Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1938 - Mariana van Zeller
Uploaded: 2023-02-08T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1938 - Mariana van Zeller' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1938 - Mariana van Zeller' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1938 - Mariana van Zeller

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
And we're up.
Hello, good to see you again.
What's happening?
Great to see you too.
Good to see you alive and well.
You scare me sometimes with your dangerous adventures,
like real boots on the ground, investigative journalism.
Yeah.
Oof.
We've been all over the world.
I think the last time I was here was two years ago.
Yeah, last time you had just gotten back from the cocaine manufacturing in the
jungle,
which was wild.
And then you took a backpack with the stuff and traveled with the...
That's right.
Oof.
And since I've reported on a lot of other drugs and other crazy situations,
and we're now doing, actually already filming season four.
Wow.
Season three is coming out.
Tell people where to get it and what it's called.
I'm trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller.
It's on National Geographic, next day on Hulu, and it's on Wednesdays at 9 p.m.
And it's about black markets.
So it's illegal markets around the world, whether it's drugs, guns, fight clubs.
I mean, anything.
Surrogacy, illegal surrogacy.
The craziest one to me was the getting the guns in America and transporting
them to Mexico,
that that is going on, and that it's going on with cops.
It is.
It is, for me, it's always been, I think the first story I did on guns in
America was about 12, 15 years ago,
where I was able to buy an AK-47 out of a Taco Bell parking lot in Arizona.
Where else?
Where else than in Arizona.
And then the funny thing that happened...
I meant where else but a Taco Bell parking lot.
Oh, yeah, of course.
Both those things.
Of course.
And then we went to a bar to sort of celebrate the fact that we just filmed
this crazy thing
that had just happened because we knew it was possible that people were doing
this,
but we wanted to show it with our camera.
So we had sort of secret cameras filming, and then I went out, and I bought it,
and we went out to a bar after, and I ordered a beer, and I forgot my driver's
license,
so they didn't give me a beer.
That's hilarious.
Isn't that funny?
So no beer, but I could go out with a AK-47.
And a few days later, we bought a 50 cal out of a guy's garage that we went out
into the desert and filmed.
Women like it when they get carded.
Of course we do.
Yeah.
It's not...
Unfortunately, I don't get carded as often nowadays.
Well, it's just ridiculous.
You know, come on.
I guess they have to, I mean, but whatever.
I mean, come on.
It's crazy.
Oh, it's ridiculous.
I know.
21?
Come on.
I know.
Look at me.
But this was 12 years ago, so it's possible.
Possible.
Yeah.
How hard is it to buy an AK-47?
It was so easy.
We went online at the time.
I can't remember the name of the website.
Backpage.
At the time, there was a website called Backpage where you could essentially
buy anything.
I don't think that website exists anymore.
But it's not even on the black market regular online website.
And we went there.
And I think we spoke to the guy 20 minutes before.
He said, meet us here.
We went there.
It was him and his girlfriend were there.
He was high on drugs.
Oh, boy.
He had two.
And he had an AR-15 with him as well that he was also wanting to sell.
We ended up buying the AK.
But, yeah, so I've been fascinated with sort of how easy it is.
How do you know he was high on drugs?
Because you could tell.
I've reported enough on drugs.
Meth, you think?
At the time, probably.
He was very jittery.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was definitely an upper.
I'm sorry.
Jesus.
And then, yeah, so then we decided to do this for the first season, actually,
of Traffic,
to story on guns and how American guns are winding up in the hands of the cartel
in Mexico
and how it's responsible for so much of the violence that's happening there.
And sort of this cycle, which I don't think most people think about,
how then the violence leads people to immigrate to America and then they come
here.
And, you know, so it's like a cycle of violence and immigration and guns and it's
all sort of connected.
But whenever we do a story on guns, and we just – another one that I did on
ghost guns
was released last week on National Geographic.
And it is the most sort of controversial issue, the hot topic that we can
always –
so I immediately start getting messages of people saying that I should go back
to my country
and what am I doing and I'm trying to take away people's rights to want a gun,
which is absolutely not the case.
And it's – yeah, it's –
Do any of the people wouldn't want to know that police officers are confiscating
guns
and then selling those guns to the Mexican cartel,
that you as a legal, law-abiding gun owner in America wouldn't want that
exposed?
Yeah, absolutely.
And that the guns that people are buying, and particularly with this last
episode on ghost guns,
which is the fact that the guns that are now these untraceable and licensed
guns are so easy to make
and they're – so many of them are ending up in crime scenes across America
and on the hands of gang members
and, you know, militant groups and anti-government groups and it's scary.
And that's all what we're trying to do as a journalist myself when we decided
to do the stories
because I started hearing from people talking about how these guns are ending
up in the wrong place.
How do they make a ghost gun?
It is – I'm happy you're asking that because I think it's the biggest –
people don't understand out there.
They think that when you talk about ghost guns that it has to be 3D printed.
It's not – a ghost gun is an untraceable gun.
It doesn't mean that it has to be 3D printed.
However, nowadays – it's basically – so it's a gun that doesn't have a
serial number.
And it could have had a serial number and the serial number was scrubbed.
And maybe they put a new fake serial number in there.
But what happens is because of the 3D printers, it's now super easy to just
print a gun or gun parts at home.
