Transcript: Mariana van Zeller on Joe Rogan Podcast #2395

Yeah, most certainly that’s the case. Geographically.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, 100% geographically.

JOE ROGAN: If you have no options and you’re stuck in a third world country, guess what? You do what you got to do.

Understanding the Other Side

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It was that story that we did in the same episode you mentioned, the cocaine trafficking, which I will never forget, which was the kid who was carrying in his backpack, right? He was 16, 17 year old kid carrying cocaine, 20 kilos of cocaine on his back for days on end in the jungles, seeing so many of his friends being killed in front of him by rebel gangs, rival gangs.

And when I asked him, “Why are you doing what you do?” He says, “Because I’ve always wanted to be a dentist. I want to go to school and be a dentist, but my family’s too poor and they can’t afford my education. And the only job that I have available for me now is doing this cocaine trafficking or carrying cocaine on my back.”

And these are stories I hear all the time. So the idea of being able to place ourselves in people’s shoes and understand that, yes, even the people that we consider the bad guys could be me and you, as you know, has always been very important for me. So the podcast allows me to do that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s great. When you say that like it’s one third, how much of it is stuff that’s not dangerous, like selling fruit on the side of the road, and so it’s untaxed labor?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s difficult to have exact numbers, but the estimate is that about 15%, 15 to 20% are black markets and the rest are gray markets. So the totality is around 35%. An estimate. But I mean, so it’s kind of half. Yeah. More or less.

JOE ROGAN: Half dangerous stuff.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. Half people, unregulated stuff. Yeah, but I mean, they also mix. Right. Because a lot of times what happens in one side affects the other.

One of the really interesting things that I think we’ve talked about a lot is I think this number shocks a lot of people. But if you think of the drug trade alone, $600 billion, that’s the estimate. Anywhere between $300 and $600 billion every year just from the drug trade alone. These are crazy numbers. And so it’s not so out of the box to think that, yeah, this is a large percentage of our economy.

The Podcast Challenge

JOE ROGAN: Is it difficult to get people to come and sit with you on a podcast and talk about illegal activities?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes, but it’s also on the show. I think the harder part is that on the show, we figured out a way of how to make them comfortable, because I would go to them, right? On the podcast, it’s harder to convince an active trafficker or smuggler to come and sit down in my office.

JOE ROGAN: Right. I would think it’s a setup.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So, yeah. So a lot of times the meetings that we had on the show happened in undisclosed locations, in vans, for example, or in places that they felt comfortable with their drug labs or their drug houses or their homes sometimes. So this has been a little bit harder, but we’re making it work. We’re having… We’re hoping that it grows so then we actually have money to start traveling more and going to some of these places.

JOE ROGAN: Is this something that you always wanted to do, like, do a podcast? Or is it something that was a necessity when the show was canceled, or did you just think, maybe I should branch out?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I’ve always wanted to do it, and I tried. We had done an iteration of it a couple of years ago, but I just didn’t have the time because I was traveling half the year or more for “Trafficked.” So it was really hard to do a weekly podcast. It was almost impossible.

But I spent so much time talking to people who have really interesting backgrounds, and then we use only five minutes of their interview, if that. And these are fascinating people that…

JOE ROGAN: Again, do you have access to that footage?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: The footage.

JOE ROGAN: The footage that you edited out?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, yes, but do you have access to it? Like, are you allowed to?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: If it’s owned by National Geographic? It’s owned by National Geographic.

JOE ROGAN: I wonder if they would sign off on letting you put that on your podcast, because that would be fascinating as well, because I bet there’s a lot that was missed on the editing floor.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You have no idea. Yeah, absolutely. But the good news is that I…

JOE ROGAN: Come on Nat Geo. Let her have the footage. It only helps.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But I have all the contacts. So as soon as I start, as this starts building up the podcast, the hope is that I’ll build it myself from the ground up because all the contacts are mine. You have…

JOE ROGAN: Contacts with like assassins and drug dealers that text each other, “Hey, what’s up?” Yeah, send emojis.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, yeah, I mean, these are people. I mean, the assassins, less so, but the traffickers and the smugglers and the scammers. Absolutely. I’m still in touch with a lot of them.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have like a file or you, like, you want to see my secret files? Do you have them like labeled, like, super shady? Less than Just Unfortunate Circumstances, Cold Blooded Killers.

Staying Connected to Sources

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s all under my encrypted messaging apps. No, no. It’s really crazy because of the success of “Trafficked,” the amount of messages I still get on Instagram and social media on a weekly basis from people who want to be on the show. Now with the podcast as well, I’m hoping that it will grow into that.

But people just showing me their drugs and their guns, they show me photos of the stuff that they’re doing. And is it because these people feel…

JOE ROGAN: Like they’re going to die anyway, like they’re going to probably get killed?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: A lot of them are afraid. One of the most interesting people we filmed for this last season of “Trafficked” was a guy that we called El Gringo. So it was a premier episode of this season. It was about cartel. It was called “Cartel USA.” It’s about the cartel presence in the United States.

I’ve reported extensively on cartels in Mexico, right, and in Colombia and in other parts. But I haven’t actually spent a lot of time with the cartel here or seen what kind of influence they have in the US.

So I had this idea, okay, let’s try to figure out how massive their presence is here, how they make the money, how do they distribute the drugs, and what impact is it having in America?

And what I found was several very surprising facts. The story actually starts in Sinaloa because I have to go there to get access to the people in the US. So I had to go to the top bosses to be able to get the green light, to then film their operations here.

JOE ROGAN: What is that like, Sinaloa?

Reporting from Sinaloa

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, it’s the place in the world that I’ve reported most from. Apart from the United States, I’ve reported more from Sinaloa than anywhere else. I have good contact there. I have an incredible local journalist called Miguel Angel Vega. He’s an ill fixer. He’s the guy that any journalist in the world who wants to get access to the cartel will contact him. And then he has his own contacts. He’s just incredibly brave journalist with his own contacts.

And then he basically contacts his people, and then they decide if they want to talk or not. And a lot of times they don’t. And sometimes I’ve done this so many times that by now they trust me. They know that I’m not law enforcement, and so they allow me to film their operation.

So I filmed super meth labs, super labs of meth there. I filmed fentanyl lab. I filmed a guy cooking fentanyl. We were all full, you know, masked up. And I filmed the whole operation. I mean, I filmed sicarios. I’ve, yeah, I filmed more from Sinaloa than anywhere else in the world.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s got to be very scary to go there and hang out with those people. Did they put boundaries on topics?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes. For example, even though I’m in Sinaloa, I’m not supposed to ask which cartel people work for. It’s obvious that when you’re in Sinaloa, everyone works for the Sinaloa cartel. I mean, everybody that’s involved in the cartel works for the Sinaloa cartel. There are other cartels trying to make headway in that region, but usually it’s all Sinaloa.

So you’re not supposed to ask who exactly they work for. And yeah, there are some questions about money, for example, how much money they make. People don’t like to be asked that. But I always ask all those questions anyway, and you get a sense whether you’re pushing it too far.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever had a moment when you were doing that where you’re like, I think I crossed the line?

The Gun Trafficking Story

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I had a moment where we stayed too long. So it was a day we were doing a story. It was for season one. It was about guns and how about American guns, the flow of American guns to Mexico.

JOE ROGAN: That was when you got the police people that were selling drugs illegally. So for people that didn’t see that episode, it’s quite fascinating. Police in Los Angeles, dirty cops were loading up their trunks with guns that they’ve confiscated and then selling them across the border in Mexico.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They were selling it to gang members or affiliate of cartel members in LA who would then ship it. Yeah, they would cross the border and ship it. Yeah, we visited. It was a scene. Yeah, it started with a scene. That episode started with a scene in LA where we interviewed a guy who goes by the name of T. And he had a room packed with rifles.

And when I started asking him where they were from, he was like, “Oh, this one was confiscated. We have an LAPD contact that, you know, sells us a lot of our drugs.”

JOE ROGAN: I just don’t understand what benefit to them.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: To the police?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. For them, no. But for them, no. For them to talk to you.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which one?

JOE ROGAN: Any of them like that, especially the cops.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So it’s the question that I get. The cops didn’t talk. We didn’t get to.

JOE ROGAN: So you got it from the people that we got it from.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: The gang member.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that the cops sold the guns to.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So I’ve spoken to cops who are doing amazing work here in the US in combating drug trafficking and gun trafficking and in Mexico as well. But these, we’re talking about corrupt cops. So, yeah, that was not the case. This was a gang member telling me how he had acquired those guns from LAPD, confiscated guns that he had acquired from LAPD.

JOE ROGAN: But even that, what would be the benefit to him to talk to you?

Why People Talk

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So in that case, it went back to my contact, Sinaloa. And I think it’s three reasons why people talk to us. I think the first one is ego. People want to boast. And if you’re part of the Sinaloa cartel, or even if you’re a boss in the Sinaloa cartel and there’s an ongoing war between you, a turf war between you and another gang like the CJNG, which is a cartel, Jalisco, they’re fighting for power, right?

So here’s an opportunity to show how powerful you are. So it’s ego, right? And a lot of these people that talk to me, very often or more often than not, it’s not the bosses or the kingpins that I’m talking to, right? It’s the sicarios, it’s the middle and low level people. It’s the traffickers, it’s the chemists, the smugglers. It’s not the kingpins.

And for them, they spend their whole lives doing something that sometimes their own families don’t know they do. I remember an episode we did about counterfeit money. People who make fake US dollars and euros in Peru, in Lima. And this guy, shiny eyes, so excited, showing me how he finishes these bills to make it look and feel and smell exactly like $100 bill.

And when I asked him, and he’s a taxi driver by day, and he does this by night. And I was asking him, “So why did you accept talking to us?” He says, “Look, my wife doesn’t even know how good I am. I am the best of the best of doing this. Nobody in the whole world can make this as well as. And I always wanted to be able to talk to somebody and show off how good my skills are. And you’re giving me an opportunity to do this.”

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So I think ego plays a huge role, and then impunity. In places like Mexico, so much corruption. What’s the downside to talking to this woman who comes and asks funny questions?

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And then I think it’s the wanting to be understood. I think everybody wants to be understood, and they know they’re considered the bad guys. They know that, you know, there’s so much stigma around what they do. And I tell everybody, I’m here to try to understand what you do. I’m not here to judge you, because I think it’s much more important to understand why you do what you do.

The Counterfeit Money Operation

JOE ROGAN: The guy who makes counterfeit bills, what’s his process?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, it’s freaking fascinating.

JOE ROGAN: Does he replicate a dollar bill with all the little things inside of him? Everything?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It was incredible. So there’s different. There’s the graphics person, there’s the printer, and he does the finishing job. He’s the finisher. And he said he was the best finish in the job. And I started calling him Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player, because he’s the finisher in soccer. So I called him Ronaldo. Okay, you’re Ronaldo.

And he uses a, it’s kind of like a porridge that I used to eat when I was a kid in Portugal. It’s called, it’s a type of, a cereal. You guys don’t have it here, but it’s like a meal. What do you call that? Cornmeal? Like a cornmeal. And he uses that. And I saw him using it. It’s not cereal, actually. It’s maizena, which is another brand. But he uses this sort of cornmeal to finish these bills to make it. The consistency, when you touch it, feel exactly like the real stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Is it made with the same paper?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No, it’s a different paper. The paper is the hardest part to get, because the paper, you can only get in the US Federal Reserves or wherever the paper comes from. It’s safe.

JOE ROGAN: It’s easy to duplicate paper.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s not very hard. And particularly if you put all the little creases and curves.

JOE ROGAN: What about those little things that you can only see with a flashlight?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They have ways around that too. It was incredible. We brought some home. Haven’t used it. It’s at my office. But it is able to possess that stuff. So we actually didn’t bring the actual. We brought the cutouts so we wouldn’t be able to use it. But it’s in the background of my podcast.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You can see the cutout and it’s really, it’s phenomenal.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy how many bills that are counterfeit make their way into our current. Is this it right here?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, this is it. This is the finisher. Yeah, he is. And you see, he’s teaching me. He’s showing me. And there’s a glue too. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so he’s making it seem more weathered, more worn.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And they make it seem weathered and worn. Yeah. It’s so crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And how many.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It is porridge, you see?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. So he scrubs it down a little bit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. With a toothbrush. All stuff that he bought at the store, like next door.

JOE ROGAN: How much currency goes through this guy’s production?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I cannot remember. This was five years ago, season one, but it was a lot. And it’s the US Secret Services that are in charge of going after these guys. So we actually saw the real money being made when we came back to the US. But I can’t remember, but it was millions of dollars.

I mean, it was like five or six families in Peru, in Lima. They’re the center of all this that were in charge, that were the best of the best at making these. And we got inside one of these.

Distribution Methods

JOE ROGAN: And how does that stuff get into US distribution?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Usually in bags. Commercial airlines, just like drugs. A lot of drugs make it in commercial airlines. Same thing. Commercial airlines, bags. People would carry the money. Mules would carry it. Actual carrying money.

JOE ROGAN: And then when it gets to America, what do they do with it?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They distribute it. So it’s funny, it’s interesting. They actually start. They go to small towns and they distribute it in grocery stores. And they don’t go to a Walmart or a big superstore. They go to small first. And that’s how it gets in the general.

JOE ROGAN: So they just buy things with it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They buy things and I wish I remember this was five years ago. They buy things, but they also have people that exchange that for less cash. Yeah, that’s what it was. I think they end up getting people.

JOE ROGAN: So people that know.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, that know. And they end up getting 70% of what? I think it was something like 70% of the actual cost for real bills. So they get real money in exchange for getting.

JOE ROGAN: They get 70% of what? A real bill.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, the whole operation, I think, was.

JOE ROGAN: So if you have a $20 bill, you get 70% of that back in profit. Like a fake profit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. The head of the group that then sells the bills when they’re made.

JOE ROGAN: I would have thought it was way less than that for someone to be willing to exchange you real money for fake money.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. I have to verify again. This is five years ago. We’ve done 50 episodes. But I think it was something like that, if I remember.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy, though, that it just gets distributed by small businesses.

The Discovery of Counterfeit Bills

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And so one of the things we started was we reported on a lot of these small businesses that found out that they were having massive amounts of loss every year from fake bills. And I remember it was in Oregon. We did a few stories there where a lot of people were complaining about this small business.

JOE ROGAN: How do they get discovered that they have fake bills?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I think they go to the bank and try to.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, the bank knows. Does the bank deposit it? Do they look at every number on the bills? Like, how do they find out that they’re fake?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I think the bank is able to find out just by looking at it.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Because I think it would fool us, but it doesn’t fool somebody who’s trained to look at these bills.

JOE ROGAN: So the bank, when you bring money to the bank, they look at every bill they’re supposed to?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, I know that. That’s how they figured out that they had been legalized.

JOE ROGAN: You got to go to a lazy bank. Go to a bank where people are.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Just phony, partying all night.

JOE ROGAN: They just assume that it’s real. They don’t care. Yeah. That’s crazy, though. So what is like for the overall United States, like, how much money comes in every year that’s fake?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, it was. I cannot remember at all the statistics, but it was a lot. It was like in the millions of dollars that people were making down there.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

Meeting El Gringo: The American Cartel Distributor

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It was crazy. Yeah. But this all back to the story of why I talked about this guy, about why people talk to us. And back to the Cartel USA story, which started in Sinaloa. There was a point to this. You were asking me about how it ended up in the U.S.

Oh, what I discovered with cartel’s operations in the United States. So one of the people we interviewed, which was really fascinating, and it was somebody who had this, carried this load on his back, and why he decided to talk to us was this guy called El Gringo, or we called him El Gringo.

And El Gringo is an American citizen who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish and who’s sort of the wholesale buyer of drugs from the cartel and then is in charge of distributing the drugs here in the US. He distributes most of his drugs through commercial airlines, usually Delta, because they have really good baggage fees. They’re 70 pounds, two bags, 70 pounds if you fly business.

And so a lot of times it was strippers who would carry the drugs from the west coast to the East Coast. And one of the things I’ll never forget, he says, “If you’re taking a Delta flight from the west coast to the East Coast, I guarantee that there’s a very high chance that somebody is carrying drugs on one of those flights.”

JOE ROGAN: Wow. You said strippers?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Strippers, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why do they use strippers?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Because they are, because people don’t suspect it’s a woman. So people are less suspicious of women, and there’s a higher chance that they’ll make it and they are more likely to take the money to do this job. I mean, at least those are the people that he found would be agree to do this. I mean, I don’t want to say anything bad about.

JOE ROGAN: You get busted doing that, though.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That is a big penalty.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You go into jail for a long time.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I know. Obviously, a terrible idea.

JOE ROGAN: Such a risk.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. So this guy, El Gringo, decided to talk to me, and he was the one who contacted me. He contacted me initially, and when telling me that he had a story, he wanted to share that he was involved with the cartel.

