Mariana's Interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Mariana van Zeller on The Jordan Harbinger Show

Podcast: The Hidden Third / The Jordan Harbinger Show
Episode: Mariana’s Interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show
Date: May 15, 2026
Host: Jordan Harbinger
Guest: Mariana van Zeller

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Episode Overview

This episode features award-winning investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller in conversation with Jordan Harbinger. Mariana shares gripping behind-the-scenes stories from her popular TV series "Trafficked" and new podcast "The Hidden Third," both exploring the clandestine underworlds of global black markets. The discussion spans from Mexican cartel infiltration in small-town America to harrowing escapes during political coups, complex scam networks in Asia, and deeply human stories among traffickers, victims, and those fighting illegal enterprise.

The episode is a candid, often intense look at the dangers and ethical dilemmas in reporting on the dark corners of the global economy – all told with Mariana’s trademark empathy, humor, and resilience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Cartels in Small-Town America

• Cartel Operations Are Not Limited to Major Cities:
  Jordan: “I don’t think drug cartel. You think, like, oh, there’s a rotten doctor and somebody’s trucking the pills… you don’t think cartels operating in small town America” (00:26)
  Mariana: “They particularly like to operate in small towns because less law enforcement, easier to hide the drugs and have their distribution networks” (00:52)
• Example from Georgia: Cartel-related torture and murder underscore that cartel violence penetrates rural America, exploiting under-resourced sheriffs and law enforcement. (00:20–01:54)

Gaining Cartel Access

• Securing Interviews with Cartel Members:
  Mariana: “We actually had to go down to Mexico and gain permission and have them say yes... You could see in the episode, he’s all like jittery...We had 15 minutes with him. Then the Marines were coming.” (02:21–03:54)
• Risk of Decoys and Surveillance: Teams are often led on “decoy” missions to test their intentions and check if they are followed by law enforcement. (03:55–04:30)

Journalistic Ethics and Practicalities

• Source Protection:
  Mariana: “We’re very, very careful with protecting our sources. We even bring masks with us... gloves, glasses, disguises…” (05:45–07:19)
• Risk to Journalists in Conflict Zones:
  Jordan on narco-journalists: “There’s a couple listeners of the show that...can't use my name or face or anything because they murder people like that all the time.” (11:03)

Cartel Organization and Drug Evolution

• More than Five Cartels: Over 200 operate in Mexico, though most people only hear of the major five. (08:12)
• Origins of Fentanyl’s Popularity: Mariana discusses early Sinaloa cartel tactics, hiring Colombian chemists to diversify into fentanyl, which exploded the cartel’s power. (09:06–10:58)

Building Trust and Narrative Humanization

• Techniques to Build Rapport:
  Mariana: “I bring cigarettes, beer...I show them photos of my son and my family...we’re connecting.” (14:32–15:50)
• Curiosity over Judgment: Prefers improvisational, curiosity-driven interviews to foster honest dialogue, resists formal question lists. (15:50–16:17)
• Why Do Criminals Talk to Journalists?
  1. Ego – pride in their skill
  2. Impunity – feeling untouchable
  3. Human Need to be Understood
     Mariana: “We all want others to understand why we make mistakes, why we do what we do.” (16:46–19:54)

The Cost and Risk of Underworld Reporting

• Psychological Toll:
  Mariana: “The biggest thing on my mind constantly...the safety of the crew.”
• Niger Coup Story:
  Mariana and her team were trapped for ten days during an unexpected military coup while filming illegal gold mining. (23:54–35:41)
  Notable Quote: “It was the worst time of my life...I wasn’t able to sleep. It was just nerve wracking.” (23:54)
• Dramatic Rescue:
  Mariana’s plea to a Portuguese pilot, and a near-miraculous 20-minute window for a private jet escape for the team, aided by local airport manager Kader, who tells her, “Happy birthday to your son” as she departs—a tearful highlight of the episode. (35:03–35:41)

US Drug Distribution Surprises

• Airlines and Strippers:
  Cartels frequently use commercial airlines and strippers to move drugs domestically—unexpectedly, women (especially strippers) are less likely to be suspected. (37:36–38:36)
• Show Production: Meticulous, often multi-year planning for each episode; Nat Geo’s risk aversion shapes the content and logistics. (38:36–40:15)

Stories of Human Trafficking and Scams

• Vietnam’s Kidnapped Brides:
  • Hmong women are abducted or tricked into forced marriages in China due to skewed gender demographics.
  • Traffickers abuse cultural traditions (ritual kidnapping courtship) as cover for crime.
  • Some women end in brothels, not marriages; harrowing undercover footage underscores their plight. (55:37–73:39)
  • Mariana: “[She] has to live with the guilt of having made that choice… that she abandoned her children and that it’s her fault.” (59:03)
• Undercover Filming Hazards:
  Government minders, police surveillance, and even tailored “minders” in Vietnam; paranoia and state surveillance complicate investigations. (59:54–67:17)

Reporting Philosophy

• Humanizing Without Excusing:
  Mariana: “The show is also to humanize people behind the mask and try to understand why they do what they do. That doesn’t mean condoning what they do, of course.” (19:18–19:54, 76:11)
• Role of Empathy:
  Mariana: “If I am going to get emotional, I am going to show that I am emotional...Ultimately, it’s all about making people care.” (84:53–86:06)

Dangerous Assignments

• Cartel & Assassin Reports:
  Dangerous moments with jumpy sources, unpredictability of violence, and moral risk of appearing to share culpability. (40:38–41:25)
• Hostile Environment Training:
  Real world, sometimes disturbing readiness instruction—"Gentlemen, it’s not an if, you are going to get raped. So this is what you have to do." (44:21)

Fentanyl Crisis and Harm Reduction

• Cartel-Driven Shifts in Drug Markets:
  Sinaloa’s (temporary) order to halt fentanyl production due to law enforcement pressure, with brutal enforcement—killing chemists who disobeyed. (45:03–48:37)
• Tranq Dope Epidemic:
  Xylazine-laced opioids cause devastating, leprosy-like wounds.
  Jordan: “This looked like someone took hamburger meat, shoved it into a bag of human skin” (48:45)
  Mariana: “We’re approaching it all wrong. This is a public health crisis.” (49:19–52:16)

Ethics and Legacy of 'Trafficked'

• Show’s End and Future Work:
  Disney’s risk aversion and production costs ended “Trafficked” after five seasons.
  Mariana: “It wasn’t my choice… It’s a very expensive show for all the security reasons and insurance reasons.” (80:19–81:23)
• New Podcast and Projects:
  “The Hidden Third” podcast shifts focus to deep, personal interviews about black markets.
  Mariana is also developing “Super Scam Me,” a show where she agrees to every scam that targets her, to experience and expose modern digital fraud. (91:02–93:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (With Timestamps)

• On Why People Talk to Her:
  “It’s ego... It’s impunity... And it’s this very human characteristic we all share of wanting to be understood.”
  — Mariana van Zeller (16:46–19:54)

• On the Harrowing Niger Escape:
  “I hear somebody call, ‘Mariana, Mariana, Mariana.’ And I look back and it’s Kader. And he turns to me and says, ‘Happy birthday to your son.’”
  — Mariana van Zeller (35:40)

• On Empathy in Journalism:
  “If I am going to get emotional, I am going to show that I am emotional...I’m hoping that the viewers and listeners will feel what I’m feeling and will care. Ultimately, it's all about making people care.”
  — Mariana van Zeller (84:53–86:06)

• On Paranoia Investigating Human Trafficking in Vietnam:
  “We started going out in the middle of the night when [government minders] weren’t watching and trying to figure out ways...”
  — Mariana van Zeller (61:36)

• On Tranq Dope’s Horror:
  “Just show that lady’s arm from the harm reduction clinic... It was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on TV.”
  — Jordan Harbinger (48:45)

• On Humanizing Traffickers:
  “The biggest learning that I’ve had from all these years covering black markets is... the wheel of history turns and where and when you were born determines whether you get crushed or raised by it…We got the lottery ticket.”
  — Mariana van Zeller (73:52–75:39)

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:26 — Cartels in Small Town America
• 02:21 — Gaining Cartel Access; Decoy Dangers
• 05:45 — Protecting Sources & Crew
• 11:02 — Dangers to Mexican Journalists
• 14:32 — Building Trust (Cigarettes, Family Photos)
• 16:46 — Why Criminals Open Up
• 23:54 — Niger Coup Ordeal
• 35:03 — Private Jet Escape & Emotional Farewell
• 37:36 — Airlines/Strippers in US Drug Distribution
• 45:03 — Fentanyl Crackdown, Cartel Violence
• 48:45 — Tranq Dope & Harm Reduction
• 55:37 — Hmong Brides, Kidnapping in Vietnam
• 59:54 — State Surveillance in Asian Reporting
• 76:11 — Journalistic Boundaries: Accountability vs. Empathy
• 80:19 — The End of 'Trafficked'; Reasons
• 91:02 — New Show 'Super Scam Me'
• 93:18 — Collaborating with US Law Enforcement
• 94:29 — Real-World Consequences: Compound Workers Fleeing Scams

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Overall Tone and Style

The episode weaves together dark, tension-filled anecdotes with humor, warmth, and hope. Mariana is candid about her own fears, mistakes, and deep empathy for sources, both victims and perpetrators. The dialogue remains unsensationalized but urgent—a call to critically consider the unseen worlds beneath the global economy, and to appreciate both the privilege and responsibility of bearing witness.

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Essential Takeaways

• Black markets are far-reaching, innovative, and thrive on human complexity—greed, fear, need for connection.
• Reporting on them is dangerous, expensive, and emotionally taxing—but vital for revealing the high cost of global demand, moral ambiguity, and systemic failures.
• Empathy and humanization, not judgment or sensationalism, make truly revelatory journalism.
• Mariana’s new podcast, "The Hidden Third," and upcoming projects will continue to expose and contextualize these hidden worlds.

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[Listen or subscribe to The Hidden Third wherever you get your podcasts. Watch for upcoming projects from Mariana van Zeller.]

Transcript

[Mariana Van Zeller]

What they did to your family.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're lucky to make it out alive.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Streaming on Peacock. These men are going to come after me. Taking them out. It's my only chance.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Put a bullet in her head. From the co Creator of Ozark.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Looks like a family was running drugs. Execution style killing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's rare for the Keys. Any leads on who they might have been running for?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

The cartel killed my family. I'm gonna kill them. All of them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

MIA Streaming now only on Peacock. One thing I found crazy was that the cartels are operating in small town America because I don't know, when you think drugs, you kind of think big cities. New York, Louisiana, San Francisco, Chicago, and yeah, there's small pilly towns. But you don't think drug cartel. You think like, oh, there's a rotten doctor and somebody's trucking the pills over there. You don't think cartels operating in small town America. That's kind of extra scary.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Absolutely. You know, I've been covering the cartel for many years now, and I sort of wanted to do a story about cartel presence in the U.S. and once we started researching it, I realized that actually the story should be all the. Should be about all the things that we don't know about cartel presence in the U.S. including the fact that they're in small town America. So one of our first shoots for that episode was in Georgia. And I don't know if you saw

[Jordan Harbinger]

the episode, but I watched all of season five.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You did?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Thank you. Yeah, and yeah, it was in Georgia. And it was. We started with sort of a murder investigation of this woman who was tortured and they cut off her fingers and then eventually killed her. And she was killed by the cartel. And it was in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. And then we sort of follow the investigation and. Yeah. Realized that they're everywhere and particularly like to operate in small town America because

[Jordan Harbinger]

law enforcement has one sheriff for the whole county and what's he gonna do?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yes, exactly. Less law enforcement, easier to hide the drugs and have their distribution networks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I suppose that's true. Right. Because if you're doing a drug buy at a farmhouse, who is. Even if the sheriff is right there at the house. All right, you guys put your hands in the air while I wait three hours for the FBI to show up.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. And they're all armed with like AK47s

