gentry progressive covenantal view. I don't really hold to classic covenantalism or Baptist covenant theology. It's more of a it's more of a kind of an odd view, which is fine.

You know, again, so, so, so what are your thoughts on, you know, why this is? You say, you know, hardcore, truly reformed guys, they're just trying to move the bar and say this is reformed. You have to be this.

Is it because they want to be part of an elite subculture? Is that what you think is what you meant by that?

So tomorrow is my 44th birthday. And I bought myself a birthday gift on Amazon last night. And it was a 1994 Hilderbrand Brothers Marvel Masterpiece card set, 300 cards. So, so I grew up in, in the comic book culture in the late 80s and early 90s, really the height of comic book culture in America.

I know I can basically tell you any artists from that period of time just by looking at it. Like thousands of artists. I used to run a comic book store. And at one point I owned about a million comic books.

And so I know everything there is about comic books. And that's a kind of a nerdy thing. Right. And so when I use the word nerd, people are like, oh, he's using a pejorative. First off, stop being a wuss.

But, but the, when we say nerd, we're talking about really people that are really into something. Right. They know all that about that. And most guys I know have a nerdy side on something. Right. And, and for me.

Yeah. Look at my, I don't know if you can see my wall. This is all, I'm a, I'm a movie nerd. I love 80s and 90s movies. I've, I would rather watch Jurassic Park than any new movie. I would rather watch Back to the Future than any new movie.

And I, and I was, and I, and, and Death of Superman was at 93, Death of Superman.

Dan Jurgens was the artist of that.

I have every comic book from that year, bought them off the stand, put them in the plastic myself, put them in my box. They're still in my box to this day. It's my one heirloom that I'm saving for my children.

This is it. This is.

Back then we thought that was going to be worth a lot of money, but it didn't work out that way.

Well, they made eight, 8 billion copies.

So that's the thing, man. So, so nerds are people that are really into that. And, and nerds are really attracted to reform theology. One, it has a rich history and there's this, there's so much to it.

Right.

And I think what I've seen is like everyone, people don't understand how much variety there is. Take like Booser, Calvin, Bollinger, Zwingli, those guys. If you look at their view on the relationship between the state and the civil government, each of them have their own little piccadillos or differences that are pretty significant that they're still working out.

And, and so some people like that's their identity. Like, well, I'm more of a Booster guy. I'm more of a Bull, you know, and they, these guys become, they start arguing over like who is right, which is fine, but it becomes a feature of their personality.

Like, I don't know, Deep Space Nine is much better than Star Trek Enterprise. Right. Or I.

How dare you? I'm just kidding.

Benjamin Sisko is certainly better than, than whatever Scott Bakula's character was. But, but it's.

I love Scott. I love Scott Bakula. I'm sorry. Necessary Roughness. One of my favorite movies of all time. Scott Bakula. I love him. So I have a soft place in my heart for, for him. But Kirk or Picard?

I think, oh man, Picard could be such a, such a white knight at times. I really like Picard at times. But I guess, I guess Kirk is Kirk. It's got to be Kirk.

Right.

Yeah.

Sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt your train of thought.

But what I was going to say is that these guys, there's a nerdiness to it.

Right.

Where they, they obsess over details. And, and so what happens then is that it's, it's a competition to see who has mastered the most information. And who knows all these varieties in the greatest way.

Just like guys that, you know, it's almost like hipsters. When hipsters are arguing about music or whatever. Have you heard of this rare band or that rare band? And I've noticed this with guys I've watched.

Like for example, I remember when that pre-sup, pre-sup was a big deal. Everyone was like into pre-sup.

Presuppositionalism and the Search for the Hardcore

Hashtag pre-sup.

Yeah.

Everyone was crazy about it. And, and pre-sup then got super reduced down to a very simplistic like usage of it. And then there was this kind of swing. And then everyone was a bunch of Tomas.

Right.

They're all into Thomas Aquinas. And they're arguing about it. And I looked at that and what I thought, and I saw a lot of the guys who were Tomas. And I'm like, I remember you being the pre-sup guy that was going on and on about it just a couple of years ago.

Now you're talking about how pre-sup is bad and it's Kantian way of thinking and all this stuff. You know, what if this is not actually as motivated by logic and reason and conviction? I'm not saying it isn't, but what if some of this is just motivated by being cooler?

And, and, and, and like, it's, it's, it's a correction. Always being on the edge, man. Always being on the fringe. And the example I give people is I knew quite a few people who went from being Ron Paul supporters to Bernie bros.

Like I knew quite a few, you know, where I'm like, those are the opposites guys. What do they have in common though? What they have in common is they, they represent the fringe and they were cool to assert an outsider element.

Right.