James O'Keefe joins Alex to discuss his journey to becoming a truth seeker, how he got started in journalism, and why he founded Project Veritas. He also talks about his relationship with Andrew Yang, and how he became a media sensation. Alex and James also discuss why it's important to stand up and speak for the truth, and what it takes to do so. And, of course, there's a little bit of politics at the end of the episode. Alex talks about why he thinks we should all be apologetic for standing up and speaking for the "Truth" and why we should never apologize for wanting to expose things that people don't want the public to know the truth about. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for this episode was done by our super talented Ameya Vellian. Additional music was made by my band, The Wangeros, and our ad music was produced by Mark Phillips. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerMedia. We'd like to learn more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll be looking out for any questions or comments you have about the show and we'll be answering them in the next episode. Send us in the comments section below. Thank you for the questions you have regarding the show. Send us an epsiode of this week's episode and our thoughts on the show! and other podcast related to this episode's theme song "Let's Talk About Truth." by The Truth. by Nomad by . Music by Skandalism, by Jeff Perla by John Rocha on & (featuring . (c) by The Good Morning America. ( ) and The Good News Project by Alyssa Grauso ( ) Thank You! by Slauson ( ) & , , and . . and by Lila Rose ( ) . (The Good News ( ) is a production by is a song written and produced and produced by The Bad News Is My Name is Good by by Darnell ( ) by , edited by ) and Music by ? ( ), in
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:33.000James O'Keefe, you know, the slogan of my campaign is truth.
00:00:40.000And you're a guy who I know has gone to great lengths to get to the truth on some things that people didn't really want the public knowing the truth about.
00:01:29.000And not to ask you the question, but weren't you some type of, in Harvard, weren't you like an artistic, or you rapped, or you did some poetry?
00:01:37.000Yeah, I mean, I did all kinds of stuff.
00:01:40.000I was a thespian in high school, so for me it was like a desire to show people things in an artistic way, and I wanted to perform and produce this material so people could wake up.
00:03:21.000And you did that through your college years?
00:03:23.000I did that until I was senior in college, and it was some of the best years of my life.
00:03:26.000I went to Rutgers, sprawling like Ohio State, although it's not called New Jersey State.
00:03:30.000It's the only state university just called Rutgers.
00:03:33.000And I had a little staff, and I grew it into kind of a local muckraking newspaper where we were looking into things, you know, and doing gonzo journalism.
00:06:15.000I opened up my laptop and I showed him the video of this Baltimore Acorn woman telling me I disguised this illicit prostitution money.
00:06:22.000I'm undercover as a pimp and I'm telling this lady, hey, I've got all these underage girls and This ACORN official is like, oh, don't put that on the tax forms or disguise this on your tax forms.
00:06:34.000I know this predecessor group to a lot of the groups today, but what is ACORN? ACORN was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and they helped with housing and loan opportunities for low-income people.
00:06:48.000They also did voter registration drives, so they got out the vote.
00:06:51.000It was founded by a guy named Wade Rathke in Arkansas.
00:06:54.000And there were allegations that they were embezzling money and doing improper things.
00:06:58.000So we did a sting to try to see if ACORN would go along with an illicit, immoral, illegal thing.
00:07:36.000And then he takes a step back and his whole complexion changes and he goes, This is going to embarrass the mainstream media like you can never believe.
00:08:06.000Clark Hoyt, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, published a column saying we were too slow to tune in and admitted that they should have covered the story.
00:08:17.000In fact, Congress voted to defund Acorn before the New York Times even assigned a reporter on the story.
00:09:40.000So the constituents were lighting up her phones and sources were telling me that she had disconnected her phone so that the constituents could not reach her.
00:09:48.000So I thought it would be funny if me and a bunch of guys were in there dressed as telephone repairmen.
00:09:54.000Saying, hey, do you need help fixing your phones?
00:09:57.000Oh, clearly we're not there to do anything.
00:09:58.000We were just making a funny YouTube video.
00:10:54.000So my probation, they would come up to my house.
00:10:57.000And we did a story in New Hampshire, actually, in January of 2012. And I couldn't go to New Hampshire.