[Jordan Harbinger]

and AR15s and they've got their helicopter on standby. Yours is in Washington, D.C. if they understand why you're calling. Like, who gave you authority? No, no, no. I followed the cartel here. Like, okay, I suggest you leave.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. You know, what was so interesting about that story is that we, in order to get access to the carte the US we actually had to go down to Mexico and gain permission and have them say yes. And so we spent quite some time in Sinaloa and met a lieutenant and all these other people involved in the cartel. And eventually it was the lieutenant who said, okay, we'll give you. Initially, it was another member of the cartel that had given us access to an operation in Washington, Washington state. And then there was some sort of arrests and that fell through. And so then it moved to the lieutenant. We basically, when you go down to Mexico, you have to meet several people, particularly if you're trying to get access to something in the United States and hoping that something will happen. So we met all these people, and there was all these possible options, but then nothing worked out. And then the last one we met was this lieutenant, and he. You could see in the episode, he's like, all, like, jittery. And it was like one of the craziest scenes meeting him. But we had like 15 minutes with him. And then the Marines were coming and they all got nervous and wanted to leave. But the last minute I asked him, can we get access to the operation into your Operation United States? Because a lot of these groups have people that work for them in the U.S. obviously, the U.S. is the end goals where they're bringing, sending their drugs. And so eventually he said, okay, we've got you. And it was all set up. And we were supposed to meet them in Minnesota. And so we traveled to Minnesota. And this was. We're like, you know, we're not a huge team, but we are six people and you've got lots of gear, and we have to all. And I'm shooting, you know, 10 episodes every year.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A year, two SUVs.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's like, you have to pack your. Yeah. And. Yeah, we get there. And then we waited and waited and waited for days, and the guy never showed up. And then finally we get a call and he's like, actually, that was a. What do you call it? A.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Like a trick.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Trick. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Decoy.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

A decoy. Thank you. That was a decoy. And we are in another state that you're not allowed to disclose, but come and meet us is here. So then we had to do, like, a company move to this next place and just hope that they'd be there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. You think they were watching you in that place the whole time to see if you were meeting with the Cops, like, they didn't show up.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, we were told that. I mean, that sometimes happens when we film in Sinaloa. That happens all the time, where they tell us one place and then they don't show up, or we know that they have eyes on the ground checking us out immediately. And sometimes it's not so much about us journalists, because they don't know even if they trust us. They don't know if we're being followed. Particularly me and the kind of work that I do.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was wondering, I mean, if the FBI is following you, you're just leading them to all sorts of criminals or Interpol or something. It's like, what does she do? She meets with all the people we can't find, and they readily meet up with her for some reason, and then film.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

What I usually say is that it's not as if law enforcement doesn't know where these people are. Like, it's not as if, you know, the whole of Mexican authorities don't know where the Sinaloa cartel is. It's more that it's law enforcement. They have to catch them in the act. There has to be evidence. There has to be a case built. And not on the case. Not so much in the case of Sinalo, but here in the United States at. So I don't think it's in their interest to follow me. But I do get often asked by law enforcement agencies in the US to go and speak at conferences about what I've learned. And that's interesting.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's gotta be an interesting balance, right? Because it would be cool to do that. But on the other hand, when you wanna film Season six, they're like, so you went and spoke at the FBI four times last year. Why are we trusting you with our lieutenant in a secret stash house full of drugs?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

One of the things I tell always is that, you know, even though if I'm. We're very, very careful with protecting our sources. So we even bring masks with us. We.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, I wondered about the masks because you're going in and you're filming these guys packing, I don't know, pink cocaine or something like that. And they're wearing, like a skull mask. And I'm like, are these guys picking this out? I was like, nah, the crew must pick these out because they're not like, yeah, hold on, we gotta go to Walmart, Mariana, and get some masks. And we want cool ones. They didn't have any in the local target, so we gotta go to another. It's like, no, no, you gotta bring Them. I, however, there was one guy who was like a drug, like a cook in the United States. And he had a ski mask on that said, yes, Daddy. And I'm like, wait, bought that?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Wait, what was this line?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was the one about the tranq dope.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

The tranq dope.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And there's a guy with a ski mask that says, yes, Daddy.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Okay, so that was his.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That had to be his.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That was his mask.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Okay.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So a lot of the times we do bring disguises, but a lot of the time, because there are situations in which they say, yes, they agree to be filmed, and then we get there and they don't have disguises, and then they decide not to do it. So we started bringing our own stuff. We even bring long sleeve T shirts, this guy's tattoos, and glasses and gloves and all of it. But a lot of times people are prepared, and so they know there's a film crew coming and they come up with these amazing. Some of the best masks we've had have been people who have picked their own. We had one guy, season one, where we filmed an episode on scams in Jamaica. It was my favorite episode still. I think it was the second episode we filmed for Trafficked. And we get there and we're interviewing all these incredibly super colorful Jamaicans are amazing. Never been to Jamaica. They're just really. The way they talk and they're.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This the one where you were under. And he's like, if I was thinking about stealing your cam.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. Stealing your shit. Victor, his name. I remember that he was thinking about stealing your shit, but he'd realized I was nice. You're good people. So I'm not gonna steal your shit. So instead I'm gonna tell you about how the game works, which is cams. But one of the guys that we interviewed, this camera was a guy, he showed up with a Trump mask because he wanted to talk about capitalism and how it's all about everybody stealing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Anyway, sensitive topic now.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Nat Geo could. Do you ever. Do you think Nat Geo would be like, oh, we don't want a president mask.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, well, they earned it. They earned it back then. And he wasn't. Was it in 2000? We filmed in 2000. Yeah, he was the president. We filmed in 2019. Yeah, it was his first term. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Interesting. Yeah. I would be like, why do you have to pick that one? Like, I don't want to deal with this for my CEO.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, true. But we didn't get in trouble for it. So we are it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How many cartels are there do we know?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think it's estimated that's around 200 cartels right now operating in Mexico. These are just Mexican cartels.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's way more than I thought. I would have said like, five.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I don't know. I mean, five big ones. You know, the big ones. CJ and Sinaloa and Jalisco. I mean, Jalisco, cjng. But there's, like, a lot more, smaller groups. We did a story once, many years ago for Nagio, not for traffic, but before, about Los Tequilleros, which was a group in Guerrero State that was in charge of, like, the production of cook of heroin at the time there. And Los Tequileros are, you know, they love their tequila.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, gosh. There's one. What is. There's one that's called. It has something to do with their haircuts. What is it? They're Los Viagras. You know, those guys. Oh, my God. They're called Viagras because their hair sticks straight up with this gel. And I'm thinking, like, you guys, the branding is so bizarre.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. Not. Not just of their own organizations, because in many cases they are organizations, but also the drugs themselves. I mean, they realize they started shipping fentanyl to the United States several years, and we did a story about fentanyl when it was just starting, so nobody in the US still knew what fentanyl was. But because I had done a story on OxyContin and then heroin, the progression from OxyContin into heroin, all my sources on the ground started telling me, hey, there's this new drug hitting the streets called fentanyl. It's a pharmaceutical drug, but they're starting to exploit the pharmaceutical drug itself instead of using it to get them high instead of in the medical treatment centers. And they're. And the cartel. And now the cartel suddenly has its hands on this. So we went down to Mexico and interviewed a guy from the Sinalo cartel. He had a kilo, a brick of heroin, and it was mixed with fentanyl. It was when it was still all heroin mixed with just a little bit of fentanyl, and then it reversed. But he was telling us, hey, this just recently happened where we, the Sinaloa cartel, decided we were gonna get in on this business. And they had hired a Colombian chemist to come there, and they'd paid him, I think, like 40 or $50,000 for them, for the chemist, for the. To teach them how to make fentanyl. And it was the biggest bet. And that's why the Sinalo cartel grew so Much. They were the first in the fentanyl game.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's crazy.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And initially, they were just shipping white powder to the US or, you know, hidden in packages and whatnot. But then they realized. Wait, there's. They realized. And then dealers and distributors in the US Realized, there's a way that we can make ours, you know, different from the other. So they started mixing it with pink coloring, dye, or blue, and pressing it into pills with the M30 to make it look real. Look real. Like it's a pharmaceutical. And they're very smart. That's the thing about these groups. They're all very, very entrepreneurial.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's the guy helping. By the way, that journalist helping you is brave. That guy.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Miguel Na Helvega.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

He's one of my very good friends.

[Jordan Harbinger]

First of all, he seems really cool. He's got this flaw factor. Yeah. And he's chill. And he's like, yeah, they would kill us if they found this. And I'm like, you're not nervous about that? So he's very good for tv, but also he's really brave. Cause my friend wrote a book about narco journalists, and there's a couple listeners of the show that are anonymous narco journalists, where they post things under a fake name because they will get killed doing this in Mexico.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's very interesting. Cause I was like, hey, who's this person who's on my Instagram? And I was like, what do you do? And she's like, well, I cover cartels, but I can't use my name or face or anything because they murder people like that all the time. And this guy's like, nah, I'm just gonna show up on Nat Geo, show my face and everything.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, he's incred. One of his best friends was killed by the cartel, actually, in Sinaloa. So this is a guy, Miguel. My friend, Miguel Ega. He's from Sinaloa. He started as a print reporter. His story is freaking fascinating. He wrote a book called El Fixer, and we optioned the book, My company. As soon as he started writing the book, I was like, I'm optioning your book. Cause his story is phenomenal. But essentially, he became kind of a journalist because he wanted to be a documentary. He wanted to be a filmmaker, like a Hollywood filmmaker. And he was working on his film, and suddenly he lost all his funding. So it had been shot, but he wasn't able to pay for the editor to get it together. And he needed to figure out how to finish this so he had worked as a journalist before and went back to the newspaper, which is one of the biggest newspapers in Sinaloa, and started working and was there when suddenly an American crew calls and says they're coming to do a story about the increase in violence in Mexico. This was several years ago. And he was like, how much do you guys pay? Whoa, I want to be that. And pretended like he had connections to the cartel and was going to give, but had zero connections in Barteau and then starts building connections. His sister in law did the hair for one of the cartel bosses wives and you know, an old high school friend was now involved in one of the distributions, all this stuff. And he started trying to figure out. And he became the number one person to this day, any international news organization or American that wants to go to Mexico and do a story about the cartel, they will go through Miguel. And he has the access.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Can you introduce this guy? Because my listeners right now are like, you are obviously getting this guy on the podcast, right?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You should. He's amazing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I would love to do that. I would love to do that. A lot of your interviews are done. There's armed guards around you. Well, you always do a great job of showing. There's always a guy in the corner doing this. Right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We're going to. Our camera team is really good at showing the danger.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Like there's some guy who's like, this is amazing.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And he's like.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Or like filming like this because he doesn't want to be like, hey man, can you turn to the side when you show your automatic weapon that is fully loaded? And I wonder if you. How, how do you stay focused when there's guys who are itchy and possibly on drugs and waiting for the marines to start shooting through the windows? And you're thinking like, okay, focus on the guy in front of me because I have 10 minutes or zero minutes. I don't even know.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think people are. We're all afraid of different things, right? That is not a situation that makes me nervous or afraid. You're afraid of running out of other

