Joe Rogan Experience #2567 - Mariana van Zeller

Episode Overview

• Investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller (host of Trafficked and creator of Super Scam Me, who also promotes her husband Darren’s upcoming 3-part Netflix series The Fall of El Mayo and his past documentary American Pain) joins Joe Rogan (co-founder and former owner of Onnit, maker of Alpha BRAIN, who also mentions his friendship with Brigham Buhler of Ways2Well) and producer Jamie Vernon to examine why global criminal networks—from online scam compounds to Mexican drug cartels—are operating at an unprecedented scale. (Disclosed episode sponsors include Spotify, DraftKings [code: ROGAN], Perplexity, and NOCO [code: ROGAN10]; Rogan also informally endorses Gorilla Mind nootropics, Pure Encapsulations, and NOW Supplements.)
• The conversation begins by deconstructing the $148 billion-a-year online scam epidemic affecting Americans, tracing how psychological grooming, AI companions (such as EVA AI's 2-day promotional pop-up café in NYC launched Feb 26 where patrons went on dates with AI companions on iPads), and Southeast Asian human-trafficking compounds industrialize fraud.
• The narrative then shifts from individual victims to institutional complicity, examining internal documents showing how social media platforms like Meta profit from fraudulent advertisements and how third-party e-commerce marketplaces struggle with counterfeit health products.
• Finally, the discussion explores the geopolitics of the US-Mexico cartel conflict, covering the betrayal and capture of Sinaloa Cartel co-founder "El Mayo," the "Iron River" of American guns flowing south, DEA enforcement scandals, and the policy failures driving the synthetic opioid crisis.

Key Concepts

• The Psychology of Scam Vulnerability and "Double Victimization": Scammers succeed not because victims are gullible, but because they exploit universal human emotions like love, trust, loneliness, and greed. For instance, a victim named Leslie was scammed for nearly a year on Instagram by a Jon Bon Jovi impersonator who offered a $100 "meet and greet" discount in Louisiana after 7 months of grooming and receiving AI-generated videos. Men are just as likely as women to fall victim to romance scams, but they experience higher levels of shame and refuse to appear on camera. Victims suffer "double victimization": first losing their savings and having their hearts broken, and then facing ridicule from friends and family, which forces them into secrecy until they are financially ruined—such as a Kansas bank CEO who bankrupted his bank after stealing $400 million (or $47 million; van Zeller states "400 million") to pay a fake 10% tax/fee in a "pig butchering" crypto scam.
• Global Wealth Disparities and the Scammer's Worldview: Understanding why overseas scammers feel justified requires looking at global income metrics. Making $50,000 a year (previously thought to be $34,000) places an individual in the top 1% of the world, while 10% of the global population—over 700 million people—live below the poverty line. An Indian tech-support scammer told van Zeller he had an ethical code against stealing from "poor people," which he defined as anyone with less than $1,000 in their bank account.
• Industrialized Human Trafficking in Scam Compounds: Many online scammers are actually enslaved victims themselves. Chinese criminal syndicates (such as Yatai International, whose head is now in prison in Thailand) pay fees to rebel groups in Myanmar and Cambodia (and increasingly operate in Dubai) to build entire "scam cities" with skyscrapers, casinos, go-kart tracks, and water parks out of flat jungle within 1 to 2 years. Hundreds of thousands of people from countries like Brazil, India, and the Philippines are lured by fake online jobs, have their passports confiscated, and are forced to scam Americans, costing US victims $148 billion last year ($400 million a day). Escape and resistance carry brutal consequences: van Zeller interviewed a man who broke both hips and legs jumping from the 6th floor of a compound to escape, and a female model forced to use real-time AI face-swapping software on video calls who was beaten and gang-raped by her boss and his friends if she moved and distorted the AI filter. In another cited case from February 2022, a kidnapped Chinese man named Li Yayuanlun resisted scamming in Cambodia and had IV-bag-sized quantities of his blood drained 7 times in half a year to be sold.
