 Howdy fam, Anthony Johnston here today from 21 Studios in Tampa, Florida here at Attorney Point USA SES event. I'm here with Roman Balmikov from The Epic Times and Facts Matter. Not facts don't matter, facts do matter, they matter very much. Appreciate your time man coming on the show. Oh yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, you've actually found 21 Studios a little while ago, right? How'd that go? Yeah, well, I didn't know that you guys had an event that you regularly put on. I'm a fan of Rich Cooper, some of his content online. Usually when he puts out a podcast, I'm watching it in the background. They've really appreciate his content. So when I was, I don't know, the YouTube recommendations, because I watched so much of his videos, I guess they recommended one of his videos where he was giving a presentation at 21 Studios at one of the conferences. So I watched it. So that's how I found it previously prior to meeting him at the last event. So was that your first introduction to the Manisphere and Red Pill kind of content? You mean Richard Cooper? Yeah, 21 Studios, anything like that. Well, I think the Richard Cooper channel was the first introduction to it. Well, I mean, prior to that, I read a few books on, I guess, either that subject or it was tangential to, because I really, I don't know about all these labels. I mean, labels are just whatever, just something about kind of bringing out the masculine energy and bringing out kind of, you know, the inner man. So I read a few excellent books that kind of began leading me down this path and then eventually I came across Cooper. So it's the ideas and the facts that matter to you, not the labels, right? Yeah, because I mean, whatever, because you can even, I mean, okay. So like in this fear that we're in, in politics, right? A lot of people really like fight to the death over labels, right? Conservative, libertarian, paleo-libertarian. It's like it's endless list of stuff for it. Yeah, like, like what's his name? I think it's the Barry Weinstein or whatever. He's a scientist, but he's constantly fighting about the liberal labels. Like, well, I'm still liberal. Everyone else, you know, that, but you know, that change. People call themselves liberals when they're more leftist. Now I have to, like, hang out with more conservatives. But it's like, okay, but what actually happened is that society shifted and that label no longer means what it used to be. Like, one good example is like, if you refer to a fag and you're still talking about a cigarette, well, yeah, if that's your hill to die on, like, sure, yeah, you can still, like, use that label, right? But society has sort of shifted. So likewise with any label, I kind of don't really care that much. I care about more like the personal development that I can take away from it, right? Like, you can call it whatever you want, but how can I use it to better my own self? So that's the only thing I care about. Yeah, you care about what works in the outcome. Exactly, yeah. Talk to me about your work at the Epic Times. I've seen on YouTube probably a thousand times on my own channel. Whenever the ads come up, like, there you are, like, did you know that I love this camera? I think you kill it, man. But talk to me about your work there and what you're doing on your own channel now. It's blowing up big, too. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so with the ads, that's one of the ways that, because about two and a half years ago, I wanted to figure out how to just reach the most amount of people with our content because I've been working there for the last nine years now. And how old is the Epic Times? Twenty-one years. Wow, so yeah. But what I found was that I knew that if people just knew about this content, they would just subscribe like crazy because I forced myself to read the other publications. I read The New York Times, I read The Wall Street Journal, and we have subscriptions to them. And I really forced myself because I really don't like them. I mean, basically, within a given story, I know the facts of the story, right? And I know generally what happened, but then I see the way they present it. They might omit certain facts. They might misconstrue what someone said in order to fit a certain narrative. And it's like, and I read it. I'm like, oh, it's so frustrating. Like a great example of that was that Joe Biden recently signed Juneteenth as a federal holiday, right? Now in America, Juneteenth is a federal holiday. And if your viewers don't know, Juneteenth was the day when slavery officially ended in America, basically, because even after the Civil War, there was still slavery in the Western states. And then in Texas, which was the last holdout, Juneteenth, which is June 19th, is when slavery in Texas ended. And so Joe Biden signed this bill into law officially making that a federal holiday. And within that story, within The New York Times, they were praising him, how he's like a leader for civil rights. But in that story, they said, well, actually, Donald Trump also was talking about making Juneteenth a federal holiday, comma, because he was hoping to win the black vote, period. And to me, I'm like, well, why are you, like, did he say that? Are you assigning that motive to him? But why, why don't you assign that same kind of level of scrutiny to Joe Biden? Because you might say, well, he's also trying to win the black vote. So it's kind of those, and that's just one example. If you don't vote for Biden, you ain't black. He said it, not me. And also Joe Biden said it, not me. So, but anyway, but that's just like one of many, many, many examples. And it's taken in its totality. It's like, oh, this is, but then I realized I get frustrated with it. I get frustrated reading The New York Times. But then I don't, when I flip us so much in my mind and I realize like, wait a minute, if I view this as the Democrat Party newspaper, then it's actually a great newspaper. It has a lot of facts, has a lot of coverage, but it's not a mainstream kind of, you know, non-partisan newspaper. It's a Democratic Party newspaper. I'm like, yeah, this is a pretty good paper. Well, that's really what news should be, right? I mean, back in the day, there was much less polarization to and politicalization. It was just news was news, facts were facts, and that was the priority. You feel that's changed in the past five, 10, 20 years? Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. And that's sort of with my channel, Facts Matter on YouTube, by the way. Hope you subscribe. Link in the description. Excellent. So with that channel, I started it on November 18th. And I mean, your viewers probably remember that after the November 3rd election, there was a lot of this, you know, election fraud allegations that were coming out. And I saw that the media was spinning it constantly, like, because again, I was following it closely, and I saw that when a story came out, they would just spin it right away. They would like, they would, for instance, use the official narrative and they would heavily weigh the elected officials narrative, for instance, versus some of the facts that were coming out and some of the affidavits that were coming out. They would just discount that wholesale and say, well, the official narrative is this. And then they would like, there was like 500 affidavits, too, or something crazy, right? Over a thousand, I think. I think it was 500 and just like in Nevada. So there was a lot, there was a lot. And an affidavit, like in case you don't know, is a sworn affidavit is a statement you make under penalty of perjury. Yeah, serious. And so it's basically, I'm saying that this is what I saw, this is what happened. And if you find out anything to the contrary, put me behind bars. You can find me, put me behind bars. So it's a serious statement. You can't just say, well, it's just a statement. No, no, it's a serious statement. They have thousands of these, right? And so I started my channel in order to, it's almost like an experiment. Well, for one, I wanted to push our content out as far as possible and have as many viewers. But also it was sort of an experiment. Like if I reported extremely factually without injecting any opinion, what would happen? Would YouTube take it down? And what wound up happening is that it blew up. Like right away, I started getting 100,000 views even on the first video. Like 200,000, 800,000, a million views. But then, and it was continuing to expand. But then when Joe Biden got sworn into office on January 20th, our channel got demonetized like that. Like without any, without any reasoning for election policy and no nothing. No, nothing, nothing. Have you had any strikes? Never, never, never. But on the back end, it just says your channel has been demonetized and it's under review. And I love it because it says usually these take about a month. And I was like five months ago and that's what it says, right? Yeah. But anyway, so, but on my channel, you'll see if you watch some of the content. I really try to stick to the facts. Like people compare it to like, well, this is my style just the way I present. They compare it to Tucker Carlson. But it's not like Tucker Carlson because he's an opinion show. Whereas I present the facts and I present both sides. I present statements. And so, and I believe that's what the news should be because then you give people both sides. You present the statements from one and the other. And then the viewer can make up their own mind based on their own judgments. And I believe that that's a really kind of respectful way because I'm saying like, hey, you have your own mind. It's not my job to tell you what to think. Like you're a sentient being who has your own opinion. You have your own convictions. You have your own religious beliefs. You have your own life experience. You make up your own mind. I'm just doing the facts because you don't have the time to sit through a two hour long Senate hearing. And so I do and I pull out the facts for you and I say this is the new developments that happen. And then we reached out to the county and we got their statements on this and compare them and make up your own mind. So you don't believe human beings are sheep and should not be sheep? Yeah, yeah, I don't. I feel like the fake news treats us like sheep, you know. Yeah, it's, I feel like, yeah. And that's been, there's a lot of overlap with that and the sort of like communist mentality because that's the same. I mean, whether you call it communism, statism, etc. The whole mentality is that like you have an elite group that knows better than the group down below. And I mean, there is a conversation to be had there because for instance, there were studies done even back in like, what was it like? The 50s or the 60s that talked about how like if you lead a story about suicide, if like, if you have a really prominent suicide case in the nation and you lead with that and you talk about it, suicide is actually like skyrocket in the country. Well, because people are like, maybe they see validation. They see that as a valid option and they do it. So there is like, there is some conversation should be had around the fact that like, yeah, like the news media and what politicians say and what leaders say, it does influence people. But I feel like it's taking it to an extreme to then say, well, we need to start shaping society using this mechanism, right? So there is like kind of a delicate balance between between, I don't know, to lack of a better word keeping people safe versus just treating people as human beings with their own. Well, being mindful of what you present, if it's a serious fact like suicide or story like that because you're right, it can inspire even mass shooters, right? They said about mass shooters don't show the face because it may need to inspire more of it. Similar issue? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's it. And so there is a delicate balance, but I lean more towards the side of like, listen, like it's still not my business to tell you what to think ultimately. So I just, I just do my best. I try to treat allegations very kind of nuanced because an allegation is just an allegation. Like someone accuses you of, I don't know, like what a rape or two crap or something. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there might be truth to it or there might not, but an allegation should, I almost, unless it's really of national prominence, I almost don't report on them because it's up to the court to decide what's true or not. It's not me, and the media can destroy a person. And in the meantime, I'm innocent to prove and guilty, at least legally, and I should be. Exactly, but if the media reports too heavily on it, even if you're proven innocent later, what happens with all those stories that have been published around your life? Exactly, yeah. So it's a delicate balance, but anyway, so that's sort of the, you know, what we do on the back end, yeah. Now, I saw on the banner for the epic time, it says truth and tradition. He talked to me about what that means. Does that have anything to do with like the war on men in America, the war on family, family values, the war on masculinity, things like that? I feel so, I mean, you know, tradition encompasses a lot of things, but I feel like, yeah, those, definitely the war in the family. I feel like it's just right now, communism, right? And it's very, like people think of communism, they think of like, oh yeah, the USSR, like maybe China, like, they think of like, like literally black and white, like footage type of things, like communism is so far removed, but it's like communism has monasticized into like sort of something totally different. But the goal is still the same, to bring about the totalitarian, they don't think it's a totalitarian state, they think it's like a social paradise on earth. Utopia, yeah, the utopia. But the way they do it is that they create a Hegelian dialectic, right? They split people up, they create two extreme positions and they eliminate the middle. And so then you have to choose one or the other and they eliminate any kind of nuance. And so you see that playing out with, yeah, the war against masculinity, the war against femininity, the war against men. I mean, it's just destroying any kind of like solid cultural norms that we have as a country. Like for instance, my family's Russian. And when I watch Russian news, okay. By the way, people on my channel have accused you of being a Russian spy and shit. I'm like, what the fuck? No. I like this guy, I think he's pretty cool. There you go. So I... Future is master. Yes, sir. So when I'm visiting my family and they sometimes have Russian TV playing, like granted, Russian TV is pretty much propaganda. Like it's unabashedly propaganda. RT and stuff. Or RT is like sort of the American facing side. Over there it's like channel one, channel two, whatever. I mean, the way that Russian media works is propaganda. But one thing that you'll notice is that there's sort of like an undercurrent when they're in doing, like on the street interviews or doing interviews of like, or like when people come in or they do like talk shows about people sitting... Well, not talk shows, but like shows about... There's this one where it's like, they kind of like have a man and then they kind of bring in girls and then there's like a panel when they kind of see whether they're compatible. It's like a, you know, a little fun show. But within the kind of the subtext is that people have an agreed upon understanding of what life is. An agreed upon understanding of like the natural life process. Like you're born, you're born into a family, you go through school, you go to college, you get married, you have a family. You know, you kind of play out this normal life cycle. But I feel like in America, the people who are kind of playing the Segellian dialectic Marxist game, they're broken apart to such a degree. But there's like really no agreed upon American life path. And so, and you feel it. You feel even agree on what a man and woman is anymore. That's exactly. Now we have like chicks with dicks and shit. Yeah, that's those are like the really extreme manifestations of it. But like, but it's everywhere where it's like, you don't, when you meet someone, you like you have no idea like where are you from? What pronoun are you like? What are your thoughts in your head? Like, like there's no like blanket understanding like, oh, okay. So like where are you from? What school did you go to? And it's like a lot of stuff is just filled in. Like you have a normal like you're a normal person with a normal life. So you think the culture has been super fractured basically. Yeah. And I feel like and I feel like that has that has largely been been pushed forward by people who have ulterior motives potentially. Well, I feel like it's kind of one of two things. One is like Marxism is really, really pernicious in the sense that like it feeds into this mindset of people who really want to do good and don't want to kind of rock the boat. I don't want to be seen as mean and generally I feel like Americans are nice and they don't want to be seen as mean and they spin it and they kind of utilize this factor where it's like, well, you want to be nice to