[Jordan Harbinger]

shit, running out of time. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Or yeah, I'm afraid of not getting that interview, for example.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's what I would be thinking about.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But I'm afraid of big predators like Shar sharks and tigers and shit like that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You dove with a shark.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I know. And I was scared shitless, okay?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Because I thought, oh, she's such a calm diver. I would never do that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Give me a hundred guys with masks and AK47s and I will take Them all. One shark in the ocean and I'm dead.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Was it you who touched it or was it. No, I touched it. Yeah. I wouldn't.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, forget it. I did. I was super nervous. But then once you're in the water, it's actually less nerve wracking. So I'm usually very focused on the interview. I have this whole thing where I like a lot of times I bring cigarette. We always have cigarettes in the production because a lot of times you have to have meetings before the cameras are even turned on and you have to get that person comfortable. And a lot of times they don't want to be on camera. Right. So having cigarettes for me, offering people cigarettes or beer or.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's very Portuguese of you.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Very Portuguese. But it's a way that we're connecting, right? I'm not above you. I'm not different from you. I show them photos of my son and my family on my phone. I ask them about their families. And it's a way that we're immediately connecting. And I do that even if they say yes. Then we sit across from each other. And even before we turn on the cameras, I'm asking questions that I know are just like, what's your favorite food? Things that we all share in common. And that's my way of humanizing them and them to understand that I'm there as a human being. And then I never have a list of questions in front of me. So that is number one. And I've worked with directors who like write all these questions that they want me to hit. And I hate that because it makes me. Then once I read that list of questions, it makes me think that I have to memorize them. And then I'm distracted during the interview. Cause I'm thinking, okay, I have to go back to the question that is on the list.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I don't want to break eyesight with them because I want them to feel that this does not work for me. That this is actual human curiosity.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, curiosity.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I could do that for 15 minutes, maybe even half an hour. I don't think I could do it for two hours. Like, I have a list of things here that otherwise I would forget to cover. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So even on the podcast, I don't. Sometimes I have some things that I want to hit, but I never look down a question. Rarely. Rarely.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. I just check and go like, okay, we already talked about this, this, this, and this.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And then, yeah, everybody has their different. Yeah, this is where you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is my crutch. My iPad crutch. Yeah, I thought that. It's interesting these guys will even meet you in the first place. Why do you think they do that? Even though it increases their. They're not getting paid, it increases their risk. This guy's like, oh, the Marines know you're here, so they know we're here. It's like he could die giving you 15 minutes of masked information that does him no good.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. So three main reasons. Number one is ego. People want to boast about what they do. I'll never forget interviewing this guy who makes. He's the best money counterfeiter in the world. He's a guy in Peru, and he makes these $100 bills and $50 bills that look exactly like. He is called the finisher. So he adds sort of the crunch to the bill and the makes it look used. And the smell and the touch. It's exactly as if it's a real bill, but it's not. And this guy, for example, he does this. He was a driver during the day, and at night, this is what he does. And his family doesn't even know he does it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And he's the driver when you're printing

[Mariana Van Zeller]

$100 bills because he needs to have a job. A lot of times it's to actually launder the money and so that his family, 10 grand a day, thinks that he has a. So I don't think he works, like eight hours as a driver. He works for a few hours. He tells a family that he's a driver. He actually has some stories of driving because he's doing it during the day, and he can launder the money, and it's not going to be a big question mark. Where is he getting all this money from? But the money that he was making, counterfeiting, it wasn't for him, actually. He was selling that because if you get caught, you know, he doesn't want to, like. And none of us wants to end up in prison. So what he would do is that he's making the fake money, and he would sell the fake money to the boss that would then distribute it around the world anyway. But his story was that when I started interviewing him, his eyes kind of lit up. You know, he's so excited. He was like, oh, my God, somebody actually wants to know about this thing that I'm amazing at. I'm like the Cristiano Ronaldo of fake bills. Nobody's ever wanted to know. And behind him that the treasury would

[Jordan Harbinger]

love to talk to him as well.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Exactly. And I'm gonna be Able. Yeah, I know. Should have introduced him. So I think it's ego and wanting to boast about it in terms of the cartel, a lot of times it's boasting, wanting to talk about it. Then it's impunity in places like Sinaloa, where people just don't really see a downside. There's so much corruption. Even if the police knows where I am, there's no chance that I'll get.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Probably could have done it without masks,

[Mariana Van Zeller]

and it would have been. And sometimes we actually have to convince people to do it with masks because they don't want to wear sunglasses or they just want to wear this mask or just, you know, mouth. Cover the mouth. And we're insistent on. This is silly, because if you get in trouble, then we'll get in trouble, too. And our whole team gets in trouble, including people like Miguel Angel Vega, who lives in Mexico. Trouble for interviewing them, because if they're found out, they're going. If they found out because of a story that we did, they're going to say that maybe we ratted them out or we gave information to the police.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're not getting in legal trouble for it. You're getting in.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

In trouble with a cartel, which is much worse.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Way worse.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And so we're very careful with protecting identities. And then let me just tell you the third reason why I think people talk to us. And it's this very human characteristic we all share of wanting to be understood. Right. We all want others to understand why we make mistakes, why we do it, why we are who we are. And that's the opportunity I give everyone. I tell everyone I approach. Look, I'm not here to judge you. I'm here because I really want to understand why you do what you do, because I think that's ultimately much more interesting than just. And that doesn't mean condoning what they do, of course.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The only time I've seen you almost maybe show that you were judging someone is that pastor who hated gay people in Kenya, Martin. He was such a piece of shit, this guy.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yep. It's not my first time interviewing him. Yeah, it's. Interviewed him before. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You were, like, right on the edge of. I could tell you wanted to just bite his face off.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We got into.

[Jordan Harbinger]

He's a terrible person.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We actually got into Buick Fight. You saw a little bit of it. It got worse. Yeah, it was a whole. I mean, he's sitting down in front of me telling me how, you know, the LGBTQ community there. Everyone is disgusting, and they're Eating the poo poo. This is what he says people do is they eat the poopoo.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I saw that and I was like, this man is mentally ill and an aggressive piece of crap. And it's. And he does it all under the guise of, I'm not religious, but like, religion. Yeah, but it's really gross and simplistic and this guy's a terrible. And he's increasing the harm for these kids who are getting shot or beat up because they're gay in Africa. It's infuriating even if you're not. It's not an issue that I feel like it's not something that personally affects me. But you can't help but be like, why are you making things worse for people that already have it hard? Why are you doing that?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right? And I think actually it personally affects us. All right? Because it's. Right now it's that group, but it could one day be Portuguese people or podcasters or. Yeah, and no, and part of that story was actually to show how it's a lot of the legislation being passed here that is influencing what's happening in Africa. So it actually impacts all of us. But, yeah, that was a really hard time. I also interviewed an assassin here. We did an episode on Assassins in la. I mean, most of the episode was filmed in South Africa, which has the highest number of assassinations and one of some of the highest numbers in the world. But we started that episode interviewing an assassin in la. And that was a really interesting one

[Jordan Harbinger]

because that's not season five.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That was season four.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, I gotta rewatch that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, that was an interesting one.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So did you lose your cool during that one? Is that why you bring it up?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, because the whole point of the show is also to humanize people behind the mask and try to understand why they do what they do. And in that case, as soon as we arrived, we met him downtown at night. I connected with him through another contact that I have here in the us A guy that I really like that has given me access to a lot of worlds underworld in the US and so he. As we're driving to meet the assassin, my contact tells me, hey, by the way, you have to be careful with this guy. Cause I think he might be kind of like bipolar. Cause he will be happy one moment and then really angry the next. I was like, dude, what the. Where are you taking me to? Right. Anyway, we get out of the car, this guy is jittery already, and he's like, okay, so what's up? What do you Guys want to ask. And I was like, okay. Hi, my name is Mariana. Here's the crew. I'm introducing everyone. He's like, just heads up. He takes out his gun from his belt, and he's like this. Do you see this here? If the police shows up and says, this is a setup, you're all dead. And so the whole interview, I'm thinking, if by chance the police shows up, not because I'm here, but if a police car drives by, he's gonna think it's because of us. So I'm trying to make it quick, right? So I'm asking questions, okay, Are you really an assassin? What do you mean? How much do you get paid? All that stuff? And then I wanted to ask. My last question was about trying to humanize him. So he says he only kills men, not women or children. And I asked him, do you have children? And what I was trying to get at is that if he was killed, his children would suffer. So even if you're just killing men, you know, the suffering is all around you. And as soon as I asked that, he was. He went. Jumped to very angry. And he was like, what the. Are you asking me emotional question? I'm not gonna get emotional here. What are you trying to do? I'm not good with this shit. And he wanted to cut the injury. So that was. There was.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That dude is damaged.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It was a hard interview. Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yikes. Are you ever worried about the safety of your crew? Because I would imagine even though I am married and have kids, I would probably be thinking, if we die here, I'm gonna feel really bad in the afterlife that I got her, him, and him all killed, and they're all younger than me, and they had their whole lives ahead of them. Like, it's my fault we're here getting buried in the desert.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Damn it.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

The biggest a thing on my mind constantly. And all our safety, I mean, we go through enormous lengths to make sure that we're minimizing the risk. You know, we have hostile environment training. We consult security companies. We don't travel with security the majority of time, because it's just. I'm trying to get people to trust me. And if I show up with security, it means that I don't trust them. Why should they trust me? Right? But then there's even. No matter how much planning you put in place, it's like Mike Tyson says, plans are great until you get punched in the face. There's always stuff that's going to go wrong. And so we had that situation in Niger, where I got stuck in a coup that was also season four. And we made that part of the story because we were there to do a story about illegal gold mining. And then there was a military coup. We got stuck and there was an incoming war. We were in one of the most dangerous places on earth with terrorist groups all around us. And the whole time I'm thinking, I'm here, I'm stuck with six other guys. It was all men, but they all have families. All their wives and moms were calling, calling my production company because I'm also the executive producer and owner of the company and, you know, asking what was happening and how can we get them back to safety. So it was the worst time of my life. I wasn't able to sleep. It was just nerve wracking.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How long were you stuck there?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

10 days. 10 worst days of my life.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That is a long time to be stuck in a military coup when you expected to be home a week or two, whatever prior to that, like. Or we're gonna be in and out in 48 hours.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's the only reason NGU allowed us to go. Cause it is one of the most dangerous places on earth. You've got Boko Haram and ISIS and Al Qaeda all operating there. You've got kidnapping squads and you're not, as an American, showing up up with no security is not a good idea. So we'd been given the military. The local military or the government had been giving. Gave us. Sorry, gave us military escort that would follow us wherever we went. So we went out into the mines. We drove for eight hours and slept out in the desert, in the open desert so that we could film inside the mines and interview the miners that are illegally mining for gold that is actually paying for the terrorist groups. Yeah, wow. Or funding part of the terrorist groups. And so when we came back from sleeping overnight in the desert, we came back to this town called Agadez. And when we arrived, we found out that there had been a coup. And immediately they removed the military security from us. So we were left with no protection in a rundown hotel with again, no protection around it and no way out. So borders were closed, the airspace was closed. And suddenly they started evacuating people from all over the world, but from the capital. And we were a three day drive to the capital and we couldn't even go because it's too dangerous. So we were literally trapped in one of the most dangerous corners of the world. And it was scary as shit.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That is awful. That's not fun. No, you're not stuck at a Four Seasons in the capital with a military surrounding it and like, oh, we'll get out of here soon. It's like, no, we're at a Motel 6 equivalent.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It was in the middle of nowhere. It was actually a building that was. It was a rundown sort of house type thing that was built by Muammar Gaddafi when he'd visited in the 80s. And they'd left that building there and turned it into basically a rundown hotel. There was, like, one drop of water, was the shower, and it was. Yeah, it was very hot. And we ate couscous morning, night and day.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I couldn't. I'm not sure what's worse, the couscous or the threat of being kidnapped by isis.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. But I have to say, beautiful part of the world. So beautiful. The desert and the landscape. So beautiful and incredible. People that were essential to sort of figuring out how to get us out of there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How did you do it? How did that happen?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It was so I had a ticking time. We had a couple of ticking time clocks. One was. Was the incoming war. So the western. Other countries in Africa that are part of the. What's it called, the group, the African Group of Nations, that I cannot remember the name right now, but they were threatening to invade Niger and depose the military leaders. And then the Wagner group in Russia were saying that if they did that, they would come in and defend the military coup leaders. And so it was kind of like a proxy war happening in front of our eyes. Right. And so that was. Was one of the ticking time bombs happening. And the other one was I had promised my son, it had been his birthday while I was there, and he finished his camp. It's a performing arts camp in New York. And every year my husband and I have a tradition where we go and pick him up, we see the play that he puts up, and it's a very important day for all of us. And I spent so much of my time on the road that I live with the guilt of spending so much time away from him. Right. So this is a day that we never change. We always go. No matter what happens, we go and see his performance. It's an important day for him and for us. It's my favorite day of the year, quite frankly. I love it. And that was happening. So we were gonna go to Niger, be there for, like, four days, get out and come back to LA and then fly to New York and do the performing arts camp. And then we get stuck. And so I'm seeing the Days go by and realizing, shit, I'm not gonna be able to make it. And I'm the worst mother in the world. Plus, I have this incredible team around me whose families are suffering right now, and we might all die and we might all be kidnapped. And so all of that was going through my head. And I went. One of the first days of the coup, I went to the airport because I wanted to see if there was any planes flying in or out, even though I knew the airspace was closed. And I met this amazing guy. He was the manager of the airport. His name was Kader. And I asked Kader, I'm talking. I'm asking, are there planes going in? Do you think there's anything coming out? He's like, nothing, Nothing. Not until we get the permission from the government. It can take months until the airspace opens. You guys are going to be stuck here for a long time. And I'm on the verge of tears at this moment. And I ask him, do you have kids by chance? And he picks up his phone and shows me photos of his kids. He's like, yeah. And I showed him a photo of my son on the phone. I was like. I told him it's his birthday next week. It was too complicated to explain. Like, so he's in the camp, like,