And then, so when we started doing the story about the cartel, I reached back out to him and said, “Actually, I’m doing a story about cartel presence here. Would you want to be on the show?” And he agreed. And he traveled out to me and we met, and he said, “Look, I’ve been dying to tell this story because if I get whacked,” which he thought he might, “he wanted his story to be out there. He wanted somebody to have heard his whole story.”

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And he’d been threatened by the cartel. They’d been sent him photos of his house and where they knew exactly where he lived and where his family was. Yeah. Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Jeez.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That was a crazy story.

Inside Cartel Territory

JOE ROGAN: When you go over and you have these conversations with the cartels, like, what is that like? Do they blindfold you and drive you out there? Do they take your phone away?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, they ask for our phones to be off, turned off.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s not good enough. Don’t they know that’s not good enough?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Where we go in Sinaloa is areas that are operated and controlled by the cartel. It’s not as if law enforcement doesn’t know exactly where they are. They do.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you know, they just don’t want you recording.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They just don’t want us recording. And they are afraid that if we, by any chance, are being followed by American law enforcement, they’re way more scared of American law enforcement than they are of Mexican law enforcement.

JOE ROGAN: Because Mexican law enforcement is probably.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Because there’s a lot of corruption. A lot of corruption. I mean, I’ve been in situations where, you know, there were police officers in the room, so.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So corrupt cops.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Corrupt cops, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Just in uniform.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Sometimes in uniform, sometimes just hanging out. Yeah. They’re corrupt cops who work many times for the cartel. Right. And that happens all over. I mean, that’s not just in Mexico. That’s happened. I’ve seen it in Colombia. I’ve seen it in Brazil.

We did a story about militias where I filmed the militia in Brazil with cops around. So, yeah, that happens, unfortunately, everywhere. But so when it’s not as if they don’t know where these people are. They are just afraid that maybe the DEA, knowing that I’m a journalist and I go and do this stuff, that they might be following me.

So sometimes they ask for our phones to stay behind, but a lot of times they just want our phones off so that we don’t transmit any signals. But once we’re in their territory, it takes months to get them to say yes. And there’s all these ground rules, right?

We can’t disclose locations or people. We have to make sure we always bring masks and T-shirts, long sleeve T-shirts and hoodies and everything with us. Because if they have tattoos and we want to make sure that they, we don’t show who they are because that can create a problem for them, but it can also create a problem for us. And it can create a problem to the local journalists that help us because they’re going to be the first targets.

JOE ROGAN: If I was this finisher guy, I would say, you got to put sunglasses on me because I have very recognizable eyes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You know, it’s interesting. Most people don’t want to wear sunglasses. We always travel with sunglasses and we ask people to put on sunglasses and people sometimes don’t.

JOE ROGAN: They needed sunglasses. His eyes are very recognizable. Very unusual coloring under the eyes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I have not met or I haven’t heard of a single person yet who has been caught from our show. And I’m in touch with a lot of them.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s great.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s been good.

JOE ROGAN: It might just be because they’re not trying.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I really realistically don’t think it’s not because they don’t know that the, who they are or where they are. It’s not that law enforcement is blind to this. I think it’s unwillingness sometimes to go after this. It’s realizing that actually these are the low level guys. And what they really want is to get at the big guys, the kingpins, which is a better strategy anyway.

JOE ROGAN: But isn’t that sometimes how they do it? They get a low level guy and get him to turn.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

America’s Drug Problem

JOE ROGAN: What a terrifying world that only exists because of an illegal market that the United States fuels.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. The biggest drug consumers in the world.

JOE ROGAN: We’re number one.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Largest. Number one. Number one. I mean, number one in incarceration. Number one. It’s $150 billion in drugs that we spend every year.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Crazy. And you know, we share this border with Mexico, which is fortunate and very unfortunate for them. They blame us for creating the consumer market. We blame them for creating the drugs that feed this consumer market.

JOE ROGAN: Is there anyone that has a realistic solution to how to at least mitigate some of that?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: We’ve talked about this. We had a little bit of a debate about this last time because I keep giving the example of Portugal and you said which has decriminalized drugs. Right. I know Portugal is not the United States. We’re 10 million people, we’re a small country. But whatever. It worked there.

Drug abuse went down, incarceration went down, HIV went down, levels of HIV went down. So it worked there. They tried it in Oregon. Right. It went terribly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but Oregon is a bad place to try it because Oregon was already so lawless that going to Oregon it like allowed people to like ramp it up. And so because you could get anything and everything was decriminalized, they just went ham.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And also they didn’t have the system in place for people who actually wanted rehab.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And so when you don’t, what are people going to do? They’re going to go back to.

JOE ROGAN: Even then, rehab is very ineffective. Like percentage wise, it is.

The Rehab Scam

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That was another episode we did this season that you should watch about. It’s called the Rehab Scam. It’s the great American rehab scam. And it’s about how in California, we filmed in Arizona and California, in California alone, we got an insurance, the head of the insurance investigations in California, an insurance fraud investigator in California told us that in his estimates that he said they’re probably very low.

10% of the thousands of rehab facilities out there are probably a fraud and a scam in which they get 10%. 10%, which is a crazy number. But he thinks it’s a low number, that it’s probably much higher than that. So our story was all about body brokering and rehab scams and body brokering. Body brokering, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What is that?

Rehab Scams and Body Brokering

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s a term that applies to rehab scams. So rehab scams is basically the buying and selling of addicts in this billion dollar market. They create these fake rehab centers that bill insurance for treatments that they are not actually giving people.

So for example, it’s a huge problem in Arizona. That’s why we started. And in California, but we started in Arizona. Native Americans have really easy access to health insurance through the Indian American health plan that they created. And it started as a good thing because it was difficult. A lot of people lived in reservations far away. A lot of people, you know, because of generational trauma and alcohol abuse and drug abuse, there’s a real need for health insurance and for them to have access to health insurance.

So you have these huge communities that when Covid happened, the state made it even easier for them to get the help that they needed through health insurance. But all these bad actors realized, oh, this is great. We’re just going to build these fake rehab centers, go around in white vans. Literally, there’s like thousands of people still missing in Arizona, most of them Native Americans.

And they go out in white vans to these reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. And they bring people, people who, you know, have problems with drug and alcohol. And they bring people to these centers and then they start billing insurance. They get you on an insurance plan and they start billing insurance. Crazy amounts of money.

Like we spoke, we were investigating this one facility that they were making $800,000 a week. A week from, you know, dozens of people that they were housing and not actually providing them the treatment that they so desperately needed. So just house them, which is also illegal. You can’t house someone. You can’t offer somebody free housing and then tell them that you will only get the free housing if you go and do our treatments. That’s illegal. It’s an illegal kickback.

But so they were doing this out in the open. And some of these business operators were actually not even Americans. They were Nigerians. I found out that there were some Nigerians that owned some of these rehab facilities.

JOE ROGAN: Nigerians are so good. It’s gambling.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: It is ingenious.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But Americans, too. I mean, there were a lot of them that were Americans. So these guys are like driving around in Ferraris and, you know, people are living in these fake centers. I spoke to people who, the therapy that they were billing like $2,500 for a therapy session. One hour therapy session. That was a Zoom meeting, a Zoom call with 600 people on the call. And that’s the therapy session. It’s bananas. Or people who weren’t even there. And they billed for insurance. And the people were…

JOE ROGAN: So 600 people were, they were collecting $2,000 from 600 people for one hour. Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It is insane.

The Business of Fake Rehabilitation

JOE ROGAN: Well, I could see why they would do that, if that’s a possibility to make money. If you open the door to criminals. And the thing about rehabilitation centers is a lot of people that go to rehab or get involved in rehab, they’ve also had shady pasts. They’ve been involved with criminals, and then they go, listen, man, I think there’s money to be made here. This ain’t fixing nobody. This is court ordered rehabilitation. I had to go in here. Let’s make some money, start our own place. What’s the steps that one has to take if one was to open up? Not that I’m thinking about doing it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Are you thinking of it?

JOE ROGAN: Not that I’m thinking about doing it. If someone was a scumbag, if someone was a terrible person, not me, but if someone was a terrible person, what would someone do? What are the parameters? What do you have to do to open up a rehab?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You need a license, probably a state license. But in some cases, it was just really easy to get a state license. In Florida, it became a huge problem. It was called the Florida Shuffle, which was this. You were going back and forth between detox and rehabs and outpatient treatment centers, and they were all owned by the same, you know, well known fraudsters. So you have to get a license, but there’s not much more. And that was the problem, is that anyone could get a license and anyone could operate one of these.

JOE ROGAN: I was reading about a judge that recently got busted because this judge was sentencing people to the rehab that they owned.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That is…

JOE ROGAN: And so taking, like, dangerous, violent criminals and not incarcerating them, but instead sending them to these rehabilitation centers that they own. Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And just collecting.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, it is. It’s so sad. It’s really, you know, as somebody who’s reported on the opiate crisis for so long, that is the only hope. Right? Let’s figure out a way. This is, we have been trying to arrest ourselves and militarize ourselves out of this problem.

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t work.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It doesn’t work. It’s a public health crisis, 100%. One of the other stories we did this season was about tranq dope. Do you know what tranq dope is?

JOE ROGAN: Tranq dope?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: No.

The Tranq Dope Crisis

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Fentanyl now is being mixed with a thing called Xylazine, which is an animal tranquilizer.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, fun.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So fun. It’s horrible. And 90% of the fentanyl that is now being, that’s coming out of Philadelphia. You know, Kensington. You’ve seen the zombies.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I have seen Tranq, where those people, like, fall over like zombies.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They’re walking down…

JOE ROGAN: They’re doing crazy yoga.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. In Kensington. And it’s the saddest thing. So we spent time in Kensington filming.

JOE ROGAN: What is it about that stuff? Is it the tranquilizer that makes them just fall over like that standing up?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, it’s part of it. So it’s a really interesting, you know, as we all know, it all started with oxycontin, and then it went to heroin. And heroin was a great high for people who are addicted to opiates because it was a powerful high, and it would keep you high for a long time. And then came fentanyl. And fentanyl gives you an even more powerful high. But it’s fast acting, so you get out of it fast.

So somebody realized if we mix tranq animal tranquilizer with this, you will still have the big high, but it will extend the time that you have that high. And what is happening to, you know, thousands of people across the US is that they are taking these drugs, getting the high that they want.

JOE ROGAN: They’re doing it like this is it IV?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, my God. It’s horrible. No, they’re shooting it off. This is what we shot in. Yeah, they shoot it off. And what we shot in Kensington.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, this is it. And where is this?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Philly. Outside of Philly.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a big problem in Philadelphia for some reason.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But this is, if you find, and this might be too disturbing, Jamie.

JOE ROGAN: Just trying to find something that, just to show what you’re asking. What’s too disturbing?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s what we filmed in our show, which was the wounds that come gangrene. It’s like, it looks like leprosy and it’s people being amputated.

JOE ROGAN: Because the title of this is “Losing Arms and Legs from China.” There you go. Oh, my God. That guy’s got no leg because of it. Oh, God.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, that guy is missing an arm. But the gangrene and the open wounds, and we filmed somebody being treated, and this woman’s arm was, like, all gone. It was just one of the most painful things to watch. And, you know, you can imagine the smell.

JOE ROGAN: And I know a comedian who went to the hospital for gangrene because of heroin, almost lost his leg. He wound up dying eventually.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But, yeah, yeah, I mean, and now with tranq, it’s just gotten, and, yeah, I don’t think any of these people want to be doing this. Right. Nobody wants to be living out on… Oh, look.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, boy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And this is not, I mean, the one we, yeah, this is just filmed is even worse.

JOE ROGAN: Looking around, there’s a ton of videos about it. So if anyone’s curious, just go…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And this one looks good, comparatively.

Society’s Failure and Hope for Treatment

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s some people in this country that have no hope, and they’re just, the addiction just has got them, and there’s no help for them. And if you get sent to a phony rehab while you’re in that state, that is really evil. That’s really evil, isn’t it?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I think it’s really evil, too, but I think, yeah, in many ways, people sometimes think, oh, these, they’re junkies. They’re out there. They just want this life. And they have failed society. I, quite frankly, think we have failed them.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not you and me, but the structure of society.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. Has failed them.

JOE ROGAN: Are you aware of ibogaine?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes, I listened to the interview you did with Rick Perry, former governor of Texas.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that was fascinating.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. That is insanely effective and readily available in Mexico. And now, fortunately, because of former Governor Rick Perry, it’s available in Texas. So they’re doing it now in Texas with soldiers with PTSD, people coming back from the war with great efficacy, and people that have also been hooked on substances because of some of the things that they’ve seen.

So I think that’s a great doorway into the right, because the right has always viewed these things like particularly a psychedelic, which ibogaine is. I guess it’s category one, right? It’s Schedule one. I don’t know. I think it’s Schedule one. So ibogaine, Schedule one. But it’s certainly illegal in America, and it’s thought of as, I don’t know how you could ever consider it recreational because it’s apparently a very brutal experience and very introspective.

And most people say, I did not enjoy that at all. I hated it. I had Dakota Meyer on the podcast, and he talked about it, and he’s like, I wanted to punch the guy who gave it to me. He’s like, it’s f*ing terrible. For, like, one whole day, you’re going over every horrible aspect of your life, and it finds, like, the pathways in your brain that created behavior afterwards.

And it gives you this insanely introspective slideshow of your life and sort of lays out, this is why you’re an addict. This is why you’re a gambling addict. This is why you’re addicted to ruining your life. These are the things that happened to you when you were young, and these are the things that you did when you were adult that you had shame over. And all these different things. These are the things that you seen that are horrific, that have scarred you.

And it has, like, an 80% effective rate for people getting off drugs with one session. And it’s in the 90s with two sessions.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Wow, that is crazy high.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And it’s legal here. Yeah.

Psychedelics and Veterans

JOE ROGAN: Well, it is now legal in Texas. I don’t know what the regulations are, how they’re doing it, but at least they’re giving it to some people in Texas. And like I was saying, this is a doorway for the right to understand. And I think this is a lot of the case with a lot of these Special Forces guys, a lot of seals and Green Berets, they come back from combat and they’re all f*ed up.

And some of their friends take them on ayahuasca journeys, and that helps them a lot. So that’s another doorway into the right. Because people on the right have always thought of psychedelics as being for losers and hippies and people just trying to escape life.

But just the sheer horror of combat experience has forced a lot of people to reconsider this position. And then they’ve had so many family members that are veterans and that are, especially guys that are in the heart of combat. And then they come back and they’re just f*ed up, and no one wants to help them. Nobody can just talk you through it.

And the one thing that I don’t want to say universally, but a high percentage have had great success with is psychedelics. So I think it’s another massive disservice that those are lumped in the same illegal category as fentanyl.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Fentanyl.

JOE ROGAN: I know.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Or meth. I know.

JOE ROGAN: Or meth.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I agree.

The Problem with Decriminalization

JOE ROGAN: But do you think that the pathway is legalization? Because even decriminalization, where are you going to get it? See, here’s the problem with decriminalization in California. My friend John Norris, he was a game warden. And do you know the story?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Okay, so John, for people who don’t know, oh, he’s great. So John was a game warden. Right. Loved the outdoors, became a game warden. He really wanted to check people’s fishing licenses and hunting licenses and making sure the land was taken care of and making sure people aren’t littering or doing anything stupid.

So he gets this call that the stream is blocked up. It’s like the stream stopped running and they can’t figure out why. Maybe a farmer diverted water. They follow the stream, they find these PVC pipes that are rerouting it to this massive marijuana farm that the cartel owns.

So when California made marijuana legal in the state, what they also did is make it a misdemeanor to grow marijuana illegally. So the cartels are like, fing great, let’s just start growing. So they’re bringing AKs and assault rifles out into the woods, setting up camps. Super toxic pesticides. Super toxic. Like sht that’s totally illegal in modern farming in America. Like way worse than glyphosate.

And that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 plus percent of all the marijuana that gets sold in the places where marijuana is illegal. It’s all getting sold from these grow ops in California by the cartels.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I’ve filmed some of them. I’ve been there. I’ve been in those mountains in California.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It is insane.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy. It’s also a side effect of what Colorado did. Colorado made it legal, great. But then they also taxed it like 39%. And so most people like, look, it’s still cheap. I’ll pay 39%. The state gets the money. It’s a net benefit for everybody. But there’s a lot of people like us grow weed illegally and sell that since it’s legal in the state. Right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And because it’s impossible to get a license in California, when they legalized it initially, made it so hard for people to actually get their licenses and do it legally, that the actual black market increased when they legalized it.

JOE ROGAN: California’s brilliant with that. That’s why they still haven’t rebuilt a single house in the Pacific Palisades that burnt down. Not a single house nine months later with some of the richest people in California. Yeah, because nobody can get permits.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They’re trying to make it easier to build.

