Mariana van Zeller returns to The Joe Rogan Experience to expose global black markets—from Peru’s coca farms (where 90% of profits go to cartels) to Mexico’s fentanyl labs, including a Sinaloa bioengineer resembling Breaking Bad’s Walter White. Her Trafficked series on National Geographic reveals how U.S.-supplied guns like AK-47s and AR-15s fuel cartel violence, even in cases like Ovidio Guzman’s siege, where traffickers threatened military families. Van Zeller also highlights systemic corruption, like Jamaica’s scammers exploiting American lead lists for survival, and the ethical risks of CRISPR, while Rogan compares the drug war’s failures to Portugal’s decriminalization model. Their raw investigations challenge narratives of greed over desperation, proving criminal networks thrive on unchecked supply chains and impunity. [Automatically generated summary]
I would say also, I would add to that, that, you know, we did Mexico with fentanyl.
We did guns here in the U.S. going to Mexico.
We did tigers in Asia and all these different scams in Jamaica and Israel.
And I think a big important reason or goal for us with this show, and for me in particular because it's the way that I approach my job and my career as a journalist, Is to not only be there to inform of what's happening, like you were saying, but also I think it's important for people to connect to people in these faraway lands that at first glance we have nothing in common, right?
These are the bad guys operating in far distant lands or maybe sometimes around us, but they're considered the bad people.
The people that we have nothing in common with.
But if you actually sit down with them and listen to their stories, and this is the big shocker of this show, and I think it rubs people the wrong way sometimes when you admit or when somebody tells you that, look, actually there is not a lot that differentiates you from the guy smuggling cocaine out of the Peru, the Vrain Valley in Peru.
You both are motivated by the same goals, which is happiness, an opportunity in life, a chance to reach your dreams.
And unless you actually look at it this way and start realizing that that is more often than not the case, of course there's a lot of bad people there doing it for greed and solely greed.
That also happens, and I spent a lot of time with those people as well.
But unless you start understanding sort of the root causes of what leads people into these lives, you're never going to be able to address black markets.
Well, you really did a fantastic job of getting close to these people and talking to them like, you know, they were talking about their family, they were talking about their children.
The one guy who is the chemist who wants to get out because he wants to go to school and like, this is my last year.
That story alone, we spent the night with these mochileros, these backpackers, teenagers who carry loads of cocaine on their back out of the valley and spending time with them and, you know, really dangerous work.
They tell us stories about how they hike for days on end out of the Amazon, the Frame Valley, to a place where then it's sent out into outside of the country to Europe and to the United States.
And you spend time with these guys, and you listen to them, and it's incredibly dangerous work, too.
They've seen their best friends being killed in front of them.
And I ask them, so why would you ever want to do something like this?
And she's like, look, very simple.
I grew up in a very poor family.
I always wanted to go to college.
I knew that the only job opportunities, the whole economy is essentially sustained by the growing of coca leaves, production of cocaine, and smuggling of cocaine.
So the only job opportunity here I had was this.
And I asked him, why do you want to go to college so badly?
Perhaps a stupid question.
But he said, you know, because I want to be a dentist.
And I said, why a dentist?
Because I want to make people smile.
And this just is like, these are the moments that I think will really stay with me.
The experience was so raw, like all of it, from showing the families growing the coca leaves.
And I learned something from it.
I always assumed that it was the organized crime cartels that were growing the coca leaves.
But no, it's these families, these very poor families that are growing these coca leaves and drying them out by the road where everyone can see.
So you have children playing, you have these very poor people that are growing this crop, and the vast majority of it is sold to the cartels, and they're not selling it for a lot of money either.
And it's also crazy that the thing itself, the coca leaf, like there's actually been people that have made a really good argument that not only should that stuff be legal, but it's probably good for you.
Well, after the OxyContin Express and seeing how many people's lives are destroyed by a legal drug, I could imagine why you would want to avoid the ones that are illegal.
My friend Jimmy in high school, when we were young, one of his buddies was selling coke and he just looked at me and he goes, you should never do this stuff.
That was one of the things that I wanted to bring up with you.
Because it's such a complicated issue, drugs, and it's so sad to see from your program to see these poor farmers to these kids who are the chemists who are putting it together and then carrying it out on the backpack.
And one of the chemists was actually one of the guys who was actually carrying it on his back, too, which is even Yeah, and he jumped into the car the first night that we got access to this illicit lab where we've been trying for so long to get this access and suddenly we're driving in the middle of the night to go up to this area where we're supposed to meet him and suddenly the guy driving our car, our guide basically stops the car, the door opens, this guy jumps in and they're speaking in Spanish and I interrupt and say, what's happening?
Who are you?
You know, our car has all our gear and my team.
And he's like, oh, sorry, sorry.
Hi, I'm the chemist.
I'm like, what?
I'm the one who's going to take you down to my cocaine lab.
These are some of the best of the best at what they do.
We filmed with one of the best guys at finishing fake US dollars in Peru.
He was by hand, note by note, finishing each single one of them to make it look and smell and feel and taste like a real dollar.
And he's the best at what he does and nobody knows what he does.
His family doesn't know.
And so we give them an opportunity to disguise their identity and to sort of boast and talk about what they're passionate about.
You know, the same with the chemists.
The same with the Sinaloa chemists that we filmed making fentanyl in front of us.
So I think partly it's that.
Then it's impunity.
In a lot of these parts of the world where we filmed, there's complete impunity.
So they don't see really a downside to talking to an internationally recognized name like Nagio.
And there's trust there as well.
And then lastly, and I think more surprising for me, but I think it's the biggest amount, the biggest reason we were given constantly, is this idea that they know they're considered the bad people.
They know they're, you know, the most shunned people in our society, and we're giving them an opportunity to tell their story and how, you know, people really want others to know, to know why they fall into a life of crime or why they become outlaws.
And that, you know, was a really big goal for me in this documentary, was to even, again, the people that are more, that we think have nothing in common with us, actually do.