[Jordan Harbinger]

brow cut to the chest.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's his birthday and I need to be there for his birthday. And it's next Friday, and this was like, Saturday or Sunday, and it's next Friday. And so please, Kader, if you find out if there's any planes coming in or out, please let us know, because I need to get my team out of here and I need to get to my son's birthday. Anyway, we start trying to figure out that's unlikely, that anything will happen, and we start contacting. We have an evacuation company that we work with. We pay a lot of money to get us out in situations like this. Well, we filmed us calling the evacuation company, and they are completely useless. There's a moment where they say, we have no plan. And I'm asking, do you have a plan? Oh, we don't have plans. It's ridiculous. You should watch this episode.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Why do I pay you $10,000 a month for this insurance? Oh, have you looked at our death and dismemberment policy?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's crazy. So they failed us. So then it was a team in LA led by the executive producers on Traffic, but also my husband, who's also an executive producer on Traffic, who's in la, and they're like, we're gonna have to figure this out, because nobody is helping us. Like, you know, nobody can figure out a way to get these guys safely. So they started contacting different evacuation companies and different groups out there that could possibly do this. And they found a group, amazing people, who had two pilots who were crazy enough to fly with a private jet in the middle of the night. And they told us they're gonna land. They're gonna be there for 20 minutes. You've got 20 minutes to get on the plane. And the plane is coming from Ibiza. And it's a private. It was a G5 plane. If people don't know. It's like the most luxurious of private jets.

[Jordan Harbinger]

DJ Tiesto uses it to get to European gigs.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Dude, it was insane. It was the biggest whiplash of my life. So, basically, after a week of eating couscous and no AC and, you know, a drip of water, and suddenly. And so this is happening. So we're following the plane as it's coming from Ibiza, and the plane's going. Coming here. 20 minutes on the ground, and then it's going to Dubai. And it's gonna drop us off in Dubai. And in Dubai, we're gonna get up our commercial planes to go back home. And the plane. It's a long story, but it's worth it, I promise.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, so far so good. I'm just imagining the pilot going, let me see the Runway. And they're like, it's that soccer field down there.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It wasn't a big Runway, and they were very brave. Cause it was an active sort of military, you know, potentially at war country. And you see, we still have printed out. My partner in traffic, Jeff Plunkett, gave me a map. When I came back, he printed out the map of what the plane radar thing. Map looked like at the time. And you can see it's this whole. You couldn't fly through. Niger is a pretty big country in the middle of Africa. And it's a red box. And then there's one plane crossing, and it's our plane that's coming. And basically, they figured out. So they're coming. We're seeing it coming from Ibiza. We are as nervous as you can imagine as we can be. We arrive at the airport, it was like 5am the sun was just starting to come up. And we are met by a group of military. They're all there, and they don't want us to leave. They start creating problems. They start saying that we don't have the proper documentation, and then back and forth. And Kader My friend, the manager of the airport, is also there. And suddenly Kader sort of takes the reins and starts literally yelling at the military, which is very risky for him, too, and trying to convince them that the papers are in order, that we need to leave, and basically doing us an enormous favor and trying to help us. And eventually they decide, okay, everybody can leave. Except. Except for we had a fixer, the producer, local producer, who was actually from Mali, from the neighboring country, who was with us and helping us. And they said, everybody can leave except for the Malian guy. And that's when I called my husband, and I said, hey, Darren, I'm so sorry. Everybody's going, but I'm staying as sort of the head of the show. I'm leaving. I'm sending the team with the gear, everything, but I'm staying with this guy. And I'm in tears. I'm thinking. I get emotional still talking about this, but for me, it was the failure of me as a mother to making this decision. And it was really, really hard thinking, yeah, I'm not gonna be there. Most important day of the year for my son, and again, I'm failing him. And it was. I'm having all these gigantic guilt problems. And yet again, Kadra comes and is yelling at him. And then my husband is on the phone with me and says, hey, I'm seeing. I'm looking at the flight report, and I think the pilots are Portuguese. Their names are Portuguese. I was like, what? Okay. So at this point, the plane is landing, and I'm running as fast as I can. As soon as the plane lands, I run to where the plane landed. The pilot, one of the pilots, is coming out of the plane, and I go up to him before the military is able to get close to him, and I tell him, are you Portuguese? And he says, yes. And I said, oh, my God. And I explained everything in Portuguese, what was happening. And I said, they're saying that he doesn't have the right paperwork, but if you are okay, that I think you can convince them to let us into the plane because he didn't have the visa for Dubai, and that was our next stop.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The pilot could just bullshit that one.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Maybe the pilot could say no. And actually, it's not a good idea for you can't take anyone on your plane if they don't have the visa to go to the next place. But because I think I'm Kildio. Sorry. But because he's Portuguese, and because he was Portuguese, I think, and because we spoke our language, I think in many Ways that helped. And so anyway, fast forward. He starts talking to the military. Kader is there helping everybody. Gets on the plane. I'm the last one. I'm running to the plane. Happiest moment of my life. And I hear somebody call Mariana, Mariana, Mariana. And I look back and it's Kader. And he turns to me and says, happy birthday to your son.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, that's.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And that's the moment that everything came. I started crying.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How glad did you kiss the ground in Dubai when you landed? I would imagine you guys must kiss

[Mariana Van Zeller]

the ground in the US When I landed at jfk. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I would be like, pilot, tell us the second we are out of missile range from Niger ground forces or out of the border. Like this big red box.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, yeah. The whole team was crying. And the saddest part for us was like, I remember looking out the window and just thinking, this is. It was a terrible 10 days for us, but this is the future of a country with incredible promise and amazing people. You know, everyone from the gold miners, the gold traders, to the people working at our hotel, to Kader, these are all amazing human beings who, every chance they had, were trying to help us. And who are people just like you and I, you know, their mothers and fathers and who now have their future up because of politics and leadership.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's interesting, when that coup happened, a lot of people online were like, good, they're getting rid of the colonial French and they're standing up for. And it's just obviously those people don't know anything about these kinds of things. They just believe whatever the sort of Russian, like, they're overthrowing the imperialist Americans. Look, the military is going to let people live free now. And it's like, that's not how any junta has ever worked in the history of military.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No. And these countries have enormous promise and potential, but they need investment. And what we were doing until up until that point was that there was actually a lot of investment. The United States invested, I think over $100 million in building the these military bases. They had two military bases. There no longer was money lost, but the idea behind those military bases was to prevent attacks from terrorist groups that would eventually, possibly what happened in Afghanistan, organize and attack the United States. So security in other countries matters ultimately for security here at home. And that's what was happening there and is not happening anymore, unfortunately.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was surprised to hear one of your sources said that commercial airlines in the US transport the most drugs. Not like truckers or secret network. It's like, no, that lady who has three bags on Delta plus two of them are clothes and one of them is full of methamphetamine.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And Delta wasn't that interesting that he said this was our interview for Cartel USA where he interviewed a guy called El Gringo, who's an American guy, doesn't speak a word of Spanish yet is one of the biggest distributors for the cartel here in the U.S. fascinating guy. And yeah, he says the way when I asked him, how do you distribute drugs? And I was thinking he was saying, I have these like four wheeled shrucks. That's what I was thinking. He's like, no, Delta Airlines.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines got a million miles.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Strippers. Strippers and Delta Airlines.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I thought that was interesting. Why strippers?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think in his women is always better, right? Because they're less. People suspect them less and I think strippers because they're more likely to do risky behavior. I'm not sure why flirt their way

[Jordan Harbinger]

out of a situation successfully. I don't know.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yes, they know how to charm people. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is it. Don't open that. It's full of adult toys. I don't know. I'm trying to think of like what the advantage is there.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think. Yeah, I think the way they dress too, probably throws people off or I mean, nothing against strippers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, I mean it's illegal way to make money. Except if you're transporting drugs for El Gringo, then you're on the line. How long does it take to plan and shoot each episode of the show?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

A long time. Months, sometimes even years. Like the Niger episode. We started pitching it on season two and it's a. It took us two and a half, three years to convince Nat Geo that it was safe for us to go to new show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, I wondered. So Nat Geo has to sign off on this stuff. I thought maybe you made it and then you just sold them the episodes or something.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No. So it's very much a partnership where every story, we pitch them stories at the beginning of each season and then they say yes to some and no to others. The majority of the stories they say yes to, but they are definitely stories that they're not interested in. And then once we start, even before we hit the ground, we have weekly meetings with them and discussing everything. This is who we're interviewing, this is how the story is going to unfold, or this is what we're hoping to get. And even when we're on the ground, we have to send them reports. And then they see, when we get back, we start editing, they see Rough cut one, rough cut two, all of the final cut. Fine, cut all of it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're very, very thrilled about your Niger experience after not wanting to do it for three seasons. And they're like, good thing we let you do that. And it cost us 100 grand in rescue fees or whatever.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. My first thought when I realized there had been the coup was, nat Geo is going to be so pissed.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So pissed.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And they're going. My thought was like, nat Geo, they're going to get their security people involved and they're going to want to pull us out of the country immediately. And we haven't even finished our story. And then I realized, oh, no, even if we wanted to get out of the country, we can't. No.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The net geosecurity people were like, we got to get them out of there. Oh, it's impossible. All right, I'm going on vacation then, because there's nothing I can do from here.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No, they were lovely. They tried. They were also having sleepless nights trying to figure out how to help us.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is going to be a bad look if they all get murdered.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's not good.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How do we figure this out? Which episode made you feel the most unsafe when filming? Except for, of course, that one. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's always, I think, the assassins one in season two. Four. Sorry, that was season four. Yeah. That was sort of scary. Some moments, obviously, we're not talking about, you know, drugs or scams. It's actual assassins. There are moments of that that weren't so comfortable. I've been in situations with the cartel, several, where sort of the Marines are showing up and it's, you know, trying to see who can save themselves. You know, free for all, where everybody just tries to get out of there as fast as they can. Oh, my gosh. And when you're with the cartel, there's always a dilemma. What do I do? Do I pretend I'm with them and just follow them, or do we try to hide if the Marines show up? And then they're going to think that it's just always complicated? What do you do? What do you decide?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my gosh.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You need, like, a white surrender Nat Geo flag that says yellow.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It would be yellow in that case.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. We're just interviewing these people.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. Which is why in some situations, we always carry press passes with us. And in some situations, like in Niger, we also have press things on the side of the trucks that we travel with. And that's always important, too. But that, unfortunately, matters less and less in the world. We Live through.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It does. Yeah. I mean, I remember back in the day, I used to go out and, like, take photos of things. And then it was like, now you need a bulletproof vest with the press Velcro to take photos of things. And it was like. And you should probably get a helmet and goggles to do this. And then it was like, oh, no, the cops are still gonna shoot you in the head with a rubber bullet.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. No matter how much they just don't care.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then I was like, all right, well, this job, maybe I should get a different job.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Is that how you find yourself here?