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly. If you would have done it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Have you had Gavin Newsom on your phone?

JOE ROGAN: No, he’s been taunting me, trying to get me to have. Why?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I don’t know. Because he’s interesting people.

JOE ROGAN: You think he’s interesting? He’s interesting as a sociology experiment. If you’re a psychologist, I mean.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You talk to everyone, I think. Do you know who I really love that you interviewed recently?

JOE ROGAN: Who?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: James Talarico.

The Danger of Political Tribalism

JOE ROGAN: He’s great. Yeah, he’s great. He had great insight as to what’s going on in Texas too, where these Christian fundamentalists who are very, very wealthy are trying to turn Texas into a theocracy. These guys sound like full on nutters.

And this is something that people have to be really careful of when you become aligned with one party or another party. Right. If you become aligned with the left, like Jimmy Kimmel was ignoring. He was mocking the president for saying that Antifa, Antifa’s not real. Antifa’s not. That’s so crazy to say. I know it’s a Democrat talking point currently, but it’s dangerous for you and for everybody else to say because they are real and they’re real.

And they’re anarchists who are committed to overthrowing capitalism. They want to destroy the western government. And a lot of them are just goofy kids that got lost in the system and then they found a gang, like a lot of gang members. That’s the same kind of thing. You find a community and all of a sudden these people are yours and they’re real.

And also they’re willing to fight for something. And there’s a lot of passion involved in it. So it’s kind of exciting. And then you also realize, yeah, corporate society is fed up. Yeah, United Healthcare, that is kind of crazy. You spend all that money on health care and you get fing nothing. And then when you do have something, they deny your claim. What is going on?

And so they don’t know where to turn. And so they get involved with a bunch of people that are doing stupid sh*t and they light Starbucks on fire or they, you know. But a lot of it’s funded too. That’s the other thing. The reality is a lot of these, you know, I don’t know about the.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Funding part of it. So I’ve organized organizations, I’ve spoken to Antifa. We did, I’ve done stories on militias. It was one of the stories we did this last season and it was important for me when we did that story. I’ve been wanting to do, there’s rising militias, rising threat of militias everywhere in the world, but particularly here in the United States.

And we also filmed in Brazil because it’s a real problem there. And I knew from the start that I didn’t want to just do right wing militias, that it was important to also do left wing militia. So we spent time with a group that operates on the border, right wing militia that operates on the border and was basically trying to catch illegal immigrants.

And then we also spend time, just a few miles away from that group, there was another group called the Black Cat Rifle group that is a left wing militia. And it is, to me, what was so scary was that they existed because of the other side. They of course existed because the other side exists, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

The Mirror Image of Militias

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And none of them understood that one would become stronger, the stronger the other would become and that this was all going to end not well for any of us. And when I was asking the Black Cat Rifle group, when I was asking why they have a militia and why are they training, I mean, they were training with guns.

And if you look at these guys, they actually look, I mean, especially the guys at the border which were the right wing militia groups. If I was an immigrant crossing the country illegally and I saw one of these guys, 100% would think that this is the U.S. army or border patrol and I would be terrified or I’d hand myself in.

But it’s there, which by the way, is not, that’s the part that’s not legal. You can train with your buddies, you can do all that, but you can’t pretend to be and you can’t look like you’re part of the military or law enforcement when you’re not. And these guys 100% look like they were. I know I’m going to get a lot of flack for this because every time I talk about militias I get flack for it.

JOE ROGAN: But why?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Because we’re living in the most divided era of our time and there’s a lot of people who believe that militias are important and think that it’s important that they exist. I find them incredibly dangerous. The existence of militias outside or on the periphery of the law, I find it incredibly dangerous.

And so when I was talking to the right wing group, they said something. When I started talking to left wing group, they were giving me the exact same reasons. I mean, it was the exact same conversation, but seen from the other side. Right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So I said, do you not, this is exactly the same thing with the other guys said. And they were like, yeah, we’re here. Their point was that, and they don’t call themselves militias, by the way, the left wing group, but they didn’t like the fact that I called them militias.

What they were saying was that, but this is basically a group who trains for what they think is going to be an incoming possible civil war. We talked about civil war with them. I know. And they said, look, minorities in this country are under attack a lot of times by these right wing militia. Whether they are part of the LGBTQ community or they’re black or Hispanic, they’re under attack.

And it’s our job to train to make sure that we protect these people that are the most vulnerable in our society. And we have to arm up and train and be ready to fight and go after the other people if we have to. They said they only protect themselves, they only defend themselves.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But that’s the exact same thing that I.

JOE ROGAN: It is the exact same thing. That was my point, was that people like Jimmy Kimmel talking about antifa not existing, that’s not good for anybody. No, they are real and they are violent.

And then people on the right that want to ignore these people that are trying to turn Texas into theocracy and put the Ten Commandments in every school. The great thing about Talarico is that he went to seminary school. He’s in seminary right now, so he’s a very religious person. And he does not want them to have the Ten Commandments in schools. He’s like, you should not. This is going to create less Christians. It’s going to have more resistance to Christianity.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And really, religion has no place in government.

Separation of Church and State

JOE ROGAN: And also, why would you have that up? But you don’t have something from Hinduism, something from Buddhism, something from Islam, something from Judaism. It should be all religions. If you’re going to have a religious class, that’s a different thing. But if you’re going to have a thing on the wall that everybody pays attention to that you have to look at every day because it’s your commandments and it’s Christianity, well, then you’re forcing Christianity on people, and that’s very un-American.

And I think he’s really right. And I think that’s the thing about being on a f*ing team is that you feel like you have to defend your team and ignore the horrible thing that your team does and then only pay attention to the bad things the other team does. That’s crazy.

Now you’re doing the man’s work for the man and you get no benefit. Not only do you get no benefit, but you actually help society erode and become more fractured.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And get to the place. Yeah.

The Need for Non-Violence

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s horrible. It’s horrible. We need another Martin Luther King. We need someone who’s an adamant expresser of non-violence as the only option. And then we all need to embrace that because there’s too many punch a Nazi people out there. There’s too many people out there that think you could just go out and do violence.

And I get it. That sounds exciting. I’m a revolutionary. Yeah, I get it. It’s exciting. It’s the wrong way for human beings. This is supposed to be 2025, right. We are supposed to have evolved to a point where we recognize that violence is one of the worst things that we ever have in our community in any way, shape or form. Whether it’s police violence or whether it’s gang violence, any kind of violence is the worst thing that we can do to each other.

We’re supposed to be living together in harmony. There’s a way at least to minimize that violence by never having violent rhetoric, by never encouraging violence. And we seem to have lost that somewhere along the line.

Violence, Hate, and Political Division

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I agree. I mean, violence and hate, you know, so much hate. Yeah, talk about hate. And hating the other side and hating anyone that doesn’t stand by what I stand or what I believe in.

JOE ROGAN: Well, look what happened when Charlie Kirk got murdered. People were literally cheering. And we found out about it. I was doing a podcast with Charlie. And we went to the restroom. And while we were going to the restroom, Jamie told us that Charlie Kirk got shot and he’s dead. And we came back and did the podcast. And I was like, people are going to celebrate this. And this is what’s terrifying to me.

And I got a message from a friend of mine who was like, man, I think you’re wrong. I think it’s a bunch of bot counts that are going to. It’s just to rile people up. But it wasn’t. I watched it. I watched a lot of it online. I watched it through famous people and prominent people that were just condoning his assassination. If not celebrating it by saying, you know, that he put hateful rhetoric out there in the world.

The way they’ll counter hateful rhetoric is love. You have to recognize that these people are wrong. They’re coming from a wrong position and eloquently state the right position, which is what Martin Luther King Jr. did.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. Which is not what President Trump said at the memorial of Charlie Kirk.

JOE ROGAN: What did he say? Oh, I hate my enemies. He loved his enemies. Yeah, yeah. I don’t agree with any of that. I don’t agree with any.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, particularly if you’re the President of the United States. You’re not.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s, you know, he’s a nut. But it’s also the only way that that guy survived what he did, what he went through, what they tried to put him through. You have to be kind of a nut. They tried to put him in jail. They tried to make a fake Russia collusion thing. They did for three years, a concerted effort that was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign that funded the Steele dossier. It was like, nutty stuff.

Like, tried to put him. He got convicted for 34 counts of felony that none of them were a felony. It was misdemeanor bookkeeping errors because he was paying off a lady he had sex with. Like, you got to be a nut to get through that and not have any feeling about it at all and just brush it off your shoulder. So, yeah, he’s f*ing crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I don’t think that’s because he’s crazy. That’s not why he’s crazy. I think he’s.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m saying he is crazy, period. And that’s how he got through all that. That’s the only kind of person that gets through that and gets to where he is today. You have to be kind of crazy. I don’t agree with any of that. Like, hating my enemies and going after my enemies.

Immigration Raids and Border Policy

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I know you don’t agree with the immigration raids either, which I’ve heard you talk about on this podcast. No, listen, I think I’m so happy that you do talk about it, because I do think it’s an incredibly important issue.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it is an important issue. It’s one of those right left things, too. Right. Where people on the right are like, f*ing turn them over.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I have no idea. Every time I posted about this, and I get so much hate also. Like, I get immediately people saying horrible things about immigrants and saying horrible things about me, and I get unfollowed immediately. Like, people don’t like.

JOE ROGAN: The thing is they, like, do it the right way. They’re like, do it the right way. Here’s the problem with that. You can’t do it the right way if you live in Mexico or you live in Guatemala and you’re walking here and you’re getting across the Rio Grande river, and here’s the other. For the last four years during the Biden administration, it was well known throughout the world that the borders were wide open.

So an estimated. Who knows what is the total number? Put this into Perplexity. That’s our sponsor, Perplexity. What is it? How many people do they estimate came in illegally over the past four years during the Biden administration? But it’s millions and millions of people, right? So people knew that they could come across.

Now they’re here because somebody invited them, right? And then they were bused to these places and flown to these places, and they were given EBT cards and some of them were given cell phones. And now you got to arrest them. Now you’re going to, like, swoop in and handcuff them and f*. Like. This is crazy. You asked me to be here. They don’t know it’s the same goddamn country, okay?

Stories from the Darien Gap

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I have spent time on the trail of immigrants. I was in the southern Darien Gap, where a lot of the immigrants were coming, and I spoke to dozens of people who were doing the journey. And maybe I just got lucky or unlucky that I spoke to the majority of the people that I spoke to had, you know, a lot of them were from Haiti, from Venezuela. Places that are completely torn up.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No economic opportunities whatsoever. Violence, extreme violence. These are the stories that I know are happening. And I have a good friend, his name’s Jacob Soboroff. He’s a reporter for MSNBC and he’s been covering immigration raids from the beginning. And one of the stories he did. And I love that I’m talking about this because this has become really important for me because I live in LA and I’m affected by this on many levels.

JOE ROGAN: Also, you have an accent.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Exactly. I’m an immigrant, so I might get deported. I know exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Ask for your paper.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You might actually take away my citizenship. But one of the stories he covered and I think exemplifies what’s happening to me right now is Estella and Nori. This is a mother and a daughter from Guatemala. The daughter was born in Guatemala with her mother, and her mother was gang raped in a small town. She’s from a small, impoverished town in rural Guatemala. She was gang raped.

And the next day. And her daughter watched her being gang raped, and she was violently beaten up. She had blood all over her face. They broke her bones. It was horrible. With her daughter, who was young at the time. And the next day, she decided she had family members in the US and she decided, this is it. I can’t live here, and I have to take my daughter to a place that’s safer.

Her daughter, who’s traumatized, by the way, by now, they came to the US. They immediately went and asked for asylum, which, by the way, most people don’t know this, but it is completely legal to come to the United States whatever way you enter, even if you enter illegally. It is legal to come to the US and ask for asylum. That is not coming to the US. Entering without papers and then asking for asylum is legal. So even when people say, yes, but do it, you can’t do it illegally. You’re wrong. It is legal to do so. Coming in with no papers.

Asylum Requirements and Process

JOE ROGAN: And what are the requirements to persecution?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You have to be a victim of persecution, whether it’s, you know, cartels. Yeah. Violence, rape, political. What are the five things? It’s like, Jamie, can you look this up? It’s political, religious, political, religious. There’s, like, five reasons why people can be persecuted. And so they came to the US. They immediately started applying for asylum. And there’s 11 million cases backlogged right now of people asking for asylum.

JOE ROGAN: Race, religion, nationality, political opinion, membership in a particular social group. So just those five things.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. So political persecution also involves imprisonment, torture, or threats of violence, huh? Yeah. What’s the numbers? 10.8 million. This is encounter. This is encounters, though, where they cross and were stopped. This also goes on according to the Trump administration’s. Well, let me say this. According to someone I spoke to at the Trump administration, they said they believe it’s 20 million over four years.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, I don’t think that’s true. I think that number is highly exaggerated.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this says in addition to these apprehensions and encounters, officials reported an estimated 2 million gotaways, individuals who were detected crossing the border illegally but evaded capture. Combining these figures suggests roughly 12.8 million total unauthorized border crossings or attempts during the Biden administration. So not 20, but 12.8. That’s still quite a bit.

Here’s another thing that people keep talking about is how many people Obama deported. But I think that’s not. I think they’re saying it incorrectly, because I think when they say that Obama deported 3 million people, they always use this like an aha against Trump deportation. I believe Obama’s deportation numbers count. Turn. Like when someone makes it to the border and then you send them back. Very different.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. He was nicknamed.

JOE ROGAN: Running into Home Depot and grabbing people, like with a mask over your face, like what we’re seeing with ICE or worse than that.

The Case of Estella and Nori

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Even worse than going to the Home Depot is the case of Estella and Nori, where they were going to check in on their procedures at the courthouse. And when they went to check on how their asylum case was going, they were detained. They had been living here for several years. The daughter is now a star athlete, amazing student.

But wait, even worse. So they are deported back to Guatemala, taken like their family didn’t even know where they were. They were taken. They took away her medication. She had high blood pressure. The mother, high blood pressure. They got to Guatemala, they don’t know. They haven’t lived there in decades. They have no idea what to do. They have no money in their pocket. They don’t have access to the medication.

So the mother dies and the daughter stays in Guatemala. And there’s footage of her holding the coffin until it’s buried and her wanting to be with her mother. And these are the stories. I mean, even if this just happened with one person, we should be asking if this is the right thing to do. But this is happening to, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of people all across the country. And this is not all right. I mean, this is not all right. We should not be doing this.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if someone’s already been granted asylum like there should be.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So their asylum procedure was ongoing. They hadn’t been granted yet, but that is. But still, you can’t remove somebody who’s ongoing procedure. Asylum procedure.

JOE ROGAN: And plus, that’s not meaning she was trying to do it the right way.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes, absolutely. And that’s not what we were sold with. A lot of people voted for Trump because they thought that he was going to go after the criminals.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think very. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is political and the fear is the both sides fear. Right. So I don’t know if you know this, but Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who was running for vice president, he just passed.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You also had him on, right?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, I did not. They just passed something in Minnesota where illegal immigrants are allowed to have driver’s licenses and vote, which is kind of crazy because.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Are you sure?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, yes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That they’re allowed to vote?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, just yesterday. We’ll pull it out.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Illegal immigrants, as in.

JOE ROGAN: As in they don’t even have a green card, as in not supposed to be here. And there are lots of driver’s licenses and can vote. Let’s find out, though, this is the.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Story that I read Jamie find out.

JOE ROGAN: I read this story and he was proudly talking about. I know. Sounds crazy, right?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It sounds crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Because I became a citizen so I could vote and it took me a long time to get.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, no. I know a lot of friends who became American citizens and it was a long, grueling process and they had to prove that they were exceptional, that there was a reason for them to be here. A lot of them were comedians and entertainers. And what is it? What are the facts of the case? Passed a legal immigrant vote. It was all over Twitter. Twitter. Okay. Not passed a bill. Okay. Driver’s licenses. That was something that happened in 2023. It said. Yeah, but there was something that just happened a couple of days ago.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Find it. Find it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’ll find it. I’ll check on Twitter. Illegal.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I have to say I find it very hard to believe.

Immigration Policy and Congressional Representation

JOE ROGAN: Me too. But not because I think that what I was getting at is a lot of the reason for wanting an open border is congressional seats. Because one of the things about when you do a census, it doesn’t count how many people are citizens. It counts how many people. And so you can get extra congressional seats if you have more illegal immigrants in your city and you have much more political power that way.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But why do you get more seats if they can’t vote?

JOE ROGAN: It’s just how it works. It’s just how the setup is the way our census is set up. So the way a census is set up, it’s just counting people. It’s not counting people that are legally here. So the census is how they dictate the amount of congressional seats.