And no matter how far you travel into the fringes of our society, that you can still find people that are redeemable and relatable.
We won the lottery ticket and I don't think most people, if you don't travel and you don't experience this, like I've been privileged to, I don't think we realize that.
You know, we filmed a lot of armed guards protecting their money and their operations as well.
But I would say that in the vast majority of cases, it really is the lack of opportunities.
I really don't believe that anyone is born one day and decides, hey, you know, what I want to do is I want to become a sicario for the Sinaloa cartel and be killed when I'm 25 years old.
I want to kill people and then be killed when I'm 25, which happened.
Yeah, you can see this is not some super sophisticated operation.
It's...
It's taking advantage of people that...
Or is it even...
It's just like this is the ecosystem, right?
And the ecosystem, this is what I was going to get at before, only exists because drugs are illegal.
And if the ecosystem was different, if drugs were legal...
I mean, how long would it take?
How many decades would it have to take before a large pharmaceutical company or some alcohol company or a tobacco company said, fuck it, let's grow coke.
You know, that's what we're seeing with the marijuana business in California right now, where it was legalized.
And what's happening is that the people that have been operating these, at the time, illegal shops for weed and operations for weed are now being kicked out of the business.
And there's all these bigger companies coming in and taking away the business from them.
Well, that was the thing up in Humboldt, you know, like in the Emerald Triangle or whatever they call it up there.
Like, they didn't want any part.
Like, there's people out there that grew pot that voted against it being legalized.
And, you know, I have friends that were trying to explain it to me.
They're like, we don't want this to be legal.
Like, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Like...
You're missing the whole point.
I get you don't want to pay taxes, but do you like living under the threat of being locked in a cage?
And do you think that the other people that grow it and sell it or the other people that even possess it?
Don't you want progress in this regard where...
That kids can grow up and become adults in a world where you have autonomy, you have control over your body, you have the freedom.
Like I was saying to this one guy, he was anti-marijuana.
We had this conversation and I said, okay, do you think it should be illegal?
He goes, yeah.
I go, do you understand what illegal means?
It means you can put someone in jail for doing something that you don't agree with that doesn't hurt anybody other than yourself.
Right?
Other than the person that's doing it.
If it was just two of us, the only two people in the world, and you thought pot should be illegal and you made the rule, and I wanted to smoke pot, you would lock me in a cage?
Well, you have the example of Portugal, though, right?
And again, it's worked really well.
Incarceration rates have gone down.
AIDS, which was high, went down.
All the money that the government was spending on incarcerating people, they're now spending on rehab centers and making sure that people get the help they need.
What I wanted to get to is in doing this show and seeing these people from the poor farmers to these kids that are risking their lives.
As you said, seeing their friends get murdered for this drug.
And they're making a tiny fraction of the profit off of this.
To getting to these nightclubs.
And even the guy that you showed in Miami that was selling coke.
Even he was making a pittance in comparison to the cartels.
In comparison to...
It's just disheartening.
I know they're trying to get by, and I know the guy was talking about feeding his family, but you're also in this horrible system that you're probably never going to get out, and if you do get out, what are you going to do now?
Hey, Mike, it says here for the last 15 years you've done nothing.
What have you been doing?
Oh, I've been selling coke.
You can't say that.
I managed to get out of the game without getting shot and killed, so I'm on the straight and narrow.
I get comments on my work sometimes, you know, especially since the show started airing where people reach out and say, and, you know, there's stories, you know, I understand part of it.
For example, the first one that we aired, the first two were the scams episode and then the fentanyl one, where we follow the pipeline of fentanyl all the way from the coast of Mexico, where we saw, we filmed the precursor chemicals that come from Asia being thrown overboard.
And then we filmed a speedboat that belongs to the cartel or cartel operators picking up these barrels and then moving them eventually to a lab.
We saw fentanyl being made.
We saw then fentanyl being packed.
And then eventually at the end, we saw it being smuggled into California from Mexico.
And we were there when a woman in this case, she was pregnant, American citizen, drove into the United States with five kilos of fentanyl inside, hidden inside her car.
And there was a moment where she actually gets called for secondary inspection.
And we're close to her.
We're filming.
I mean, we're not filming her because we're keeping the cameras low, but I'm watching what is happening.
And as you know, I've been reporting on the opiate crisis for many years, and I've spent numerous amount, countless times with mothers who've lost loved ones to the opiate epidemic.
So to me, that was very hard on my shoulders, the idea that on one hand, I was seeing this woman, and I knew she had kids, she was pregnant, and I knew what that meant for her family if she got caught.
And on the other hand, I also knew what that would mean for American families if the drugs went across and came through.
So it was a really hard time for me as a journalist.
And I think I get flack for that, for not being absolutely clear that, you know, I think people would prefer if I was just, okay, these are bad people.
And because there's so much suffering around some of these trades, right, such as fentanyl, and even cocaine, that I think people just have an easier time in life thinking of the world as black and white, that they are bad people, we would never do that, you know, us in that position would never do that.
And I think it's a harder, more challenging look of life if you realize that actually it's a lot more grey and that people are a lot more similar to us.
Well, I think that's one of the reasons why your work is so important because you do take those risks and you do show the human side of the people that we like to demonize.
We like to demonize them and think of them as being just evil, this evil scourge that comes from these other places to our good place.
But this guy, who in a lot of people represents your father or your boss, this really cold, sort of fact-based, no-nonsense, super-successful guy, who's telling this fool, this liberal fool, if you buy drugs, you support terrorism.
What you're doing is so important because you're showing...
You're showing human beings who got handed a terrible roll of the dice, a bad hand of cards, and they're stuck in this very poor village in Peru with dirt roads and no money and no opportunity and no way out.
And we can either choose to ignore it and pretend it's not there and not do, you know, just keep on demonizing these people and keep on consuming and keep on buying because that's why it's because there's demand or else it wouldn't exist.
Or we can actually go and shine a light and try and understand why they happen, why these people turn to black markets and why the trade exists and try to do something about it.