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right, Exactly. Is there anything you learned while planning these episodes that almost got you into trouble? Like, thank God we have a satellite tracker. Or thank God you mentioned you have the hostile environment training. But what does that. What do you do? What do you do with that knowledge?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Everything. I mean, they teach us what to do if somebody gets shot, how to use a tourniquet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, so it's like wilderness. What is it like, first responders?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, first responders, but also then real scenarios. They show us videos of situations where things get, you know, like, where there are shootings, but also if you're being followed, what to do to evade surveillance, telecommunications, how to make sure that you're not being listened, how to protect your sources. It's like a broad. You learn everything. I remember an interesting funny story about this is for season one, when we first started shooting Traffic, I'd been reporting on black markets for years at that point, but I had just hired a team of camera folks that hadn't. They, in fact, had been working with Anthony Bourdain on his show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And then that's a gig. Yeah, Very different game. That came to an end and I reached out and I asked if they wanted to work on my show. I loved the Bourdain show and I loved how it looked. And I sort of had spent a lot of time doing these stories, but doing them with, like, handheld cameras and not the best quality. And we wanted to. With Traffic, we wanted to combine sort of gonzo journalism or, you know, boots on the ground journalism with. With beautiful imagery, Nat Geo style. Right. And so we hire these guys. And so it was one of their, I think, first hostile environment training of this type, where we're actually going to hang out with the cartel and the criminal underworld. And I remember the guy that was teaching us at the time, he's a British military, former military dude, really fun guy. And he turns to us and he says, okay, so now what do we do? If you get kidnapped, ladies, there is a chance you will be raped. And so if this. And then explains what to do in those situations. And I look at the guys and they're like, oof. Yes. Oh, my God. That's not happening. And then he looks at the guys and is like, gentlemen, it's not an if you are going to get raped. So this is what you have to do.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my God.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I see all of their faces like, what? What? I don't know if we should be doing this show. And they were brave and they did it. But we still talk about that old

[Jordan Harbinger]

Vietnamese ladies cooking pho on the side of the street in Hanoi last season. What the hell did you get me into?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Geez. Oh, my God.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But they did it and no one got raped.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. No. So far, season five. Yeah. I thought it was interesting. The Sinaloa cartel is murdering the fentanyl cooks now or recently. Can you explain why that is? Because I thought that was. You explained well in the show. But I think people are gonna be confused. There's tons of fentanyl here in the United States. It's coming from the cartel, or it was coming from the cartel. Now there's bodies piling up on top of 20,000 fentanyl pills under an overpass. What's going on?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. So the authorities, the American authorities started going really heavy on the Chapo family. Right. The Sons, the Chapitos, as they called it. Sons of El Chapo. El Chapo was caught, brought to the United States, and then the Sinalo cartel was run by the Chaplitos on one side. And El Mayo, who's the legendary partner, sort of shadow partner of El Chapo. Everybody knows El Chapo, but nobody knows El Mayo. But he was the equal partner for the Sinaloa Cartel, and in many ways, sort of more crucial to the operations of the cartel. He was the guy that sort of the whole corruption that had the liaison, the partnerships with governments and law enforcement around the world in order to be able to move his drugs at the scale that they did. And so once El Chapo was brought to the United States, the government started really going after, particularly the Chapitos, because they were in charge of a lot of the fentanyl production. And I don't know if you remember, there was a thing called the Culiacanazo, where the Mexican Marines went and detained, apprehended Ovidio Guzman, one of the Chapo San. Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Said we're kill all your families if you don't want to.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. So the military detains this dude, the son of El Chapo. And immediately all the different factions of the Sinalo cartel got together and said, no, we're not going to let this happen. So they brought the whole of the Culiacan, which is the capital of Sinaloa, down to its knees and demanded the release of El Chapo. Sorry, of Ovidio Guzman. El Chapo San. They released him a few years later, but they released him because they had to. It was so embarrassing for the government, the Mexican government, and it empowered the American government in this pursuit, too. Because what they saying, you guys aren't gonna be able to bring them to justice. So we are gonna work with you, and we're gonna be much more involved in making sure that we're bringing them to justice and stopping the production of fentanyl. And so there started to be more and more pressure because now they're dealing with the American government wanting to come there and take them and arrest them. And so when it started getting heated, they realized, okay, we have to do something about it, because nobody wants to end up in jail, in prison. So they asked, let's stop production of fentanyl, because that will get the authorities off our backs, the American authorities off our back backs, they thought, and they did, and they stopped production for a while. But because there's not just one or two chemists, it's hundreds or thousands of chemists, and they all depend on this now for a living, a lot of chemists decided to not abide by the rules, the new rules of the cartel. And they kept making fentanyl. So those were the ones who started being killed. What I heard when we were doing that story, because it made no sense, because I knew that there was something still fentanyl coming across, was that they already had large deposits, so they were going to move those deposits of fentanyl to the United States and stop the production in the hopes that that would prevent the American government from coming after them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So, like, oh, we're going to stop producing it. Great. What we didn't tell them was we have 15 million pills in an entire house.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. And we went to one of those labs where it was still being produced. But then we also went to an underground lab with a guy showing that he was a chemist, and he did everything in an underground lab under his house, which was insane.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That was insane.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That was so crazy. It was a drainage tunnel. Yeah. That happened to pass under his house. And then he figured that out. He was like, I have the Best lab situation in the world. Like, nobody's ever going to find me. So we went under, and he wasn't producing fentanyl anymore because he was visited by two cartel members who basically threatened to kill him if he continued.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Geez, that's crazy to me. The tranq dope thing is disgusting, by the way. So this is like dope mixed with xylazine, which I think is a veterinary tranquilizer.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, that's right. An animal tranquilizer.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So the whole. I mean, forget. Don't. What is it? Don't just say no to drugs like that whole campaign. Just show that lady's arm from the harm reduction clinic. So this looked like. This looked like someone took hamburger meat, shoved it into a bag of human skin, and then soaked it in a sink for three days and then just stabbed like, a hundred little holes in it with a needle. And I. It was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen on tv. And I can imagine did it. It must have smelled horrendous, like terrible, because it looked like she just had a rotten arm. It was like zombie.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. So we were there in a small clinic in Kensington, Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for tran dope. Tranq dope. What it does is it's fentanyl mixed with the animal tranquilizer. And what it does is that fentanyl gives you a really high high. But unlike heroin, the high goes away. Very few. So they figured out a new drug that they could mix there, which is a tranquilizer that allows that high to stay high longer. It allows you to stay high longer, which is ultimately what every user. Drug user usually is after. And so they started using it, and they didn't even know there was tranquilizer in it. They just realized, oh, this is a good high. Let's keep using this. Right? But what they didn't know, and most people didn't, it's a new sort of medical phenomenon. Nobody has studied this because it's so new, and it's never sort of shown up anywhere. Cause nobody is, you know, willingly using horse tranquilizer on themselves is that it creates these horrible wounds that look like leprosy, essentially. I don't know if you've seen films of, like, leprosy back in the day when it was still big in India, but it looks like that. It's like big open wounds with, like, pus coming out. And it's just one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. In this case, we were in this clinic run by these sort of Volunteers, amazing people who are dressing the wounds and unwrapping. And we were seeing them doing this to dozens of people and asking if we could film this woman agreed to be filmed. And we see this amazing guy who is doing again, volunteering his time and opening up this wound. He has learned how. He's not no medical training, but he's learned himself how to do it. And he's treating this woman's arm. And the moment he unwraps the. What do you call it? The gauze. The smell is everything you can imagine. It's super powerful. But yet this is a human being who's being treated. Right. The last thing, the worst thing I could do is start talking about how much the smell and what that taught me. And the guy said so well, as somebody who's been covering the drug epidemic for so long, is that we're approaching it all wrong. This is public health crisis that's happening in America. We essentially have thousands of people on the streets of America nowadays hooked on this drug. You might think that they're there because they want and they're doing the drugs because they want to. Nobody wants to be out there like this. Nobody wants to. Nobody would ever willingly, willingly do this. It's a public health crisis. It's like leprosy. It's like so many other diseases that we've been able to combat and fight against. And here, for some reason, because we think that they have a choice, we allow it to happen. And the reason also why they're being treated in this roadside clinic instead of going to hospital. We spoke to a lot of these users, and they were all saying, we go to the hospitals. They think there's so much stereotyping, and they're immediately. They're stigmatized, and they're treated as junkies, not treated as human beings. And that's what with our episode we try to do is really humanize these people and try to show this other side that they're human beings just like us and need help more than we do.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's a scary path, right? Because I had a friend who had a back injury. So It's. He got OxyContin, and then he got hooked on OxyContin, and then he couldn't get it anymore, so he started doing heroin. But now you can't get heroin, so

[Mariana Van Zeller]

you do fentanyl, and now you can't get fentanyl.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You're doing tranq dope.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So it's like it's a fourth wave. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You end up with a guy who's like a construction worker. This guy was an MMA fighter. But you get a back injury and it's like five years later, or. I don't know how a few years later, they're in an alley covered in open sores, and it's like.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And Jordan.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Disgusting.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Every conversation, every time I bring up the opiate epidemic, somebody has a story like that. And the vast majority of them starts with an injury. Starts with even I had an ep. I'm not gonna name him, but I had an executive producer on television that worked with me for some time who had seen my coverage on opiate. On the opiate epidemic, and called me one day and says, hey, you have no idea what just happened to me. I had. I went in for like a tooth surgery and they gave me opiates. And I had no idea it was. That I would be. You know, because some people have the chemistry, brain chemistry, that makes them more hooked. And he had never. He never had an addictive personality or anything. And he was like, I spent two months doing these opiates, and you have. Weaning off those opiates was the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life. And he said I was on the verge of, like, a mental breakdown. You just talking about how this normal person goes and in two months is super hooked on these drugs. And he doesn't know still how he managed to get off the other way. But for a lot of people, they don't. And so that's what I mean when I say it's not a choice. Yeah, it isn't a choice.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's terrifying. I mean, I'm curious how you're clearly careful not to touch any of this stuff. Because if you go to a drug lab, I don't know, what kind of precautions do you take? Because that stuff is in the air and it's on the bag and it's on the table, and you put your elbow down, and now you've got.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I don't know, as long as you put it on your mouth or your eyes or you ingest it, usually it's. Yeah, I mean, not a great idea. Where they had bags and bags of tranq dope, and they were mixing the fentanyl with the xylazine. And we used gloves, which is the appropriate thing to do. And they were using gloves, too. But when I was in a lab in Mexico and saw them making fentanyl, this was for season two. We did a story or season one of fentanyl that was insane. Cause the chemist that was making. We went in with, like, hazmat suits and, like, big masks and, you know, respirators. And. I mean, we look like those movies about epidemics, you know, where the scientists walk in there and they can barely move. That's what we looked like when we were filming. So it's me and my team. My guys are holding their cameras through their masks, and we can barely move with these gigantic suits and these dudes. Two dudes from the Sinaloa cartel that made the chemists for the Sinaloa cartel making fentanyl. And they had gloves and they had, like, one of those just Covid masks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, yeah. Like a scarf around his face.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. And I was like, aren't you scared? He was like, no. This is actually great because I know the fentanyl is potent. I know I've got it. I know I've got. Made it. He's making it. I know I've got the end product when I start feeling through my skin, because it comes in through the skin, you see the fumes are everywhere. This is why we're using these sort of respirator masks. But I know I start getting. My heart starts beating really fast, and that's when I know I've got the good shit. These people are bananas.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My God, these guys are crazy. They're insane. One of the saddest episodes, I think, was the Hmong women in Vietnam getting kidnapped, essentially, and sold to Chinese men. Tell us how they get snatched and scammed, because this is. It's really extra disturbing that it's not. I don't know why this is. It's not better if their family sells them. Don't get me wrong. But it's really scary to think you're going shopping and your friend's like, hey, let's go get something to drink. And then your friend sells you to a Chinese guy and you just vanish.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. I mean, it's essentially what's happening there. We heard dozens. We talked to dozens of women who told similar stories, who were. These are Hmong villages. So it's sort of impoverished communities in the mountains of northern Vietnam. And, you know, not a lot of job opportunities. Not a lot of. Yeah, just education. And a lot of times they would meet people on, you know, that kind of foreigners or, you know, Chinese people or more wealthy Vietnamese people that would come through and they'd start charming them. It's a lot what happens here, actually, with people. Pimps, romance, scam kind of thing. Yeah. And then say, hey, do you want to go for dinner with me? And then the next thing they know they're being handcuffed and blindfolded and taken across the border to China and sold to men. And one of the most horrific stories I heard, there was this woman, something similar to her happened. She was sort of kidnapped, sold. She found herself living in a small apartment with a Chinese man and. And his parents all living in the same apartment. And this is happening in China, by the way, because of the one child policy. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