00:11:04.000The probation officer told me strangely, and I think the probation officer is a fan of mine, this guy named Pat Hattersley out of Patterson, New Jersey, which is not the best place to be.
00:11:15.000He goes, listen, you can do your work, but it has to be in New Jersey.
00:12:10.000You have this whole conservative media ecosystem.
00:12:12.000For some people in this podcasting world, it's proven to be a profitable line of business.
00:12:16.000Well, they tend to project their own biases and motivations onto you because if they're all about money, they're going to say that you're all about money because that's what they're all about.
00:12:24.000For me, it was like – I was thinking back to those days in the Carriage House.
00:14:15.000I mean, it actually was actually one of the things I was going to ask you about is it reminds me weirdly of my first career where you would never draw this analogy, but was actually drug hunting, right?
00:14:27.000You never know in advance which one's actually going to be the one that works, which means for everyone that works, you need, there's like a whole footprint of like multiples more behind it that nobody ever sees.
00:14:40.000And I've got to imagine that's what your life was actually like, and all of them require courage.
00:14:45.000You're taking risks, and my line of work is more capital risk, but you're taking deep personal risk, which is even more significant.
00:14:53.000In the beginning, there was one thing we did in New Hampshire where the attorney general, or I don't remember, it was the associate attorney general, I think he raided or came to the home of the reporter who did the story, and his name was...
00:18:43.000I had to travel around in an SUV, you know, because I'm on the phone with sources, and I'm on the phone with donors, and you have to protect those people's identity.
00:19:06.000I know that one board member liked to say, we don't need James O'Keefe anymore in this organization.
00:19:15.000I don't think they've done too well without you, it doesn't seem so far.
00:19:18.000Well, when I left, they had about $8 million cash on hand or so, $10 million cash on hand, and they spent all of it in the last six months.
00:19:54.000And the funny thing is that story exploded in part because only a small handful of people who had reach in conventional media actually picked it up, right?
00:20:27.000And it elevated Veritas and my name to heights, never seen before, that there was a board member who said, this is our opportunity to get rid of James O'Keefe.
00:20:38.000I mean, what is going on in that person's brain?
00:20:41.000Right, but I think you should ask that person that question.
00:20:43.000Just a basic business judgment or organizational judgment to say that, okay, we usually want to double down on success, not to take the legs out from under it.
00:21:42.000This is the thing that kind of frustrates me at times, even in the conservative movement, is stuff doesn't get off the ground that much because of all of the BS of the infighting and whatever, where...
00:21:58.000You know, people on the left have mastered Their capture of universities, corporate America, Hollywood, and otherwise.
00:22:06.000And there are always this bright-eyed conservative vision that will start on day one.
00:22:12.000And very few things are able to actually get the traction to hit critical velocity because of stupid stuff like this.
00:22:19.000There'll be some sort of animus of a battle between personalities.
00:22:24.000And I think part of it, I don't know if this is true in your situation, but part of it is that when your actual principal motivation is to make money, right, there's pros and cons to that, right?
00:22:36.000But a lot of people in the ESG movement or otherwise, their motive is to make money.
00:22:41.000And they're using the smokescreen of caring about some sort of social agenda and cause is just like woke smoke to deflect from the fact that, look, at the end of the day, we're in this to make an extra buck.
00:22:52.000And I'm going to be disciplined because that's the metric that matters.
00:22:55.000Whereas what I see in a lot of the so-called alt economy, and I know yours was nonprofit, but it's a similar mentality is they'll tell themselves that their motivation was actually that they're business people and they want to make money.
00:23:10.000But actually, their motivation was actually.
00:24:04.000I won't say his name because people have a freedom of association right under the First Amendment to associate freely with a nonprofit without being doxxed.
00:24:11.000But this guy gave half a million dollars to Veritas and he pulled me aside.
00:24:29.000Oh, he said, this guy who gave you $500,000, the guy who's actually writing the check, says the guy who's not writing the check, you might want to watch out for him.
00:25:08.000It's not so there was that and I and it was inconceivable to me when I when that guy told me that it was so outside my experience that I did nothing with the information.