But I also think maybe the only way we're going to really resolve it is if you have treatment centers and rehabilitations that are funded by the profit off of legalized cocaine and heroin and all these other drugs.
If we had, look, if heroin was legal tomorrow, I'm not going to fucking do heroin.
I don't want to do heroin.
But it is legal.
And OxyContin, you could, that's basically the same thing, right?
If you want to make sense of this, there should be some sort of a percentage of the profits that has to go to rehabilitation centers.
And then there's another one.
Ibogaine.
Ibogaine has been proven to be the very best method for many people for kicking addictions.
And not just addictions of chemicals, but addictions of endogenous chemicals like gambling.
People that are gambling addicts have found great relief with Ibogaine.
People that are addicted to alcohol.
People that are addicted to a lot of different controlled substances.
Have found amazing relief through Ibogaine.
Ibogaine is not something you get addicted to.
It is a ruthlessly introspective drug, and you have to go to Mexico to do it.
There's Ibogaine clinics.
My friend Ed Clay, he started a clinic down in Mexico because he got hooked on pills because he got hurt, and he wanted to figure out how to get off of them.
There's a lot of weird addictions that people have that are, in many ways, connected to trauma.
Gabor Monte thinks that almost all addiction is connected to childhood trauma and he makes a very compelling argument about it.
It's interesting to hear him discuss it because everyone that I know that's an addict has had a fucked up childhood.
It kind of makes sense.
There's something there that was off and wrong or there's abuse or there's something.
A lot of soldiers.
There's a ton of soldiers that come back, and they have severe PTSD, and then on top of that they have CTE, so they have legitimate trauma, physical trauma to their brain, and they wind up getting addicted.
Like, my cat used to play this game where he would hide.
But he would hide and his tail would be sticking out.
And I'd be like, bitch, I see you.
But if he couldn't see me, he thought I couldn't see him.
And I'd grab his tail and he'd poke his head out and swim.
And then he'd go back in there.
I'm like, bitch, I see you.
And we would play games, you know?
But it was fun.
But I would laugh, be like, I think he thinks that I can't see him because he can't see me.
Like, it's a childish game, but it's a fucking cat, right?
We're playing this same kind of stupid game.
It's like we're pretending that drugs are illegal.
When drugs are everywhere, we're pretending we're stopping drugs by keeping them illegal, but we're just propping up organized crime.
It's so much worse.
This simplistic approach to it, this childlike approach to it, there is not a single intelligent person, if you laid out the facts, and they looked at it objectively, would think that this is a successful method of handling this.
We keep pretending that we don't know that what we're doing and the billions of dollars we're spending on this is pretending that it's making a difference, and it really isn't.
This is the shittiest war that the United States has ever fought.
If you think we did a bad job in Vietnam and Afghanistan, at least we didn't...
The war on drugs has been a loss.
They've lost every year.
They've never won the war on drugs.
When you showed those Coast Guard people, that was incredibly illuminating.
Because the way that guy described it, where he said, you're dealing with an area that we patrol that's larger than the United States, and we have about four boats.
Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time with law enforcement and you hear their stories and, you know, they're really out there on the front lines trying to make a difference, most of them.
And again and again you hear just how frustrating their job is because they know, you know, that they're really not making a dent.
But I think it's also hard to admit in many ways because this is their lives and their livelihoods that if you talk to law enforcement, even now, I actually just did a story for season two about weed, black market weed in California.
And even now, you know, they will tell you that they think that it shouldn't have been legalized.
Because they have a point.
Black market weed has only exploded since legalization.
But I don't think that not making legal, it's really about the regulations that are in place in California.
We went to one of these grows this summer with an operation much like that.
And it was funny because all of the law enforcement that was there, they were brought in sort of, you know, those ropes on helicopters where they come and they drop them because it's really out there in the middle of the forest.
But they couldn't do that to us.
So we had to actually drive part of the way and then hike down.
And it took us like, you know, almost a whole day of hiking through like Thick brush to get to this area where they were diverting water and where there's marijuana growing all around us and it was all cartel operated.
And you realize just like what these guys have to go through because then it's also on a weekly basis they have to get supplies and food and they have to get the, you know, the drugs out of there.
On my way driving here to the show, I passed by the place where I had filmed just three weeks ago, actually, this guy in his hotel room, a dealer, a meth dealer.
But he was washing one of the things he did before he started getting clients.
And the clients are not the people that you think are meth users at all, by the way.
We interviewed a lawyer.
We interviewed a mom with kids at home.
It was an entrepreneur.
Not at all the people that you think are meth users.
And this guy, before he started, he's washing the meth.
And that's because he says he prides himself on selling good quality meth.
But he had purchased it from Mexico and he wasn't sure about the quality, so he washes it.
I can't remember what it is, the product that he puts in, but it's to see all the other stuff that comes out.
And then you can see just sort of all this other chemicals that are put in there and you sort of realize.
And when I was filming in the cocaine lab, the same thing.
And the fentanyl lab, too.
The amount of shit that goes into these drugs, if that alone is not going to dissuade you from doing them, it's chemicals, it's gasoline, it's lime.
You know one guy that we filmed for the Fentanyl episode?
Cartel chemist.
So this guy was a bioengineer and incredibly smart and knowledgeable.
And we met him in this abandoned location where he's basically making fentanyl and pressing it into the M30 pills, which are fake.
It goes round back to the beginning of the opiate crisis because they make them to look like Oxycontin, like the 30 milligram pills that Purdue Pharma and Oxycontin had.
But it's pure fentanyl, essentially.
And they're becoming really popular on the streets of America and part, you know, really deadly stuff.
And so we saw him making it.
And you never know with these guys.
Like, I spent time in some of these illicit labs where you kind of get a sense that shit could go wrong very fast because they have no idea what they're dealing with.
And these are very potent chemicals.
But in this case, you know, it's not easy to make.
I mean, it is because it's cheap, and once you know how to do it, you know how to do it, but it's, you know, I can't show up and try to make that, the whole thing could explode just because the chemicals are so potent.