For people who don't know there's not enough women to marry in China because.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right, because there's one child policy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You wanted a son. If you can only have one, you aborted or got rid of the girls. And now there's like one girl for

[Mariana Van Zeller]

every, I don't know, three men or something. Two men or something. It's not as big, but there's a lot of single men. And in China, it's incredibly important culturally, very important to get married. You're seen as a failure if you don't. If you don't get married and if you don't have children. Your parents will be the biggest sort of sadness of their lives. If your kids don't have kids, don't give you grandkids, basically. It's very important culturally in China. So there's enormous pressure on these men and they can't find Chinese women, so they're going and paying people to go find them wives elsewhere. So this case of this Vietnamese woman shows up. She was young. I'm not sure if she was a teenager, but she was young. And she shows up at this small, tiny apartment. This guy, they lock her in a room, and the parents live there too, but they lock her in a room. The guy comes in just to have sex with her. She eventually gets pregnant, is forced to give birth to this child. They take away the child from her and let her visit, see the child once in a while, let the child go into the room to be with her. She gives birth to a second child, and then after they want two kids, give them to two kids. And then they say, okay, if you want, you can go back to Vietnam. And she says, well, well, will I be able to see my kids again? And says, no, you can either go back to Vietnam and be with your family, or you stay here and you stay live your whole rest of your life locked in a room, but you'll be able to see your kids. So she had to make this decision.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was terrible.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It was.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You forgot that they sterilized her before she left because they didn't want her to start another family for what reason? I don't really understand.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, you see, I didn't even remember that part. There are parts of it that I couldn't.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That was particularly horrifying. Like, if they're gonna let her go, but. And see the kids only on FaceTime. What's the difference if she has more kids? They just didn't want her to. I don't know. It seemed extra evil.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's extra evil. I mean, that's when she totally. When I started talking about her kids. And how often does she get to talk to them? Because it's not just that she is not able to live with the kids or ever see them again. It's the fact that she has to live with the guilt of having made that choice. Right. That she abandoned her children and that it's her affair. Fault.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's just one of the most.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The whole thing was so disgusting. And I think. Was she the one? She was like 12 when she got taken there.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I can't remember how.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There were a few different blur together in my mind, but one, her friend asked her to go hang out or something. And then she woke up in a car. And the other one, she said they brought her to a room. There was a bunch of Vietnamese people in there. Two of them or three of them tried to run away, and they cut their leg tendons so they couldn't go and run away. I mean, this is like a really large organized crime operation that's able to

[Mariana Van Zeller]

smuggle and that nobody's talking about it, because it's not in the interest of either China or Vietnam to expose this. And, you know, journalism is very heavily surveilled in those countries. And our whole experience in Vietnam was insane. It was the moment we landed, we knew we were under surveillance. We had a government minder that would follow us everywhere. I had to show him my list of questions. So we'd fake. We'd pretend we had lists. I like, wrote fake questions. And then he'd give me. Okay. And then I'd sit down and start interviewing people. And the first person I interviewed, I started asking them the questions I wanted to ask. And these were people that had gotten in trouble for trafficking. They'd done time in prison, and they were out. So they'd agreed to talk to us. So we're asking them questions, but then I start asking the questions that I wanted to ask. And immediately we get stopped from the government minder, who, by the way, is also traveling with a police officer. So we're being. We have a government minder and a Police officer checking every single interview and listening, and they are with us. And then our van one day disappears for hours. And it's our production van that we rented. But the government minder and the police decide to disappear with our van. So we know that it was either checked and bugged and probably both. And so that's when we realized, oh, my God, they're not just listening in on our interviews. They're actually listening in on our private conversations in the van. And then there were situations in the hotel where I truly believe my phone was being. Was bugged at the hotel because it was a crazy light situation and conversations that I were having that I knew that there was no other way they would know unless they were listening. So the whole situation was crazy. And we started sort of going out in the middle of the night when they weren't watching and trying to figure out ways.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my gosh.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

To do this story.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's a creepy feeling to have. Government's buying you. I went to North Korea, and it was just a tourism ish trip, Right. But I remember going, when did you go? This is 20. I went 20, 12, 13, 14, and 15. I think.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You went every single year? Yeah, for three, four years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

For four years, yeah. And then it became illegal actually, after that to go. So I had to sell the tour company. But I remember being.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But it was your tour company. You would bring people.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I was bringing people. So fun. It was like we had a partner in base that was a British company running in China that would bring people, and they were. They're like 20 years behind. So I was like, well, you need a website. And they're like, yeah, we have this URL/north korea trips. And I'm like, how about how to go to north korea.com? and they're like, oh, that's a good idea. And then you would have to, like, email them on a form that was broken half the time or call China and leave a message, and they would call you back during business hours. And I was like, how about a chatbot in the corner where people ask questions? And then we don't know. We'll email you back. Put your email in. And a squeeze. And newsletters. And they were just like, wow, Blown away. Yeah. So we were like, wait, we're gonna run this and we'll sell you the leads. And so that was the company. And then I would get all these free trips. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna go. And I talk about it on the show. And people go, I want to go.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Me too.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So we would go. And then it would fill up another one and another one and another one. I just kept going for free. It was fun. But I remember being in the hotel and there's like the hotel phone, and it was on a desk. And you know when you're at a hotel, there's a wire for the lamp and a wire for the phone. This desk had 100 wires coming out of the back. And I'm thinking, one of these is for the phone, one of these is for the lamp. What are the other gazillion wires? And then you'd be talking with a friend in there, and the phone light would, like, turn on a little bit and then turn off when you're done.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's right. That's what was happening in my. But I kept thinking, like, maybe I'm imagining this, because that's what I. How technologically inept must they be to not figure out how to not make that light go on?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, Soviet era wiretapping technology from North Korea slash China. And I remember things like that. And I remember being in the bathroom and people were like, do you think they're filming us? And I was like, don't be ridiculous. And then I remember taking a really long shower and all the steam went on the mirror except for this circle.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I was like, why would that be there? And it was. It was like, only if that's a different temperature than the rest of the mirror. And it's like, well, what's a circle? Why would it be right there? And I was like, guys, turn on your shower. Tell me if you have a circle. And you're like, yeah, we have a circle. And it's not in the exact same spot. So it's not like the mirror was made and there's a glass thing there. It was like somebody's circle was a little bit over here. Another person's circle was a little bit up here. And I was like, that is a fricking. Like there's something behind the mirror.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Have you watched the Apple Show Silo, by the way? If you watch it, that's exactly where they hid all the cameras. It's behind the mirror.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my gosh. So we snuck up. There's a hidden floor in the hotel where you stay. And we walked through that floor. This is where Otto Warmbier actually walked through that floor. But the kid who got arrested and then ended up dying there. So we would walk through that floor and they would catch us there. But I remember going. And we'd just say, oh, we're looking for the bathroom.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Why is it a secret?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's a secret floor because it's employees only, and they have meeting rooms, and there's propaganda posters all over the walls and everything. And he stole one of those posters. That's why he went to jail.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, shit.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But we walked around there, and when they would catch us, we would just say, we're looking for the bathroom, and pretend to be really drunk, or actually be really drunk, as the case was happened to be. And I remember one time we were walking around, and we walked to sort of a dead end in the hallway on one of the hallways, and there was a pile of cameras on the floor. And it was like, why do they have a pile of cameras? Where would those go? I mean, they obviously go in 100%. The rooms are in the public area. And it's just like. I remember looking at the little circle lens in the camera and going, I wonder how big that is? Exactly. And I wanted to go and touch it and be like, okay. And then go back to my shower and be like, okay. But I didn't have a chance to do that. But I was just thinking, filming us in the fricking bathroom.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God, that's. Yeah. So, yeah, I didn't think about it in the bathroom.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You question your sanity, though, right? Like, you're like, I'm being paranoid. Why would they care? And. But weird things do happen. Like, year one, you go in there, you tell him what you do, you run a podcast, and then three years later, you have the same guide, and he goes, jordan, how's your podcast going? And you're like, okay, there's no way you're going to. You either have the best memory of anybody I've ever met, or there's a file on me that you read before I get here. And you're like, oh, that's the podcast guy. Cause what the hell? Even though it's North Korea, you've still had 300 people come in per year besides me. So what the hell? What the heck, Lee? You know? And so that's. That kind of.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's unnerving.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's unnerving. Yeah. And you start gas. Gaslighting yourself. Like, no, that can't be this, can it? No, I'm being paranoid. I'm not that important. But then he did know that thing. It's just bizarre being watched like that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. There was a moment where we all decided we were gonna get. So we're in the Northern Vietnam, and again, we're being followed and everything we're doing. We're thinking, oh my God, this is crazy. They know everything, all our moves and everything. And we all decide we're gonna get. Cause they do a lot of tailoring in Vietnam. You can get your suits done for like 100 bucks. You get the most beautiful custom made suit. So my whole team decided we're all gonna get suits made. So we. And then that night we're having. I think we kind of like left the hotel without telling our government minder and went to like eat good Vietnamese food. And there we are. And who shows up but the tailor? And he's sitting at a table right next to us and he's like, this is. And this is like a big town with lots of restaurants. And we're thinking the tailor is also a spy. Tinker Taylor. What's that thing?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Tinker, tailor, spy. Yeah. And then it's like, no, it's just a coincidence. Is it though? Or did the government minder go like, hey, they think I'm not following them. You have to go follow them and pretend that you're just seeing them there?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, we don't know. I mean, it could be a level of paranoia. It could be actually all.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Exactly. Just because you're. What's that phrase? Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Yeah, it's like this might actually be the case. You mentioned in the Vietnam episode that in some of the villages, something like 10% of the people are missing.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Which is some of the smaller villages. Yeah. With the women. Yes. And some of them trafficking organizations that work there believe that a lot of them were in fact kidnapped and taken to China. Some of them take jobs in big cities and don't come back. But it's still an enormous number. And you have families all over Vietnam looking for their daughters, having no idea what happened to them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, if you take a job, don't you call your parents and say, by the way, I'm alive?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, of course, of course.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So that's like, yeah, maybe they took a job. But then you're not missing, you're just not at home. That's different.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So I don't know. And they kidnap these people often off the street. And I think you'd mentioned something like the witnesses, bystanders don't intervene because there's a ritual.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So that's what's so unfortunate about all this too, is that amongst. In the Hmong culture, the way that people get engaged, or one of the cultural traditions that they have there Is that for a man to ask for a woman's hand to get married, he actually, there's some strange cultural tradition where they go and kidnap them from a public street, take them on the back of their bike, or take them in the car, wherever. And it's sort of a thing that they do, and then they go and present them to the parents and they get engaged. The problem is that. That this is also how traffickers are kidnapping women. So they're actually using sort of the cultural tradition as a disguise to actually kidnap women. And it's very unfortunate.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I grew up in Detroit, near Detroit, and there's a lot of Hmong there from after the Vietnam War. It's like one of our ethnic minorities that no one else has ever heard of.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And that's why you're so comfortable saying their name back and forth. I was like, no one knows about the Hmongan yet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Everyone says Hamong or something. It's wrong. And anyway, so my friend was dating one of these girls, and they ended up getting engaged. And she's like, so here's the thing. You have to kidnap me with your friends.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right? So you. So you know this too?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. And I remember being like, how are we doing this? And he's like, yeah, I have to plan a kidnapping. I didn't end up being part of it. It would have been awesome, but because he ended up postponing it and stuff, and I moved. But basically he had to stage a kidnapping where it was like a bunch of buddies and had to go when her and her friends were hanging out unexpectedly. I mean, it was all planned and then like, go and kidnap her and then basically show up with her to the parents and be like, I'm marrying your daughter. And it was. It's pretty cool when it's not actually human trafficking.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right? And it was really hard, actually. Cause there's a ton of footage out there on YouTube of real kidnappings and of these traditions. So even for us, like, our archival producer lost their mind trying to figure out what's real and what's just a marriage proposal, you know? You know, it took a long time, but. Yeah, I'm so happy you mentioned that. Cause you hear, you know, even we're reporting, we make. We fact check. But it's good to have this corroborated. Like, this is actually the case. And it happens even outside of the country.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's just a small. But it's very. It's unusual. And I remember being like, she's messing with you, dude. Don't do that. You're gonna get arrested. And it was like, you have to plan it carefully, because if your neighbors see you yanking a girl out of the house, they're going to call the police and you're gonna get shot or arrested.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No one's gonna believe that you're actually.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No. Here's the thing, Officer.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I love this woman.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's a ritual. We've been dating for a while. Oh, yeah. Okay. Tell it to the judge. Tell it to the judge. I was so frustrated for you during these Vietnam interviews, though. Like, hey, do you know anyone who's human trafficking? And they, like, look over to the cop and the government minder, and they're