Here’s what was going around Twitter. Okay. Minnesota election confirms noncitizens can vote with driver’s licenses. 10-14-25 this is it. State hearing. Minnesota Director Elections Paul Linnell testified that noncitizens holding driver’s licenses under the 2023 Driver’s Licenses for all law can register to vote and cast ballots by affirming eligibility as the ID verifies identity but not citizenship.

Secretary of State Steve Simon noted that such voting is illegal and rare with post election adults identifying discrepancies for prosecution, including 59 just 59 potential cases in 2024 that they. The testimony has prompted Republican demands for voter roll audits and reforms coinciding with federal lawsuit against Minnesota for incomplete registration data.

So at the very least, this is opening up the door for people that are non citizens to vote. And it seems like they’re confirming that noncitizens with this driver’s license can vote.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That it can be a consequence of it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not the goal of it, but it’s also.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s a consequence that can happen.

JOE ROGAN: It is a consequence of it, but.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I don’t think it’s purposely done. I mean, I think that it’s trying to make it easier for people to vote. And unfortunately, it’s a little bit like the rehab scam. Right? You’re trying to make it easier for Native Americans to get health insurance. But guess what? Then there’s people who are going to abuse that opportunity or that.

JOE ROGAN: Most certainly.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And that’s what’s happened. That seems like what’s happening.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a very charitable way of living.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Maybe, but I.

JOE ROGAN: What are you trying to say? I don’t understand. It says that they can register to vote, but the next line says that the voting is illegal. Yeah, it’s illegal, but they can register. But they could do it if they wanted to.

Immigrants as Political Pawns

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Either way, I think what is happening is that immigrants are being used as political pawns. Right. As we know from both sides, by the way. Both sides.

JOE ROGAN: 100%. We both agree with that.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And these are human beings, like the mother. And like so many of these stories, like the father of the three military American guys went and served for our country and the father was deported. These are horrible stories of human beings.

And a lot of times the people that are traumatized are American citizens. They are the kids. They’re pulling away their family members, their mothers, their fathers, and it’s American kids who are being traumatized.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also heartless. And you’re showing to the world that you don’t care, that you just want to achieve a result. And you want to achieve a result that is going to leave a terrible feeling for anybody with a heart that looks at that story in that case.

And then they’re going to associate the United States government more and more with tyranny, more and more with fascism, more and more with, you know, you think you’re just enforcing a law because these people broke a law, but that there’s still human beings that have been a part of these communities.

The law is just some sh*t people wrote down. It should make sense and there should be exemptions or at least some sort of amnesty if someone has been here.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, that too.

JOE ROGAN: But there in a pathway.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, And a pathway. And right now there isn’t.

Tax Contributions of Undocumented Immigrants

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because these people are probably not paying taxes. And if you could make them citizens, how much more money you would make.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right.

JOE ROGAN: But they’re probably taxes for buying things. No, not only for buying taxes or for income taxes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: For income. They actually pay income taxes.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Do they file for income taxes or they get income taxes removed from their paycheck?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Can you check that out, Jamie? I read about this recently because it’s something that so many people. It’s often used by the right. How these people are here and they don’t pay taxes. That is actually not. It’s millions of dollars a year that undocumented immigrants pay, I’m sure not only in sales, but also in income taxes. And both with the fake Social Security numbers they get. But also I think there’s something that I.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you probably have to have that for certain jobs. Right?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Fake Social Security, fake Social Security numbers. But I think there’s a way also that they figured out that people are here while they’re going through asylum procedures or trying to get their green card, that they.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s still a lot of people that are from 2016 says $11.7 billion in state owned, collectively undocumented in a riotsky. So I would imagine, though that that’s like at the very least less than there would be if everybody was totally above board. You know what I mean?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, yeah, 100%. We could be making so much more money.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, they’re the bat. Let’s not. Who are we kidding ourselves? I mean, they are the backbone of our economy. Particularly in California, where I live, there would be no construction, there would be no agriculture. There would be no kitchens and restaurants and hospitality services without these immigrants.

JOE ROGAN: Undocumented immigrants paid nearly 97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So the idea that they don’t pay taxes is bullsh*t.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a lot of money. And that’s money that now you have to account for because those people are going to get kicked out. Yeah, right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But meanwhile, if they’d figured out a pathway to citizenship, I bet that number would increase, you know, and also they can get different jobs, you know, they wouldn’t be stuck economically because that’s the weird thing about people that sneak.

Like when these farms get raided and they bust all these people, the farm doesn’t get busted. Like, hey, what are you doing? And how much were you paying them? Like, should you go to jail for paying them less than you’re supposed to pay people? Yeah, because that’s the reason why you hire people that don’t have any paperwork.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. Because you want to pay them.

JOE ROGAN: One guy is a horrible person. I heard he did a job, and then when the job was over, he called ice on the people so he didn’t have to pay him. Might not be real, though. Might be a TikTok. They might have got me. Might be China trying to set us up to yell at each other. Because that’s a lot that’s going on too.

But, yeah, it’s heartless. And that’s. And if you’re supposed to be a Christian nation, right, which is like, what the hard line, right. People want. Well, that’s not a very Christian ideal. Well, they broke the law. Right? I get it. They’re families, right? You would have broke the law, too, by the way.

Most of those people are deeply religious. A lot of those people that are coming from South America, deeply religious, from Central America, deeply religious people. They’d be on your side if they had a chance. These are like hard working family people. They’d be the kind of people you want in your community for the most part.

But there have to be a way to sift out. You have to figure out, okay, who’s the cartel members, who’s a terrorist?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: 100%.

Finding a Pathway Forward

JOE ROGAN: I don’t believe it’s an open border, but I do believe that once people are here and they’ve completely integrated into society, it seems pretty foolish to just snatch them up and send them to countries that they don’t even know anymore. How about this guy in Maryland that. This Abrego Garcia guy that they keep, they’re trying to send him to Africa.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, my God. It’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: Three countries in Africa said no, but.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: One said yes, right?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I don’t know. Have they. Are they going to send him to Africa?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Who said yes?

JOE ROGAN: They just got to.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, they failed. Okay, good.

JOE ROGAN: Why are they sending him to Africa? He’s not from Africa. It’s like, guys, that’s crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. I’m happy you use your platform to talk about this, because I rarely do. I get an issue that I’m like this passionate about and that I see so much injustice that I feel like I need to talk about that.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no heart. You have to have a heart. You have to, like, you have to, like. The law should be to serve and protect. Right? This is the whole reason why we should have law enforcement. Right?

So in this situation, what are you protecting? Are you protecting American jobs? Do you want to go pick strawberries? Like, these people are, like, coming here because this is a way better option than where they live.

Wouldn’t it be better if those people were doing that work and making a livable wage. And wouldn’t it be better if these greedy corporations weren’t just able to hire illegal people and pay them under the table a tiny amount of what they really should be getting as a normal human being?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Absolutely. For all of us. It would be better for all of us.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just you’re taking advantage of these people and once they’re here, look, if you’re here and you’ve been robbing people and say, yeah, f* that guy, get rid of him. Like, get rid of all the parasites and all the criminals and all the predators that are destroying people’s lives. All the people robbing people. Yeah, get rid of them.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Everybody wants that.

JOE ROGAN: But after that you got to figure out a way to like, otherwise we’re just going to have this stupid divided country with left and right and these people will never vote Republican again.

Which is really interesting because a lot of Hispanics and a lot of like Latino people are religious. And there’s a lot of the things that the Republicans talk about that they would align with. Like Cubans, for example. Cubans are hard liner, right wing people. They don’t f around, they’re very disciplined, they know what communism looks like. F you.

They’re not. They don’t tolerate no nonsense in Miami. You know, it’s like, and that could have been the Republicans, could have captured a lot of those people that are deeply religious. Like that’s one of your core values is you think it’s a Christian nation, right?

It’s just you got to figure out how to do it with a heart. I know you can’t snatch a hard working father away from his children that he brought over here from another country just because he wants them to be able to listen, live and not get killed in the streets. He wants to be able to make a living.

And this guy probably works 14 hours a f*ing day, sees them, kisses them on the head before he goes to sleep, crashes, gets up in the morning and does it again. That’s right. That’s what you want in this country.

It’s like you got to find the pathway for good people. And like, you can’t tell me we don’t have enough resources for that. Because you see the amount of money that goes through USA or went through usa, the amount of money that goes to weapons manufacturers.

We don’t have enough money to sort out who’s a good person and who’s a bad person and find some sort of a pathway. I’m not saying keep the border open, but the people that are here, let’s root out the fing terrorists. Let’s figure out who’s the bad people. Some definitely bad people got through after that. Let’s, you know, let’s fing break bread. Let’s break bread.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: 100%. I agree with you 100%.

JOE ROGAN: We’re supposed to be a community.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If you come over here and you bust ass for 25 f*ing years and you’re a part of the American community and then all of a sudden you don’t have the right paperwork, so they’re going to send you a country that you don’t even remember because you know you came over here when you’re 15, like, you barely know how to speak Spanish anymore. Like, what?

The OxyContin Crisis and Florida’s Pill Mills

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, I know. It’s absolutely, I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s, I’ve been reporting on these issues for so long. It’s truly, I mean, it’s why I came to America, why so many people come to America. It’s because this is what this country stands for. It’s like, it’s welcoming to immigrants, and immigrants make America great.

JOE ROGAN: Ed Calderon was telling us a story about a young man who came over here when he was a baby. His family brought him over here when he was a baby. So he doesn’t have any paperwork. And he was in his twenties. They snatched him up and sent him to Mexico and he doesn’t even speak Spanish.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And he’s like, f* you, you’re not American. Now you’re over there during some sort of an ICE raid. They grabbed him and sent him to Tijuana.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: He doesn’t even speak Spanish.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a full on American, just with bad paperwork.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And the only difference between him and me is that my parents were born here. Yeah. I happen to be born here. I got lucky. It’s like, I’m not saying you should have the border open because you shouldn’t. Every country should be checked because there’s threats in the world. And also there’s a lot of people mad at us because we’ve done some f*ed up things all over the world.

And that’s the dark part of all this mass migration in both Europe and in America. It’s like, why are these people fleeing where they were? Well, because we bombed the f* out of it. We destabilized their government. Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, not all, not all of it.

JOE ROGAN: It, but like Libya, there’s a ton of them.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: The money that we’re using in trying in these raids. Like, let’s figure out how to stem the immigration. Let’s try to figure out how to stop the consumption of drugs so that there’s less violence in those countries, stop the flow of guns so there’s less killings and gangs. You know, it’s like it’s a cycle of destruction that we’re enabling them, and then we go and catch them.

JOE ROGAN: And it all really started with moving manufacturing overseas as well. Once we took all the manufacturing out of America, and then we moved manufacturing overseas or over to other countries across national lines. Now all of a sudden, you can get things made way cheaper, but then you create all this poverty.

And then what happens with poverty? People fall into drugs because they have massive despair, and then the falls into drugs. Well, you brilliantly documented that with the OxyContin expression. That piece was how I found out about you, but also how I found out about that problem, which is so insane where you could tell people if they’re not aware of how it all started.

Inside Florida’s Pain Clinics

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, it’s interesting because I just had the FBI agent that investigated that case on my podcast.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Fascinating. Okay. So I found out that reading the newspaper, my husband and I were working together at the time, and we found out that there were all these people who were going to Florida just to buy pills. So there was these pain clinics, these pill mills, as they were called, and they were distributing. The numbers were crazy. 90 of the top 100 doctors prescribing OxyContin were in Florida. 90 of the 100. It’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: What is that? 90 of the 150 states.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I know. It’s insane. And this is the sad part. It’s not as if these pharmaceutical companies or the distribution companies didn’t know this was happening. They did. They just pretended that they didn’t because it was huge business, and it was great.

And why Florida? Because they had really lax regulation. So you could go doctor shopping. You could go. I went undercover. So that was part of the story that we did OxyContin Express, where I went undercover into one of these pain clinics. And I asked the receptionist, I said, I have a little bit of a back pain. What do I need to do if I want to get some pills?

And she said, what would you like? And we can give you OxyContin, we can give you some benzos. We can give you what’s called the South Florida cocktail, which was essentially muscle relaxants, benzos, and OxyContin.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how she was describing it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: She didn’t say it, but that’s what it became known as. This is the South Florida cocktail. But she said, we can give you this, this, and this. It’s the Holy Trinity, right? And all you need to do is you go to the back of the clinic and there’s a place there where you can get an MRI, and then you come back to us.

And an MRI is a ridiculous thing because you can read anything into an MRI. All of us have backs, have a spine, and whatever comes out results in the MRI that the doctor can pretend to look at it and say, oh, yeah, yeah, I can see why you’re having back pain or neck pain, and I’m going to give you this.

But the problem is that the doctors weren’t even looking at the MRIs. That was just, you know, in case somebody ever came after them, they could say that they had MRIs. They were seeing people in less than three minutes and saying they were doing all these less than three minutes. So you’d have a patient come in.

And then these amazing entrepreneurial twin brothers called the George Brothers built this business. It was called American Pain. They basically built a business out of two or three pain clinics.

JOE ROGAN: Sounds like a movie. American Pain.

The George Brothers and American Pain

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So my husband did a documentary about it, about the rise and fall of these twin brothers. They started by selling steroids. And then somebody told them, dude, why are you doing, what are you doing? Selling steroids? Or you could make making so much more money.

JOE ROGAN: What is the name of the documentary?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s called American Pain. You should watch it. It’s on HBO. It’s so good.

JOE ROGAN: I think, actually I’ve heard of it, now that you mentioned it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s really good. So we reported OxyContin together. And because we were chased down I-95 by these goons, by these two brothers, by these twins, Darren became obsessed with them and then contacted them in prison.

Okay, so it’s a really funny story. I’m going to tell the story. So we find out that these were the biggest operators. Five of the top 20 prescribers in the whole country were doctors working for the George brothers. They were distributing millions of pills. They were not only prescribing, but selling out of their pain clinics. They were making millions of dollars.

I mean, so much so that they were stashing it in bags and putting it in the attic, their mother’s house’s attic and stuff. There was insane amounts of money. And people would come in from all over the country, mainly from Appalachia, and they would come in, drive down, and they would get to these clinics and they would say, I want to see a doctor for less than three minutes.

The doctor had a rubber stamp to stamp the prescription to make it fast. So they see you three minutes. Okay, next one, and stamp it. There were people passing out in these pain clinics in the lobby, people passing out outside.

So when I went inside, talked to the receptionist, and then I went outside and I bummed a cigarette out of somebody and I explained, hey. I pretended I had secret cameras. They didn’t know I was filming. And I started saying, what are you doing here? And he’s like, oh, yeah. I came from Kentucky, and this is one of the best clinics. I can get all my pills here.

And then I go back and, you know, we sell them and we can still use the pills we want. It’s feeding our addiction. And we go out and we sell them for 10 times what we’re paying here. And so it was a big business.

JOE ROGAN: And then. No database, right?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And no database, yeah. So you could go to several different doctors. Doctor shopping. So we’re outside this American pain clinic, which we knew at the time. They had security guards outside, surveillance cameras. So we knew they were shady. But we also knew that they were the biggest operators in town, so we wanted to film outside.

And it was our last day in Florida. We kept it to the last day for safety reasons. And we’re outside, and it’s me and my husband. He’s filming it. And suddenly, within minutes, a car comes across. And these two big guys start yelling at us and threatening us.

So we get back in the car, and we’re saying, no, we’re just filming. This is public property. We can film. It’s like, get the f* out of here. What are you guys filming? We get in the car, we leave. They start chasing us down on I-84.

And I am running out of gas, and I stop at a gas station. And the night before, I watch the Sopranos, which is the wrong thing to do. So the whole time I’m imagining it’s straight. A scene out of the Sopranos, right? They stop right behind us as we stop for gas, and they come out of the car again. I was like, holy shit. Get back in the car, drive out. They continue chasing us.

And then we run out of gas right out on the highway. And we stop the car and decide, I’m calling 911, by the way. And I called a sheriff’s department person I interviewed the day before, and I told her what was happening, and she said, call 911 immediately. These are not people you want to be messing with.

So I called 911, and eventually I stop on the side of the road. They stop next to us because they’re dumbfounded. They’re like, what the f*? Why did they stop? They have no idea that we ran out of gas. And then the police comes up and they ask them some questions, and they came up with this silly excuse and they let them go.

And a few months later, they were taken down by this massive FBI investigation that was happening at the same time. So I interviewed the guy, Kurt Mackenzie, who was the investigator that knew of us at the time. He realized, oh, my God, there’s these crazy journalists that are doing this story at the same time as they were.

And we were actively trying to get them to talk to us, the FBI. And they couldn’t because they had an active investigation, but they actually tapped in. And American Pain, my husband’s film, is all about that. They tapped. They did taps, wiretaps on all of these guys. So they know everything.