And yet, here he was, and we were wearing our hazmat suits and our masks and everything.
And I started talking to him and he was, I mean, I suddenly thought I was talking to Walter White from Breaking Red.
He was exactly that, like a geek when it came to chemistry and had always loved chemistry and, you know, had worked in chemistry for a while and then was approached by the Sinaloa cartel and they needed a guy who knew how to make this stuff.
And he's decided, why not?
I can make a lot more money making this.
And now he's like one of the biggest chemists for the Sinaloa cartel.
I think that steroids are many, there's a lot of different things that are legal now in terms of like you can get testosterone replacement therapy, hormone replacement therapy, and they basically give you the vial, right?
I had a friend, my friend Brian, who lived in Boston, was a natural bodybuilder.
And he was very dedicated.
And he was a legitimate natural bodybuilder.
He worked out very hard.
He ate very clean.
And he was super, super dedicated.
And you would swear he was on steroids.
He was big.
I mean like big giant arms, like really thick guy, but just really dedicated.
He is nothing like those giants that you see at the gym that are on steroids.
There are people that walk around, like if you go to like a Gold's gym in Venice in the heyday when all the elite bodybuilders would go there, they don't even look like humans.
And he calls himself Dr. Tony Huge, even though he's not a doctor, but he is a lawyer.
And he's...
If anyone is interested in...
He's basically a spokesperson for steroids.
He's people who are bodybuilders.
He's also a bodybuilder himself and goes to gyms and competitions.
And he was with this kid and kids adore him.
I mean, we spoke to teenagers who look up to Tony Hughes and want to do everything he does, which is mostly PDs.
And this kid wanted to be, he went to Vegas to help this kid out.
How old was this kid?
He was like 19, I believe.
His name is Zach from Florida.
Super nice kid.
Met his mom, all of it.
But had tried steroids, had had sort of a bad experience with steroids.
Decided he was going to try and do it with other things, but not steroids, not testosterone itself, but other substances.
Tony Hughes was helping him out.
He gets there, Dave, the competition.
He goes on stage, and again, he looks like the others around him who have been doing steroids look so much stronger than him.
And he comes out, yet, you know, again, super dedicated kid.
Like, this is his life.
Spends most of his time at the gym and eats right and all that.
And in the middle of the competition, Tony Hughes says, okay, it's time for us to go back to your apartment and get you ready for round two.
They go back, and we filmed all of this, and he opens up a big suitcase, and inside this suitcase, it's like the Mary Poppins suitcase that more and more shit's coming out, you know?
And starts giving him injections of insulin and all sorts, I don't know, half of the things that he was giving.
And the kid's like, are you sure this is okay?
Are you sure this is okay?
Insulin.
And I'm worried for him.
He says, okay, I'm starting to feel my heart beating really fast.
You know, don't you worry.
And then he goes back.
And you can actually see the transformation in this kid's body within an hour of him taking these drugs.
They don't exactly know if steroids killed them, but it's like, you know, if you see a body and then there's a gun right next to the body, and the body has a bullet hole.
If there's a Mount Rushmore of bodybuilding, he's on it, 100%.
It's like Arnold, Franco Colombo, Lee Haney.
I mean, Mount Rushmore doesn't have enough heads.
Right?
Dorian Yates.
But Ronnie Coleman is without doubt on there.
He was a multiple time Mr. Olympia.
Enormous guy with spectacular genetics.
Spectacular genetics.
And Ronnie did the podcast and he said that when he was...
He's really in rough shape now.
Like he can barely walk.
His back is really fucked up.
He's had many, many surgeries.
And he's basically had every disc in his back fused except for one.
Wow.
time walking and even standing up but when but that's because you know he pushed himself so hard so it wasn't just the steroids he pushed himself through pain so when he got injured he didn't give a fuck he just kept working out hard and stacking weights and you know squatting spectacular amounts of weight but he was I believe he said he was 30 before he took steroids So he was a full-time cop and he was competing, just like, I mean, perfect genetics.
And he was saying, you know, I was asking, like, isn't it for somebody, he apparently loves baseball, has been a huge fan of baseball in his life, and then became the supplier of steroids for, you know, big shots in baseball.
And I was asking him, don't you think that's unfair, you know, considering that these are illegal and it's just some people are taking them and others aren't?
He's like, yeah, unfair is not to take them because everybody's taking them.
And also suing the other people that were calling him out.
But in his eyes, they betrayed him and that they were selling him out so that they could get a cheaper deal.
But they were doing it, too.
And they were all admitting they were doing it.
So they were getting, you know, immunity.
If you got rid of all the people that tested positive when they took away Lance Armstrong's jerseys or whatever, you get a jersey from winning all his victories.
I mean, he has them on the wall in his house.
If you took away all those, well, who wins then?
Who wins those years?
Well, you have to go back to 18th place to find someone who didn't test positive.
Bill Burr the Comedian has a hilarious bit about, like, our psycho is better than your psycho.
It's like you're dealing with a dirty sport.
It's an entirely dirty sport.
They've been blood doping and they've been doing EPO and testosterone and all these different things.
And then there's a real argument that it's actually healthier to do that with drugs than it is to not do with drugs.
Because without the drugs, your body has such a difficult time recovering from the massive amount of work you have to do when you're doing something like the Tour de France.
Well, I did know that one, we don't have to say the name, but there was a prominent tennis star that the World Anti-Doping Agency or one of them came knock on this person's door and they locked themselves in a safe room.
And they said, oh, I think there's an intruder, someone trying to come and get me.
The documentary is so well done because Brian Fogel, who is the director and the guy who made the documentary, he had a plan and his plan was film him with no drugs doing this bike race and then come back next year with the supervision of an anti-doping expert from the Soviet Union.
In the middle of all this happening, it gets exposed that the Sochi Olympics, that the urine samples had been tampered with, and that there was, like, micro-scratches on there, that they had devised some sort of a method to open up the urine samples and replace the urine with clean urine, and holy shit, it's crazy.