00:25:19.000And in other words, I didn't take the I didn't take the warning seriously.
00:25:23.000And then when the Pfizer story broke, it was like, here's our chance to get rid of O'Keefe.
00:25:31.000I went through so much pain the first week, I don't think I ate any food.
00:25:34.000I think we've all been there in life once or twice.
00:25:37.000But I realized as soon as it happened, no use crying over spilled milk.
00:25:43.000Bizarrely, I had more DMs and more people reaching out to me.
00:25:47.000Debbie Bernal was this Pfizer whistleblower who provided some of the documents inside Pfizer that corroborated Jordan Walker.
00:25:55.000She was previously unwilling to go public, and then after what happened, she was inspired to go public.
00:26:02.000So it strangely helped me journalistically, and that more people kind of trusted me when you go through these sorts of trials and tribulations.
00:26:41.000It seems to me there was a piece by Dr. Robert Malone who wrote a great piece about this called The Institutional Pathology That Removed James O'Keefe.
00:26:48.000And it's all about sort of churches and hospitals and boards who don't necessarily own the company.
00:26:53.000And they question when you are successful, they seem to go back and question the success.
00:29:02.000You're not looking for unsolicited advice, but friendly reaction is, I think you need someone who can do the plumbing for you so you're not focused on it.
00:30:06.000And there's an element, I will say this on a positive side, this is probably the stage you're in now, where in the early phase of building the plumbing, I've made this mistake in other settings before, Is you fall into the trap of thinking that like, okay, there's the plumbing and there's the substance, right?
00:30:24.000You're bringing the fluid and somebody else needs to build the piping.
00:30:28.000In the early stages of getting any new thing off the ground, those two are actually inextricably linked.
00:31:17.000So now I'm still having to indemnify myself.
00:31:20.000But the point I'm thinking about as you went there is I'm like, I realized early on in my life that if I want to do the right thing, I have to be the chief decision maker.
00:31:28.000I have to be the ultimate decision maker.
00:31:30.000I think Steve Jobs said something like that.
00:31:32.000Like, I have to be the person in charge.
00:31:46.000And if I work for somebody else, the system will make me bear false witness.
00:31:50.000It'll make me compromise on my ethics.
00:31:52.000And if I compromise on my ethics, to borrow the Howard Rourke metaphor, then I have to destroy the building because it's not the building I want to build.
00:32:48.000When you're young, you know, we're similar age category, but most people our age, most people any age are lucky to ever figure that out for themselves.
00:32:56.000You figured that out at a much younger age, right?
00:33:39.000So, like, let's just put things in context here.
00:33:43.000Notwithstanding all the trial and tribulation you've been through, I'm saying this, you don't need my pep talk, but I'm saying this for the people who are watching to see, right?
00:33:51.000Because there's a version of looking at your story that can leave.
00:33:55.000I mean, there's part of me that feels this way sad to see what a guy like you has gone through and what our country does.
00:34:15.000Let's do the version where this is a talent that was put on this earth to do this thing that needs to be done.
00:34:22.000Uncover things, stories that weren't told and just tell them literally without a filter with like directly just by putting up the footage that he gathered directly and allow you to see it.
00:34:35.000Now it's just the implementation question, right?
00:34:37.000And so we could, I could give you my two cents on the implementation and how to think about that, but it might At least for me as an observer, I don't know for you, but it takes the pressure off to see that you've got like seven tenths of it already under your belt.
00:36:39.000How you feel about it is a choice, right?
00:36:42.000And so I think that people view you as somebody who embarrasses other people by showing things they've done behind closed doors that they wouldn't do behind doing public.
00:36:54.000But even that Pfizer guy or whoever it was, The act of being embarrassed and humiliated, like that's a choice by what you said.
00:37:05.000And I think that what you're calling out is an element of our human nature that's fundamentally fallen, insecure, to say that there are things that I'm willing to do That I don't want to acknowledge that I'm willing to do or things I'm willing to say that I don't want to acknowledge that I'm willing to say.