• The Lifecycle of a Romance Scam and Money Mules: During her undercover investigation using the persona "Marisel," van Zeller commented on fake celebrity profiles and within minutes was messaging 3 Keanu Reeves, 2 Brad Pitts, and several George Clooneys. She eventually "dated" a scammer posing as "Mark Turner," a 4-star US General in Syria (using stolen photos of former Navy SEAL Sam Havelock), who asked for $17,000 for a private flight after a base attack. The US payment address led to a Houston widow whose husband had died of cancer; after being scammed for 3 years by a man claiming to work on a Russian oil rig and losing her savings, the scammers converted her into a money mule to launder checks and cash boxes from other victims, letting her keep just $50 for gas out of a $17,000 package.
• Platform Complicity and Meta's "Penalty Bids": According to a late-2025 Reuters investigation by Jeff Horwitz, internal Meta documents estimated users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are exposed to 15 billion "higher risk" scam ads daily, projecting that 10% of Meta's 2024 revenue (roughly $16 billion, much of it originating from China) would come from ads for scams and banned goods. Meta's automated systems only ban an advertiser if there is at least a 95% confidence of fraud; below 95% (such as 94%), Meta leaves the suspected scammer on the platform and charges them higher ad rates via "penalty bids" (Perplexity flags that while Reuters proved penalty bids existed, claims of a flat "50% extra surcharge" are not established by evidence, and van Zeller clarifies she only said "penalty fees"). Furthermore, internal documents showed Meta searched its Ad Library using the exact keywords and celebrity names used by regulators to delete only those specific ads and manage "prevalence perception." While Reuters found briefing notes prepared for Mark Zuckerberg on cross-border scam displacement, Perplexity notes Reuters could not establish whether he personally read them. By comparison, in 2025 Google removed 602 million scam-related ads to Meta's 159 million, even as Meta's global digital ad revenue is projected to reach $243.56 billion by the end of 2026, surpassing Google's $239.39 billion.
• Sextortion and Section 230 Reform: Lack of platform verification has lethal consequences. Gavin Guffey, the teenage son of South Carolina Representative Brandon Guffey, died by suicide around 11:00 PM after being sextorted on Facebook/Instagram; weeks after Facebook removed the scammer's profile, the scammer created a new account using the exact same email address to extort the grieving family. This spurred the passage of the TAKE IT DOWN Act and the introduction of the bipartisan SAFE Platforms Act (introduced Dec 15, 2025, by Reps. Valerie Foushee and James Moylan), which would require advertiser verification, block banned users from returning, and strip Section 230 immunity for scam ads. (Rogan compares tech platforms' reluctance to self-police to the 1990s, when comedian Barry Crimmins had to testify before Congress to force AOL to shut down child pornography rings, and also discusses how the legal system handles child predators by referencing Hillary Clinton's 1975 court-appointed legal aid defense of 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor for raping a 12-year-old girl—where Rogan hedges, "I don't want to get sued, but I'm 99% sure," and corrects Jamie when a debunked Pizzagate/Huma Abedin rumor comes up first, before confirming Clinton negotiated a plea deal of 1 year in county jail and 4 years probation and later laughed on 1980s audio that Taylor passing a polygraph destroyed her faith in polygraphs.)
• E-Commerce Counterfeiting and Supplement Contamination: Unverified third-party sellers also threaten physical health. Rogan notes that in the early days of Onnit making Alpha BRAIN, third-party testing caught unlabelled contaminants because manufacturers failed to clean mixing bins. While Rogan and van Zeller guess that 25% to 30% of supplements on Amazon might be fake, Perplexity explicitly hedges that there is no reliable established percentage for overall counterfeits, noting that the widely cited 57% figure comes from a small 2022 JAMA Network Open lab analysis of 30 immune health supplements bought on Amazon in May 2021, where 17 of 30 (57%) had inaccurate labels (13 missed listed ingredients; 9 had unlisted substances). Globally, Amazon reported seizing and disposing of over 15 million counterfeit products in both 2024 and 2025, while a 2018 government investigation found nearly half of 47 test purchases across five e-commerce sites were counterfeit.