How they were. How they knew there were people dying, people overdosing just outside their clinic, and how they were just kept going. And the doctors themselves as well. They were dirty, dirty, horrible doctors that knew there were people dying and they couldn’t give a shit because they were making millions of people.

The Human Cost

JOE ROGAN: I think something happens when you see a bunch of people die. There’s a lot of doctors that, I think they get very calloused to the idea of death, and especially if the idea not good doctors. There’s great doctors out there, obviously, but there’s sociopaths that become doctors and become even more sociopathic once they realize they can make money off of it.

And that whole Florida pain pill scene was a classic example of that. Because there’s only one way you would have a system like this. You’d have a system like this. If you want it to be corrupt, I mean, it’s just designed to be corrupt.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Designed to be corrupt. I mean, how is it possible that you can go, I remember, I’ll never forget interviewing the mother of a kid who had just died, and then a few months later, her other kid died. So she had two sons, and she lost both of them to this. And it was all because of the pain clinics.

And she was showing me the pain. The painkiller bottles, the prescription bottles that the kid got. It was hundreds and hundreds of pain pills that the kid got from just doctor shopping.

JOE ROGAN: They were just selling them. And the fact that you could doctor shop, the only reason why you would have that it’s not difficult to have a database. I mean, this was 2000. And what. When this was going on what year?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: 2008, 2009. That’s when we did our story.

JOE ROGAN: Plenty of computers, the Internet was around. This could all be prevented.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I know, but everybody was just making so much money. The doctors, the pain clinics, the distributors, the pharmaceutical companies, and the Sackler family. The Sackler family.

JOE ROGAN: Now I know that after Peter Berg’s Netflix series Painkiller came out that they put a halt on because they were supposed to pay an enormous settlement. Like 6 billion. Not really enormous compared to their property.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: I was about to pay them, but it was going to supposedly keep them out of jail. And I think there was a judge that put a halt on that and they started another investigation.

The Sackler Settlement

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: What happened was that the settlement they had agreed to, to settle as long as they were never found, the family itself was never found liable again.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which is f*ed up.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You can’t do that. You’re literally buying your way out of jail when you might be responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And I mean, it’s been a million people who have died in the past 20 something years from the opiate crisis. It’s crazy. I don’t think people realize this.

JOE ROGAN: This family thinks they’re going to be able to buy their way out of being responsible for maybe a million people dead.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: With a drop in the bucket. I mean, they’re not directly guilty of all those deaths, but they created the problem of the opiate crisis, the biggest drug epidemic in America’s history. And they’re paying, buying their way out with a profit of the drop in the bucket of the profit.

JOE ROGAN: Compared to what they have. Yeah. They’re not even going to feel it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: $6 billion. Oh, it’s so evil. Yeah, it’s just so evil. Yeah. They tracked down the guy who approved it for the FDA. Do you know that?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No.

JOE ROGAN: He was living in a small town in New Hampshire and apparently they’d taken this guy, would not approve it. And then they got him in a hotel for a weekend and the pharmaceutical drug companies. And no one knows what happened in the hotel. No one knows what they did, what kind of deal they made or what happened. But when they got out, he approved it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: He approved what?

JOE ROGAN: He approved OxyContin from just the original approving of OxyContin.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Do you think he was bribed to do that?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think he did it because he’s a nice guy. I mean, I don’t know what.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But OxyContin has its place, like for terminally ill cancer patients, for people dealing with a lot of pain. There’s a reason why people. It should be available for those in need.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But that’s not how they were selling it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No, they were not. In fact, the ads at the time from Purdue Pharma was that less than 1% of people would become addicted.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That literally that was the number they gave. Less than 1% of addiction rates from this.

JOE ROGAN: Do you know what we found out the other day? Heroin was created to help people who had morphine addiction.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: To try to wean them out.

JOE ROGAN: It was offered as a safe alternative to morphine.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Wow, I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I didn’t know that either. Isn’t that kooky? So it’s like we’ve been doing that forever. Well, I’ve got something better for you called OxyContin. By the way, only 1% of the people get addicted to it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And then it was fentanyl too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Insys Pharmaceutical Case

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You know, when we investigated fentanyl, they started. It started as a drug for terminal cancer patients. And we went after this one company called Subsys, where the guy, the head of that company called John Kapoor was the first, and I believe only until this day, head of a pharmaceutical company to be charged and go to jail.

And we had a whistleblower in our investigation. This was before he was arrested and found out and tried. We had a whistleblower telling us that the company Insys Pharmaceutical, Subsys was the thing. Insys Pharmaceutical was the name of the company that they were doing exactly the same that Purdue Pharma did back in the day, which was in their case, they were actually bribing doctors.

They were taking these doctors all to like, travel experiences around the world and paying them to prescribe their medication. So you’d call and you’d go to the doctor and say, I have a headache. Oh, you should be taking Subsys. It’s a great fentanyl. It’s going to cure your headache. Imagine.

And then the people at the company hired by Insys, they had their insurance department would call insurance and say, oh, this person, you need to approve this medication for this person because they have cancer. They were lying to insurance because it was only approved, insurance would only pay. And these were very expensive drugs if it was for cancer patients. So they would lie.

And so this whistleblower basically opened up the Pandora’s box and told us all about this. And then there was a big investigation into it. And it was the first and only, I believe, pharmaceutical company owner that ever went to prison for it.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But it was the same playbook. It’s crazy. So it’s like it keeps repeating itself.

Evil in the Pharmaceutical Industry

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just evil, right? It’s just evil finds a way to manifest itself through any business. If you got people that are incentivized by money rather than doing the right thing. And evil finds a way to go. Listen, we can just fudge the books. Listen, we can form a study and make this study seem as if it’s a victim.

By the time they get it, by the time they figure it out, we made a lot of money. And that’s the playbook. I mean, that’s how they got Vioxx through. It was like clear email evidence that they knew it was going to cause serious health problems with people that took it. But I believe the exact quote was, “but we believe we will do very well with this.”

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s f*ing crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s evil. It’s evil. And they’re detached from it because they’re not like seeing the person die in front of them. They’re not seeing some child trying to wake their father up and realizing their father is cold and dead because he had an overdose in the middle of the night and no one’s taking them to school because their dad’s dead.

You know, like they don’t see that. They’re sipping scotch in some f*ing country club somewhere and driving around in a Mercedes and they’re just looking at the amount of numbers that they made from that. It’s evil.

The Cost of Medications

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s evil. I remember interviewing a woman, we did a story about fake pharmaceuticals and why I think it’s 20 million Americans that can’t afford their pharmaceuticals. So they go to places like Mexico and online to Indian pharmaceutical companies or fake and buy medication that sometimes works, but a lot of times is counterfeit and is bad and actually can kill.

And I remember interviewing the sort of the head of this big lobby, one of the biggest D.C. lobby groups for pharmaceutical companies and asking her, and she was very happy to be on the show because we were talking about counterfeit, right? And she thought she was going to be able to just talk about how bad counterfeit medications are and how important it is to buy the real medications from real pharmacies.

And I was asking her, but what does it say about the pharmaceutical companies and the health care system in this country when 20 million Americans can’t afford their life saving medications? What do you think that says? And she says, oh, you know, the medications, these, they’re too expensive. We have to figure out a way to bring prices down.

And, you know, they always say that it’s not for profit, it’s for research and development, which is bullshit because a lot of it is used for marketing and a lot of it is used for its profit. Right. They’re making a f*ing ton of money out of it.

JOE ROGAN: They make so much money.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And I asked her, have you ever actually spent time with anyone who’s struggling to buy their medications? As the head of this pharmaceutical lobby, have you spent time with any of these people? She was like, no. Like, straight out, no.

How can you represent the pharmaceutical companies? Know that one of the biggest problems we have in this country is that people cannot afford these medications and not have spent one single minute with a person who has a hard time affording these medications. Right.

JOE ROGAN: That seems evil, too.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But it’s that disconnect that you’re talking about. Right. It’s not actually understanding the problem or wanting to know the people that are being affected by these problems.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And the medications are so expensive. Some medications are so ridiculously expensive. And you realize, like, they’re not. They don’t have to be that expensive. This is just a company making massive amounts of profit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Paying their CEOs millions of dollars.

The Revolving Door Problem

JOE ROGAN: They could stop a lot of that if they cut that revolving door bullshit out. If they made it so that if you work for the FDA, you can’t just hop over to Eli Lilly, like, right away after you leave. Like, you have to wait 10 years.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Say that like, okay, you want a career, some way you can not profit at all from the pharmaceutical drug industry for 10 years after you’re done being a regulator.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I agree with you and I know that it’s a huge conflict of interest. And we’ve seen how bad that can be and how bad it could be. But I also, I try to put myself. If I spent my whole entire career, you know, with ambition and trying to do good, and then I end up at the FDA and I have a chance to do something good, and then I, yeah, whatever happens, I lose my job or I.

JOE ROGAN: You’re in the vampire machine and you realize, like, oh, this whole system’s f*ed. Let me just hop on over to GlaxoSmithKline.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out, like, what.

JOE ROGAN: I want to get a house in the suburbs.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I know, I know. But I try to look at it through other eyes and see like, okay, we have to figure out what these people are going to do because what do you do after if you can’t work for 10 years? This is what they’ve lived all their lives working in. Right?

JOE ROGAN: Sort of. But I think it’s incentivized. I think they are making laws and pushing things specifically at the behest of the pharmaceutical drug industry, knowing that there’s a golden parachute awaiting them.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. But I don’t think all of them. I think a lot of people, and I’ve interviewed the head of the CDC, it was a while back, we did a story about. Anyway, I’ve interviewed some of these government officials that work at the FDA and I don’t think all of them are there with bad intentions.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no. But a lot of the ones that do know it’s available. And the shocking number of people that leave those positions of being a regulator and go over to work for the pharmaceutical drug. I mean that’s a kind of crazy conflict of interest.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, it is.

JOE ROGAN: You’ve been passing laws and winking at people and shaking hands and playing golf with them and then you make it easy for them and then all of a sudden you work for them and you’re making a million and a half a year.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, of course it is a lot.

JOE ROGAN: Of people like that. And that’s why it’s a dirty a business. And then you got a dirty a business because they sponsor all the news like “brought to you by Pfizer,” Anderson Cooper “brought to you by Pfizer.” Bananas in this country.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It only exists in America.

Media and Pharmaceutical Conflicts

JOE ROGAN: You know, Calley Means was talking about this and said the issue is not that this way more people will buy their drugs. The issue is now the media won’t criticize their drugs because they need it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh my God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’re financially invested in these companies. They’re partners basically. Without the pharmaceutical drug companies, I think cable news would be in deep shit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Well, as a member of the media, I’ve never had that problem. I have never had and I have investigated as you know. But I’ve never had my boss tell me I can’t.

JOE ROGAN: Of course. But you look at the kind of stuff you do, you know, you’re doing the real stuff like your boots on the ground in the scariest parts of the world. You’re doing a different thing. You’re a real journalist and I really appreciate that.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s, you know, you’re not getting that on TV for the most part. You know, it’s only has to be on a show like yours, but like on TV news, you’re not getting that kind of. I mean, not that kind of investigative journalism that you do as applied to everything.

There’s a lot of conflicts of interest. There’s a lot of people that don’t want you investigating certain things, you know, don’t want you to investigate waste and fraud in government.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And that’s the role of journalism. I mean, people in power have a hard time with the truth.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And their job is to go out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, exactly.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which I know. Which is why, you know, it’s so troublesome that we live at a time where people don’t believe in journalists and think that all journalists are either fake or they’re lying. And that’s a real problem, because it’s a real problem for all of us.

The State of Mainstream Journalism

JOE ROGAN: I think it is. But the one solution to that, I think, is mainstream journalism has to change its way. You can’t just be working as a propaganda arm for the Republican or the Democratic Party, which is what Fox News does and which is what MSNBC does. They stick within the lines.

And you also, it opens the door for independent journalists, which I think is the most promising part of it. The people that come through that, you know, you can count on because they always tell the truth about stuff, and then they develop a reputation, like guys like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, those type of people that work for mainstream organizations and then realize, I’m being constrained. And this is not real journalism. This is not what I signed up for.

Like Matt Taibbi, I trust that guy just with everything. He doesn’t lie. And he’s going to tell you what he knows about this and why he thinks it’s this way and what’s going on, regardless of party lines. Have you ever read “Hate, Inc.” his book? Really f*ing good. He makes the case that Rachel Maddow is Bill O’Reilly on the left. It’s like basically the same thing.

And he’s just talking about this whole industry that’s sort of set up with media to keep everybody at each other’s throats. And that’s what they’re selling. They’re selling hate and outrage every day. And your dad gets home, all these motherf*ers, and he’s yelling at the TV. That’s what that is. It’s like everybody’s being played.

But in your real life, how are you encountering most of this? Most of this you’re not encountering. You don’t need to be this elevated and agitated, but then you’re online, on your Twitter feed, arguing with people. And it’s like, everybody’s going crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, it’s the attention economy. Right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s what we need, a Martin Luther King. We need someone who has a very compelling voice that preaches non-violence and someone who resonates with people because he’s a powerful speaker or she’s a powerful speaker who has this message.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, maybe it’s James Talarico.

Political Extremism on Both Sides

JOE ROGAN: Maybe. Look, he’s a genuinely good man. But that was the point was like if you’re a right winger and you go f* those Antifa people, you gotta realize like, stop, stop being on a team. Because these kooky theocrats, they’re on this side too. They want to turn this entire state into theocracy.

Like, there’s a lot of nutty people on the right to the right wing militias, they’re f*ing insane too. Don’t ignore them. And on the left, hey, don’t ignore Antifa. Hey, don’t light the capitol building on fire. Hey, don’t take over giant chunks of Seattle and change the name of it. Remember that when they did that, do you remember? What did they call it, CHAZ? Remember that? Where they took over and the mayor said maybe it’s the summer of love. They took over blocks of Seattle.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Wait, this was, we’re talking about Antifa.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, what is Antifa? Right? It’s just…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But that’s the thing. I think maybe that’s what Jimmy Kimmel meant when he was, I don’t think they have a handbook.

JOE ROGAN: They have a flag like Antifa has.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, but it’s several different groups, right? It’s not, there’s not one group. It’s not like, you know, some of these right wing groups that are.

JOE ROGAN: But you can say Islamic terrorism. Are you talking about Hamas? Are you talking about Hezbollah? Now there’s a lot of different factions, but the reality is there is Islamic terrorism and there is Antifa.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Absolutely. I mean, like I said, I’ve reported on them. I’m not denying that they exist.

JOE ROGAN: The thing is the people on the left don’t want to do it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s more decentralized is what I mean.

JOE ROGAN: They want to ignore it because they’re the tough guys of the left. They’re the people that are going to go out and do the dirty work that needs to be done. The same way that people would look at like some right wing militias, if they’re right wing, a few extremists. But hey, they keep those left wing people on their toes.

The Rise of Independent Journalism

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right, right, yeah, we need more independent journalists. I think you’re right. Going back to the independent journalists, it’s partly why I’ve now started this podcast on YouTube is because I know it’s a place that I can keep doing if it grows, and I hope it will, doing the kind of reporting that I do, that I don’t have to depend on a Disney or as much as I thank Disney, National Geographic for having me all these years.

It is really important to be able to do independent journalism and not be limited and stop and be told what you can and cannot do. Of course, it is crucial for the health and survival of our democracy. So YouTube is actually an amazing platform for that.

JOE ROGAN: It really is. And fortunately, because of social media, you can kind of suss out who’s legit and who’s just a propagandist. You know, it’s really…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because now, like, if you’re a person who’s an independent journalist, but it seems fishy that you only talk about one issue all the time and then all of a sudden someone finds out, oh, look, this guy gets funding from this organization and this organization is run by this guy and this guy supports, you know, he’s from Russia or whatever.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It is, or just by perpetrating, perpetuating these lies. I will keep my fan base even if I know that is a lie. I don’t even think it’s like they’re being paid to say this. I think that they gave, they get their audience and their followers and pay that way.

JOE ROGAN: They’re also probably not the most nuanced thinkers.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, they’re definitely not the most nuanced thinkers or willing, but it makes them money to not be.

JOE ROGAN: I had a friend who briefly worked on a right wing show and one of the things that the host told him was, hey man, you gotta stay and defend the party. Like whatever the party says, like whatever, you gotta go with that and get them on your side. That’s how you build an audience.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And he was like, right, but that’s exactly it.

JOE ROGAN: My friend was like, I’m out, I’m done. No, I’m not doing that. Like, I’m going to tell you my opinions on things. And some of my opinions are very left wing, so I’m not doing that. So he left. Kudos to him.

