want to welcome everyone back to the Piquanines show Benjamin Boyce is here with me for the first time

he's had me on his show and we recently met up in person so um we did you come on the show yeah

and let's let's let's have a conversation I want to talk about your your path start Start off telling, tell people about yourself.

Tell people, you know, as much as you're willing to let on, did you come from the left?

What are you?

I mean, just go.

Give some background, especially about how you started in the whole streaming thing and being on YouTube and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Well, I grew up in California, evangelical Christian and has some pretty powerful experiences when I was really young, impressionable.

But I had what I consider a direct

experience of the Holy Spirit, very explicitly and powerfully in my life. And yet, with that said,

my parents were involved in a cult, a California cult in Mendocino County and San Jose.

And that was very formative for how my family and then how I consider group solidarity

and group identity and how, you know, overarching religious identity can be corrupted, manipulated by powerful charismatic

leaders and what forms that, uh, that relationship between a leader and his flock.

But, um, my parents got out of that when I was five, though that's kind of a background with

kind of difficulty with centralized authority, charismatic centralized authority.

And politically, I was kind of just a kid until I started delivering paper route.

I had a paper route.

The news used to come in these sheets that you would bundle up

with a rubber band and you'd drive around or ride around 5.30 in the morning tossing these

papers into driveways. And at some point in my teen years, I stumbled upon, it was a little bit

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