• Cartel Geopolitics and the "Iron River": The Sinaloa Cartel was fractured when co-founder Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada was lured to a ranch by his godson Joaquín Guzmán López (son of El Chapo) under the pretext of mediating a dispute between the Governor of Sinaloa and a former mayor/university head. After killing El Mayo's bodyguards, Joaquín bound, blindfolded, and flew him on a small propeller plane to a New Mexico airstrip to hand him to US authorities in exchange for leniency for himself, his brother Ovidio, and his father; El Mayo pled guilty, refused to cooperate, and is serving life in prison. Cartel power is maintained through extreme political violence—a peer-reviewed study recorded nearly 500 assassinations of Mexican politicians between 2000 and 2021, and the Council on Foreign Relations reported more than 30 candidates killed in the 2024 election—and is armed by the US: over 70% of guns at Mexican crime scenes come from America, exemplified by an LA trafficker van Zeller filmed buying confiscated AK-47s from corrupt LAPD officers for ~$700 and scoped rifles from a US Marine to drive south across the border without inspection.
• Law Enforcement Perverse Incentives and Drug Policy: While 95% of fentanyl enters the US through official ports of entry (mostly driven by US citizens—Prompting a side discussion where Rogan mentions actor Michael Douglas paid for college after receiving only $10,000 from his father Kirk Douglas at age 18 by smuggling suitcases of marijuana twice, with Jamie correcting Rogan that it was domestic transport from California to New York rather than across an international border), US enforcement often backfires. DEA whistleblowers in New Mexico revealed agents allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills (one wiretap involved 350,000 pills; another courier delivered 50,000 to 100,000 pills repeatedly in 2022–2023; van Zeller recalls an initial figure of 1.7 million pills) to hit Albuquerque streets to build bigger cases even as a months-old baby died from exposure, and in 2024 the DOJ rewrote its 2017 rules to remove the requirement to seize fentanyl "as soon as practicable." Meanwhile, comparing decriminalization models shows why Oregon failed where Portugal succeeded: Portugal built treatment infrastructure 2 years before decriminalizing drugs (backed by universal healthcare) and forces users caught with up to a 10-day supply before a 3-person panel to choose between treatment or punitive action, whereas Oregon waited until 1 year after decriminalization to invest in treatment, handing out $100 fines and hotline business cards that only a few hundred people out of thousands called.
• The Evolution of Synthetic Opioids and Emerging Treatments: Over 1 million Americans have died from the opioid epidemic in the last ~20 years (more than in all US wars combined in the last 150 years), leading to a revised January 2025 settlement where Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family agreed to pay $7.4 billion and lost future civil immunity. The crisis continues to evolve: after Sinaloa cartel members initially paid a Colombian chemist $40,000 to learn how to make fentanyl and mix it into 1-kilo bricks of heroin, cartels are now using Chinese precursors to produce nitazenes, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than fentanyl that evades fentanyl test strips and often resists Narcan. On the treatment and neurological front, Rogan highlights that former Texas Governor Rick Perry underwent brain scans before and after taking ibogaine at the Beond clinic in Cancun, Mexico, showing massive improvement in his normal age-related brain atrophy at 4–6 weeks and complete reversal after 6 months. (Similarly examining rapid technological shifts earlier in the episode, Rogan and van Zeller discuss an article in The Science Times about researchers creating a robotic finger covered in living, self-healing human skin grown from human cells, though Jamie hedges that the viral story and photo are actually 4 years old and its current status is unclear.)

Quotes

• At 0:02:26 - "Because I think what these scammers are so good at doing is that they prey on emotions that we all share, you know, love and trust and sometimes greed as well." - Mariana van Zeller explaining why anyone, regardless of intelligence, can be manipulated by online fraud.
