“The Problem with Purists”

Why Loving Something Isn’t a Free Pass to Be an Asshole

✍️ Rob Petrozzo, for Rally

This week’s Shiny Things is more of a stream of consciousness than a structured newsletter, but bear with me because I promise it applies to you and YOU specifically.

It’s about a strange little rituals almost all of us perform in the margins of our lives… 

It’s the part that’s supposed to rescue us from the “hope this email find’s you well” notes and calendar invites of our day job.

It’s the place where we get to care about something purely because it brings us joy. The thing we can talk too much about with friends. The thing that plugs us into a community of like-minded nerds and weirdos who get it, and we can kinda be ourselves without feeling “uncool.”

I can tell you from experience, making believe you’re too cool for everything all the time is exhausting.

The “other stuff” in our lives outside of the charade of our career-life makes it way easier to bury your ego. You get to come to the actual realization that no one actually cares about the way you look, act, walk, or talk. Tough realization sometimes… 

But collecting, tinkering, owning, restoring, tracking, buying, selling - it doesn’t matter the format, the price tag, or the category - is where the real you lives. It all scratches an itch that your job usually doesn’t: it makes us feel alive. 

For most of history, that alone was enough.

But once you care about something - I mean really REALLY care - another human instinct kicks in… you want to be good at it.

The best at it.

Even if the “it” is objectively ridiculous.

If I’m taking a nap on the couch, I want it to be the BEST nap. Drifting into another dimension nap. The nap that reminds you you’re human and when you wake up you forget what day it is type of nap.

So of course the moment something becomes “your thing,” you start paying attention. You learn the nuance. You memorize the details so can bring them to a conversation without messing it up.

You figure out the patterns. You build the information advantage that turns casual enjoyment into competence, and competence into the kind of quiet mastery that feels earned (because with anything worth doing is worth doing well).

And that’s precisely where things start to get complicated…

In this installment of Shiny Thing$, I’m gonna tell you a little story about the Purist that changed our entire business here at Rally and shaped a lot of what’s happening in the world of collecting and investing today. 

The Rise of the Purist

When we started Rally back in 2017, we forced ourselves into all the rituals early-stage startups were encouraged to do back then , which was the basic user journeys, moodboards, personas… the whole anthropological theatre investors expected you to present during fundraising.

Because we were building something that didn’t exist yet, everything had to be pulled from our own lives and the people we knew best. We landed on two initial archetypes of “The Rally Customer”:

• Persona 1A: The Investor - the person who sees everything as a landscape of opportunity - a series of mispricings waiting to be corrected and profited from.

• Persona 1B: The Purist - the person who didn’t enter through the doorway of money at all, but through love. Deep, obsessive love for the thing itself.

The “Purist” wasn’t a negative figure at ALL at the time. In fact, we kind of admired them and I think in our heart of hearts wanted that person to be the core user of Rally.

The Purist was the one who corrected you on the difference between a Ferrari 246 Dino GTS and a Ferrari 246 Dino GTS with “chairs and flares.” He knew difference between a black diamond and a black star stamped on the corner of a first edition Pokemon card. He could explain the art-historical significance of a pigment choice in a 1960s canvas, or why you want your Ref. 16528 Rolex Daytona to have an upside down “6” on it’s subdial.

The Purist is the reason these worlds don’t collapse into noise. They’re the ones who protect the lineage, the history, the language, and the standards. Without Purists, enthusiast culture dissolves into Amazon impulse buys.

Purists are necessary. Purism is healthy.

But Purism has a dark twin…

His name is “Asshole.”

And that dark twin shows up the moment the Purist begins to believe that because he loves something deeply, he has earned the right to dismiss anyone who enters the room through a different door.

Where Purism Turns Into Gatekeeping

At some point in the last decade, the word “Purist” became a shield for a very particular type of dismissiveness.

In car groups if its not manual, then you’re not one of them.

With watches, if you only buy Rolexes, you’re not one of them.

With trading cards of all kinds, if you came because prices went up, then you’re not one of them.

And the funniest part is its these same people forget that the entire reason they fell in love with the thing in the first place was because someone (usually someone older or more experienced) let them in. Someone answered their questions and didn’t make them feel stupid. Someone held the door open, like an actual adult.

What Purists often misunderstand is that enthusiasm and investment are not mutually exclusive categories of participation. In fact, they’re usually the same impulse expressed through different mechanics.

The information edge that Purists hoard for validation? That’s the same edge investors use to generate alpha. The difference is only intent.

But it puts the Purist on the defense. 

“It’s MY thing. I care more than you, and I know more about it than you ever will!” 

That type of rhetoric and internal monologue is nothing more than one thing: Fear.

A Purist who lashes out at newcomers isn’t protecting a hobby. He’s protecting his identity. His feeling of insider status. His sense of superiority rooted in the illusion that he discovered something rare before the “crowd” polluted it. The ole “I saw that band before anyone knew it existed, buddy” when the band has no idea that YOU exist.

But nothing stays small.

Not the band. Not cars. Not cards. Not art. Not wine. Not sneakers. Not watches. Not fossils. Not Pokémon.

The moment a category grows, culturally or financially, and it attracts more people. Prices change. Narratives evolve. Expertise reshuffles. The spotlight widens.

And instead of embracing that growth, some collectors react as if someone broke into their mom’s house and stole their childhood. But the truth is simpler and much less dramatic…

When more people care about what you care about, the thing becomes more important, NOT less.

Everything Has a Price Now

This is the part of the conversation where I have to own something directly.

At Rally, we absolutely commodified a lot of things people view as sacred: Classic cars. Baseball cards. Watches. American History. Literature. Dinosaur bones. Things that have deep emotional roots for people. Things tied to their parents, their youth, their sense of self.

I’ve gotten actual death threats in Twitter DMs before over the way some individuals feel we as a company have treated inanimate objects. I never thought humans could be truly insane until starting this company and seeing that type of vitriol. 

That said, I get why what we do freaks people out.

But here’s the part the Purists miss - commodification doesn’t always kill your culture. It can help preserve it, and people other than you can care deeply about it while creating a financial outcome around it.

The “platform” aspect of a hobby creates infrastructure that is sometimes very good. It builds price discovery. It forces transparency. It turns oral history into trackable history. It invites more people in. It elevates the best examples. It rewards the most knowledgeable voices. It lets you get real access to grails. You’re allowed to disagree, but thats my position for better or worse.

Most importantly: it ensures that people who truly love these categories, who have spent decades learning the nuance, finally get rewarded for that knowledge.

Because the quickest path to alpha in any category is the same:

curiosity → competence → information advantage → timing.

You don’t get that path without Purists. And you don’t get price discovery without investors. Both matter. Both balance each other. Both keep the ecosystem alive.

So here’s my thesis, the one this whole stream of consciousness has been orbiting:

It is absolutely okay to be a Purist. It is absolutely okay to be an Investor.

It is not okay to be an Asshole.

The person who enters a hobby through enthusiasm deserves the same welcome as the person who enters through investment. One might join for love, one for upside, but both bring something that strengthens the category.

The future will have a bit of both… the emotionally invested and the financially literate. 

Everything has a price now. But everything also has a story.

And the strongest ecosystems are the ones that make room for both.

Until Next Week…