But this is the world that we’re living in now where it’s like people decide that they’re going to only adhere to one ideology and you don’t realize how malleable humans are. It’s so easy to form group and have everybody like get a part of it and have an ideology. And it could be positive or it could be negative. And if it’s negative and everybody’s on board with it, then you got Hamas or then you’ve got, you know, whatever, whatever organization is. You’ve got the, you know.

The Danger of Tribalism

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Absolutely, yeah, fill it out. I think it’s a comfortable, it’s a much more comfortable way of living to believe that there’s bad people and then you’re the good people part. Right. And there’s that other side and you’re on this side, you’re on the good side. Right.

JOE ROGAN: You just gotta never be willing to do evil because you think you’re doing it against evil people. You can’t do that because then you’re evil. Like you’re the thing you’re trying.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which is interesting. We did a story about assassins and we interviewed an assassin in America and an assassin in South Africa, which has the highest rates of assassins. And that is exactly what they said when they justified what they do, which is the worst of the worst crime. Right. You’re taking away somebody’s life.

But that is, their justification was that they were killing bad people. And so they’re, you know, God was on their side and they were killing bad people. But it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit, not on the assassin level, but it’s a little bit that, that idea, like.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that’s a crazy rationalization. You know, that’s what Genghis Khan used to say that he was killing.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: There was a famous quote of Genghis Khan.

JOE ROGAN: You must have done something horrible for God to break me.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That I’m your punishment. The punishment of God. That was his quote. It’s the craziest quote from a guy that killed 50 million people in his lifetime or responsible at least indirectly to 50 plus million people dying. Yeah, but imagine that among, you know, God must have sent me. You must be terrible if God sent me.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, when you bring God to the equation.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but the thing, but that’s how crazy people could rationalize evil. That like, I’m working for God to just destroy this whole village. I’m going to kill a million people in this village and stack their bodies up in the center. That’s what Genghis Khan did. He said, well, God must have really hated you. He sent me.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, people could do that with anything. And this is the problem with tribalism. This is the problem with being on a team, because if you’re on the left, you hate the people on the right. If you’re on the right, you hate the people on the left. And you know, you wear your outfits, like, maybe you have blue hair, you got an American flag T-shirt, you know, and everybody hates everybody. It’s like, for what?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right? And then they’re on social media talking about stuff with so many opinions, but with no actual knowledge. Like, not once having spent time actually on the ground looking at any of these issues. Right, right. They talk about these immigrant raid, immigration raids, or drugs coming across, but not one single one of these people that have all these opinions have actually spent a f*ing day reporting on it.

Immigration Enforcement and Statistics

JOE ROGAN: I saw one of the conversations with Tom Homan where they were saying that 70% of the people that they catch coming across, which was bullshit. Let me say this. 70% of the people that they catch and send back are criminals.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Bullshit.

JOE ROGAN: Even if it was true, why don’t you get that down to 100%? Like, why don’t you figure out who’s not a criminal? And then you’ll have everybody on your side. Like, if you’re only deporting gang members, no one would be complaining. If you’re only going after known gang members and getting them only going after known scammers, criminals, fraudsters, armed robbery, whatever anybody’s doing, then you’d have everybody on your side.

Like, 30% is crazy. Imagine if that applied to most things. Like if most people who are accused of a crime, 30% were…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: 70% were guilty, 30% were innocent.

JOE ROGAN: 3 out of 10. And everyone’s getting f*ing snatched up en masse.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But you know that that number is not correct. It’s actually 40% that have some sort of criminal history. Criminal history. But a lot of times it’s nonviolent. It can be a misdemeanor. It can be actually a parking ticket. And only 7% of the people being deported have been, have criminal, have been charged with criminal violence. So the numbers are insane.

JOE ROGAN: I wonder if they could mitigate some of this if they just change the way the census works. But I don’t think they can. I think it’s a constitutional thing. I think it’s the way the Constitution is written. I think it has something to do with the way it says it. It doesn’t say lawful citizens. I think it says people living.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: People.

JOE ROGAN: People living. Which is, you know, kind of, you know, they’re people. They’re just people. Like people with paperwork or people not paperwork. We just got to figure out who’s a f*ing criminal. That’s it. That should be the only thing that…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Everybody agrees on, which takes money and resources. Right. It’s a lot harder to do it.

The Reality of Modern Scams and Forced Labor

JOE ROGAN: Well, they think that they were moving people into this country politically to get these people eventually a pathway to citizenship, and then they would have lifelong voters. And this is what. But this is the allegations of why they were moving people to luxury hotels in New York City and paying them and doing it in Chicago as well, where the people that were poor, that were living in Chicago were like, hey, we’re not getting these resources. Like, why are you giving these resources to people that just came here from another country?

This is obviously before all the ICE raids, which have completely changed public opinion. So that’s where it gets really f*ed up. Because there’s people that probably would have been willing to vote Republican again because they didn’t like what the Democrats were doing, because essentially they had a dead man who was pretending to be president. And then they just had some people running the government from behind the scenes. We’re not really sure who that was. And that doesn’t seem right. So I voted Republican.

There’s a lot of people that feel that way. And then they see this and they’re like, I can’t support that. I can’t support this heartless shit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Exactly. I agree 100%.

JOE ROGAN: And I’m sure I catch shit for it online. But I don’t read it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You definitely read it, right? I don’t read it online.

JOE ROGAN: Stories, you got to. If you have to. If you’re in a position like I’m in, you have to stay sane. And the only way to stay sane is to say as conflict free as possible. So even though I talk a lot of shit, I don’t read anything anybody says back. Like, say it all. You’re allowed to. You should be.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I read it all. I mean, I don’t read what people are posting, but I read all the messages I get sent and everything, and I reply and everything.

JOE ROGAN: That’s very nice of you. It’s just, it’s not tenable at my.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, of course not.

JOE ROGAN: But it would be nice if I knew they were going to be nice. People that I meet are almost all nice. Yeah, I mean, universally nice people.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So much easier to be mean online than it is face to face. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Even people that I know don’t like me. Certain people, I could say what I mean, I say hi, and they like hi. And they don’t like me, because I represent stuff, but they’re not mean to me. You know, whereas in the privacy of their own home or sitting on the toilet, they could say the most awful shit on Twitter. I don’t need to read that.

And I would probably say it if I was them, too. That’s the thing. If you feel powerless and voiceless and you see someone doing something that you don’t agree with, and then you have this Twitter account and you just like, f* that guy. I get it, I understand it, but I can’t read it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. No, I don’t think you should. You have to start drinking again if you.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I never drank for that reason. I always drank for fun. I just, you know, I think social media for the most part, is net positive. I think.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You think so?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I do.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, I love it and I use it and I use it as a tool from the work that I do, 100%. But I’m a very optimistic person and I always thought, you know, there’s a reason, you know, there’s great ways of using social media like you do, but with young people nowadays and young.

The Impact of Social Media

JOE ROGAN: People, it’s very challenging. But this is what I think. Information is almost always good. And then the understanding that some of the information is bad is good because then you realize, oh, don’t trust everything. Figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. And then finding verifiable, accurate sources of information is good.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, that’s what I think is harder and harder to do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but you can do it. But the point is, at least more information is available now than ever before, which just makes it very difficult for governments to pull off stuff that they were trying to pull off before. It makes it very difficult for people to get scammed like they were getting scammed in the past.

It’s just, there’s going to be a bunch of people that get duped no matter what, and there’s going to be a bunch of people that get kidnapped by social media, meaning that their attention span and their focus, their life becomes a part of that thing. But I think this is a new and emerging aspect of society that we will navigate and that we will learn from the failures, and it will cost a lot of people their happiness and prosperity.

A lot of people will get wrapped up in that shit and it will f them up. And that’s net negative. Right. But I think we’ll learn from it. Like, you don’t want to get bit by the rattlesnake. You hear that rattle? Get the f out of there. We’ll realize through all these other people’s mistakes, where the pitfalls are. So we’ll have to develop more robust ways of thinking about things and more resilience, more resiliency. And I think that’s the net positive.

And then this communication with people all over the world, net positive. I think ultimately the real problem is the challenging aspect of it is a lot of people you’re communicating with aren’t real. And that’s a giant problem. Now, China was busted using ChatGPT to promulgate. They were using it to. They were going into Reddit forums, and they’re using it on social media, and they were pretending to be people and they were arguing about stuff. And you could just give it a prompt, like, from the position of a white supremacist, say, why all Mexicans should be.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: To create a. To create division. I know. In this country.

JOE ROGAN: I know. Yeah. And so that’s a giant percentage of all social media discourse. So I don’t necessarily think you should be going back and forth with people, but I think as a source of information and news and alternative perspectives and boots on the ground, people like, hey, I’m reporting live from Gaza. Look what they just did to this aid party.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And it was what we thought was going to happen when the Arab Spring happened, you know, because everybody has a phone. And finally we were able to film these amazing, you know, revolutions. But I think that promise has sort of weighted a little bit. I have to point out one thing you said, how scams are not as prevalent these days.

JOE ROGAN: I shouldn’t have said that. That’s not what I meant. Really. I meant the government. It’s more difficult for government. That’s crazy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: We’re living in the golden age of scams.

JOE ROGAN: I get, like, 30 texts a day. The dude that owned my phone number before me, this dude Raymond, was a moron, and. Raymond. Raymond, you f*ing idiot. Did you sign up for everything, bitch? Cause this guy, every day, like, hey, Raymond, your loan’s been approved.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So really fun. I’m going to come on your podcast next year once I’m done with this project. But I’m working on a really fun project for National Geographic, which is where I say yes to every single scam that comes my way.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, boy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I’ve been filming it for a few months, and it’s been a crazy, easiest, wildest journey.

JOE ROGAN: Can you tell us?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No, I just can tell you I have romantic relationships with people.

JOE ROGAN: Hot damn.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I spend a lot of time on my burner phone with people love bombing me, really. But it’s not. It’s a fake Persona. I put a wig and glasses.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, so you use your own picture. You don’t even use AI?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No, I don’t use AI. We actually sort of modified. We put a fake nose on me and a wig and glasses. But people say it doesn’t look at all like me. I can see it’s me. But I will talk. It’s really fascinating.

But also to talk about scams, which I can talk about a lot, is we are living in the golden age of scams. I think it was Warren Buffett that said fraud and scams are the number one growth industry of our time. And one of the stories we did, which is so sad, and I hate to bring it down back to sad topic, but is that we. I didn’t know this before starting to report on it, which a lot of times you think you know these scammers, these guys that are texting and emailing you and calling you, that these are, you know, people in West Africa or, you know, wherever, but like, loan operators. Well, we did a story about these scam factories. Have you heard of these?

JOE ROGAN: No.

Inside the Scam Factories

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s these compounds in places like Cambodia and Myanmar in Asia, where they are, are. It’s basically factories with sometimes with thousands and thousands of people forced labor. So these are mostly people from India, sometimes Brazil, other Asian countries. The Philippines is a big place where they respond to ads to work in what they think are legitimate businesses, to work in online companies and whatnot.

And they are. They pay for their expenses to travel to these places, to Cambodia and Myanmar. In Myanmar, they’re operating out of this area that’s an ongoing civil war and is ruled by these militias. And they get in there, and as soon as they get in, they take away their passports, and they’re trapped and they’re forced to scam.

So they spend 24/7 scamming Americans and European people. And it is an industry where they’re making billions of dollars. The US government just recently seized $15 billion from one company, from one group of people alone in crypto. It’s the craziest thing. So these people are being tortured and beaten, sometimes killed and forced to scam.

So we went actually to Myanmar. We were smuggled into the border into Myanmar, into the country illegally.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Across the river. And spent time in this town that was basically built by these. This Chinese gang that was all with the money of scamming Americans. And they were trying to build, like, a Mini Macau. And the guy that ran the company is called Yatai International. And he took us on a tour of this mini Macau.

And it was so surreal. It was like these aqua parks with no one in the aqua park and these luxury casinos. We ended the night so crazy. We were trying. This guy said he would give us an interview, but first we had to do the tour and the interview would happen the next day.

So we ended a night. This was actually not filmed in a karaoke. That was a massive room where every single. Every wall and the ceiling was all a screen. It was like the future. And this is in a war torn area of a country that’s incredibly poor. And they’ve built this place with millions and billions of dollars from. From profits of scamming.

And we ended the night with this guy who’s basically the head of this criminal Chinese gang running these scams in this karaoke, singing Celine Dion and Whitney Houston and being poured whiskey and whatever high end brand we wanted.

JOE ROGAN: You were getting drunk with them?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh my God. Yeah. I was singing my heart out. I spent the whole night singing Whitney Houston. The videos are so embarrassing because I cannot sing my life. But I was like, we need to get this guy on tape. So I’m just going to do whatever.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And then the next day we interviewed him and it was just f*ing crazy. And we ended our last day. I mean, we interviewed a Chinese dude, so sad, like 21 year old who was caught trying to escape and was. Was chased out of the building. He ran out of a third floor, broke both his legs, one at the hip, practically died. Was actually saved by an onlooker who took him to the hospital and then moved to Thailand where I met him.

He was in a wheelchair, told us about beatings. We spoke to another Indian kid also who was like, they had a water hose on his body. He was forced to stand for 24 hours and then electrocuted. And I mean the videos out of these places were insane. Like people with horrific wounds and people dying and killed and. Yeah, and just forced into scammed scams. Forced to f*ing scam.

JOE ROGAN: Forced into scamming.

Forced Scamming and Human Trafficking

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, forced into scamming. And then we interviewed a girl called Angel who was raped repeatedly by her bosses. And she’s sort of the face model. So a lot of times after speaking to these, what they think are romantic relationships, for a long time they want to see people’s faces. So this is the girl that then they put a fake AI face on top of her. But it has to be a girl because of the mannerisms and the voice.

And they have this girl who actually speaks English and she would talk to victims of scams and pretend that she was the wonderful woman that they’d been dating for months and convince them to put their money into this crypto business that was fake and take millions out of these victims.

So this woman starts crying and telling me how she knows she’s doing something awful and how she’s raped and how she doesn’t want to be doing. And at the end she says, I just want your—I said yes to doing this, even though it’s incredibly dangerous. But I accepted doing this because I just want a message for the victims in America, the people that I’ve spoken to, that I don’t—that I’m sorry. I just want to apologize for all the harm that I’ve caused.

And she’s like in tears, but I have no way. I mean, these are heart wrenching, heart wrenching stories.

Rescue Operations

And the last day we were there, we were able to—there’s this amazing organization called Acts of Mercy, religious based organization that is working to try to get these people out. And a lot of these bosses, actually, if you can pay for ransom, you can pay $10,000 to save a person from there. Because if you’re a bad scammer, if you’re there and you’re horrible, and if you’re sad and depressed and you’re not doing your job, it’s better for these bosses if you just get paid $10,000 to let this person go.

So there was this case of this Filipino woman who the boss had agreed to a $12,000 payment to release her. But it’s really dangerous for—there’s this negotiator that goes and sort of tries to get her out of this compound. But he has to come with the money and he has to be able to pay the crime boss, but he also has to pay the militia to get him in. So it was a whole process.

And we were with this group, Acts of Mercy, and another guy filming them as they’re on the phone negotiating her release. And they’re on the phone with her. She’s inside the scam center and she’s like, “Where do I go?” This scam center is massive. She had no idea where to go.

And they’re saying, “Go to the west gate and the guy is there waiting for you.” She’s like, “I don’t know where to go.” And she’s crying. “If they see me with a phone, because it’s a confiscated phone, they’re going to beat me. And they’re going to put me in the dark room where I’m beaten and tortured for days.”

And Amy, the woman on this side is telling her, “Believe us, there’s somebody waiting for you. Do not be afraid. Bring your phone. We need to be telling you how to get there.” It was this whole ordeal. It was f*ing insane. It was out of a movie.

And in the end, they didn’t manage to get her out that day. But she was released a month later and she made it to safety. But just to show how dangerous and difficult it is, even when they agree to let them go.

Pig Butchering Scams

JOE ROGAN: So what are most of the scams? Are most of the scams crypto scams?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They’re called pig butchering scams. Yeah, that’s the name they give them because it’s a Chinese expression. It started in China. Started as a domestic scam in China, actually. And pig butchering, because the idea is that you fatten the pig, which is your victim, and then you kill them at the end. Right. That’s why it’s called pig butchering.

But the idea is that you meet somebody online and it’s usually a beautiful girl or man, and you create—you start a relationship with that person. You start—

JOE ROGAN: How do they meet them?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You know those texts that you get a lot of times, like, “Hey, I haven’t talked to you.” A lot of those are pig butchering scams. A lot of messages you get on Instagram from these beautiful girls, or they’re—

JOE ROGAN: Stepping it up because I got a few iMessages like that. Not even just a green text bubble anymore. They got iPhones now.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And then they tell you, follow me on Instagram, and then go, let’s go on WhatsApp. And then they are sending you photos of them in their private jets and living this wonderful life.

