#2092 - Mariana van Zeller

Mariana van Zeller (0:15)

Great, thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

I'm so happy every time I see you that you're alive and well, because you do some wild stuff, lady. You get involved in some situations.

SPEAKER_3 (0:26)

I do. This past year was crazy.

Yeah?

Mariana van Zeller (0:29)

Yeah, we just had season four come out, and it's my favorite season for many reasons, but also because it was quite the adventure.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

What did you get involved with this season?

Mariana van Zeller (0:40)

Well, it ended with a military coup in Africa when my team and I got stuck.

So that was a good kickoff to all of it.

It was in Niger, so it's in the Sahel region of Africa. The US has actually a military presence. Remember a few years ago when there were these four US. Marines that were killed in the Sahel in Niger, nobody even knew they were there. Well, there's actually over a thousand troop stations in Niger. And we were there in a little town called Agadez, which is in sort of the southern border of the Sahara Desert. And we were doing a story about gold mining. So the story itself was incredible. We had to, you know, we had a military convoy with us because it's an incredibly dangerous part of the world. You've got terrorism, you've got ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram. You've got kidnappers, so it's very, very dangerous. We'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we had to have a military convoy with us at all times. So we're talking about four armor trucks with lots of trained soldiers that every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their guns all around. They were very well trained. A lot of them are actually trained by the American military. And we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines, which are crazy. It was an eight hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated mines. We're going down these tunnels and it's a hundred meters down, hand dug tunnels with nothing to buttress them, no safety precautions or anything, but we filmed it all and we get to the end and there's people basically mining for gold.

And again, constantly with the idea that the military is telling us, okay, we have to film fast, we have to do this fast, we can't be out at night. So we went to a sort of safety, more safe location to sleep that night under the stars.

And then the next day, it's time to come back to Agadez, the town, which is about 100 miles, but takes anywhere between like three to 12 hours to get because you can, lots of things can happen along the way. And we arrived in Agadez and we got worried that there had been a military coup and the president had been deposed and he was now being kidnapped inside the presidential palace. Basically, he was stuck there with his family.

And that we were about to lose our military compounds and security. And they closed all the land borders and the airspace. And we were stuck with no way out because you can't travel by road without security in that part of the world. And there were no planes leaving. So we were stuck.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

Wow. How long were you stuck for?

Mariana van Zeller (3:18)

It was about nine days. The military coup happened on a Wednesday and we left on a Thursday, sorry, so eight days. But it was eight incredibly scary days. You know, I'm...

I've been a journalist covering black markets and going to war zones and conflict areas all my life. But this was, I think, the most uncomfortable and scared I've ever been because, first of all, the uncertainty of not knowing. There were all these... The West African states were threatening invasion. The Wagner group, the Russian mercenary group, were saying that they were going to come and protect the new military coup leaders.

And so it was a power struggle between the United States and Russia. And that's sort of the last place you want to be, right?

And again, no protection. I'm there with my team. I'm sort of the boss in that situation because I'm the owner of the company that produces this. I'm the host of the show. I'm the executive producer. And I felt very responsible for my team as well. And yeah, the clock is ticking. And they're telling us that in a few days we're going to invade and there's going to be a possibility of a massive war.

And we're stuck with, again, no protection and no way out. So it was really, really scary.