So my take on the adult use of these things is very different than my take on the use of them for competition.
Now, I've had people, it was Luke Thomas that was saying that they should just be able to take drugs, right?
Wasn't it?
I believe it was.
He's got a really good argument for it.
That they're doing things, and this is for fighters, they're doing things, they're just getting away with it.
They're doing things in some sort of a sneaky way, they're microdosing, they're figuring out a way, and that if you just like regulated the levels that they could compete at and just let them do whatever they want, it'd probably be better for everybody.
In the early days of the sport, and I'm sorry Luke if I've distorted your argument, In the early days of the sport, it was Wild West, and everybody was juiced to the gills.
And in Japan, when they competed in Japan, it was actually in the contract that they would actually, not only would they not test, they would say in all, like my friend Ensign Inoue, he's a legend in mixed martial arts, like one of the early pioneers, and he said that when he was in PRIDE, it was in all caps, WE DO NOT TEST FOR STEROIDS. It was in the contract.
And, you know, if you're on a host of these performance-enhancing drugs, you will have more endurance, you'll be able to recover faster, you'll be able to train harder, and you'll be able to endure more punishment when you're actually inside the ring or the cage.
Now, with CRISPR, obviously I'm not a scientist, so I'm going to butcher this, but there's going to be good things that they can do where they can remove genes that can cause leukemia, they can remove genes that can cause Alzheimer's, but they're also going to be able to alter people, and it's just a matter of time.
I think right now we're on the third iteration of CRISPR, I believe, where they keep improving the method.
Now, as they continue to improve this method, there's going to be innovation with everything.
Nothing ever stops.
And it's going to be worldwide.
Once this technology is reaching China and Russia and wherever, who's to stop people from making people with this?
And they actually did it with, I think there was something they did in China, I believe it was, where it improved their cognitive function.
They were trying to engineer something.
It might have been something against HIV. A gene to stop them from potentially getting HIV and it actually wound up improving their cognitive function.
It's going to be weird shit they're doing with people.
Yeah, like a walk in the park compared to the rest.
And cloning, too.
I did a story about cloning once.
Yeah, how in Argentina, actually, which is sort of the center of polo horses and the polo, the sport, polo.
And the majority of the horses and the best teams are all cloned.
And it's all actually being done by an American company, owned company by this American guy who has diabetes and who's, I believe somebody in his family died from diabetes, his grandmother perhaps.
And he's trying to figure out a way that he can clone parts of his body and make them healthier and really fascinating stuff.
You think of a clone, you think of something that looks exactly like the other.
Apparently, the part that is more visible, which is the outward skin and the horse's hair, Actually, the hair, the color of your hair has something to do with the temperature of you when you're in the body before you were born.
And so the horses that were cloned, actually the hair were different colors.
But in the physical abilities and health-wise, the way your body operates, that's what's cloned.
And also, apparently, they were saying that the personality of these clone horses were very similar to the original horse In terms of being fighters and not giving up and all that.
Every time, even though I fly constantly, I still am the kind of person that I walk into a plane, I step foot on a plane, and I get excited about everything.
I love to say that I have exploration in my blood because I'm Portuguese and we come from a long line of explorers around the world in history.
And he has it too.
But I don't know.
I think partly, yeah, he just shares with me the joy of traveling and the exploration and...
The weird of the places.
I took him to Morocco a couple of years ago, and because it was so unlike anything he had seen, he was in heaven.
He wanted to dress with the same, the jalabas, as they call them.
Men wear jalabas, these long dresses.
He wanted to wear the jalabas.
He wanted to do everything, like put the, what do you call the thing, the scarf on your head, like the Tuaregs there, because we went camping in the Sahara Desert.
Because it's like, think of the things that people are inherently afraid of.
Like, I think it was Rupert Sheldrake was talking about this, that children, even children that grow up in New York City, they're not worried about car accidents or child molesters.
They're worried about monsters.
They're worried about monsters in the room.
They're worried about monsters in the dark.
And that, they believe, stems from some sort of a genetic memory of cats.
Big cats hunting us when we used to be primates living in trees.
And the thing that every chimp and every monkey is afraid of is a fucking cat.
I'm going to tell you a story that happened to me.
I actually told your team before coming in.
I am terrified.
So I meet with cartel members.
I meet with these people all around the world.
And usually I tend to be scared.
But I'm terrified of big animals, especially big cats.
I was in the Amazon once.
I was doing a story about biopiracy there.
And again, I was with my husband, Aaron.
And we went deep into the Amazon, like really deep, to camp with these two Brazilian scientists.
And we were looking for poisonous snakes and poisonous spiders and the most poisonous creatures in the Amazon.
We went out at night in the middle of the night with them with just flashlights and our snake boots.
And initially, I was kind of scared.
And, you know, they would pick up these really dangerous fer de lance and the most dangerous snakes and all that.
And I went back to camp after this night thinking I am the bravest person in the Yule universe.
I can do this as well, if not even better than men can.
I came back and I wasn't afraid and I did this.
It's something that terrified me, you know, poisonous snakes.
But I did it and I'm so strong and I'm so powerful.
I'm so brave.
I'm the queen of the Amazon.
And then I went to bed that night in these hammocks that we hung on trees out completely in the open.
And I had the hammock on the far end because I was a woman and the scientist stayed and my husband next to me.
But still, I was more exposed than them.
And in the middle of the night in the Amazon, where it actually gets really cold, I didn't know that.
But I woke up kind of cold and suddenly I felt it.
And there was a breath right next to me, a warm, smelly breath right next to my face.
And I'm out in the open in this hammock.
And I was absolutely sure.
Of course, I know it's a jaguar.
The scientist had just told us that he's not scared of anything except for jaguars because he knows that they're in this area and they've killed little kids.
So this is happening to me in the middle of the night.
And I had this reaction that I didn't think was possible.
You know when you have nightmares when you were a kid and something horrifying happens and then you want to talk and scream and ask for help, but you can't.