00:37:24.000And that gap, that doesn't fall on you.
00:37:28.000It falls within each of us as a human being.
00:37:31.000And I think because you're in the position you're in, You've realized that, hey, tape everything you do, and that's the way you would live your life.
00:37:37.000Something to the effect of democracy, health of a democracy is determined whether people can say the quiet part out loud.
00:38:05.000Then you don't need to apologize for it at the individual level, at the level of a nation.
00:38:10.000But today, the reason why we're as divided as we are, I think, is because people don't feel free to say in public what they'll otherwise say in private.
00:38:21.000And that's a loss of self-confidence that we need to somehow rediscover.
00:38:27.000I guess my question, I got a question for you is, this is a hard question, so I mean it in a challenging way.
00:38:37.000Do you think in the mode you've chosen to do this, right?
00:38:41.000I have no doubt you're doing useful service for the, you've done a useful service for the country, opening people like my eyes, who've seen the things you've exposed, I can speak to that personally, that you're doing a value for the external world.
00:38:52.000But for that person, or for the person who's on the receiving end of it, Do you think you're making it more or less likely for them to live the rest of their life afterwards in the direction that You strive to live your own life.
00:39:12.000Do you think that guy from Pfizer is more likely to be even more embarrassed the next time that thing happens?
00:39:17.000Or do you think that having gone through this experience, he's now at the level of an individual on the other side of that?
00:39:23.000I don't know if you have a view on that.
00:39:47.000But that really speaks to, I mean, before hidden cameras, there was pencil and paper.
00:39:50.000Like Upton Sinclair, when he infiltrated the jungle, he didn't record it, but he, you know, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quips, you know, are we going to get upset at Upton Sinclair for smuggling his pencil in?
00:40:57.000Like there was a story on NPR we did where an NPR official brought up the name of a Libyan reporter in their newsroom, and I redacted that.
00:41:04.000And then people attack me for doctoring footage.
00:41:54.000But I said that because in the beginning of my trajectory, I mean, and the reason I'm saying this to you, you might say, let's focus on the positive.
00:42:01.000But I think it's important to focus on the suffering a little bit.
00:42:45.000Like, people, I mean, much less derisive, but just to the level of inaccuracy, stuff will show up saying that I was born in India, has the wrong last name of my wife.
00:42:56.000I mean, it's just people who can just...
00:42:57.000You know, edit and say anything, that's fine.
00:42:59.000The answer to, I don't think that we should have a systematic suppression engine of that.
00:43:03.000But what it does do to the level of a person, I think, is interesting.
00:43:08.000And it sounds like it's worn on you a little bit.
00:43:10.000And I bring that up because I think that is why it is so important to use hidden cameras in certain contexts.
00:43:16.000And I write in my book, American Muckraker, it's a question of relative deception.
00:43:19.000We have a Washington Post, to borrow an example, who did a front page story in 2009 when the Acorn story came out.
00:43:27.000And they said, James O'Keefe went after Acorn because he doesn't like black people that vote.
00:43:44.000So when you live in a world where that happens on a daily, and by the way, that's just the stuff that I called out, happens a hundred times a day and they get away with it.
00:43:53.000When you live in that world, it's not just morally permissible to record people without them knowing.
00:44:04.000And, you know, that's the world that we have to live in.
00:44:08.000Now, what effect that has, if you want to live in a different country or a different world, which does not place a primary emphasis on the First Amendment, then go live in that country.
00:44:33.000And the Article III courts generally protect the First Amendment because the same journalists that want to point a gun on me, like when the FBI raided us, they were like, whoa.
00:44:43.000The ACLU is defending or filing amicus in my case because the FBI raided me and they never released the probable cause.
00:44:49.000And the law stipulates that if you want to raid journalists and point guns at them and take their notes, Society needs to see what the probable cause is.
00:45:01.000I mean, most federal judges, I think, were still at a place where they will come out on the right side of this, and if not, the Supreme Court will.
00:45:07.000The current Supreme Court understands this.
00:47:15.000And that still keeps me as an optimist and keeps me as a hopeful person.
