Transcript
Joe Rogan (0:01)
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
Kash Patel (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Joe Rogan (0:06)
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night.
Kash Patel (0:08)
All day.
Joe Rogan (0:13)
All right, what's going on, man?
Kash Patel (0:14)
How 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 effing wild. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it.
Joe Rogan (0:26)
What was it? 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 this, 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 that what that showed me was the people at the Bureau, literally people who've been there, 30 year agents, they're coming up to me like, dude, we wanted to do that 15 years ago. Really, 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 (1:25)
What kind of stuff 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. And there were two homicides an hour in this country. And we have a 38,000 person workforce. And 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, the field offices in major cities. And they said, well, we've got 11,000 FBI employees in what we call the NCR, the National Capital Region. So if you take D.C. and you do a 50 mile, 60 mile radius around it, 11,000, almost a third of the workforce worked 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 got to come back here and prioritize stuff here. So I said, look, we're moving agents and intel analysts to the field. And that's what I did. 1500 people are going to the field because a third of the crime doesn't happen in Washington D.C. in the 65 miles around it. And 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.