[Mariana Van Zeller]

like, no, not me. Meanwhile, I know that he was a human trafficker.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Bro, you just got out of prison for human trafficking. We all know that you're guilty. You did your time. What's the deal? I don't know. Nothing. Don't worry about it. And it's like, oh, for God's sake, why did we show up and do this?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And we had people who agreed to talk to us. The police showed up at their house and told them not to talk to us. So it was really hard. And it wasn't really until we sort of partnered with that Asian undercover group of journalists. They were amazing. And they were the ones who went into some of these brothels using undercover footage. And they were actually able to get all the stuff that we needed. Cause until that point, we thought we didn't have a story. And then we met them, and they started doing this incredible work. And I was like, okay, so this. At least we have footage of this actually happening. Cause nobody wanted to talk to us.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, the brothel thing is extra gross. So you think, like, oh, they're getting married off to guys in China. All right, they're starting a family. It's definitely not ideal. It's definitely still human trafficking. And then you find out, oh, not all of them get married. Some of them just get locked in a storage unit so that they can

[Mariana Van Zeller]

get raped over the ones that don't get married. You think the worst of the worst, living in the situation, that that woman lived right in the house with the family. Chinese family locked in the room and forced to give birth to kids. But in this case, there's even worse, which are those that don't get married. They're put in brothels because the traffickers have to figure out how to make money out of this commodity. For them, these women are just commodities. And, yeah, being locked in those rooms. And this undercover journalist, it's this Incredible work where he shows up at this brothel and he says he's like this long corridor and. And every single door, you know, on both sides are women that are locked and forced to have sex with men. And they're not making any money.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're in the dark.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

In the dark. And so he goes into one of the rooms. It's complete darkness in there once he gets in. At one point, I think he turns on the light and they tell him, no, no, no, turn off the light. Cause he wants to see what's happening. It's the madam that runs the brothel that takes him there. As soon as he gets in, she locks the door from the outside. So then he's in there, he says he saw there was three women. And they start whispering to him and saying, okay, what can we do for you? And he's like, nothing, because he was just filming undercover. Nothing. I don't want anything from you. And trying to figure out how you can get out of there. And they start saying, look, if you don't have sex with one of us, you have to pick one. Because if you don't have sex with one of us, they're going to beat us. So you have to pick one. And it's this moment for him where he's trying to figure out what to do, and then he just starts knocking on the door and comes up with an excuse that he doesn't like the darkness or something. I can't remember exactly what was his excuse to get out of there, but he got the footage of that whole situation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's so creepy. And you just have, you know, like, in my house, watching this in my office, comfortable, a beverage in my hand. I'm just like, oh, my God. The only real difference is I just happen to. To not be born in a village in the mountains of Vietnam.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. Dice roll. The biggest learning that I've had from all these years covering black markets is that I usually use this line that I read once that I love, which is the wheel of history turns and where and when you were born decides if you get determines whether you get crushed or raised by it, right? And we are the lucky ones, right? We got the lottery ticket, right? We were born where we were. We got opportunities that we did. We got access to great education. And so what I wanted traffic to be also is a great conversation starter for all of us to understand what are we doing with these opportunities that we're given because we're not the girl in Vietnam or even some of these traffickers that even some sicarios in Sinaloa, where this is the environment they grew up in. This is all that's offered to them, this is all they know. And I will never forget this interview that I did with a 16, 17 year old old kid in Peru who's carrying cocaine on his back. Like kilos and kilos of cocaine. Backbreaking work through the mountains of Peru, seeing some of his friends being killed in front of him by rival groups. I mean, he's like, at this point has seen dozens of people being killed, extreme violence, really difficult work, really dangerous. And when I asked him, why are you doing this? He says, look, I've always wanted to be a dentist. I've always wanted to go to college. My parents can't afford and so this is the only work that will allow me to go to college. And I say, why college? What do you want to do? He says, I want to be a dentist. And I asked him, why do you want to be a dentist? Because in my little town, all the posters that I see for dentist worker for dentist offices are people. It's like posters of people with big smiles. So I want to make people smile. I want to be on my own show.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's so. So instead he's humping cocaine through the jungle.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Exactly. Hoping that one day he can become a dentist. So that's what I want the show to be. I want people to see many of these traffickers. Again, we do not condone what they do and many of them are. It's difficult to even empathize. But the majority of the people that I talk to are people just like you and me that are born, you know, that don't have the opportunities or the luck that we have.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you do a good job of not glamorizing, but humanizing the people involved. But not sort of making excuses for the people who are doing criminals.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No, and I ask all of them hard questions. It's my job also as a journalist. I'm not there to then have fun with them. Right. Even though I'm trying to connect on a human level and treat people with respect and try to find the humanity out of them. Because by finding the humanity then you really sort of get the depth of the reporting that you need to understand why things like this happen. But at the same time, I'm also holding them accountable for what they do. So even the cartel, like you're always told there are questions that you don't ask the cartel. I will always ask those questions of the cartel. Well, one of the first ones is what cartel they Belong to. They don't ask me. They don't like being asked that. You know, bosses and structures or names and things like that. But. But I always, you know, I try to always do my job as a journalist, which is hold people accountable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Props, by the way, to whoever does the music. Music on the show. Because whoever they are, they find, like, the best obscure Vietnamese rap with an electronic music dance beat behind it. Whoever picked that is fire.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think that was actually our director on that episode. Rob Moraskin is really good with music. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was like, where do you even find something like that? Like, you don't pop. You don't type in. You don't type that into Spotify and find that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We also have an amazing music supervisor. His name's Dan Wilcox. He's been on kcrw. Do you know the show Morning Becomes Eclectic? It's like this show in LA that's like. Yeah. Anyway, he's an amazing music supervisor. He also finds really good music.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, yeah. It's pretty cool to have something like that because, you know, someone is just spending hours finding the perfect track or gets really lucky here and there and finds a track or finds a track and goes, one day I'm gonna use this.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Use this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then when they're looking for music is like, ah, Vietnamese rap from the 90s. I'm doing it.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I love that you notice it. Thank you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, well, it's part of the production thing. And it's like, I would love to do a show. Like, if I did a TV show, I would do Trafficked. I mean, it's already taken, but I'm like, oh, very rarely do I envy someone else's job because I have a pretty cool one, too. I talk to smart people, interesting people all day. But trafficked, I'm like, would I trade? Maybe? I mean, it's a little scary getting stuck in Niger after a coup. I do have little kids. My wife would not be interested in me trading. But I'm like, I could probably do a couple seasons of Traffic.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. You know, you came to an end. We did five episodes. This was the last five seasons. This was the last season.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I did not know that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So we're looking to do.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So there goes. My final question was, what do we expect next season?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

There goes, well, screw that. See, I told you not to have ruined it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, no, now I'm paying the price for that. What's your favorite part of the job, you think? Or what was your favorite part of the job?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So what comes next? Let me tell you what comes Next. Because I'm still working in black markets, I have a podcast that I love. I started doing this a few months ago, and I think the way I describe it is, you know, in many ways, trafficked was sort of the map of these black markets. And the podcast is a little bit like the diary, right? It's where I actually get to sit with people and have intimate conversations. On Traffikt, you'd see, like, these. These people have incredible, fascinating stories, and yet you'd hear, like, two, three, four minutes of their lives. And here we. I have a platform where we can talk and I can understand, you know, who they are, why they do what they do. And it's really, really. These are people with some of the most fascinating lives, right? People that work and have operated somehow in these black markets. So I've got that, and I'm working on other shows. But what was your question about?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was, what are you gonna. What's for next season? But it's not.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, but then you asked me something else, which is what I love most about my job. I mean, it's just the privilege of a lifetime, right? Being able to see things that nobody else sees and connecting with people that I would never, you know, becoming friends with, with victims of human trafficking in Vietnam or with the kid that's carrying cocaine or a Jamaican scammer, Tweety, that I'll never forget. There's all these people. Again, not condoning what a lot of them do, but creating connections with them and feeling the privilege of walking in their shoes for a little bit and understanding their lives is amazing. It just expands your mind in a way that I think we all should be exposed to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I agree. I mean, why end it then? Is that just Nat Geo doing it?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It wasn't my choice.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, boo. Okay. Sorry about that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Nagio's choice. I think it's a bunch of reasons. Nat Geo is owned by Disney and Amazing company, great company, but they're not known to love risks, risky undertakings. We had a lot of situations that were very risky, including Nigeria. It's also a show that at times becomes political. I think Disney doesn't like to be political and likes to stay away from that. I think that it's a costly show. It's a very expensive show for all the security reasons and insurance reasons in general. Working within the Disney family, there's a lot of hoops and a lot of requirements that they expect from you that makes the show even more expensive. So it's generally just an expensive show. And we did five amazing seasons. We got nominated for 29 Emmys Emmys. Last year was the most Emmy nominated unscripted show in the history of the Emmys, which is crazy. And we're gonna be up for a bunch, hopefully. Oh, my God, I'm jinxing it already.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Careful.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We're applying. We're submitting to the Emmys this year for season five, and I'm gonna figure out a way to keep doing what I do elsewhere.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I was gonna say if you can do it on YouTube or, like, with another. There's so many apps and streaming services now. You don't really. It's kind of like with podcasting. When I was younger, I wanted to be on road the. And then I got on satellite radio, and it was like, I don't need it. The station manager would go, what if you do this really lame thing that makes your show exactly like everyone else's show and then we cancel it because it's just like everyone else's show, but not. And it's like, no, thanks. I'm gonna do this podcasting thing. And I remember everybody is like, what a loser. Podcasting is for losers. Now all those radio guys are doing podcasts because it makes more money and you don't have to listen to some knucklehead station manager who doesn't understand what you do.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, that's exactly it. So that's my plan for the future, is that I can figure out how to grow the YouTube channel that I have.