You're frozen.
That actually happened to me where I was suddenly, I felt it here.
I knew I needed to ask for help, but I completely froze and I couldn't get any words to come out.
But apparently my teeth were shattering so damn loud that my husband next to me woke up and said, hey, are you okay?
And I was able to say no, and then he came up with this flashlight and looked all around and didn't see anything and thought, obviously, I was probably dreaming.
This wasn't true.
He told me it's nothing.
I'm sure you just imagined this.
This didn't happen.
The next morning, wake up.
I didn't sleep at all, obviously, but my backpack was full of hair.
And I was so ready to, like, turn to them and tell them, okay, see, guys, see?
You think I'm just, like, afraid, and I imagine this stuff, but this stuff actually happened, and here's the hair.
And then the scientist, like, points out this guy, Paolo, who's great.
Paolo says, hey, Mariana, look there.
There's a dog, and there's this little dog that I spent the whole night sitting in my little backpack.
There's people that were poo-pooing it because there was a mountain lion sighting in the area and some people think that he was killed by the mountain lion, but...
Well, he saw the babies first and then he started walking towards it and then it started walking towards him and then he started backing up and it chased him.
My friend in my old neighborhood had stopped outside of her house and she saw a mountain lion and started filming it.
And while she was filming the mountain lion, a second one ran right by.
Well, there's some of them that have been collared, and there's some of them that haven't.
And there's a lot of people that think it's wonderful that they're around.
Yeah, and I'm like, okay.
Look, I'm glad they're real.
I love the fact that a mountain lion is a real animal.
But they shouldn't be in fucking Calabasas.
Jesus Christ, you hippies.
Like, kill that thing.
Net it.
Do whatever you gotta do.
Get the fuck out of there.
Like, just eating a bunch of dog eaters and kid eaters.
Listen, it will definitely eat a baby.
100%.
You got your little baby wandering around the middle of the night?
It shouldn't be.
But if it was, and that cat came along, that baby's dead.
It's going to eat it.
They'll eat everything.
They eat dogs, they eat cats, they eat everything they can.
They did a study in San Francisco where they, you know, whenever they have what's called a depredation permit, when they find that a cat's been killing a bunch of animals, they'll issue a permit where you can kill it.
When they kill these cats, the most shocking thing was 50% of their diet was pets.
And you know that the guy that he tells a story about when they were attacked by bears, the guy that he tells always that on his team actually rode the back of the bear.
And they all tell it the same way, that everyone was just like, you go to a place that you didn't know your brain, like a room in your brain you didn't know you have.
Like, oh, look at that.
You've never been in here before.
This is what happens when you're about to die.
This is what happens when a giant super animal is about to eat you.
I'm not a person that thinks you should go and kill all the predators that kill people.
I love the fact that we have this rich sort of tapestry of life.
There's so many different things.
And I love the fact that there's so many different things.
But they shouldn't be in Calabasas.
They want to make wildlife corridors over the 101 because these cats keep getting hit by cars.
Yeah.
Hey guys, maybe we're just concentrating on keeping them healthy where people aren't.
I don't think we should encourage.
There's all this weirdness that comes in California when it comes to these animals.
They kill just as many of them as they used to, but they only kill them by hiring people to kill them.
They don't allow hunting anymore.
Whereas in other places that they have problems with mountain lions, hunting is still legal.
Like Colorado.
Like my friend Johnny, he is a hunting guide in Colorado and he gets hired to hunt mountain lions because these mountain lions will take out calves and cattle and they'll attack livestock and once they start going into...
So they have the wildlife management companies, they have these sort of very...
Calculated processes where they determine how many tags can be issued and how many mountain lions can be sustained in an area without them encroaching on livestock and things along those lines.
And then you get to this animal rights argument where people are like, hey, they have a right too.
We're in their land.
You shouldn't do anything.
You should leave them alone.
And this is sort of what they've decided to do in California.
In California, the ultimate goal...
California's weird in that it's not Department of Fish and Game.
It's Department of Fish and Wildlife.
And so that's on purpose because they don't want to think of these things as a resource that people hunt.
They want to think of them as wild animals that they protect.
And so the Department of Fish and Wildlife is...
In many ways populated by people who are animal rights activists versus people who are hunters and fishermen and conservationists and people who understand this sort of pragmatic approach to managing wildlife.
It's a real complex issue.
They've decided to just let these animals handle themselves.
I talked to one person who's worked with the Department of Fish and Wildlife who said their ultimate goal is to have no hunting at all in California.
They would like the animals to manage themselves.
But when that happens, then the animals kill dogs and wildlife, and then you kill those animals.
They seep the tiger bones, the older the tiger, and the more they're wild, so instead of being farmed, because there are also tigers being farmed in Asia.
But if they can catch them from the wild, it's even better.
And they seep them in these vats of rice wine.
And they stay for years and years.
And then they sell this for incredibly, really expensive bottles of wine.
But then we came to the U.S. and we looked at a crazy shocking number, which is that there are more tigers in captivity in the U.S. than there are in the wild, in the entire world.
And I like that we so tend to look at Asia and criticize these people are being crazy and I can't believe what they do to these animals and yet the commodification of tigers is happening right here because it's all, they're making money out of roadside zoos and taking selfies with the tigers and Or just rich assholes who have a bunch of tigers.
Now, what is it about certain countries, because I don't want to say Asia, but it's in Asia, where they like these weird exotic things that are proven to not be functional?
Like rhino horn.
Rhino horn is a thing that they love in certain circles in China, right?
That's where the big trade...
And the way it was described to me by a friend who's Chinese...
It's more of that it is very difficult to get.
So you have some people over your house, and you're like, would you like some rhino horn?
And you're like, oh shit, this dude's balling.
He brought out the rhino horn tea, and you all sit around with pinkies up and drink your wine.
Right, because I think it's probably difficult for us to understand this long history of the use that's been, like, it's been sort of celebrated, use of rhino horn and tiger parts and shit.
