DREAM TEAM: Tim Pool & James O’Keefe on ‘The Tim Pool Show’ Talk About Breaking Stories, Exposing Corruption, Ethics of Going Undercover To Expose The Private Lies

[HARPERS FERRY, W.Va.—Oct. 22, 2020] Guerilla journalist, Tim Pool, hosted guerilla journalist, James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas, for more than two minutes on “The Tim Pool Show,” livestreamed to more than 75,000 YouTube viewers.

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“You are an entrepreneur. I'm at your place right now and it's amazing what you are building and what you've built,” said O’Keefe to the host.

O’Keefe said he admired Pool’s willingness to go it alone and build his own brand and channel in order to practice his own style of journalism because it was the same decision he made more than 10 years ago when he founded Project Veritas.

“What I've learned in my career is that, when I started, I was in a garage with nothing but a mic and a laptop and I realized, okay, in order to make videos, I have to do something else and--I have to be the chairman of a company,” he said.

The program was livestreamed on Pool’s YouTube channel, opening at roughly 40,000 viewers, but it quickly jumped to nearly 80,000 for the rest of the show. The total
viewership for the program, considering other platforms and replays, was more than one million viewers.

Pool, O’Keefe discuss Project Veritas’ Google Investigation

One hour before the show, Project Veritas launched the first of three videos exposing cultural and political bias inside Google and Google employees explaining on hidden camera how that bias informed how the search engine giant manipulates search results.

In that video, Ritesh Lakhkar, technical program manager in Google’s Cloud division, told a Project Veritas undercover journalist: “I feel suffocated at Google.”

Lakhkar said why the Google culture was oppressing. “On one side you have this professional or unprofessional attitude, and on the other side, you have this ultra-leftist attitude, and your entire existence is questioned.”

Google exercises deity-like control over the information Americans receive, he said.

“You’re like playing selective God,” he said.

“If it was fraud, it doesn’t matter, but for Trump, Melania Trump, it matters, and on the other side, Trump says something, misinformation, you’re gonna delete that because it’s illegal under whatever pretext,” he said. “If a Democratic leader says that, then you’re gonna leave it like that, so I’m like, okay, you’re not following one way or the other. You are just plain and simple trying to play God.”

Ritesh Lakhkar: “The power’s in the search, yeah.”

 Journalist: “The power to control reality. How do you feel about that? How does that make you feel?”

Lakhkar: “Helpless.”

Senior Google Manager On Search Engine’s Power: ‘You Are Just Plain And Simple Trying To Play God’… ‘The Power’s In The Search’ … ‘Trump Says Something, Misinformation, You’re Gonna Delete’ … ‘If A Democratic Leader Says That, Then, You’re Gonna Leave It’

“In terms of the bias accusations against you, what- what I really love about this was when you're- you're publishing Google,” Pool said.

“You know what I love? I love the irony of you literally exposing manipulation, interference and censorship, and then they censor you,” he said. “It's the perfect, the best way to describe irony--is a firetruck on fire--the firetruck is supposed to put the fire out, now it's in flames. You're exposing these Big Tech companies and they're actively shutting you down in real time.”

Pool said he sees the same manipulation of democracy at Reddit that Project Veritas exposed at Google.

“It reminds me of what we heard from the CEO of Reddit,” he said. “He actually said: ‘I'm confident Reddit could swing an election. We wouldn't do it.’ Then, what do they do? Now,
they're actively censoring, you know, conservatives, Trump supporters, so, we're seeing this kind of thing just basically across the board.”

Pool asks about Project Veritas accused of deceptive editing, the ethics of hidden cameras

“I bring this up, because I can't remember exactly what expose you did, but they said you deceptively edit videos, and you secretly record people, so you know, it's unethical,” Pool
said.

Pool said when the British Channel 4 used hidden cameras for its reporting on Brexit supporters, it was praised.

“I'm sitting on Twitter, and I'm like: ‘Wait a minute. They're praising this and condemning this at the exact same time. It's the exact same thing.’”

O’Keefe said he and his Project Veritas are one of the last practitioners of undercover journalism, which he combines with video, the most reliable medium for conveying quotes to the public.

“Deceptive editing is--I mean, all journalism is edited in a selective fashion,” he said.

“Words are arranged onto newsprint. Bob Woodward in his book, ‘Fear,’ and the new book, which--I don't even know the name of the new book he wrote—but, Bob Woodward uses deep background sourcing, and something that Tom Wolfe invented, like this new journalism,” he said.

“This thing where, Tim, he meets with a source, and the source tells him a story on hearsay, and then he puts the quotes from the one source in other quotes, and he tells it
like it's a direct quote. What is that if not selective editing? Our stuff-- every word, you can see the person's lips moving,” he said.

“It's asinine if you actually think--it's pathological if you think about it, that journalists, like
Bob Woodward, who quote people, who quote other people, and then he puts that stuff in quotes, is saying that I selectively edit, when you can see the person's lips moving,” he said.

“It's worse than 1984,” he said. “As Gavin McInnes says: ‘It's become almost a Kafka-esque
nightmare.’”