[Jordan Harbinger]

By the way, South Africa looks so cool and beautiful, but holy crap, that place is the wild west. Your armored car heist thing.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, that was a crazy story, right? The heist?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, the heist crews blowing up armored cars. And then they're like, oh, how do we keep these people secure? And it's like helicopter chase and escort thing. And I'm like, can't you just have more guards? And they're like, ooh, that sounds expensive. We're not doing that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's a war game between the security companies and the robbers and the heist gangs. And they're all trying to one up each other, and they're all one upping each other constantly. So now you've got like a war on the highways of South Africa. It's insane. In Johannesburg, particularly. And Durban. Yeah, it's crazy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And this woman's like, oh. Our plan, since they're shooting these, is to make them bomb proof.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Proof, huh?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like, maybe there's another solution.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

First it was like, make them bulletproof. Right? Which they did. And then the heist crews were like, oh, yeah, take a look at that. This rifle, that's bulletproof. And they started bombing the. Using explosives to open these things up. And now we're going to make them bomb proof and they're going to come up with something else. It's a cat and mouse game.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You could not pay me enough to be an armored car driver in South Africa after seeing that episode.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

The guy who's been shot multiple times, who thought he was dead, he'd been

[Jordan Harbinger]

robbed like 14 times.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And then he. There's a video, which is insane, where he's. It looks like an active war zone, essentially he's being shot at from all sides. He's wounded, he thinks he's about to die. He's like trying to get his radio to call for help. And then he gets back on a truck like a couple months later and is back doing that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That was the guy who's like, oh, he's gonna kill me. So he shot the guy through like a hole in the truck.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

He did. And was able to shoot the guy shooting at him.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A story from Iraq.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And it's.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I know. Hollywood. Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And he's like an old dude who looks like he should be a mall security guard.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. So this is the part that made me feel bad, is that this guy, obviously I asked him why is he retiring? Because he can't afford to retire. He has done. He's taken bullets for the security company. Just give this guy his full pay, let him retire. Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I don't know what wages are like in South Africa, but I'm gonna go ahead and guess he's not making six figure salary.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No, not at all. These guys are making nothing and they're risking their lives. Yes. Make nothing. Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I notice you're emotional at times with interviewees, people who've lost children or simply saying insane things like the pastor we talked about before, like gay people should be executed and stuff. How do you decide when to. To blur the line between like 60 Minutes journalist who shows absolutely no emotion and being more human with the person in front of you?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I never. That line doesn't exist for me because I believe journalism is not just about holding people accountable and it's not about objectivity. I think part of our jobs as journalists, perhaps one of the most important jobs, is connecting people with other. Creating connections between us, the viewers, the listeners, and people on the other side of the world that we think we have nothing in common with. Right. I think that's one of the most powerful tools in journalism. I also think that in many situations that work, the job of a journalist is very much like a caretaker. Right. When I'm interviewing the victims and even some of the really sad stories behind some of the traffickers and people involved in these black markets, I am almost their therapist. These are people who have never shared their stories. There's a very important caretaking part of the journalism profession that people usually don't talk with about. That I think is very important. And it's the only way that you can show the complete picture. And I am also a human being. So if I am going to get emotional, I am going to show that I am emotional. And I'm hoping that the viewers and listeners will feel that and will feel what I'm feeling at the time and will care. Ultimately, it's all about making people care. Right. About these issues in the world.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Would you let your son do trafficked on that Geo or would you talk him out of it?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I've never been asked that. I would love for him to be a journalist because I love my job so much and I think he's 15 years old now. I think that it's just I've led such a fascinating life that I wouldn't want him not to have it. I would be worried. But one of the things that my parents taught me, and I think part of the reason why am the way I am, is that they were never fearful. They were never helicopter parents. Right. They allowed me to explore the world if I wanted to go up trees, if I wanted to move to Syria, which I did right after.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Syria.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, I moved to Syria right after Columbia University. The war in Iraq had just started. I wanted to be close to the action. I wanted to be, you know, reporting from the Middle East. At the time, I didn't know anyone in Syria. I didn't know Arabic. You know, I was basically next door to a huge war. And my parents never told me, don't go. Right. They were always supporters and trusted my common sense, sometimes to their detriment. But that's the kind of parent I am too with my son, is I want him to explore the world. I want him to make mistakes. I want him to sometimes feel uncomfortable, get outside his comfort zone. I think that's very important. And I think there's a instinct or not an instinct, but usually parents try to protect their kids to their detriment. Sometimes too much. I'm not saying that, yes, my son go out and hang out with drug traffickers, but do something every day that makes you feel a little Uncomfortable, because that's the way that you evolve and you become a better human being.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I agree with that. I'm just. It's easy for us to say. And then it's like, mom, I'm gonna go to Venezuela and I'm gonna meet up with these people who are human traffickers that also sell cocaine. And you're like, I come from zero credibility. Telling you not to do that because it's too dangerous. So have fun.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right? I would basically. I mean, he's 15 right now, so obviously he wouldn't go now, but later in life, when I went to Syria, I was like, 26 or 27 years old, and when I started doing sort of these sort of stories, yeah, I was around that. That age. And I think at that point I had a little bit of experience. I was a little bit more mature. I had conversations with my parents about it. And I think that I would prepare him and tell him everything that I know and hope that he would make good decisions and, you know, have the training that he needs to have. Although I didn't have any training when I went to places. That's kind of bullshit.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But I would try to get him.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Hold on, Mommy's coming with you.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Probably. I'd be with, like, binoculars.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. I won't say anything, I swear. I'll just hang out in the van. No mom. Yeah. Although it'd be great to have your mom be your ep. If your mom is Mariana Van Zel. Is there any place that's been just impossible to film in so far, but is on the top of your list?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, North Korea would be one of them. I would love to go to North Korea. And Iran. We've had plans to go to Iran. We've been pitching a story on Iran since season one of Traffic. And so so far, it hasn't worked out for us.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Now might not be the best time to go to Iran.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No, I know. Although would it be the best flat? This is when we want to be there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's true. Although getting stuck there now.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, it's just. It's very dangerous and particularly as a journalist. And. Yeah, there's all reasons not to go. I was trying to go there with my Portuguese passport, so. Because you fly under the radar, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, a little bit. Until they realize. Well, because you have to apply for a journalism permit to film and they're going to at least Google you and then doesn't matter what color your passport is, I guess. Have you ever had to scrap anything because the footage didn't work? Out or it got lost or your camera got stolen or something.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Not like that. But we had a story we were going to do once about uranium and nuclear weapons and sort of the trafficking of nuclear weapons and uranium, and we were going to Ukraine. This was way before the war. It was again, I think it was season. Yeah, it was season one of Traffic. So this was 2000. And then we got word that it was really dangerous. And I can't share many details, but we got word that there was. Even though our producers and producer and director was already on the ground, and they called us and was like, do not come. We have to get out of the country. There's shit happening. So we never did that story. And that's one that I'm sad. We're really looking forward to doing that story.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That was before the war. So the shit happening was what, organized crime or something, or you can't even say what it was.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It was a mix of. I think it was kind of a mix of paranoia, to be frank, and the government talking to people about that we would get in trouble if we did it. And then the people that were gonna take us in to give us some of this access deciding they didn't wanna do it. So it was a combination of things.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see. Well, I was gonna ask what to expect next season, but we covered why that's not happening. So what other shows are you working on? Or what other documentaries are you working on?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So I'm working on the hidden third, the podcast. You can catch it on YouTube, link

[Jordan Harbinger]

to it in the show notes. Pay those bills.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I need some of your viewers, Jordan, or listeners. And then I'm also working on a really fun show. I can't tell a lot about it, but it's a really fun show for Nat Geobelt scams. I can tell you a little bit about it. It's essentially the idea. It's called Super Scam Me and it's a show I pitch them, which is. I've reported on scams extensively. I've been all around the world talking to scam victims, but I've never felt what it's like to be a scam victim myself. So for a limited time period of time, I say yes to every single scam that comes my way. I answer every phone call, every reply to every email. I create this Persona that I put out online and I open myself up to romance, dating, romance, scams, crypto, all the scams you can think of.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So right now you have dudes from Bangladesh messaging you and telling you how beautiful you are or whatever. Just. You should invest in their secret crypto platform that's made them 100% return.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You have no idea. I am talking to three Brett Pitts, a couple of Keanu Reeves. I think four George Clooneys. Because celebrity scams are huge right now. I have. I'm romantically involved with a couple of men. I have all these amazing scams happening right now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's really kind of scary.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's funny when you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's funny when you are a willing participant and knowing it's a scam.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You ever send. So we covered those pig butchering scams and scam centers and things. Also you covered in trafficked. And one of the things I was wondering about is, what if I just started talking to these people knowing it was a scam? Cause before I used to berate them in Chinese and be like, I'm a Chinese party official. And they'd be like, I'm sorry, we'll take you off of our list. And then when I found out they were being held there captive and they weren't willingly doing it, a lot of the time we start, I started messaging back and being like, hey, are you okay? And they're like, oh, what do you mean? And I'm like, are you in a Cambodian or Burmese scam center and you can't escape? And some of them will reply and go, yes. And it's like, is there anything I can do to help you? Thinking they're gonna go, yeah, just deposit crypto. And they're like, can you tell someone that I'm here? And I've had people send me, like, their family's phone number. And they're like, I'm deleting this account, but just please tell me you did that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God. That's so sad.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was a guy in Dubai told. He reached out to me. Cause he heard the podcast or saw the podcast on YouTube that I did covering this. And he said, I'm trapped in Dubai in the uae. And he drew a map of the scam center. And he called me and we recorded the calls and everything. And I called a prosecutor in Santa Clara who covers a lot of crypto scams.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, yeah, Aaron West. Aaron West. I love Aaron. He worked with her for this story.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So she said, there's no evidence that this is happening in Dubai. This is a couple years ago. And then about last year, she called me back and she goes, so you're right. There is a huge organized crime connection. There's a Chinese gang working there. We think that the Guy you talked to may be a part of this thing.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So he ended up escaping and, like, deleting all of his media.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, that happened. So a lot of. We interviewed a few. A lot of victims from these crime compounds who had just been able to flee the scam compounds and were in Thailand. On our story, scam City. And some of the Indians that had just fled the scam compounds went through Dubai. They applied to a. For a job in Dubai. They got to Dubai, and they. They met a woman who lured them for a job in Myanmar. And then they got stuck in these compounds. And these kids were beat and tortured with electric shocks. It was the whole thing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This guy told me that. He told me that. And I thought, oh, is this real? Right, Someone's winding me up. But it all got corroborated. I mean, not his particular stories, but it was all like, yeah, they're getting shocked with batons. And then he sent me all of the personnel with all the photos of everybody who worked there, and I gave it to. To the. I end up giving it to the FBI. So I have all these guys from Sierra Leone who work for the security, and he's like, this is the chief enforcer. This is the guy who beats us. This is the boss. Here's a photo of the boss. Here's his nickname in Chinese. I don't know his real name. And so the FBI was, like, going through all these files, and they're like, oh, yeah, okay. Interesting. Like, this is. This totally makes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Did you meet with the FBI?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, they came to my house. My wife was thrilled about that. She's like, what are you doing? Because I'm like, oh, they want.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Actually interested in. So do you think they were investigating this because no one has done it?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, what they were mostly interested in was that this same guy said there were scams, and they didn't seem to care about that. The guy. FBI agent in Tennessee cared about it because it was his beat or whatever. But what really got their attention was this guy on the recorded call had said they meet with Russians all the time, and they talk about they have an insider at a US bank, and they're gonna do something, some kind of thing at the US bank and steal all of the money and the personal data. And then the FBI came over, like, that night because they were like, we want to know if there's going to be a terrorist attack on a bank in the United States. They were really interested in that. So I asked that guy for more information about that. And he told me who the Russians were and how they changed all of the IP addresses. He just knew who kind of who they were. He didn't have their full names or anything. But then he also had said there's a company that comes in and installs VPNs so that they can change their IP addresses every week. So he gave off all of the vendor information and they. I think the FBI was like kind of thinking, and I'm. I'm speculating here. I think they were thinking, if we can find out who that VPN company is, we can monitor that VPN company and find out which bank it is and what they're going to do, which is probably a good way to invest in.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I should have talked to you. When were you. When was the celebrating game?

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was like last year.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. When. Yeah, we filmed two summers ago. But all of this would have been good information for us, even for our story.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, Next time.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, next time. I need you as my.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right. I would happily join the Van Zeller crew. Thanks for coming in. This has been super fascinating. I'm glad we finally got a chance to do it. I think season one, I emailed you and then five years happened and now we're doing it and it's over and

[Mariana Van Zeller]

it wasn't my fault.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, it was actually my fault. Yeah, it was. Cancel. Couldn't do it. You were out of the country. I was out of the country. Season was over. Too early for the next season.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's right. That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Finally caught it.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. Now when traffic is done.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, we'll have to catch the next one, whatever that might be. Thank you very much.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, I had such a fun time. Thanks for having me. Jordan.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Thank you for checking out this Entire episode on YouTube. If you want to follow up on this topic, check out our podcast feed or visit us on our website@jordan harbinger.com where you can learn more about our guest and dive even deeper into what we discussed today. And remember, YouTube only has about a quarter of the episodes that we release here on the Jordan Harbinger show audio feed. Any podcast app should have us check out the links in the description where you'll find access to all of our shows that don't appear on YouTube, such as skeptical Sunday, where we debunk topics like crystal healing, GMOs, conspiracy theories, homeopathy, tipping, and even lawns to find out if they're backed by science and or logic. Also, our feedback Friday episodes where we help people escape from cults, get raises at work and take all manner of questions from you, the audience. And some of that stuff is dicey. Every episode of the Jordan Harbinger show has something useful that you can take away and apply in your own life life and help you navigate what I know can often seem like the overwhelming and paralyzing challenges of modern life. Thank you for watching and remember to like, comment and subscribe.