00:47:19.000and i think the tide can turn if people know what's going on if they know what's happening at the irs and the fbi if people could see what's happening inside schools inside government bureaus and and how they talk about you the taxpayer if they could see that for themselves it would change people's whole perceptions and it would save the country i think I think so, too.
00:47:43.000And I think the reason it would save the country is that 80 percent of people or more in this country would have the same reaction, which is not what we're taught to believe.
00:47:54.000You know, we're taught to believe we live in a divided partisan time and, you know, somebody, you know, 50 percent of the country is going to agree with one thing and 50 percent another.
00:48:04.000Not in the kinds of questions that you're putting your finger on the pulse of, which is just straight-up corruption, lying, dishonesty.
00:48:10.000I mean, I don't know whether you're Democrat or Republican or left-wing or right-wing or what you thought in the Iraq war or high taxes or low taxes, but you want to know the truth about what Pfizer is or isn't saying about the vaccine.
00:48:22.000You want to know the truth about what you're saying.
00:48:25.000Media is or is not telling you about an organization that's getting boatloads of federal funding in the name of promoting civil rights in the form of the ACORN example.
00:48:35.000I think that when it comes to the basic values, free speech, honesty in government, self-governance as opposed to elite aristocracy, most Americans agree on the basic rules of the road.
00:48:48.000They might be divided on abortion or whether corporate tax rates should be high or low.
00:48:54.000Those are questions that people might want to debate vigorously, but that's not the Kind of thing you're putting your finger on the pulse of.
00:49:01.000I think it'd be difficult for you to find my political views anywhere on the internet.
00:49:29.000Because I do have a strong view on this.
00:49:31.000Maybe you'll disagree with me on this.
00:49:32.000This comes from traveling the country, not through the filters that were fed through cameras and social media algorithms and otherwise.
00:49:40.000But that is what I'm doing right now is traveling the country with roomfuls of people from tents in Wisconsin to farmers in Iowa to people in New Hampshire or whatever it is.
00:49:51.000I believe that most people in this country, like the overwhelming majority, easily over 80% of this country, can agree on those things.
00:50:26.000You and I were both in latter half of high school when those two planes hit the Twin Towers.
00:50:31.000When I gave the commencement address at my high school two years ago, that was the first year where not a single one of those kids was born on the date that those two planes hit the Twin Towers.
00:50:42.000And so I think half the people never really learned what those values, most importantly, the tools of discernment to get to truth, were in the first place.
00:50:51.000Who we can bring along to agree with us.
00:50:55.000Not in corporate tax rates being high or low, but that's a cup of coffee, right?
00:51:00.000For lack of a better description, just grounded on certain things that are true in the world, agreeing that what your camera capture really happened.
00:52:02.000Then you're going to just believe you're going to believe anything because you have a vacuum and something's going to fill the void.
00:52:07.000If it's not the true thing, it'll be the fake thing.
00:52:10.000And so that's a much longer discussion.
00:52:12.000But to bring back to where we are right now as a country, I share some elements of your pessimism, but I do think that 80 plus percent, and it could be half the remaining 20 coming along with us too after we fill that void and bring them along, generally people younger than you and I, I don't think that we're actually as divided on the basic questions of truth as we're taught to believe.
00:52:41.000And the way we call the bluff on that is by Frankly, people like you, man, doing what you're doing, right?
00:52:48.000Let people react to it and close that gap between what people are willing to say in public and what they're willing to say in private.
00:52:54.000That calls the bluff on a division that I think is mostly manufactured.
00:52:58.000There was a recent, just real quick, there was a recent example last week of a story we did.
00:53:40.000It was like a sketch comedy of what these people are actually like behind closed doors.
00:53:45.000And I think more things like that revealing real human nature because human nature is pretty nasty.
00:53:54.000So we need to expose it and understand the truth.
00:53:57.000And then I have an infinite faith in the power of the American people.
00:54:01.000They can, if they elect you or whoever else they want to elect and Congress can You know, we have all these people in Congress are supposed to make decisions, but people don't have access to the information.
00:54:12.000I think there's a version of what you're doing that gives me some inspiration and ideas for how to do this in the federal government as well.
