Joe Rogan Experience #2092 - Mariana van Zeller

Mariana van Zeller returns to recount her latest season of 'Trafficked,' which ended with her team trapped during a military coup in Niger and escaping via a clandestine plane evacuation. She walks through investigations into gold and diamond mining, ape and tiger trafficking, hash production in Morocco, and the drug trade across Mexico's cartels. The conversation digs into systemic failures: America's prison-industrial complex versus Portugal's decriminalization success, fake pharmaceuticals laced with fentanyl, and the illegal body-parts trade. Joe and Mariana explore the disturbing Body Worlds/'Bodies' exhibits allegedly using executed Chinese prisoners, and the Jeffrey Epstein sextortion-as-intelligence-operation theory. Throughout, Mariana argues that desperation and broken systems, not innate evil, drive people into crime.

• Mariana's team got trapped in Niger for eight days during a military coup and escaped only by hiring a private evacuation plane that landed at dawn.
  00:02:37
• A Portuguese pilot secretly agreed in Portuguese to risk flying them out while the military, unable to understand the language, tried to block their departure.
  00:08:21
• To capture one baby chimp for the exotic-pet trade, traffickers must kill roughly ten chimps because the whole protective family attacks.
  00:21:20
• She interviewed a working assassin 15 minutes from her LA home who pulled a gun and threatened to kill her team if it were a setup.
  00:41:35
• About 20 million Americans buy medications on the black market, and cartels force Mexican pharmacies to stock fake pills, many laced with fentanyl and meth.
  00:57:18
• A Harvard Medical School morgue manager was implicated in selling stolen human body parts through secret Facebook groups.
  01:40:33
• Mariana details an alleged murdered pregnant Chinese woman turned into a plastinated statue still displayed in 'Bodies' exhibits like the one at the Luxor in Las Vegas.
  01:41:04
• An episode began with a DM from a woman whose retired-truck-driver father was scammed into smuggling heroin and is dying in a Mozambique prison.
  02:03:22

• Only about 244,000 metric tons of gold have ever been mined, fitting into a pile roughly half a football field wide.
  00:10:57
• Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, and treatment costs the government less than incarceration, lowering HIV, crime, and addiction rates.
  00:31:11
• Tigers in India's Sundarbans have killed an estimated 300,000 people over the past century, partly because brackish water makes them aggressive.
  00:27:33
• The word 'assassin' derives from 'hashishin,' linked to a sect of Nizari militants associated with hashish.
  00:39:29
• A South African hitman named JoJo has killed over 30 people and is paid about $1,500 per hit.
  00:44:45
• The US is largely unregulated regarding what happens to donated bodies; skulls sell for $5,000, a tongue for $1,000, and a skin wallet for $2,500.
  01:36:21
• Body plastination must occur within 48 hours of death, yet Chinese 'unclaimed' bodies are only legally unclaimed after 30 days.
  01:40:33
• The liver is the only organ that regenerates; a donor can give half their liver and it returns to full size within 6 to 8 weeks.
  01:57:39
• Foxconn factories in China installed suicide-prevention nets around buildings rather than addressing workers' conditions.
  00:18:12
• In the Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot, 12 of the 14 participants were FBI informants and two were FBI agents.
  01:29:37

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