So there are all these companies out there who sell 80% kits that have
everything to build a gun except for the receiver.
But there's a company, for example, called Defense Distributed, ran by Cody
Wilson, who was the first one to use a ghost gun or a gun – a 3D printed gun,
actually.
It was called the Liberator.
And he got into all sorts of trouble.
The Liberator.
Yeah.
And he's a strong believer in – he said he wanted this – his company to be
sort of the WikiLeaks for guns
so that everybody could have access to guns.
So he sells these kits that are 80% kits.
And it's all – everything you need to buy a gun except for the lower receiver,
which is what the ATF and the government actually considers to be the gun.
What part is the lower receiver?
It depends on which weapon, I believe.
But it's the bottom – on the guns that he's selling, it's sort of the bottom
piece.
Oh, okay.
There's the Liberator.
Yeah, that is a Liberator.
Yeah, so this is all 3D printed.
And he showed me –
Oh, that's an actual gun, that plastic thing?
That is.
And, you know –
If somebody pulled that on me, I'd be skeptical.
And this was several years ago.
It's evolved a lot.
It's evolved a lot since then.
Yeah.
The ghost gun.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's a real gun, that plastic thing?
Yeah.
And so –
Now, but if you want to see some of the new ones and what they're making, yeah.
Now, these are also ghost guns.
And some of that is metal.
So where do they get in the metal parts?
Some of it is metal.
It can be all 3D printed.
Some of it is metal.
So you can buy it from companies like Cody Wilson's.
They use 3D print metal?
Oh, nowadays, yes.
You can have a –
It's like a polyammer –
What's the –
I can't remember.
Polymer.
Polymer, sorry.
Polymer material that is –
Yeah, that's what a lot of the guns are actually made of.
Like a carbon fiber or something?
Because I've seen carbon fiber barrels for hunting rifles.
They make them very light so that people can take them into the backcountry
when they go deep into the woods.
There's all the kind of parts you can make with 3D printed metal stuff.
Oh, one of the craziest things we filmed for this ghost gun episode was
actually these teenagers
that were also making 3D and ghost guns, and they came to the desert with us,
and we spent a whole day with them shooting guns and showing us what they build.
And they were also making drop-in seers, which are little pieces that transform
a gun from semi-automatic to fully automatic.
And they're illegal, actually, in America.
You can't buy that at a gun store, but they're making them for 50 cents.
Yeah.
Wow.
It's a crazy, it's a crazy world.
How much, like, how much of an education are you getting in how fucked we are
by your show?
Because I would be very pessimistic if I had gone to all the places that you've
gone to and seen all the chaos that you've seen.
I'm not.
I'm not pessimistic at all.
I think one of the biggest surprises for me filming this show has been finding
out that even the people, not all,
but the majority of the people that I've met involved in these illegal
activities around the world,
that they are very much people just like you and me.
And it is more often than not because of a lack of opportunities that they end
up involved in a life of crime.
And I think, you know, there is the idea that no matter how far I travel to the
edges of our society and that I can still find people who are relatable and
redeemable makes me actually have a very optimistic view of the world.
Of course, that doesn't apply to everyone.
You know, when I'm interviewing white supremacists who talk about, you know,
wanting death for minorities or, you know, other people that I've interviewed.
Have you done that?
You've interviewed?
Yeah, we did.
We did an episode.
Is that on this season?
It's on season two, last season, on white supremacy.
Where did you go?
We went to Denver.
We interviewed.
Denver?
Mm-hmm.
There is a, we interviewed a couple of people in Denver.
Uh, one of which was a 28-year-old, believe, uh, he was a, I can't remember
what he was by day, but, uh, he showed up wearing a swastika, um, and, uh, he
was talking about a race war, and he was going to do everything he could to
make this race war start, and, uh, and he was part of Atomwaffen, which is a
big anti-white supremacist group that has actually been responsible for some
deaths in the U.S.
How many of those people just need, like, somewhere to belong to, and this is,
like, something that they find that they can, they can find a bunch of people
that are energized about a very specific cause, and then they find that if they
align themselves with this group, there's, like, a camaraderie and a brothership
in this cause, even if it's ridiculous and disgusting.
I think a lot of them.
Yeah.
I think the vast majority of them, actually.
Lost people.
Yeah, and it's the danger of the internet, right, because it's a loudspeaker,
and fortunately, it's a place where you can find that community, but that
community is not always good.
It's a danger of psychology, too, right, that people are easily manipulated,
and they want to belong to a group, and especially if they think that it's,
like, some sort of a secret group that other people don't know about, and that
they have this cause they think is, you know, valid or just.
Or make sense of the world, you know, maybe if the world is, if they feel like
the world is not, is unjust towards them, they feel like there has to be a
reason behind it, so maybe it is.
Did you ever see when W. Kamau Bell went and interviewed a bunch of KKK?
He's great at that, because he's such an easygoing, likable guy.
He's so nice and so smart that when they're with him, they're like, hey, you're
different, and I'm like, hey, man, you need some black friends.
There's a lot of people like that out there, you fucking idiot.
You know, it's like these poor, sad, lost people, and then they're committed to
this thing, this horrible idea.
I know, so much of it comes out of ignorance, too.
Yeah, most of it.
Yeah, I know.
And foolishness, and it's just, it's so disheartenin