these people. Look, you're hurting their feelings, right? You don't want to call them names. You don't want to be inclusive, man, gender them and etc. And I feel like like, okay, sure, you don't want to hurt their feelings. But I feel like that's been taken to like such an extreme that it's like fracturing society to a certain sense. And this is very on a scale of one in 10. How dangerous do you think this is for the future of the United States? Very dangerous. I mean, I mean, yeah, probably like, yeah, nine. Yeah, probably 10 because I mean, because if you take it to a logical conclusion, like where where does it ultimately go to, right? And unfortunately, I mean, if you, you know, there was this trending hashtag not too long ago, Yuri was right, right? Yuri Besmanov, right? So if you watch Yuri Besmanov, which I highly recommend he's a Soviet defector who actually defected to Canada. Wow. Yeah. And he he had two presentations. Yeah. Well, that have been documented. He also published a book under a suit of them, but he gave this presentation where he explained how the Soviet Union was planning to subvert America, right? And he talked about how it takes a full generation to kind of undermine, undermine an entire country. And gosh, I lost my train of thought. I forgot Besmanov. Yeah, and a fracturing of the country. Yeah. But anyway, I would highly recommend you watching that because he kind of laid out this whole, this whole thing is, is something that the Soviets were planning for quite a long time in advance. Sorry, I forgot. I was going somewhere with that. Maybe I'll remember it later. But I would highly recommend that if you if you really want to kind of understand where a lot of this stuff ultimately came from and where this Hegelian dialectic came from, oh, no, we were talking about where this leads to, right? Yeah. So what likely happened and what has happened throughout history is that once, once people come into power, once like communists come into power, a lot of people who kind of like champion a lot of these individual causes that have essentially led to them coming into power, the socialists coming into power, they're actually persecuted themselves. They turn around and they're like, hey, we actually, we don't need these radical revolutionaries. Oh, the purists. This happened in Russia too, right? It happened in Russia, China, Cuba, Ethiopia with the DERG regime. Stalin killed all the purists. Sorry, the 100% communists. Yeah. Well, oh yeah, Eastern Europe, there's a ton of examples of this where you have a lot of the agitators who are initially agitating. They're trying to, within their realm, let's say within the realm of the church or within the realm of education, they were agitating. They were pushing for more Marxism. They were pushing to kind of break apart the structure as it is. Once the people, the socialists come into power, once the communists come into power, they have historically actually been turned around and they don't want more agit... Yeah, exactly. They don't want... Those agitators have kind of served their purpose and then they get persecuted themselves. That's what we call the mutual idiots, right? Exactly. Well, that's what Lenin called them. And so, I mean, they're pretty naked about it. And I think it was actually the naked communists as the name of your best-known book, ironically. And I feel like they are... No, maybe I'm mistaken. That was another book. But regardless, I mean, if you read the writings of them, they're pretty unabashed about it. However, going back to the media narrative of it, like Wikipedia, if you look up cultural Marxism, which is basically Marxism through the use of the culture, right? Instead of any wars or the Cold War, it's communism and Marxism being pushed through the institutions, Wikipedia labels that as a conspiracy theory. Wow. The best part is they quote a bunch of professors saying, oh yeah, it's been disproven by a bunch of professors saying it's a conspiracy theory. But ironically, the theory is that the professors are doing it. So it's like you're interviewing the professors who would never admit to it, or maybe they themselves aren't familiar with what's going on. Regardless, I mean, what I would recommend anybody to do is just to be extremely open-minded. That's what I try to be. And just explore the facts. Don't be worried so much about the labels. Like, oh, this is called cultural Marxism. This is called feminism. This is called whatever. I did want to ask you, actually. Do you see a connection? Some people say feminism is like communism in a pink skirt. Do you see feminism as an element or a major form of cultural Marxism? Well, okay, to be honest, and we talked about this before the interview, like I have my areas of expertise, not a big expert on feminism. From what I've read, it seems like first-wave feminism had some legit concerns. Like, you know, the rights of, oh, you know, some other rights, I'm not exactly sure. But there were some legitimate concerns that women were pushing for in the first wave of feminism. But from my understanding, the second and third wave of feminism, which is sort of, I think right now it's like the third or fourth wave. Yeah, and I'd say it's like fourth wave these days. Yeah, it's gotten to a point where... Well, it's hyper-radical. It's believe all women, which is like delusional, me too, toxic masculinity. The future is female. It's like, I'm not female. Where's my future? Yeah. Like, hello. Yeah. Well, even like the me too movement, right? Like, this is what the Communists did. They take a kernel of truth, which is that, sure, yes, there is legitimate problems with women getting, you know, raped or getting put into positions like that. However, then it gets like ramped up to like this