• At 0:07:49 - "And I think it's that idea that you get to a point where you start suspecting, okay, this doesn't sound real, but I've invested so much, the reality of my life is so sad compared to this, that maybe I prefer to just go on." - Mariana van Zeller describing the sunk-cost fallacy and loneliness that keep romance scam victims hooked.
• At 0:11:37 - "But actually men are as all as likely to falling victim to these scams as women, but they just have a lot more shame around it, so they're less likely to talk about it." - Mariana van Zeller correcting the misconception that only women fall for romance scams.
• At 0:12:11 - "It's what I call, is there's a sort of double victimization, right? Because initially, not only do you, you know, your heart is broken, you lost all your money, but then you go back home or you go to your friends and you talk about this, and the first response is, how stupid could you be?" - Mariana van Zeller explaining why shame prevents victims from seeking help early.
• At 0:14:46 - "Well, if I go into a bank, if I go into an account, once I get access, I can see everything that's there. If you have less than $1,000, I'm not going to steal from you. But if you have more, that means you're rich." - Mariana van Zeller recounting the moral threshold of an Indian call-center scammer she interviewed.
• At 0:15:25 - "I mean, 10% of the world's population lives under the poverty line. So that's 700 and something million people who have trouble finding, you know, shelter and food for themselves and their family." - Mariana van Zeller contextualizing the global economic desperation that fuels overseas scam centers.
• At 0:21:17 - "And they had posters all around the city saying, 'No scams are allowed, we don't torture people.' If you need to say it..." - Mariana van Zeller describing propaganda inside a Southeast Asian scam city built by Chinese criminal syndicates.
• At 0:24:36 - "And we're not talking about just a few hundred people, it's hundreds of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people coming from all over the world who are lured into what they think are going to be online jobs, and once they get there, they take away their passports and they force them to scam Americans, essentially." - Mariana van Zeller detailing the scale of human trafficking inside Myanmar and Cambodian scam compounds.
• At 0:25:41 - "They've estimated that Americans lost $148 billion to online scams last year. Billion. Do you know how much that is a day? I did the math, it's $400 million a day." - Mariana van Zeller citing Consumer Federation of America data on the financial toll of online fraud.
• At 0:32:03 - "If their system sees that there's a 95% certainty or over that these are scams, they remove them. If there is less than 95, let's say 94%, what they do is they give you a penalty fee, so you have to pay more, but they allow you to stay on the platform." - Mariana van Zeller explaining how Meta monetizes suspected scammers rather than banning them.
• At 0:35:32 - "Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day." - Joe Rogan reading directly from the Reuters investigation into Meta's ad business.
• At 0:36:28 - "So the conversation has to stop being, 'Why are the victims falling for this?' It's, 'Why are we allowing this to happen?'" - Mariana van Zeller shifting the focus from individual gullibility to corporate and regulatory failure.
• At 0:40:46 - "A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open tested 30 immune health supplements purchased on Amazon in May 2021. Researchers found: 17 of 30—about 57%—had inaccurate ingredient labels." - Joe Rogan reading Perplexity's breakdown of the study on third-party supplement accuracy.
• At 0:46:12 - "So basically, Facebook had taken down that particular profile, but had allowed the same email address to create other profiles." - Mariana van Zeller explaining how a sextortionist returned to harass the family of suicide victim Gavin Guffey.
• At 1:12:34 - "So I had to get my husband to run back home, get me the wig, get me the fake nose and the glasses, and send him lots of photos of fake Marisel from the hospital with a catheter in my arm and pretending like this is real." - Mariana van Zeller recounting how she maintained her undercover persona during an emergency appendectomy.
• At 1:39:41 - "And Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo's son, himself, personally, basically hand-delivers him like a box of pizza to the American authorities." - Mariana van Zeller describing the betrayal and kidnapping of Sinaloa Cartel co-founder El Mayo.