00:54:22.000I mean, we're talking about taking on the deep state.
00:54:25.000The managerial class, the administrative state, right?
00:54:28.000The people who were never elected to be in a policymaking function that are functionally in a policymaking function, even though we say they're not.
00:54:35.000I think exposition is a big part of the key to success.
00:54:43.000I think one of the things that Musk did at Twitter that I thought was pretty good, simple first step, is just publish the files of what the government actors pressured this one private company to do.
00:54:55.000I think there's a version of this for what I'll call the state action files.
00:54:58.000I want to do this pretty early on, is just anytime a government official in the federal government has pressured a private party or a private actor to do something that the government couldn't do directly, I think there are all kinds of ways in which that's illegal and we need to deliver accountability.
00:55:12.000But let's just start with step one, just publish it.
00:55:16.000You got to roll the log over, see what crawls out.
00:55:20.000There's an element to this that I think is harder in certain settings than others.
00:55:25.000Actually, maybe you've seen a version of this too, literally.
00:55:28.000I think the way it works in the federal government, this is what I think happened to Trump a little bit, is you roll that log over, you see what crawls out.
00:55:34.000You strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.
00:55:37.000So I think if you're going to roll the log over, you've got to be ready and willing to bring the pesticide.
00:55:43.000I think that's the equivalent of quite literally the guy coming, beating up you and your staff, trying to, like, break your card.
00:56:43.000You're going to put your body in there and just get in the way, not because you know it isn't going to hurt them, but it's still your best chance of ensuring it.
00:56:52.000You're doing it to protect your family, whereas it's counterintuitive because most people don't do it so that they could not be away from their family.
00:57:00.000You're doing it to protect your family.
00:57:04.000It's not unique to my family, obviously, but if you think about...
00:57:09.000Our relationship to one another, like our relationship to our family members, like that's the impulse for me is, are we taking some risk by going on the path that we're going on?
00:57:50.000I think that's where we are right now.
00:57:53.000And so that makes the choice a lot easier.
00:57:57.000I think it's also why you see sometimes a positive change doesn't happen gradually.
00:58:03.000I think negative decline often happens gradually, actually.
00:58:08.000It's infinitesimally small pieces of a downward slide.
00:58:13.000You don't see ascent happen in the same way.
00:58:17.000You get to the depths of where you're at the precipice and then that just selects for either ultimate decline and then it's all gone and you're done and history relegated what was once good to the dustbin of history.
00:58:33.000Or it selects for a quantum leap of just saying, okay, We're not going to gradually find our way out of this, but we will leap our way out of this.
00:58:41.000And I think that's one of the moments we're in.
00:58:43.000And you're one of the people who's lighting the match.
00:58:47.000And the question is, do you combust a good kind of reaction where you cause a rocket ship to take off or doesn't it?
00:58:54.000In which case, we're all done and that's the ballgame.
00:58:56.000My team and I force people into these boxes where they're required to make a decision.
00:59:02.000Like when I've been in court and federal court and the jury verdict, it forces all this hyperbole and innuendo melts away.
00:59:08.000And it's like, do you want to live in a world where you...
00:59:12.000And I've been in court many times, and I've won, all but one, where there's logic prevailed.
00:59:18.000You force people into this, make this decision.
00:59:20.000There was a case in North Carolina where logic prevailed.
00:59:22.000The federal judge is like, I've watched the video, ma'am.
01:00:01.000We're not there yet to create the paradigms and circumstances that my reporting does with police body cam footage and superintendents and people calling.
01:00:09.000So I don't think AI is a threat to me yet.
01:00:12.000But yeah, we force people into that moment you just described where they're required to grapple with the questions.
01:01:05.000It's one of the greatest violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States for them to raid journalists' homes over a story I never even did.
01:01:36.000I think you set an example for young people who, I think the most important moral of the story isn't any of the implications for the country, all of which is important, but for maybe a younger person watching this, at least being somebody who found his calling, who's pursuing it, who's doing it without apology.
01:01:55.000A modern-day Howard Rourke and his discipline.