JOE ROGAN: Is that what they’re doing with you?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: With your—

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: In other ways, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So these scams that you’re—one of—

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: One of the ones we’re trying to get is that we’re getting several different kinds of scams, like Indian call centers and all. But eventually they start saying, “Look, we are living—” And so you’re curious, like, how do you—how are you making so much money? It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been investing in crypto and I can’t really tell you much about it now.”

So they last—it can last months. And at some point they’re like, “Okay, I built a relationship. Yeah, I’m going to tell you how I do it. You’ve got $5,000 right now.” And then you put the $5,000, and then they show profit on these fake websites. It looks completely legitimate.

And you’re saying, “Oh, my God, I put $5,000 and now I have $10,000. How much more can I put in?” So people are going all in, and they’re like, everything. They have 401ks, they’re remortgaging their houses, everything.

The Kansas Banker Case

And then did you hear the cases about the guy in Kansas? No, the bank. The guy that was the head of this bank in Kansas. Jamie, did you hear about this? It’s a f*ing fascinating story. It was a story in the New York Times, and then it got reported everywhere. I was trying to get this guy to talk to me because his story is fascinating.

So this guy, amazing member of the community, small town in Kansas. The local bank that was started by the farmers decades ago. It’s where all the farm community would put their money, would trust this bank. Well, it turns out that this guy, the head of this bank that everybody trusted, upstanding member of the community, stole millions of dollars from the bank. And the bank went bankrupt.

And he was stealing the money because he was being scammed by a pig butchering scam. And it started with him putting his own money. And then they kept on saying that in order to release the funds and all the millions that he’d made from his initial investment, he would put in more and more money. I think he ended up putting in something like $47 million from customer accounts.

JOE ROGAN: To scammers, depleting the bank’s holdings. When a state banking regulator uncovered this fraud, it closed the bank and called the FBI. Whoa. He started slow, investing a few thousand dollars in 2022 to buy what he thought was cryptocurrency. Oh, my goodness.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: How sad is that?

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, awful. Obviously he was stealing from his customers, but I find it—so he actually traveled to Australia at one point, thinking he was going to meet the people that owed him money. I mean, he actually was completely scammed. And this is the head of a bank. The head of a f*ing bank.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s f*ing crazy. These guys are so good.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. They get a banker, but he’s a banker in Kansas, though. You know what I’m saying?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Come on, don’t be mean.

JOE ROGAN: Sorry, Kansas, but you know what I’m saying.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: He’s in prison now.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, well, he should be. He stole $47 million. But he’s also a dumbass. And the crazy thing is that you could be a dumbass and be a smart person. If greed gets involved, greed is—for greed, I think greed, greed for shady people. It’s almost, it’s kind of fascinating because you’ve got to know at one point in time this is not smart. But the greed is like, but what if it is.

The Psychology of Scam Victims

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But I think more than greed, I think it’s the acceptance that you have lost all that money and that must weigh so heavily on you. If you have, if you’re about to foreclose your home, if you’d sent all the money from your kids’ college funds, if—

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I mean, the banker. Yeah, but even the banker, I mean—

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But even the banker, he sent all his—initially it was all right, but then he started stealing. That’s all greed, I don’t think. I think it got to a point that he was swindled and made to believe that if you give more money, he would get the money that he gave back.

JOE ROGAN: One million. He would get back and he would—

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Give back the $45 million that he gave. He stole from his customers. I think the realization, and this is something that I know from talking to so many scamming victims, it’s not so much about wanting to make that money. It’s the realization that you’ve been talking to somebody that’s not real and that you have been so swindled.

And I don’t want to use the word dumb because I think all of us can fall victims to these scams. But the acceptance of that is really difficult. So you just want to keep on believing it. You just pay whatever you need to pay. So the dream stays alive.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a Carl Sagan quote about that, that it’s easier to convince a person—it’s harder to—once a person has been swindled, it’s much more difficult to convince them of the swindle. They’ll find ways to justify that. It must be true.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: 100%. I feel that experiment I’m doing right now, I mean, even though I know I’m being swindled, but there’s something about once you’re deep in that relationship, it’s—yeah, it does something funny to you.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also exciting. Right. And that’s the problem is that most of life is boring. And if you’re involved in something that may or may not yield money or may or may not yield some sort of romantic relationship, or may or may not yield a drug deal or a—

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Celebrity scam, huge these days. If you’re talking—if you think you’re talking to, you know, Brad Pitt. Yeah, yeah. Maybe your life has a meaning, right? There’s a reason why you’re here. There’s something exciting happening.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if you have a 65 IQ. That’s the problem. There’s a lot of dumbasses out there, and it’s not fair to scam those people. Some scams we tolerate, like televangelists. We’re like, look, if you really believe that guy with the private jet and the Bentley, that guy, you need to send him money because God wants you to send him money. You’re on your own. It’s such a dumb scam. It’s so out in the open.

Astrology and Psychic Scams

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Astrology is another one I’ve been looking into.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if astrology is 100% bullshit. This is my take on astrology. I think at one point in time they had some knowledge about astrology that may or may not be lost. Maybe some people understand it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I’m a believer like you, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: There’s thousands of books that are—ancient books. I don’t know, thousands, but a lot written about the very specific details of astrology, in terms of where the constellations are, what time of the day it is, where the Earth is in relationship to Mars. It’s very weird stuff because I want to know what the f* was the origin of all this?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right? Absolutely. I meant psychic scammers. Sorry? Not astrology. I meant psychic scammers.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, psychic scammers. Yeah, psychic scammers.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I’m a believer in astrology as well.

JOE ROGAN: I think there’s something to real astrology. I need to get a real astrologer on. I’ve tried to find one that I think is legit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: What sign are you, by the way?

JOE ROGAN: I am a Leo.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, of course you were.

JOE ROGAN: Of course. That’s ridiculous.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So is my son. So is my dad. It’s one of my favorite signs. I’m a Taurus.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. I don’t know. I think that newspaper astrology is bullshit.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, of course it is.

JOE ROGAN: But I don’t know that real astrology is nonsense.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Do you get that a lot? That when you say you’re a Leo, they say, yeah, of course you are.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve heard it before. Yeah. Why? I don’t know.

Astrology and Celestial Influences

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, because you like the spotlight, right? Which is my son and my dad as well.

JOE ROGAN: Is that what it is? A spotlight?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Leos like to. What is it like attention. They like attention. Yeah. I think I’m a little Leo as well. But I’m a Taurus, I’m strong.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’ve heard, like bullheaded. I’ve heard, you know, strong willed.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That’s Leo.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Taurus as well, right? The bull. Yeah. But I don’t. What I’m talking about is like the super specific stuff, like you were, you were born at 3am, you were conceived nine months before that. When were you conceived? What was going on? Like, how did this. Where what in the procession of the equinoxes? Where’s the position of the Earth? You know, there’s a lot of weird stuff they take into consideration.

I’m like, wow, I’d really like to learn about it, like from someone. I’m going to have someone on that really understands. I just have to have someone on who’s not a kook. And that’s the problem is it’s like one of those disciplines that’s littered with kooks.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right? Yeah. I find it fascinating too. And I’m a non believer in everything. I’m very skeptical about everything. But astrology I’ve always kind of believed into. I mean it’s the idea that where the sun and the stars, they have an effect on tides and currents and why wouldn’t that all have an effect?

I mean, I know nothing about it, but why wouldn’t it have an effect of. On you when you’re born and when and where the time.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And it’s probably a part of nature’s natural order too, to create a bunch of different kinds of people.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Because, I mean, what makes you who you are? There’s a lot of factors, right? There’s environment, there’s genetics, and then there’s probably some celestial sh*t going on. Yeah, maybe I’m not, you know, I don’t know enough about it, but I’m open to it because I think there’s a lot of information that was lost.

I think there’s a lot of information that we would dismiss, you know, from ancient civilizations that we dismiss that. I think, I think the problem is that these ancient civilizations collapsed. And like with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, you’re left with very little, like a lot, A lot of like very important information is missed.

And so then you got to kind of like go, well that seems like bullsh*t. That seems like old folksy stuff. Like maybe, or maybe there was like, maybe they had figured something out over a long period of time and there was a science to it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right? Yeah, you should have an astrologist on that would be super interesting.

Remote Viewing and UFO Disclosure

JOE ROGAN: First time one is not crazy, you know, like a psychic. Like get a psychic on some crazy. I’ve had people on that were remote viewers. That’s another weird one you have. Yeah. How put. Hal Puthoff was. He was running some various programs for the United States government specifically.

I had him on though, to not talk about remote viewing, to talk about UFOs. And he was actually brought on board during Herbert Walker Bush’s administration. They. Well, he was working for the government at the time, but they brought him on as one of the scientists that they’d got a group of people from various disciplines and they said, we’re going to compile a list of pros and cons in terms of the impact of society of disclosure of alien life.

And this is what they were telling him. We have recovered crashed UFOs and we are doing back engineering programs on them. We have for years. We also have recovered biological entities. We are thinking about disclosing this information to the American public. I want you to compile a list on the positive aspects of disclosure, how it will affect society and give a numerical value to these things. And then negative.

And all these scientists came up with a much higher negative than positive. And so they didn’t disclose.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And what. Do you know what the list was? What were negative?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was religion, government, the economy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Those were all negatives.

JOE ROGAN: Those were all negatives.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It could affect religion, it could affect.

JOE ROGAN: The economy, it would affect government. And the fact that no one would ever listen to the President because he’s just a btch. The fing aliens are hovering over our head abducting people every day.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So this is why I think it would be interesting. I actually think that there’s a positive if it were to happen right now because it sure as hell would bring us all together.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, well, that was. Reagan said that. You ever see that speech?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No.

JOE ROGAN: It was a famous speech that he gave in front of the United Nations. And I think he gave this speech at a time where, you know, this was like Gorbachev, tear down that wall. It was that kind of speech where it was like trying to unite us all together. And his speech was, imagine if we were all faced with an alien threat from another world, how quickly we would unite together. Yeah, we would.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, we need it now more than ever. So if they’re out there.

JOE ROGAN: I know, but is that the only way we can unite? We have to be threatened by another enemy like God? We’re so f*ing warlike. We’re so warlike. We need an interstellar war to unite America and the rest of the world.

Political Division and Social Media

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s so sad because it didn’t used to be like that. Right. Politics wasn’t something that people talked about all day long, all the time.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the negative aspect of social media.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. Because this is all people talk about. Like, even us. There’s so much interesting stuff to talk about, and yet we’ve spent time talking about politics because.

JOE ROGAN: But we’re talking about the fascinating aspects of politics as it affects human civilization and how discourse.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yes. But also like the division and the right and the left, and being careful with what you say, because what if the other side did this and that? It’s now in every single home, in every single conversation people have. And it’s just. It didn’t used to be like that. It just didn’t.

Like government was there, it existed. It’s supposed to work. Well, if it’s not, hopefully there are good journalists out there exposing what’s not working out well. But it should not be. The discourse all the time about whether you’re right wing, you’re left wing, whether you’re with us or not or against us. And it just taints everything and takes too much space.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: For other conversations, with much more important conversations that we should be having. Whether it’s about AI, whether it’s about social media, whether it’s about aliens. They’re much bigger problems that are coming in our future.

And we shouldn’t be so sort of tunnel focused on whether we’re, you know, whether what we’re saying is approved by the right or the left or whether this or that. It’s just.

JOE ROGAN: This is an amazing waste of mental resources. And it’s also a way for very uninteresting people to attach themselves to a worthy cause.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: People that have nothing else going on in their life. And all of a sudden it’s this. Whatever issue it is, whatever issue it is, that’s their whole identity and they go all in. And it’s generally a distraction for a failed life.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I think so, too.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a lot of it. It’s not doing what you really want to do, not having the relationships you really want to have, the friendships you really want, and instead you’re involved in this f*ing stupid cause. That’s so dumb.

But you’re right. If the aliens showed up, we’d probably all unite together. But unfortunately, like, I feel like the most united moment that I could remember in my adult life was right after September 11th.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, same.

JOE ROGAN: Were you in America at the time?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I was in New York.

JOE ROGAN: You were in New York? Oh, boy.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, I was.

September 11th and Early Journalism

JOE ROGAN: How different was the feeling where everybody was, like, smiling to each other and saying hi on the street afterwards, the elevators.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I mean, I did the initial reporting for Portugal for Portuguese television that day. So I was at Columbia University’s journalism school. I just moved to New York on the month before.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. And I think it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Where were you living?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I was living on 72nd and Broadway.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so you’re Upper west, pretty far away from the actual.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Did you go down?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah. So I didn’t go to ground zero, but I went to midtown, to the rooftop of this building where everybody was doing sort of the satellite live feed. So you had journalists from all over the world. Meanwhile, I was 24, 25 years old. I’m like, zero experience doing a live feed. I was. I just moved to the United States.

It’s actually. It’s an interesting story how I even got to the US because, you know, I applied for Columbia University three times. The first time, I was not accepted. The second time, I was put in a wait list and didn’t get accepted. The third time, I flew to New York and I knocked on the dean’s door and I explained, I’m Portuguese. I really want to come to this university. I want to be a journalist in America. And he sat me down, we spoke for an hour, and that year I was accepted.

JOE ROGAN: That’s amazing. It’s amazing that you could do that.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And it taught me my first big important lesson in journalism, which is get in there. Persistence. Don’t be afraid to get no’s because, I mean, what’s the worst that can happen, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Impact of 9/11 on Journalism

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But a month after this, I’m in New York and sleeping in the morning, and I start getting phone calls. And I was sleeping that late because I’d been studying until really late that night, the night before. And the first phone I picked up was my television station that I’d worked for in Portugal. I’d done an internship there and worked there.

And they called me and said, “Hey, turn on your television.” And it was when the first tower had collapsed. And they said, “Turn on the television and see what’s happening.” I had no idea this was happening. And they said, “We need you to go to midtown and do the… we have no Portuguese journalists in Manhattan. They’re all, our journalists are in D.C. or they are outside of Manhattan. Manhattan had been locked down. You need to go down and do the live reporting for us of what’s happening.”

And suddenly my cell phone started ringing, and it was my mother who was crying and begging me not to leave the house. And I had to explain to her, “Mom, this is my dream, to become a journalist. It’s part of my job. And I have to go.”

Anyway, an hour later, I was at the rooftop of this building, surrounded by all these journalist heroes of mine that I grew up watching on live television and shaking. I was so nervous. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to put two words together. So nervous. And I ended up doing my live report, and it all went well, and I was ecstatic. I was so happy. I was, “Oh, my God, I did it. I did it. I have a future in this profession that I really want to be a journalist. And this is great.”

And then I will never forget, and I get emotional every time I talk about this, but I will never forget just walking down to the streets and seeing the first people looking for their loved ones. And it’s like the posters with the faces of the husbands and the children and not knowing where they were.

And that moment totally changed my life because, sorry, it was a moment that I… yeah. First of all, realization, what the f*? This is not about you. And this is about something so much bigger that’s happening where so many people are affected by this.

And it was the moment also that I realized that the kind of journalism that I wanted to do was try to understand why this sort of evil happens in the world and how do things like this exist. And a year after I graduated from Columbia, I moved to the Middle East and I enrolled in the University of Damascus in Syria to learn Arabic and to try to do… I did my first story as a freelance journalist about the jihadis who were crossing to Iraq to fight against the Americans. That was the first story I ever did as a freelance journalist.

And so, yeah, so I was there on 9/11, and remember, after reporting going to school and going up to my building and meeting strangers on the streets, and everybody was just looking at each other and hugging each other, and so much love and support. And it lasted for months, and it was really beautiful. And everybody came together and it was a beautiful, beautiful thing.

JOE ROGAN: And everybody went right back to being…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: A father, and everybody went back to this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which is… yeah. Which is me against you, which is so sad.

Unity Through Tragedy

JOE ROGAN: Well, for just that one brief moment, I realized for that, during that time when everybody had that American flag on their car and they were driving around with it in LA, which is one of the most unpatriotic places in the country. They all had American flags in their car. It was a crazy moment. And I realized, oh, this is possible. To unite us. We don’t have to be in this stupid mindset. But why does it take something terrible? Why does it take a tragedy for us to be united?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And you know what’s so sad is that 3,000 people died on that day. Right. I’m going to bring it back to drug and alcohol addiction. But 3,000 people die every single week in America from addiction, from drug and alcohol addiction. These crises are happening every day. And yes, let’s actually unite to do some good and to try to solve problems instead of dividing to try to figure out how to hate more another person.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And how to separate us all.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know that and I know that. And we both live that way.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Why talk in circles about this?

JOE ROGAN: What’s going on? We need to get the rest of the world on board. We need to get people to stop paying attention to all this shit and just learn how to be nicer.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. I agree.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, there’s… you don’t have much time in this. Life doesn’t last as long as you think it does.