• At 1:49:21 - "A whistleblower came out and said, basically, that the DEA in New Mexico was allowing millions of pills of fentanyl to go out on the streets in order to build bigger cases." - Mariana van Zeller highlighting the contradiction between the DEA's "One Pill Can Kill" campaign and its field operations.
• At 1:54:20 - "So what Portugal did, and this is important, is that two years before they decriminalized drugs, they started creating rehab facilities and treatment centers for people with addiction." - Mariana van Zeller explaining the prerequisite infrastructure that made Portugal's drug policy work compared to Oregon's.
• At 2:06:22 - "A million people have died from the opiate epidemic in the last 20-something years. It's more than in all wars combined in the last 150 years." - Mariana van Zeller putting the total mortality of the American opioid crisis into historical perspective.
• At 2:18:16 - "He had a brain scan done before he did it, and they had shown that he has normal age-related atrophy of his brain, normal, like he's older, you know? And went down there, within four weeks, I think, or six weeks, had a massive improvement. Went back six months later, all the atrophy is gone." - Joe Rogan sharing former Texas Governor Rick Perry's brain scan results following ibogaine treatment in Mexico.

Takeaways

• Eliminate shame when discussing scams with loved ones: Avoid asking victims "How could you be so stupid?"—instead, offer judgment-free support so family members (especially elderly relatives and men, who hide victimization out of shame) feel safe admitting they are being groomed before they lose their life savings.
• Never click on suspicious or celebrity-endorsed social media ads: Interacting with even a single fraudulent ad trains platform algorithms to flood your feed with dozens of high-risk scam advertisements.
• Beware of "tax" or "fee" demands on crypto investments: Recognize the classic "pig butchering" trap where a platform shows massive fake investment returns but demands an upfront percentage fee (e.g., a 10% tax) to release your funds.
• Refuse requests to receive and forward money for online acquaintances: Never accept mailed checks or cash boxes to convert into cryptocurrency for someone you met online, as scammers routinely turn broke victims into unwitting money mules who face federal prosecution.
• Do not rely on video calls as proof of identity: Be aware that scammers in overseas compounds use real-time AI face-swapping filters and AI-generated videos to impersonate celebrities, military generals, and models during live chats.
• Purchase dietary supplements directly from manufacturer websites: Avoid buying vitamins and nootropics from unverified third-party sellers on large e-commerce marketplaces; buy directly from reputable brands (such as Pure Encapsulations, NOW Supplements, Gorilla Mind, or Onnit) that conduct third-party lab testing for label accuracy and contaminants.
• Verify viral science and political claims before repeating them: Follow Jamie Vernon's real-time fact-checking approach by cross-referencing viral stories—whether checking the actual sample size of a supplement study, verifying if a "new" technology story is years old, or separating documented legal cases from internet rumors.
• Support legislation requiring digital ad verification: Advocate for regulatory reforms like the bipartisan SAFE Platforms Act and the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which compel tech platforms to verify advertisers before accepting money, block banned email addresses from creating new accounts, and remove Section 230 immunity for paid scam ads.
• Do not rely solely on fentanyl test strips to guarantee drug safety: Understand that emerging synthetic opioids like nitazenes (which are 50 times more potent than fentanyl) do not register on standard fentanyl test strips and are often resistant to Narcan.
• Build treatment infrastructure before decriminalizing hard drugs: Policymakers looking to reform drug laws should follow Portugal's blueprint—establishing universal access to rehab facilities years in advance and mandating treatment panels—rather than Oregon's failed approach of decriminalizing first and handing out optional hotline cards.
• Inspect southbound border traffic to curb cartel power: To weaken Mexican cartels, US border enforcement must inspect vehicles heading south into Mexico to stop the "Iron River" of trafficked American firearms, which currently account for over 70% of weapons at Mexican crime scenes.
• Audit law enforcement metrics to prioritize public safety over massive seizures: Reform DEA and DOJ protocols so agents are required to seize lethal drugs like fentanyl immediately rather than letting hundreds of thousands of pills circulate in communities just to build higher-profile conspiracy cases.