You know, in BC, you're not allowed to, if you hunt bear, like they hunt, like black bear is a, it actually tastes good.
Like it's a commonly hunted meat in terms of like the pioneers used to hunt deer and like even bison, they would just cut the tongues out and use the hide and they would hunt black bear for the meat.
So people were shooting bears just for the gallbladder.
So in BC, if you hunt bear legally, you're not allowed to gut them.
Because they want to make sure that you're not doing it just for the gallbladder.
So in some sort of a weird twisted logic, you leave the gallbladder there to rot because you can't be in possession of a bare gallbladder.
So it's really anti-conservationist because like...
First of all, I don't think there really is a medicinal purpose for the bare gallbladder.
But in certain animals, like with buffalo, when the Native American, like particularly the Comanche, would eat the buffalo, they would take the gallbladder and squirt the bile over the liver.
And they would eat raw liver and use the bile as seasoning.
Because it's kind of salty, I guess.
I've never tried it this way.
So they had a use for it.
But if you ever did that with bear, like bears are predators, like you can't eat them raw.
Like you would get really fucked up.
You'd get trichinosis and all sorts of parasites.
But I don't know what they're doing with the gallbladder.
But it's so common that they actually had to pass a law to say that you can't gut the bears.
So when you shoot a bear, you have to leave all that stuff.
You can't be in possession of it.
So if you shot a bear and you took the bear and butchered it and all that stuff, you have to leave the guts.
Like sometimes you go to a Chinese restaurant and like my friend Ed told me that at some Chinese restaurants they would say it was scallops but it was really skate wing.
So they would take like and they would punch holes in like a stingray wing and sell that as scallops.
Like I don't know.
But whatever.
That's a thing where, for whatever reason, it's prized, but it's not that good.
Like, there's weird things, like lobster.
Like, if lobster somehow or another was like some thing where you really shouldn't eat it because it's terrible for the environment, it's destroying lives, and there's only four lobsters left, and look, I got lobster for dinner.
It was like, ooh.
And he sat around and ate it and, you know, put fucking tinfoil over the window so nobody could see in.
It's also a dish apparently in Spain, but they make it better in Portugal.
And it's full of olive oil and garlic, which is all you need to make something taste really good.
And it's these tiny little worms, essentially.
They're mini baby eels.
And I guess it's bad for the environment, so they stopped eating that.
But that's the kind of thing that I understand, again, like the lobster filled with butter, where you had to understand why you'd pay the amounts of money, because it is really good.
You know, I've covered the gun sort of trade and illegal guns here in America, but I had never...
And I've always wanted to do a show about where I explore the pipeline of guns going down south from the west to Mexico and how it's contributing to the violence there.
And we were given incredible access.
The film essentially started with a car of a woman being loaded with AK-47s and AR-15s in L.A., just a few minutes from my house.
right next to the 710 freeway on the middle of a weekday night.
It's insane.
And we can see them packing the guns.
We interview them.
And these are LA people, people who live in LA and who work essentially for the cartel.
And we saw them packing this car and then we saw that night we followed a car across the border into Mexico.
Nobody stopped them.
I mean, there isn't even any border patrol when you're going south, only when you come north.
And then we saw the guns being sold to the middleman, and then eventually heading to Sinaloa.
And we were in Sinaloa.
I don't know if you read in the news last year, there was when Ovidio Guzman, who was the son of El Chapo, remember?
And then they basically took hostage of the whole city.
There was a siege of the city of Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, and the cartels wouldn't let it go.
And we're threatening the whole city with violence if the authorities wouldn't release El Chapo San.
And we were actually in similar reporting when this happened.
And all around, there were, again, American guns.
There was AK-47s.
There were even.50 cales.
There were trucks with.50 calibers coming from the U.S. And yeah, and we filmed with, essentially we spent time with three sicarios, three gunmen from the Sinaloa cartel.
All of them had and owned American guns.
And since then, two of them have been killed.
So we spent time with three and it's been only a year and two of them have been killed and they were 20 something year olds.
And at the end of the film, I think, you know, we thought, okay, we've gotten to the terminus of what they call the Iron River, which is the pipeline of guns coming from the West to Mexico.
They even have a saying for it, which is Mexico, the West supplies the guns, Mexico supplies the corpses.
That's what we heard, like one of the guys that we interviewed said.
And the U.S. has become the supermarket of guns for Mexico and for a lot of Latin America.
You know, I spent time reporting on the violence in Brazil, and you go to the favelas in Brazil, and, you know, you look into the guns and where they came from, and it's from the U.S., the majority of them.
What was happening is that the ATF, which is the agency responsible for tobacco and firearms, was allowing, had an operation happening where they knew guns were being sold and smuggled to Mexico, and they were allowing this to happen because they were trying to figure out, gain information from this.
And what happened is that one of those guns eventually was used to kill a Border Patrol agent, I believe.
Yeah, they were allowing them to go to the hands of the cartel because they say they were trying to get information from where those guns were going, which is essentially what we filmed.
We saw the whole process of where they arrive, how they're shipped, what they do to avoid border blocks.
But some of the most restrictive, especially compared to Texas and Arizona.
And I thought, you know, this is probably wrong.
They're telling us it's California because we get a lot of times they tell us it's one place because they don't want to spill the beans immediately before they trust us.
And eventually it was realized that it was happening in California.
So we went to meet with this guy who lives in L.A., just, again, 15 minutes from my house.
And there he was in this house packing the guns and he had his cousins working with him and helping him out.
And he says he's been doing this.
It's been the family business for years and years.
He started working for the family business when he was seven years old.
Yeah.
And helping with the gun trade and the drug trade.
And I asked him, one of them was a semi-auto AR-15.
It had the scope.
It was super professional looking.
The other one was an AK-47, and then he had a couple of handguns.
And I was asking, how did you get your hands in this?
And I, having done reporting on this, definitely thought it was from a gun show or, you know, getting people to go to shops and buy stores and buy guns legally and then selling them on the side.