The Power of Empathy

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No. And just have empathy. It’s my main message. It’s just try to place yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Don’t be quick to judge. Actually try to understand why these migrants are coming to this country. Why these people are carrying drugs on their backs and excruciating, difficult work and dangerous work. Why are they doing it instead? And why are people scamming? Try to understand why they’re doing what they do. And once you understand the root causes, then you can actually make a difference and try to change that and actually have an impact.

JOE ROGAN: Absolutely.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which is much harder. Much harder to try to solve it that way.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, much harder. It’s hard for people to have empathy, too. Some people, especially if they’re just tired all the time and exhausted and they’re unhealthy and their life sucks and they just want other people… f*. And they don’t see those people. They don’t feel it. They’re not.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They need a Martin Luther King.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: They need a James Baldwin.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we need someone like that, for sure. We need someone who’s got, someone who is a powerful speaker, too. They have to be charismatic. That has a message of non-violence and love, because it’s really the only way. You don’t get anything from violence other than more violence, unless you’re the biggest, baddest bully. And then you squash everything around you and great, now you’re a dictator. Not good for any of us.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: No, it doesn’t.

JOE ROGAN: It’s contrary to what we’re supposed to be about in the first place. This is supposed to be the United States of America. We’re supposed to be a community.

Patriotism and Politics

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I don’t think that LA is the most unpatriotic. I know you don’t like LA. I still live there and I know you don’t like it, but I disagree that it’s unpatriotic.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think it is?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Why would you say it’s unpatriotic? California is an incredible state. I know.

JOE ROGAN: If you have an American flag in front of your house, people will call you racist. That’s a fact.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I haven’t seen that happen.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a fact. That’s a fact. There’s a lot of indoctrinated young kids perhaps.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And those people are assholes and not… they’re as full of hate as the other people.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t get that in Texas.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. But you also have places in America where if you have an LGBTQ flag on the front of your door, you’re called lots of other things.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. So that goes both ways.

JOE ROGAN: Well, well, that’s not necessarily patriotism, that’s just being an intolerant asshole. But I think that the real problem with Los Angeles is the government and the fact that they want to ignore the rampant fraud and the fact that everything is so over-regulated it’s impossible to get permits for things. So industry’s leaving, the overtaxing.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Have you read Ezra Klein’s book about this?

JOE ROGAN: No, I have not.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve heard him giving a bunch of interviews about it.

JOE ROGAN: He’s getting attacked for it. Now people are saying he’s leaning right, which is hilarious.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But it’s about how if you’re… he’s a Democrat, as you know, but how Democrats have to figure out how to make the system work and how to build things and how to and not do what you were saying, create all these limits and these problems for building houses in the Palisades.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s also the problem is that Democrats are the Democrats of 2025, not the Democrats of 1994. If you go back to the Democrats and Bill Clinton was President, it was a totally different thing. Bill Clinton, if you hear him talk, he sounds like a populist that is going after criminals. Yeah. Pretty pro-America. It’s, that’s what everybody can get on board with. It’s that’s the real problem is these ideologies shift with special interests and money and funding and propaganda, and then they become something unrecognizable. They become something that supports war, that becomes something that suppresses free speech. They become something that was entirely in direct opposition to what it would have been in 1985.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s, yeah, but not all. Not all.

JOE ROGAN: Of course not all. But this is the same problem, because it’s if you decide I’m a right winger, you’re supposed to take in all of that. You’re supposed to… that guy said to my friend, you got to support a party across the… that’s the only way. You got to get them on your side. Even if I don’t agree at all with what they say, I have to bite my tongue because I’m a part of a gang now. F* off. And that’s the problem, is that we only have two stupid parties and…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Huge problem.

The Two-Party System

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, you do have a Liberty… I’ve voted Libertarian twice, but it’s kind of f* these people. I’m going to vote for nothing. That’s never going to win. Which is crazy to say, but that is kind of what it is. And then you see other countries that have six, seven…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah, Portugal and the majority of European countries, the Netherlands.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a lot of countries that have multiple parties.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And, yeah, obviously there’s division, but there’s nothing like the division that exists in the US right now.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the negative aspect of social media, I believe. I believe it’s ramping up people, and it’s pushing the divide even further. But what I’m hoping is that this is a growing pain and that we’ll sort through this, but we need nonviolent leaders that are very intelligent. That also makes sense to both people, which I do think is possible. Both groups, both ideologically captured sides, which I do think is possible, because in the middle is where we all live.

In the middle is where all we live. We all want safety, we all want education. We all want fairness. We all want to make sure that no one’s polluting. And good access to resources and a chance to make a life for yourself and pursue your dreams. That’s what we all want. All that other stuff is just dividing points.

One of the things I had Rep. Luna on the podcast, we were talking about something and she said they don’t want to fix this issue because they can fund their campaign with it.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Of course, I mean, that’s immigration to a country.

JOE ROGAN: But isn’t that crazy? Politicians will fail to resolve an issue on purpose because they want to raise funds by campaigning on this issue.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It is disgusting. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so gross. That is un-American. That’s truly evil.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Truly evil. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And when she said, I was, oh, I didn’t think of that, but I kind of did, but I didn’t want to believe it. And then coming out of someone’s mouth who works in government, I’m, oh, f*.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right. If you stand for a cause, right. And that, and you’re seen as the person that can potentially solve that problem and then that problem goes away, then you don’t have a platform to stand on. So a lot of times you don’t want to solve that problem.

JOE ROGAN: Geez.

The Broken Immigration System

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And I think in many ways that’s what immigration has done because it is not possible that we have the broken immigration system that we have. We have the backlog of people trying to become, to get papers who can’t. We don’t have a way for people who want to come to this country legally to come to this country legally.

It’s been decades and decades of this and we haven’t been able to figure out how to solve this problem. And it has to be because it benefits all politicians that this hasn’t been solved.

JOE ROGAN: Well, another very high level politician told me once, I can’t remember if he said it on the podcast, I don’t want to say his name, but that he had a conversation with a man who was the CEO of a large corporation and said he was very opposed to tightening up the border because he needs the illegal immigrants for the workforce. He said it openly.

So that’s part of it too. They want cheap labor because it helps their bottom line. And as long as those people don’t have paperwork, they have to shut the f* up. They can’t demand better work rights.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Which is a problem also now with the raids is that a lot of violence is happening. Even if it’s rapes or domestic abuse and people are just, even if they’re going through this, they’re not going to call the police because they’re afraid of being deported.

JOE ROGAN: They’re scared they’re going to get deported.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: It’s an overcorrection after overcorrection without actually fixing the f*ing left and right and left and right. And that’s where you get real cynical. You’re like, I think these people like it like this. I think they like all this crazy shit.

Political Disengagement and Cynicism

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s difficult not to get cynical. And actually, to me, it’s always heartbreaking when you hear people saying that they don’t vote or they don’t really, they’re not into politics. They don’t care about what’s happening because politicians are all the same. They’re completely disengaged. And to me, that’s heartbreaking.

JOE ROGAN: It is heartbreaking.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: That’s taking the power away from people.

JOE ROGAN: The other thing you think about these dark times is they call for people to rise up. Not like rebel, I mean, they call for a hero. And that’s what we always hope for. We’re like, maybe there’s one person’s going to figure this out. Maybe there’s going to be this person that emerges, this real leader.

And they’re looking at the Democratic Party and they’re like, no, there’s no one there. Who’s it going to be? I don’t think Talarico is trying to run for president. So outside of him, who really makes sense? You got a bunch of people that are just politicians, politics as usual. And then once they get inside…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: You have a bunch of cowards on the Republican side that when they’re seeing this stuff happening, even though we know that they don’t agree with that 100%, we know they know it’s morally wrong. They’re too afraid to speak out.

Insider Trading in Politics

JOE ROGAN: And they’re all insider trading. All of them. On top of that, they’re all making… It’s crazy. You see, they’re making $170,000 a year. They get into office within a couple years, they’re worth $10 million, they’re worth $15 million. And you look at it, it’s all stock trades.

This is bananas, that this is legal. You motherf*ers. Put Martha Stewart in jail. Tried her for insider trading and got her.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Martha Stewart, you mean.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I say Martha Quinn. That’s the MTV VJ. Sorry. Martha Stewart.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I love Martha Stewart.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so funny.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I really want to have her on my podcast.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, she’s a badass lady. But they put her in jail. They put Martha Stewart in jail.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Have you watched the doc about her? It’s so good.

JOE ROGAN: No, she’s quite a lot, but you also have to be quite a lot to become that person. That’s how you become that person.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: She’s a proud bitch. And I love it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of funny. You could say the same thing about a lot of people that are very famous. Well, listen, it’s always great to talk to you. I really appreciate you coming here and you do amazing work. You really do. It’s so courageous and so necessary, and I think you provide a window into various aspects of life on this planet that otherwise people would not have access to.

The Hidden Third Podcast

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Thank you. And I hope the podcast will be the continuation of that.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure it will be. So the hidden third. And it is available on YouTube. Is it available everywhere?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Everywhere, everywhere.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s this first guy you have here?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Fabian Alomar is an amazing guy. That’s the retired FBI agent that I spoke with. You should listen to that.

JOE ROGAN: What is it about?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: He’s the guy who went after the pill mills in Florida, who was doing his investigation at the same time as I was doing. Fabian Alomar is a great guy.

JOE ROGAN: And he’s a…

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Former skater, did nine years in prison. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for kidnapping and beating the shit out of this guy who supposedly, he was on crack, very high on crack. Beat the shit out of this guy who supposedly allegedly had raped his sister, but beat the shit, kept him in a trunk, beat the shit out of him.

Was arrested for seven years and then did two more years because he almost killed a child molester in prison. But basically did a whole 180, is now an actor on the Maya, has an incredible life story. He was brought up by gangs. His family members were all gang members. They all did time in prison.

But has done a whole 180, is now involved in… It was that show with the guy, the bikers.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s a biker gang show.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: He also did that with Eva Longoria, the Hot Chili. What was it called? The Flaming Hot Movie. Also in that movie. Anyway, he’s become an actor, but also very involved pro skater and also very involved in anti recidivism.

And then another guy we had on was Matt Boyer. Do you know Matt Boyer? He was, you should have him on. He’s in prison right now. We interviewed him a week before he went to prison, actually. He’s the guy in the Ohtani scandal. Baseball. The Ohtani scandal.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know that scandal. Do you know it, Jamie?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What happened?

The Ohtani Gambling Scandal

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: So you know Ohtani?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Biggest, most well known, most successful baseball player. The best player, baseball player ever, apparently, is Ohtani. He’s in the Dodgers. He was signed up for the Dodgers. It turns out that his translator, who is also his best friend, because Ohtani is Japanese and doesn’t speak fluent or doesn’t speak English.

So he has a translator who’s also his best friend in the US who’s with him 24/7, had a gambling problem. And the bookie in this gambling problem was a guy called Matt Boyer. Fascinating guy. Grew up in Orange County and built an empire. I mean, making millions of dollars as an illegal bookie, flying private jets, betting insane amounts of money himself. He’s also a gambling addict, but had high athletes from all over and important celebrities basically placing bets with him.

Instead of placing them online, they placed them with him, but all illegal. And it was found out just before he was about to sign for the Dodgers, the Ohtani, that while they were investigating a casino in Vegas, they came across this bookie. And through this bookie, they found out that Ohtani’s translator, and possibly they thought initially maybe Ohtani was illegally betting.

This is a guy that stands to make millions for the Dodgers, for all the companies that he sponsors. So this was a f*ing massive deal. And it turns out that Ohtani was not the one betting. It was his translator. Matt Boyer, who’s at the center of the scandal, believes that Ohtani knew that his friend and translator had a betting gambling problem.

But he came out and said he had no idea. And nobody wanted this problem on their hands.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: The amount of money that you could lose. And so they basically, the guy came out saying, initially he said that Ohtani knew. The translator said Ohtani knew. And then he came out and said, actually, Ohtani had no idea. And I lied. And now he’s also in prison, but Matt Boyer is now serving, I believe it’s seven or something months in prison.

JOE ROGAN: For illegal gambling.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: For illegal, for being a bookie. For money laundering. And he was, I think it was something like $40 million. His losses were around $19 million.

JOE ROGAN: Between September 21st and January 2024, his winnings amassed to be over $142 million. He won over $142 million, which he kept for himself. His losses were around $183 million.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Oh, he lost $40 million that he still owes Matt Boyer, by the way. He only, his main bookie was this guy.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God, he must have been gambling so high.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s insane. And he couldn’t stop. And Matt talks about this guy I would text, he’d be down on a place and he says, let’s double that, let’s triple that. He was always sort of chasing that dopamine.

The Hidden Addiction of Gambling

JOE ROGAN: It is a crazy addiction.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s the secret, it’s the hidden addiction as they call it. Because you can be completely, you can have a job, you can be a working addict and nobody will ever know that you have a massive gambling problem until it all…

JOE ROGAN: For whatever reason, when people get hooked, they can’t shake it. It is a crazy one.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Because the dopamine, it’s really interesting because you get the hit of dopamine whether you lose or win. So you’re always getting that dopamine hit.

JOE ROGAN: Did you see Uncut Gems Adam Sandler movie?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I did, yes.

JOE ROGAN: The best adaptation of a gambling addict I’ve ever seen in a film. Watching that film gave me anxiety. I was like, oh my God, don’t do it. Don’t do that.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I know. It’s so anathema to who I am too that I always get so nervous like, don’t do that.

JOE ROGAN: I know, but I’ve been around a lot of those people. When I was in my early 20s, I spent a lot of time in pool halls and I was around a lot of gambling addicts and I was just fascinated by it. People that would go from the track to the pool hall, so they would go to the race track all day, gamble on the races and then go to maybe off track betting, bet there and then they go to the pool hall, bet there, try to get a poker game, bet there, try to go to Atlantic City on the weekend, bet there.

Just full on gambling junkies, their whole life revolved around gambling. They didn’t care about anything else.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Smart because they know that the probability that they’re going to lose more than they win.

JOE ROGAN: They were like a full on meth head that was just chasing the high. I mean there was no thought of, hey, I don’t have any money, and I’m 40. There was nothing like that. It was just, I’m in this, and this is what I’m doing. I need to win.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a terrifying addiction.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Terrifying. It’s really, really terrifying because it’s weird.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, oh, my God. What hijacked your brain?

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: And unlike other addictions, there’s no government program out there to help you. And now we’re making betting legal. Sports betting is now legal in the majority of states. So it’s like, and we’ve got ESPN and all these big companies making money from it.

JOE ROGAN: I know, but I’m not opposed to that. Here’s the, because I don’t have a gambling problem. So if…

Gambling Addiction and Responsibility

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: But I agree that the problem is not that you’re making money from the betting, but then knowing that gambling is a problem and that there is addiction, then you should be able. You have to. It is your responsibility to set aside some money to try to figure out how to address the problem of addiction and gambling.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but I don’t think that there has been an established solution for gambling addiction. I think some people are going to fall by the wayside, and they’ve always been that way. That’s my take on it.

It’s like, I’m not a gambling addict, but say if there’s a boxing match and it’s Terence Crawford versus Canelo Alvarez, I’m like, I think Terence Crawford’s going to beat the odds. I think he’s going to beat him. That’s what I was saying before the fight. No, I didn’t. But if I did, I would have bet. But I would have bet a couple hundred bucks or something. Maybe $1,000. Yeah. And I think the odds are it might have been like two to one for Canelo. So you would have made $2,000 on a thousand.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Right.

Legalization and the Cartel Problem

JOE ROGAN: But I don’t have a problem with gambling, so it’s not. I think it should be legal, just like I think alcohol should be legal. I think you should be able to go to a store and buy alcohol. I think most drugs should be legal. I think the real problem is the fact that they’re illegal, which means you’re getting them from cartels.

But then there’s a dilemma of how do you change that? Would you just rip off the band aid and make everything legal, and then you become Portland for a few years, the whole country is f*ed. And how many people die of overdoses because of that? That’s an unfortunate thing.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Portland, I don’t think, is a good example, because they also didn’t have the safety net. So that’s what I—

JOE ROGAN: They were also super kooky. It’s a super kooky place to live. Anyway, keep Portland real.

Mariana, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. When you’re done with the scammer thing, come back.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: I will.

JOE ROGAN: Please. I need to hear everything. Okay. All right, one more time. The show is called The Hidden Third.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: The Hidden Third. It’s on YouTube.com/Mariana Van Zeller. And we’ve got two episodes already that premiere this week, and it’s a weekly podcast.

JOE ROGAN: Fantastic.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Two episodes all the time. And you can also get it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

JOE ROGAN: All right, good luck with that.

MARIANA VAN ZELLER: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Thanks for being here. Bye, everybody.

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