whole giant movement where, I mean, and actually, ironically, I've read at least that it has kind of turned around and now it hurts women because like men in power are now less more reluctant to, for instance, like promote women or take them on business trips along. Even hire them. Yeah, or even hire them because they might get accused of these me too allegations. So again, it's like, is this dialectic where there is legitimate concerns with women, you know, getting raped and having, you know, sexual assault done against them. Then there's the men who have been accused falsely and they have, and they want nothing to do with it. And so what this dialectic does, what these people trained essentially Marxism do is they separate them and cut out the middle. And so you can't, you can't say like, well, you know, this is a nuance. Let's judge a case by case. He said, wait a minute. Judge a case by case. That's a far right, you know, that's a far right type of thing to look at. I've seen people accuse you being a far right news source at the epic times. I'm like, no, I think they're just focused on facts. Exactly. I mean, that's perfect. Because what we do is we, during the Trump, well, that was never the case until Trump came into office. And then we reported on him accurately. We didn't spin the facts when, you know, when we discussed the administration. And so again, it was a Hegelian dialectic. You're either with Trump or against Trump and there's no more nuance. So I mean, that is the Hegelian dialectic is the method that Marxism uses to just break down society. They create two pollers, two polar extremes and then they destroy the middle. And so you have to pick one or the other. You have to go into one or two camps and then those two camps clash with one another and society breaks down as a result. Yeah. Yeah, that's what happens. Yeah. Last question, as you mentioned, you got divorced before the interview. How did that go down and how did that influence your life today? Yeah, so the divorce, okay, I won't go into the details because I do respect my ex-wife to not talk about it. But the point I will mention about the divorce was that in that process, we got married young, relatively young. I think we met when we were 22, married at 23. And in that process, a lot of my personal, I only talk about it for myself because whatever, you know, I think life is a bit more about personal development than calling out on anybody else because you can help all the people develop themselves all you want. But at the end of the day, if you're just a loser, you know, sitting at home, it's like, okay, whatever. So I'll only talk about it from my perspective. So throughout the course of the marriage and also through the divorce, I realized a lot of my own shortcomings, especially as a man. And then she called him out and she's like, listen, you have a vaporeous presence to you, meaning like, I'm not solid, you know? She said that I'm not grounded. She didn't feel safe and secure with me. And, you know, again, I'm not going to talk about anything about her. I really took that to heart. I'm like, you know what, you're right. Everything you said there is spot on and I need to work on that. And so what I did is I took that to heart and I started meeting with men who I, you know, I looked around in my circle, my extended circle, I said, okay, which are the men that I really respect who I think are grounded, who I think are solid? And I just invited them out to coffee. I'm like, hey, listen, like, tell me, tell me about your life. Tell me about marriage. What is it? Like, how are you grounded, you know? And I just talked to them. I developed deeper connections with these men. I started exercising, working out. I, you know, joined jujitsu actually, right? Richard Cooper always talks about joining jujitsu. A lot of managers into that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I just started developing myself. And I think that that's the key, you know, to just develop your own self. And so I feel like, yeah, the fact that the marriage broke down, it sucks. Luckily, we didn't have any kids, you know? So that was good. I mean, ultimately, How many years ago is this? Five, six, seven, eight years ago? The divorce five years ago. Yeah, same. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, so I mean, I just took it as like a great opportunity to do a lot of self-reflection and just move forward and just like build myself up from the ashes, you know? Like, just take, because I meditate a lot. Like, I meditate a lot. And so what I found was like, I was able to kind of like review myself in this process and sort of view the notions that I held about women, about like, oh, she's the perfect one or like, you know, she's like a unicorn or whatever, you know, all this stuff. And I saw the like, oh, you know what? That's not necessarily the case. And so a lot of these notions, they kind of like whittled away and burned away, sort of like a phoenix, you know, like, a lot of that stuff was just reduced to ash and there was like, I don't know, maybe like 10% of me that remained, but that 10% was like pretty solid. And I was able to kind of grow and build on that. Now it's a process. I mean, I'm still young. I'm still growing, building. You're kicking ass, man. You know, we're Epic Times leader Porter. You got your own channel. It's huge. Half a million followers, right? You're killing it, man. Almost 600,000. There we go. Maybe some of you can subscribe and push it over 600,000. Do it, guys. Do it. Yes, I appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate your time today, Roman. Big time. I appreciate everything you do, man. 100%. I'll see you on YouTube and maybe see you later this year. Great. Yeah. See you later. See you guys.