And he said, in his case, he gets most of his guns from law enforcement, from LAPD or from military, down in the military bases in Southern California.
So the AK-47, he had, I believe it was the AK-47, he said, so this gun here, for example, this belonged to my homie, my, you know, guy that works with me or I'm friends with.
The LAPD found it, confiscated it, and then we have a connection, and they sold it back to us for $1,000.
I mean, I don't know right now because resources are so strapped if there's anything that anybody can do any differently than what's being done currently, like what budgets are.
But I do know that your piece on the OxyContin Express had a giant impact on legislation.
Literally, people saw that and then people saw the podcast that we did.
Yeah, we were called by law enforcement around the country and senators in Florida trying to, you know, sort of get more knowledge of what we'd seen, what we'd witnessed, and if we could try and help in any way in changing the laws there.
I would think that if I was the cartel and I relied on this Iron River, I would not want someone like you exposing it just so I could snub my nose up at the Americans unless they're so brazen that they think no matter what happens, there's always going to be this pipeline of drugs and guns.
Yeah, we spoke to a state police woman, actually, who was in tears, saying, you know, I was there, I went out, I protected Mexicans that day, my fellow Mexicans.
And the moment that she realized that they were going to give him up, she just broke down in tears.
And she said, all of this for what?
You know, I put my life on the line repeatedly for what?
Do you think that these exposes that you're doing currently, these episodes, do you think that they have the potential to have the kind of impact that the OxyContin Express had?
Does that make your job harder, though, to know that if people find out that you can, in fact, put the brakes on whatever illegal business they're running?
I mean, in some situations, yes, people are making a lot of money.
But I don't think that the actual, the majority of the operators, like the backpacker kids, you know, like the mule, you know, like the scammer in Jamaica that we interviewed, I truly believe that if they could, they would lead another life.
And so we spent time with like all these scammers and like surrounded with their bodyguards with guns and one of them told us as we started interviewing this guy called Victor, I'm putting on his mic and he tells me, I'll only let you do this, Mariana, because you're a woman.
If you were a man, you wouldn't touch me, you know.
And then I go on.
I said, Okay, Victor, what do you do?
Let's start this.
What do you do?
And he says, You know what I do, Marianne.
I'm in the money game.
You call it scamming.
I call it the money game.
And then he said, You know, and then we start talking more.
And then he says, Look, I was even thinking of robbing you and your crew.
I was going to take away all your gear, going to rough you up a little bit.
And, yeah, so we ended up interviewing five or a handful of people there and sort of listening to their stories and why they do what they do.
And there was Tweety, the female scammer, she's an incredible woman, who tells us a story that she works at a resort in Montego Bay, where full of Americans, and every day she goes to work knowing that the Americans spend more money a day at the resort than she makes in a week or a month working there.
And she comes back home one day and her grandfather is very sick and needs an easy treatment but can't get it because she can't afford it because healthcare is very expensive in Jamaica.
And she realized the only way she can save her grandfather is by turning to scamming.
And she starts calling Americans.
There are these lead lists that actually sell for a lot of money.
A lot of them are coming from call centers because Jamaica has become sort of a center for call centers because it's cheaper labor.
Yeah, and then it's really sad because we also, you know, show the other side, which is Americans, even some committing suicide because they've lost all their savings.
There was a show on scammers once that was really sad because there was this man, he was in his 60s, and he was convinced there was this woman in Europe that he was having a correspondence with, and it was really a scammer, and he went over there twice.
He never talked on the phone, just exchanged emails and photographs and never talked on the phone, but they made a plan to meet somewhere twice.
So twice, this guy went over to Europe.
And his family, his daughter in particular, was trying to tell him.
And you could see he felt like such a fool.
But he was still holding out hope because he really was convinced.
But then here he was in Europe and nothing was happening.
When you have vulnerabilities and you have people that take advantage of those vulnerabilities...
You know, that are also vulnerable, like financially vulnerable, and they have a lot of incentive to try to do things, and it turns out to be profitable, and then it turns out to be their business.
And you go, well that's awful, that's terrible.
But is it terrible to buy an iPhone?
Because when you buy an iPhone, if you follow...
I talked about this the other day with Matthew Iglesias.
If you follow an iPhone all the way down to where the metal comes out of the ground, you find slave labor.
One of the things that was really strange and made me nervous was when the people in the town found out that you guys were there when you were with the guy that was making the coke and you had to get the fuck out of there immediately.
It helped that I had Dirt Smith, Garrett Smith, the bear rider with me.
It was crazy.
So just the whole day was insane.
We finally get access.
We get on the road.
This chemist jumps into the car with us.
We're going out there.
And then we get there, and it's completely night.
Middle of the night, there's not even a moon that day.
So it was dark, dark, dark.
And, you know, we're Nat Geo, so we come geared with...
All these flashlights and headlamps and we're ready for everything that can happen.
But we get there and the guy tells us, okay, no lights allowed because if the population, if the people around the villages see you, they're going to be pissed and they're going to come after you.
There were other moments when we were filming with the sicarios, the gunmen in Sinaloa, for example, and they told us that while we're with them, we're protected, but if the Marines show up, that there's nothing they can do, the Marines will start firing at us, and we are going to be stuck in the middle.
And two hours into filming with the sicarios, their walkie-talkies start buzzing, and we know something's off, and they turn to us, and you could see they're panicked, and there's a Marine helicopter coming our way.
And there's this really uncomfortable situation where we're like stuck.
They start going out with their cars.
We go where our car is out in the open and we see the helicopter and do we follow them?
And then they're going to think that we're with them and if they start shooting at the car, they're going to start shooting at us too.
Or do we pretend that, or we stay here and hide and look even more suspicious.
They're all, you know, we put so much, you have no idea how much work goes into every single one of these pieces.
You know, it's months and months of preparation, and then it's months of editing.
And it's, you know, it's been two years in the making, two years to this day, more or less, when we started working on this series, and it finally was released.
And yeah, I mean, every single second that you see in the film is thought out and Well, you nailed it.