#2334 - Kash Patel

Kash Patel (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

SPEAKER_3 (0:06)

Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

What's going on, man?

Kash Patel (0:14)

How are you doing, Joe?

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Very good to see you, sir.

Kash Patel (0:16)

Thanks for having me in Austin.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

What is it like to be the head of the FBI? How weird is that?

Kash Patel (0:20)

It's completely f-ing wild. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

What did you think it was going to be like and what was different once you got in there?

Kash Patel (0:35)

I thought that we were going to be able to come in with the movement that President Trump came in with the administration to fix the errors that the leadership of the FBI previously made, not like the 37,000 change people. And we are. We're doing a ton of work. I didn't know we would be able to do it this quickly, is my surprise. And what that showed me was the people at the Bureau, literally, people who have been there, 30-year agents, they're coming up to me and be like, dude, we wanted to do that 15 years ago.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

Really?

Kash Patel (1:10)

We wanted to do that 10 years ago. And then my question was like, you guys are the pros. Like, I'm just, my job as the director, I'm not chasing down bad guys, I don't know how to do that, is to give them what you need and get the hell out of the way. And they were like, dude, all they did was get in the way.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

So, like, what kind of stuff specifically, specifically did you start doing that they wanted to do 15 years ago?

Kash Patel (1:31)

Simple, the one that I've taken the biggest heat for. You know, when I said, hey, there are, these are the statistics from the USG, so you can take them or leave them, right? I don't know where else to go because nobody else does these, right? In the last calendar year, not this one year before last, 100,000 people were dying of drug overdoses a year. That's one every seven minutes. A child or kid was being raped every six-and-a-half minutes in this country. There were two homicides an hour in this country. We have a 38,000-person workforce.

I said, okay, where are the agents? Where are Intel Analysts? Where is everybody? We got 55 field offices. We got 300 what we call RAs, Resident Agencies, so satellite offices to field offices in major cities. They said, well, we've got 11,000 FBI employees in what we call the NCR, the National Capital Region. If you take DC and you do a 50-mile, 60-mile radius around it, 11,000, almost a third of the workforce work there. They said, what the hell are they doing there? They said, well, they mandated if you want a promotion, if you want to move up, you're going to come back here and prioritize stuff here. I said, look, we're moving agents and Intel Analysts to the field. That's what I did. 1,500 people are going to the field because a third of the crime doesn't happen in Washington DC and the 65 miles around it. Everybody was like, we've been wanting to do this forever. I mean, just think about it. One agent out in Indian country, one agent out in Texas, Arkansas, Washington state, prevents a homicide, conducts a major drug bust, stops a ton of fentanyl or meth from coming into our country. One agent can do that. And the agents that I talk to now from around the country are just stoked.

Joe Rogan (3:10)

That's awesome. That's great news. That really is great news because the fentanyl thing scares the shit out of me. It really does.

Kash Patel (3:17)

Well, it's one of the things I want to hammer down on. But whenever you want to get into that.

Joe Rogan (3:20)

Yeah, please. Yeah. It's so terrifying because, you know, we've shown it on the podcast, the amount that will kill you.

Kash Patel (3:27)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:28)

It's so small. It's like the tip of a pencil.

Kash Patel (3:31)

Yeah, it's like point something something milligrams. It's nothing. I'll give you.

I put this big program. I love doing this long form stuff, and this is the only long form interview I'm going to do. I hope you know. Well, thank you. I do one interview. I do one interview a month, one. And it's usually like a five minute TV thing just to keep the press. And we do a lot of stuff on social media. But I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Even when I was on the campaign, I was just this is like the best way to get information out. So fentanyl, right? Everybody's like, how do you attack fentanyl? How do you stop this stuff? Okay. Yes. Let's go after the gangs, excuse me, the narco terrorists down in Mexico. 100 percent. You got to go after the cartels, the drug trafficking organizations. You got to shore off the southern border. The president has done an amazing job at both of those things, made it a priority. So we have decreased the amount of fentanyl being moved around, let's say, right, but not necessarily coming into the United States. So where's the root of the problem? The CCP. So the fentanyl precursors, the stuff you need to make fentanyl comes from mainland China. That's it. Now, I'm sure like 1 percent of it comes from somewhere else in the world, but that's where it comes. They've got hundreds of companies standing up in mainland China shipping this stuff out into the world. Now, their cover is that fentanyl has, and it does have a legitimate lawful purpose in terms of an anesthetic or medical use for anesthesiology related stuff. So there's like a minimal use for it. What the CCP has done is they've come out and said, this is like the biggest, like talk about the devil pulling the wool over the world's eyes. They're like, we don't make fentanyl. They're right. They don't. They just give you all the ingredients for it and ship it to Mexico. And then what they did was to trick the world. They came out and said, hey, we're going to not sell precursor X. They're like, so now we're out of the fentanyl trade entirely. The problem is there's 14 other precursors you can use to make fentanyl and they're still shipping all of those. So what we did when I got to the Bureau is we stood up this massive enterprise to go after fentanyl precursor companies in Mainland China. They're probably not going to like that. What they're doing now to get cute is they're shipping that stuff not straight to here. They're going to places like India and I'm also doing operations in India. They're having the Mexican cartels now make this fentanyl down in Mexico still. Instead of going right up the southern border and into America, you know what they're doing? They're flying it into Vancouver. They're taking the precursors up to Canada, manufacturing it up there and doing their global distribution routes from up there because we were been so effective down south.